THE HOURS BEFORE: A Story of Mystery and Suspense from the Belle Époque Read Online Free PDF Page A

turning down of the corners of his thin, bloodless lips, folds the newspaper slowly between his hands - folds it once, twice and, by the time he has realised what he is doing, a third and a fourth time into a crumpled mass. This he hurls upon the table, and with slow, measured steps upon the carpeted floor advances steadily to the window of his hotel suite overlooking the Munich skyline and begins once more to contemplate the headline he has just read.
    ‘Millionaire’s Daughter in Cult Suicide.’
    He looks up and allows his gaze to settle upon the rooftops and the more distant wooded horizon where the slopes of distant hills and mountains rise beneath the clouds - until both mountains and clouds become indistinguishable in their awful, chilling beauty. How, he asks himself, could anyone make such a rash assumption? Even the chief of police he spoke to only an hour ago had been unable to speculate on what lay behind the death of five young people in a remote chalet up in the mountains, the place burnt to the ground without a single occupant having escaped. Surely it’s just too early to say why.
    Immaculate as ever, his dark hair tightly ordered, brushed smoothly close to his scalp, his tailoring impeccable, even down to the buttonhole flower - today’s choice being an expensive purple orchid - he knows he must speak, must react in some way.
    ‘This is not good, Joseph, not good at all,’ he observes, not bothering much to look at his companion, Joseph Beezley, a man of prodigious legal expertise and administrative skills who usually accompanies him everywhere, but who just this morning has returned from Bayreuth on an overnight train. ‘Suspicious circumstances, yes - I’ll grant them that,’ he continues in the typically grave voice he has when deliberating. ‘But where did they get all this nonsense about cults; about suicide pacts; about some group of anarchists or millennialists? They are jumping to conclusions here. Poor journalism - exceedingly poor.’
    The observation is a strange one, especially at a time like this. He realises that. But for a man who runs an empire of newspapers and publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic, looking at it with the critical eye of a trained professional is his way of dealing with the pain, helping him to stay in control.
    ‘Most tragic, sir,’ Beezley replies, approaching his master in the fashion of an obedient spaniel who might, at any moment, be honoured with some crumb of attention.
    ‘My daughter … she just wouldn’t have been mixed up in that kind of foolishness,’ Peters states, turning at last to his secretary - and, even as he does so, his eyes clouding over with disappointment, as inevitably they do whenever he beholds the man, even after all these years. So very dull. ‘Her mother - yes. Nothing would surprise me about that crazy witch-on-a-broomstick. But not Penelope, not my dear Penny.’
    He raises finger and thumb to the corners of his eyes, to control some unwonted tears from forming there - his eyelids closing as he tries to find relief by looking into darkness; but all he can see is the awful sight of the shroud being rolled back in the mortuary yesterday and the charred little body that was virtually indistinguishable from the other four he had been asked to examine. Mercifully, there were some articles of jewellery found upon her wrist and fingers he knew were hers, so identification was just about possible … at length.
    ‘The bodies, Joseph ...’ he begins again and holds out his palms in the air as if taking the measure of something. ‘Those bodies, they were so small! They shrink in the heat, you see. That’s what the police told me. But suicide? Collective suicide? Maybe it is true - seduced by some group of fanatics. Where did I go wrong, Joseph? Where did I go wrong?’
    Beezley coughs in his typically decorous manner and directs his gaze to the floor, confident from years of experience that he is not expected to respond to