The Riddle Of The Third Mile Read Online Free PDF Page B

each stage her fingers splaying across his chest.
    For Browne-Smith these moments were almost unbearably erotic, and he knew that he had little hope of lasting out much longer. Yet he made one further quite extraordinary request. ‘Can you open the curtains-just a little bit?’
    When the woman returned she saw that the man’s jacket, hitherto folded at the foot of the bed, was now lying beside him; and as she looked down, at his motionless body, she saw the tell-tale stain that seeped around the front of his well-cut, dark-blue trousers. His eyes were closed and his breathing steady, the right hand hanging loosely over the side of the bed, the index finger missing below the proximal inter-phalangeal joint. His glass, on the table beside his head, was now empty. She gently took his right arm and lay it alongside his body. Almost, for a moment or so, she felt a pang of tenderness. Then she hurriedly redressed, unlocked the door of the room, went out, and spoke in whispers to a man standing outside-a man who was reading a book entitled Know Your Kochel Numbers.
    Her duties were done.

CHAPTER FIVE
Friday, 11th July
     
    A woman of somewhat dubious morals seeks to relax, although such is her nature that she recalls too clearly, and too often, the duties she has been paid so handsomely to perform.
     
    In the latish evening of the day on which the events described in the previous chapter took place, a woman was seated alone in an upstairs flat, bedsitter-cum-bathroom-cum-kitchen, of a house situated in one of the many residential streets that lead south off the Richmond Road. Half an hour earlier she had walked from East Putney tube station, and now she felt tired. Piccadilly to Earls Court, change trains, across the Thames to Putney-how many times had she made that tiresome journey? It would have been so much easier to live in Soho, and there had been no lack of opportunity on that score! But she enjoyed her two lives-her two spheres of existence which intersected at (almost) no no single point. Here, in soberly bourgeois suburbia, she was a middle-aged woman with a job in the city. Here, she kept herself very much to herself, quietly, pleasantly, comfortably, dealing with rent and rates and household bills, and furnishing her few rooms at lavish expense. Yet these rooms were for her enjoyment only , since she had never invited another person into them,aceptfar the cleaning woman (two hours per week). Except, too, for theman who had come to see her only four days ago.
    The woman we are describing looked to be about forty, but was in fact some ten years older. Yet one could readily beforgiven for such misjudgement. She was a large breasted woman, with hips that had put on several inches over recent years, but her legs were finely graceful still, her ankles slim and firm. There were, certainly, a few tell-tale lines at the corners of her mouth, and again at the sides of her eyes; but the mouth itself was as delicately, deliciously sensitive as it had always been, and the eyes were normally as clear and bright as a summer’s noon in the Swedish hills.
    Tonight, however, those selfsame eyes were dull and sombre. Seated in an armchair, she crossed her nyloned legs, rested her blonde head upon her left arm, and stared down for many minutes at the richly patterned Wilton carpet. She still felt that residual sense of triumph and achievement; but she felt, too, a certain tension and concern which, over the last few hours, had been growing inexorably into a sense of guilt-ridden remorse.
    It had all had its beginnings early on the previous Monday morning, almost immediately after the Sauna Select (just off Brewer Street) had opened its doors to the men who frequented that establishment. There was nothing common, nothing mean about it all; just a gentlemanly and a ladylike understanding that with little fuss and large finance the whole gamut of erotic refinements was readily available. Many of the steady if unspectacular clients were men