Ice Blue Read Online Free PDF Page B

with narrowed eyes
and curled lip. She seemed to assume he was a guest from a
neighboring house, wandering in to see what all the fuss was about.
Kate wasn’t surprised by the young woman’s irrationality, or her
knee-jerk hostility, for that matter. The level of emotion in the
room was palpable, sizzling around both women, Jules in
particular.
    “This is Chief Superintendent Hetheridge, of
Scotland Yard,” Kate said quickly. “He came directly from a black
tie event to take charge of this investigation.”
    “Inspector?” Jules looked up at her mother.
“Then how do you know him?”
    “We were friends, once,” Madge Comfrey said
softly. The naked pleading in her eyes disappeared, as if Jules’s
question had recalled her to herself. Face going blank, she sagged
back down on the sofa beside her daughter. “Forgive me, Lord
Hetheridge. When you appeared so suddenly, almost out of thin air,
I thought … I thought I was losing my mind.” She gave a short,
shrill laugh. “Maybe I am.”
    “Let’s hear your account of what happened,
from the start,” Hetheridge said, in the same authoritative tone he
had used on Kate, when she felt herself close to losing control in
the library. As he seated himself opposite Jules and Madge Comfrey,
Kate’s stylus paused. She considered the pair, taking them in not
as witnesses, but as women.
    Madge Comfrey was about fifty, with thick
brown hair arranged in a wavy, gravity-defying halo Kate associated
with upper-middle class mavens. Her dress was printed with tea
roses and long green vines – Laura Ashley, Kate thought, or one of
her imitators. Madge exuded the air of a woman who had once been
beautiful, and told herself she still was. Hers was the frozen
forehead and taut, line-less eyes of someone under an aggressive
surgeon’s care. Her make-up was also a fraction overdone: fuchsia
lips, frosted eye shadow, and a thick black line drawn beneath each
eyelid.
    Under normal circumstances, Jules Comfrey
would have been pretty, perhaps even uncommonly lovely – she had
precise features, excellent skin, and thick, glossy brown hair that
fell to her shoulders. But tonight she was bone-white and trembling
with ill-contained fury, fear, or both. She was slender enough to
look sickly when tired, and her clothes – baggy blue jeans and a
rhinestone-accented T-shirt – were poorly chosen, as if she had
tried to borrow a bolder girl’s style and wound up looking like a
poser.
    “Begin with dinner,” Hetheridge said,
settling himself on an overstuffed armchair. “Why did it end
prematurely?”
    “That was my fault,” Madge said. “I had
arranged for a small dinner party – two couples and a single friend
of Jules’s – but Malcolm didn’t feel up to entertaining. He asked
me to call the whole thing off. But I felt it was too late to
cancel. Malcolm didn’t take much interest in our guests, I’m
afraid, and some of them felt slighted. Everyone decided to take a
rain check on dinner and let Malcolm get his rest.”
    “Rubbish,” Jules snapped, not with surprise,
but with the triumph of one eager to seize on a lie. “Mother, you
can’t keep covering for him, especially now. He was a pig and a
complete rotter, and he ruined what was supposed to be my night. It
wasn’t just a small dinner party,” she continued, voice rising. “It
was my engagement party, and he destroyed it! He treated Kevin like
shit and everyone left because no one could bear to be around him
for one minute longer!”
    “Your father held some animosity toward your
fiancée?” Hetheridge asked.
    “He thought Kevin wasn’t good enough,” Jules
added, lip twisting into what Kate suspected was a habitual look of
disappointment. “He didn’t care how I felt or what I wanted. He
just wanted a son-in-law who would impress his friends.”
    “Jules, please,” Madge murmured.
    “When did the guests leave?” Hetheridge asked
Madge.
    “Early. Six o’clock, at the latest.”
    “What did you do as they