Dead on Cue by Anne Morice

Author:Anne Morice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2021-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

The media did their best, but the material was pitifully meagre. Heavy reference was made in the newspapers to the poignancy of a woman meeting her death in a manner so imitative of a scene in one of her husband’s novels, and in the television news bulletin the same photograph of the exterior of the house in South Park Terrace was flashed on to the screen for about four times in as many hours. We were also treated to a number of blown up snapshots of Gwen at various stages of development, from the age of six months right through to her wedding, twelve years before her death.

One trouble was that, apart from this distinction, her life appeared to have been singularly uneventful. She seemed to have had few friends and no relatives at all, except for her elderly parents, who were seen squashed, somewhat unnaturally, side by side on a small couch in their terrace house in Stoke-on-Trent, in order to announce to the nation that they were very shocked by this terrible crime and appealed to whomever was responsible to give himself up.

Details of the murder itself, or such of them as the police chose to reveal, were equally thin on the ground. The house had been broken into, by way of a basement window, at some time between two and four a.m. and she had been killed by a single blow, struck from behind. No trace of the weapon had so far turned up, either in the house or garden, or in the gardens of neighbouring houses.

‘Probably chucked it in the lake in Regent’s Park,’ I suggested.

‘If so, it should narrow the field of suspects to manageable proportions,’ Toby replied, ‘for he must be the world champion caber tosser. The park gates are locked from dusk till dawn.’

‘Yes, I suppose you’re right. So presumably he took whatever it was away with him and dumped it somewhere else. It’s odd, though, because one would have thought that even carrying a heavy object like that to the spot where he’d left his getaway car, if he had one, would have been risky. Not many people around at that hour, but all the more reason to be noticed and remembered by someone coming home late, or letting the cat out. However, that’s for the police to busy themselves with and, personally, I’m more interested in what I’d call the domestic side. For instance, what was she doing in the kitchen at that hour of night?’

‘I understand the theory is that she’d heard someone moving about and had come down to investigate.’

‘And a right daft one too, in my opinion. She is reputed to have been such a timid, mouse-like creature. Everyone is agreed on that and I must say that the only time I ever saw her that’s exactly how she struck me. So how do you reconcile that with hearing a noise in the middle of the night and prancing downstairs, unarmed, to find out what the intruder was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.