Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

alcoves on either side of the fireplace. Two were with Sarah and some guys, one was with an older man who looked like her dad, and another with an older woman I figured was her mother. It was Katie, who was now lying at the morgue.

She got up and grabbed the largest of the framed photographs and handed it to Harry. He looked at it without expression and handed it to Dehan. Sarah was watching her face with anxious eyes. I should have left it to Harry, but I knew that however bad the truth is, not knowing is worse. So I said, “Sarah, I’m afraid we have bad news for you. You might want to sit down.”

She went very pale and sat carefully on the sofa. Her eyes were already welling up.

“I’m afraid Katie has been killed.”

Her lower lip curled in and the tears spilled from her eyes. Dehan, in that weird, paradoxical way she has, edged closer and put her arms around her. Sarah sobbed, shaking silently, with her face buried in Dehan’s neck. After a moment, we heard the click of the kettle in the kitchen. Harry stood and said quietly, “I’ll make some tea,” and walked out on quiet feet.

I sat a moment in the large armchair, where Katie must have sat a hundred times, looking out at the quiet, leafy street, thinking about Freud’s words, ‘…we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object, or its love.’ And I wondered about those people who go through life believing they have the right to destroy other people’s lives, and rob them of their loved ones.

Harry returned, carrying a tray with a teapot and four colorful mugs. I made room on the littered coffee table and he set it down. There followed a bizarre ritual in which he poured out the tea and asked each of us in turn if we wanted milk and sugar, and we told him which and how much of which. It had a strangely calming and sobering effect on Sarah. By the time he got to her, she had stopped convulsing and was able to wipe her eyes on her sleeve. Harry handed her a handkerchief and she blew her nose, then told him a cloud of milk and one sugar.

Tea and the British is a thing that not even they understand, but it’s real. After a moment, Harry returned to his chair and sat.

“Sarah, I know this has been a terrible shock. Do you feel up to answering a few questions?”

She nodded. “I’ll do my best. What happened? Was she mugged or what?”

He sighed. “That’s what we’re trying to understand. Did she, to the best of your knowledge, Sarah, did she have another flat somewhere?”

Her face, slightly puffy and red, registered surprise and confusion. “Only Chiddie’s place. I mean her daddy’s house, in Sussex.”

“Can you think what she would have been doing in a flat in Whitechapel?”

“Whitechapel?” She actually laughed. You might as well have asked the debutante daughter of a Boston Brahmin if she had an apartment in Hunt’s Point in the Bronx. “Good Heavens, no! Katie? Never!” She shook her head, confused. “Are you sure this isn’t some ghastly mistake? Katie wasn’t even in London. She’s been away on holiday.”

FIVE

I set my mug down carefully on the hearth beside me and leaned forward with my elbows on my knees. “Where did she say she was going on holiday, Sarah?”

“Well, that’s the thing.” She blew her nose and mopped her eyes. “She didn’t. She was very excited about it, but couldn’t tell me where she was going. It was all very hush-hush and I supposed it was to do with her work.”

Dehan sipped her tea. “She had a job?”

“Sort of. She was a reporter on the local paper. You know the sort of thing: Mrs. Henshaw had to call the local fire brigade to rescue her kitten, Mittens, from the sycamore at the end of her garden. Protest over awning at landmark corner shop. Sometimes she did the horoscope too, under the name Madam Stardust. She was awfully good. And of course the social pages: who was in town, who was away. She knew everyone, so that was easy for her. But what she really wanted to do was to be a proper reporter…”

Dehan cut her short. “So, in what way, Sarah, do you think that her holiday was connected to her job? You said it’s a local paper, so why would they send her away to report on somebody else’s kittens?”

She smiled and Sarah laughed. It sounded a bit like a braying donkey and was kind of infectious. Dehan started laughing too and Sarah leaned back and put her fingertips on Dehan’s arm. “No! Silly! Sorry! Silly me! I should have explained. Katie’s daddy is frightfully important and he has all sorts of connections, and Katie was tapping him for information she could use in a feature which she was going to offer, as a scoop, to the Telegraph. She was frightfully clever like that.”

Dehan had stopped laughing. She looked over at me and her face said we had been here before[4].

I asked, “Who’s her father?”

“Lord Chiddester.”

Harry’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, Katie Ellison! Charles Ellison, Lord Chiddester’s daughter.”

Sarah gazed at him with glazed eyes. “Yes… Sorry. I thought you realized that.”

Dehan was frowning like she was getting a headache. “So is it Ellison or Chiddester?”

I said, “It’s a complicated system.” I looked at Sarah. “What is he, a marquis?”

“Yes, the Marquis of Chiddester.”

I turned back to Dehan. “Chiddester is a place in West Sussex. Charles Ellison is the Marquess of Chiddester, so he is known as Lord Chiddester.” I smiled. “His close friends probably call him Chiddester or Chiddie, though his given name is