Mr Wrong Read Online Free PDF

job was a huge breakfast, lunch, tea and coffee service bought by Mr Whitehorn in a particularly successful summer sale in Suffolk. It had to be packed and listed,
all two hundred and thirty-six pieces of it. It was lying on an old billiard table with a cut cloth, and Meg found that the most comfortable way to pack it was to bring each piece to a
chaise-longue whose stuffing was bristling out at every point, and put the heap of newspapers on the floor beside her. Thus she could sit and pack, and after each section of the set she could put
things back on the table in separate clutches with their appropriate labels. She was feeling much better than when she had woken up. Not having to face the drive: having put an advertisement into a
serious paper almost made her feel that she had sold the car already: Val had said that she might go to a film with her on Sunday afternoon if her friend didn’t turn up and she didn’t
think he would, so that was something to look forward to, and packing china wasn’t really too bad if you took it methodically and didn’t expect ever to finish.
    In the middle of the morning, Mr Whitehorn went out in his van to fetch the packing cases. He would be back in about an hour, he said. Meg, who had run up to the shop to hear what he said
– the basement was incredibly muffled and quiet – made herself a mug of coffee and went back to work. There was a bell under the door-rug, so that she could hear it if customers
came.
    She was just finishing the breakfast cups when she saw it. The newspaper had gone yellow at the edges, but inside, where all the print and pictures were, it was almost as good as new. For a
second, she did not pick up the page, simply stared at a large photograph of head and shoulders, and M1 MYSTERY in bold type above it.
    The picture was of the girl she had picked up in Hendon. She knew that it was, before she picked it up, but she still had to do that. She
might
be wrong, but she knew she wasn’t.
The glasses, the hair, the rather high forehead . . . but she was smiling faintly in the picture . . .
    ‘. . . petite, auburn-haired Mary Carmichael was found wrapped in her raincoat in a ditch in a lane not one hundred yards from the M1 north of Towcester. She had been assaulted and
strangled with a lime green silk scarf that she was seen wearing when she left her office . . . Mr Turner was discovered in the boot of the car – a black MG that police found abandoned in a
car-park. The car belonged to Mr Turner, who had been stabbed a number of times and is thought to have died earlier than Miss Carmichael . . .’
    She realized then that she was reading a story continued from page one. Page one of the newspaper was missing. She would never know what Mr Turner looked like. She looked again at the picture of
the girl. ‘Taken on holiday the previous year.’ Even though she was smiling, or trying to smile, Mary Carmichael looked timid and vulnerable.
    ‘. . . Mr Turner, a travelling salesman and owner of the car, is thought to have given a lift or lifts to Mary Carmichael and some other person, probably a man, not yet identified. The
police are making extensive enquiries along the entire length of the route that Mr Turner regularly travelled. Mr Turner was married, with three children. Miss Carmichael’s parents, Mr and
Mrs Gerald Carmichael of Manchester, described their only daughter as very quiet and shy and without a boyfriend.’
    The paper was dated March of the previous spring.
    Meg found that her eyes were full of tears. Poor, poor Mary. Last year she had been an ordinary timid, not very attractive girl who had been given a lift, and then been horribly murdered. How frightened she must have been before she died –
with being – assaulted – and all that. And now, she was simply a desolate ghost, bound to go on trying to get lifts, or to be helped, or perhaps even to
warn
people . . .
‘I’ll pray for you,’ she said to the picture, which now was so