The Saint Valentine's Day Murders Read Online Free PDF

purchasing was to be decentralized immediately. On Wednesday, Personnel News announced the names of those employees at equivalent rank to PEs and APEs who had been called for promotion board interviewing. Only Charlie’s name was on the lists. Amiss had called his staff in one by one to try to comfort them and offer some cheery word of hope. He had expected them to be upset, but hadn’t anticipated how far removed they were from the civil service ethos of licking wounds in private. Tiny had raged; Henry had griped; Graham had actually wept. Only Tony and Bill had said little other than that life was unfair and someone had a down on them. Amiss had an uncomfortable suspicion that they all – to a greater or lesser extent – blamed him for this new rebuff, despite the fact that not one of them had been even considered for promotion in years.
    Thursday, to cap it all, had seen the arrival of the egregious Melissa Taylor. Amiss shuddered. This was not the time to think about her. Better to focus on Jim and Ann Milton, whom he hadn’t seen since before he left the Department. He wondered if Jim had yet become a Chief Superintendent. Ann, presumably, was still coining it as a management consultant. Agreeable people, he thought, as he negotiated their garden gate and looked at the unpretentious Edwardian house that lay a little back from the street. They would help renew his faith in the possibility of making a happy marriage. Even his feelings for Rachel were insufficient to withstand the horrors that overcame him every time he thought about what that state was doing to the people he worked with.
    Milton opened the door and greeted Amiss with a slightly forced heartiness that was unsettling. When Ann followed him into the hall looking flustered and strained and made an unnecessary fuss about taking his coat and overnight case, Amiss’s unease deepened. Fighting? They all began to relax as they chatted over pre-dinner drinks, and, to Amiss’s relief, by the time they had finished soup and were on their second bottle of wine, they were both looking more as he remembered them. Over dinner he went to great lengths to make his account of PD as entertaining as possible and was gratified by the hilarity with which his best stories were greeted. He had been saving for the end his pièce de resistance .
    ‘And now we’ve got our graduate trainee – Melissa Taylor.’
    ‘Don’t keep us in suspense,’ said Ann. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
    Amiss was savouring the moment. ‘Nice wine, this.’
    ‘Come on!’
    ‘Melissa is a dedicated member of the sisterhood.’
    ‘You don’t mean she’s a lesbian?’
    ‘She hasn’t actually said so yet, but there isn’t much doubt. She is certainly preoccupied to an inordinate degree with the struggle against male oppression. Not only is she an enthusiastic supporter of the separatists, but her spare time is spent in raising funds to aid the establishment of a women’s colony in Devon, on the sacred turf of which no man will ever set foot.’
    ‘But what in the name of heaven is she doing working in the BCC?’ asked Milton.
    ‘Oh, she was quite frank about that with me. She couldn’t find an ideologically OK job so she eventually compromised her principles and kept quiet to the BCC recruiters about her private beliefs. They were impressed by her first-class Economics degree and thrilled to learn that she had been accepted by a university in London to do a part-time MSc. Of course, as she explained it to me, once she had been offered the job formally, she couldn’t compromise any further, so she gave the relevant chap in Personnel a lecture on sexism. He retaliated by posting her to PD. She doesn’t care. She has no desire to spend more than a couple of years in a male-dominated capitalist organization, but the salary is useful at present. She’s scrapping the MSc, of course.’
    ‘How are the others taking it?’ Milton wanted to know. ‘Particularly Henry?’
    ‘Henry is so