After the Auction by Linda Frank

Author:Linda Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

WHEN WE SPOKE on the phone, Helen Wolf had invited me to lunch at her flat on Monday.

“It will be a private place to talk,” she said. “And I can spread out the materials I have to show you.”

The conversation heightened my anticipation of this meeting. As Monday dawned I charged out to the pool with more than my usual vigor, as if this were the first day of a fresh school term. But to get soaked, I hardly needed to swim. The moment I walked out of my building, the sky disgorged a downpour that persisted all morning.

Back in my flat about ten o’clock, I phoned Helen to confirm our noon appointment and to warn her that the weather might delay me. Though I left my flat with ample time, the three-block walk to the Tube station looked like a wade across the Channel, and I settled myself into the empty taxi that had thankfully slowed when I reached the corner. However, its crawl through streets overflowing with both water and traffic did, in fact, make me about twenty minutes late.

Helen lived in the middle of a row of almost identical Edwardian attached white buildings on a side street in Kensington near the Royal Albert Hall. She had told me that her flat was on the first floor.

“Simply ring, and I shall buzz you into the front entrance,” she’d said.

Just as I pressed the button under Helen’s nameplate, the front door opened, and a tall, blonde woman—dressed, like everyone that day, in a nondescript mackintosh, but with a poplin rain hat poised rakishly over her left eye, à la Marlene Dietrich—stepped out and held the door for me with one hand while gripping a shabby brown leather briefcase in the other.

“Thank you,” I said.

Inside the narrow foyer, opposite the stairway leading up to the other two flats, was Helen’s door, which I pushed open with a light knock.

“Miss Wolf? Helen? It’s Lily Kovner. The door was open. I don’t want you to be alarmed.”

Other than Brahms’s Second Symphony, I heard nothing. I crept along the parquet floor through a narrow foyer, past the entrance to a galley-shaped kitchen into a living and dining room space that defied any stereotype of an old lady’s bed-sit in both size and décor—a forest green Danish modern sofa, black leather Knoll arm chairs, Moroccan area rugs, Charles Rennie Mackintosh wooden tables, a few modern paintings on the wall.

The music came from a stereo in a three-sided nook adjacent to the main seating area. A dying fire on a stone hearth was the only gap in the ceiling-to-floor bookshelves that lined each wall. A tidy rectangular Rennie Mackintosh desk and chair faced the fireplace. A puddle of broken glass sparkled on the rug next to the desk.

“Helen? Helen?”

Turning around toward an opening that framed a short hallway on the opposite side of the living room, I saw the soles of two black oxford shoes. Pointing outward like an upside down ballet first position, they were attached to the feet of the inert body of a bald woman sprawled face down on the floor.

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