The Secret of Annexe 3 Read Online Free PDF Page A

overlooking the annexe.
    Yes. If she could help out, of course she would! The only thing she
couldn’t
definitely promise was to stay awake. Her eyelids threatened every second to close down permanently
over the tired eyes, and she was only half aware, amidst his profuse thanks, of the palms of his hands on her bottom as he leaned forward and kissed her gently on the cheek. He was, she knew, an
inveterate womanizer; but curiously enough she found herself unable positively to dislike him; and on the few occasions he had tested the temperature of the water with her he had accepted without
rancour or bitterness her fairly firm assurance that for the moment it was little if anything above freezing point. As she closed the door behind Binyon and went back to her bedroom, she felt a
growing sense of guilt about her early morning escapade. It had been those wretched (beautiful!) gins and Campari that had temporarily loosened the girdle round her robe of honour. But her sense of
guilt was, she knew, not occasioned just by the lapse itself, but by the anonymous, mechanical nature of that lapse. Jenny had been utterly delighted, if wholly flabbergasted, by the unprecedented
incident; but Sarah herself had felt immediately saddened and diminished in her own self-estimation. And when finally she had returned to her flat, her sleep had been fitful and unrefreshing, the
eiderdown perpetually slipping off her single bed as she had tossed and turned and tried to tell herself it didn’t matter.
    Now she took two Disprin, in the hope of dispelling her persistent headache, washed and dressed, drank two cups of piping hot black coffee, packed her toilet bag and night-clothes, and left the
flat. It was only some twelve minutes’ walk down to the hotel, and she decided that the walk would do her nothing but good. The weather was perceptibly colder than the previous day: heavy
clouds (the forecasters said) were moving down over the country from the north, and some moderate falls of snow were expected to reach the Midlands by the early afternoon. During the previous week
the bookmakers had made a great deal of money after the tenth consecutive non-white Christmas; but they must surely have stopped taking any more bets on a white New Year, since such an eventuality
was now beginning to look like a gilt-edged certainty.
    Not that Sarah Jonstone had ever thought of laying a bet with any bookmaker, in spite of the proximity of the Ladbrokes office in Summertown which she passed almost daily on her way to work.
Passed it, indeed, again now, and stared (surely, far too obviously!) at the man who had just emerged, eyes downcast, from one of the swing-doors folding a pink, oblong betting slip into his
wallet. How extraordinarily strange life could become on occasions! It was just like meeting a word in the English language for the very first time, and then – lo and behold! – meeting
exactly the same word for the
second
time almost immediately thereafter. She had seen this same man, for the first time, the previous evening as she had walked up to Jenny’s flat at
about 9.30 p.m.: middle-aged; greyish-headed; balding; a man who once might have been slim, but who was now apparently running to the sort of fat which strained the buttons on his shabby-looking
beige raincoat.
Why
had she looked at him so hard on that former occasion?
Why
had she recorded certain details about him so carefully in her mind? She couldn’t tell. But
she did know that this man, in his turn, had looked at
her
, however briefly, with a look of intensity which had been slightly (if pleasurably) disturbing.
    Yet the man’s cursory glance had been little more than a gesture of approbation for the high cheekbones that had thrown the rest of her face into a slightly mysterious shadow under the
orange glare of the street lamp which illuminated the stretch of road immediately outside his bachelor flat. And after only a few yards, he had virtually forgotten the woman