Something in the Blood (A Honey Driver Murder Mystery) Read Online Free PDF

yourself.’
    ‘I will.’
    The old coach house they lived in was situated at the end of the long, paved courtyard to the rear of the hotel. There were two bedrooms downstairs plus a bathroom. The upper floor that had once held hay and barley for the horses, now boasted a fitted kitchen and a spacious living room. A stone fireplace graced one wall of the living room and two huge A-shaped trusses supported an exposed apex ceiling panelled in Canadian maple. The panelled ceiling was the reason Honey had created bedrooms on the ground floor and living space upstairs. The view was good. So was the ceiling when you were lying flat on your back, staring into space.
    Kicking off her shoes, Honey lay back on the yellow leather settee and eyed with – affection? Yes, affection, her collection of corsets, silk stockings, and beautiful garters festooned with ribbons, flowers and even tiny birds made of real feathers. Pride of place went to the copious bloomers said to have belonged to Queen Victoria. Like her other favourite items, the bloomers were safely framed behind glass and hanging above the fireplace.
    Framing them had been done swiftly before an uninformed member of staff assumed the voluminous expanse of cotton was a tablecloth.
    Poor old Queen Victoria. She’d turn in her grave if she knew that someone could actually contemplate setting a plateful of English breakfast on her drawers!
    End of the day. The best time. She poured herself a glass of wine. There was something about a good wine that made one see clearer, when in fact by reputation it should make one’s thoughts fuzzy.
    First, the question of Elmer Weinstock; was he merely missing? Was he here on a secret mission? Or was it that Mervyn Herbert had smashed his last load of ice for the visiting American and decided to smash Elmer’s head in along with it? On the other hand, perhaps there was some other reason that wasn’t yet quite clear.
    Never mind. At least her rooms were full. Dear old Casper had sent more business her way.
    She toasted herself.
    ‘Honey Driver. Five-star hotelier, world-famous beauty and famous detective.’
    A little over the top, but there …
    ‘Give it time,’ she said with a sigh and closed her eyes. She dozed. In her dreams she was wearing a deerstalker hat, toting a magnifying glass and smoking a pipe.

Chapter Four
    It was Saturday night, pouring down and gone one o’clock when Loretta Davies, Mervyn Herbert’s stepdaughter, left the Underground Club, which was subterranean, and close to the river.
    ‘Getting a taxi?’ shouted one of her friends, tottering on the edge of the pavement and hanging on grimly to her boyfriend who was impatient to be away and screwing her in the privacy of some shop doorway.
    ‘You must be jokin’. I’m skint now ain’t I!’ The shouted reply was drowned in the drumming of the downpour.
    Whatever else her friend shouted back was drowned too. Both the girl and the young man faded into the darkness between the high buildings.
    Loretta pulled the collar of her jacket up around her face as best she could. It was plastic, black and shiny. The rain hammered on it before running off in sheets like it would off a tin roof. The Mac was also short, her skirt shorter and her black tights sodden from the thighs downwards. Wisps of hair clung wetly to her face and water dripped from her eyebrows.
    Passing cars muted the sound of her DM’s splashing on the glossy pavements. Headlights glanced like the beams of a lighthouse through the teeming rain.
    Streetlights and headlights lessened once she left North Parade. She kept the gardens on her right aiming to make her way across the road near BogIsland, an old Victorian lavatory that some quirky soul had changed into a nightclub at one time.
    As she bent her head against the driving rain, she cursed the night. Her footsteps bounced off the walls in narrow alleys. At times it seemed like an army was following her – or at least one person, possibly more. She