She Shoots to Conquer Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nothing. She’d snuffed it all right and we come back inside so he could phone the authorities.”
    “Did they have trouble getting here?” Ben began pacing, his eyes shifting from me to the door and back. I knew what he was thinking and he was right. I desperately needed a cup of tea or if possible something stronger to keep me from starting to cry. Un-fortunately, if there were a bottle of brandy in the room, a team of detectives would be needed to find it. An automobile accident amply explained by the fog would not have caused investigators to linger on the premises. Routine for them, while to us the deceased was a nameless, faceless stranger, but surely she was someone’s loved one . . . wife . . . mother . . . daughter . . . friend. What an agonizing shock for the bereaved to receive by phone or a knock at the door!
    “It’s what they’re used to, isn’t it? The police and medical people,I mean, getting to places in the worst possible conditions, and of course Lord Belfrey turned on all the exterior lights for them.”
    Hadn’t they been on when the woman arrived? This thought blocked out any other.
    “Not that they was likely to do much good, that fog being thicker than a sheepskin coat.”
    “Lord Belfrey,” echoed Mrs. Malloy, as if prayerfully reeling off the names of a dozen holy martyrs.
    “That’s his nibs,” replied Mr. Plunket with a prosaic scratch of a nodule below his lower lip.
    “A proper lordship?” Mrs. M pursued hopefully, while sinking into an armchair that looked as if it had been rescued after being set out next to a dustbin a hundred years ago.
    “What other kind is there?” muttered Ben, his eyes fixed anxiously on my recumbent form.
    “Oh, you know,” an airy wave of a ringed hand, “the sort as is given for your lifetime only—that doesn’t get passed on through the family. Or don’t you get made a lord for being a famous jockey or actor?” Her rouge brightened at this possibility. “Maybe that’s just for sirs and dames and all that lot.”
    “The title’s been in the Belfrey family all of six hundred years.” Pride was evident in every throb of Mr. Plunket’s voice. And despite my increasing headache it struck that he had evinced no emotion of approaching scale when describing the appallingly recent death just beyond the doorstep.
    “Have they lived here the whole time?” Mrs. Malloy inquired in a breathless rush.
    “Give or take the times it was taken away on account of them being on the wrong side politically. Tudor times was the worst, from what Mrs. Foot, Boris, and me understand it. And for what? is what we ask ourselves. Roman Catholic . . . Protestant! Who gives a flaming candle?”
    My mother-in-law for one, I thought dizzily. There is a woman who has never voluntarily missed mass a day in her life and can discuss the impenetrables of transubstantiation with the best ofthem, including St. Augustine had he paid her a vision. My Jewish father-in-law might not have made him quite so welcome; he’s a crotchety man, not at all welcoming to drop-in guests at the flat above the greengrocer’s shop in Tottenham.
    “But there’s an end to everything, even bloodthirsty kings and queens,” said Mr. Plunket as if reading from a pamphlet on sale for twenty pence at the entrance booth. “The Belfreys always came back home to Mucklesfeld Manor, and some of them—the ones that wasn’t given over to living it up wild—went about setting it back to rights, just like his nibs has made up his mind to do. Although who can say as to what will happen now that woman’s been taken away in a body bag. Mrs. Foot and Boris both talk like it won’t make no difference but . . .”
    Mrs. Malloy cut into his ruminations. “Mucklesfeld?” Her voice was sharp-edged with disappointment. “Not Belfrey?”
    I heard what sounded like a hiccupping cough, but looking to where Mr. Plunket still stood at the foot of the sofa, I realized he was chortling. In the sallow light cast by