Murder on the Hill Read Online Free PDF Page B

happened?”
    I reminded myself to be charitable. It was quite clear what had happened. “The cat did it,” I said. “All of it.”
    “Oh my… hang on, I’ll get you free. Are you hurt?”
    “Not yet, though your cat seems to want to eat me.”
    Cordi shooed the beast away and knelt by my side. “Together we lift,” she said.
    Although she was approaching her forties, I have to say I was impressed at her power-lifting technique. This was a woman who had clearly spent many an hour doing squats. With her help I managed to lift up the case and scramble free of the wreckage.
    “I’m so sorry,” Cordi said. “With your fall earlier and now this… I feel awful.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” I said.
    “How did it happen?” Cordi looked from the sofa to the bookcase and must have realised I didn’t do it with telepathy.
    “The cat,” I said. “I was fast asleep when it came running in and jumped up on the bookcase. It was crying, so I tried to get it down when it darted away and made the bookcase collapse.”
    I have to be honest, I wasn’t comfortable lying like this to Cordi, but I could hardly tell her that I was scoping the joint for a gem to steal.
    “Monty! One of these days, you horrible little fur-ball,” Cordi said, shouting into the hall.
    A sharp mrow came from the kitchen.
    I realised I had deepened the animosity between us, making a mortal enemy out of him. Oh well, Monty would have to get in line behind Ivanov.
    “I think a cup of tea is in order,” Cordi said, wrapping her velour robe around her body. “Tea fixes everything.”
    I wish it did. I’d have to find the gem another time. Perhaps find a way of checking out the rest of the house. However, that seemed like a task for those people on the hoarder shows. I wondered if there was an emergency hoarder-whisperer hotline I could call as I stepped into the kitchen to be appropriately caffeinated.
    ***
    A twenty-minute drive later, we had travelled barely a mile. Honestly, I could have got there quicker on foot. The rush-hour traffic in and around Notting Hill was a nightmare.
    We parked round the back of the library and ascended the steps, entering through the glass doors.
    A couple of silver-haired pensioners gave us the stink-eye as we chatted on our way in. Ignoring them, we walked through the turnstile and into the library proper.
    Stacks in rows lined the place, creating a multitude of dark passages.
    It didn’t feel entirely different to Cordi’s front room. I had a nightmare vision of one stack crashing into the other like dominos, with me at the end, my corpse being eaten by a large grey cat.
    “Hi,” a woman said from behind the reception desk. I looked up expecting an elderly lady but was surprised to see the librarian was in her thirties with short-cropped black hair sporting a blue-dyed stripe across the front. She wore dark red lipstick that was set off by a silver lip ring. It looked odd contrasted against her prim and proper starched white blouse.
    “Can I help you?” she said to us both.
    “Where can we find books on jewels and Japanese artefacts?” Cordi asked.
    The punk librarian eyed me with suspicion. “I’m with her,” I said. “Research for a… thing.”
    Wow, smooth.
    Punk-Librarian rolled her eyes and tapped out some commands on the computer. She wrote down some reference numbers on a Post-it note and handed it to Cordi.
    “Fourth row,” she said quietly, pointing her black-nail-varnished fingers to the appropriate stack.
    “And computers?” I asked.
    “At the rear of the library,” she said.
    “Thanks.”
    I broke away from her intense stare and followed Cordi into the library. “Let’s split up,” Cordi said. “You do your computer stuff, and I’ll stick with what I’m good at: digging through books.”
    “What exactly are we looking for?” I said.
    “Well, we should perhaps find out where those dorus come from, see if there’s anything local, and some information on the black