Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club by Julian Leatherdale

Author:Julian Leatherdale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

It was well past midnight. Joan lay in her divan bed, silvered in moonlight, listening to the soft groaning of the cat asleep on her feet. In the other room, Bernice had finally settled after taking a powder to quell her nerves and her snoring could be heard through the bedroom door.

Joan felt that one great burden had been lifted from her chest. She had followed the leads like a good detective should but in her heart she’d never been able to bring herself to believe Bernice capable of murder. Joan had chosen not to share the autopsy finding that Ellie had died of strangulation. Was any woman strong enough to do that? Perhaps. Her husband is a slaughterman and it is her regular custom to assist him in the skinning and cleaning of the beasts. She is not a muscular, masculine type of female either but feminine in appearance.

Joan was deeply shocked, however, to have learned that her sister, her mentor, her friend, had punched Eleanor in a drunken rage and then lied to her to cover it up. Bernice was right to be afraid of the police. They would not be forgiving of two lesbians having a domestic while on the piss. It was the kind of thing that would make for a great courtroom drama and sleazy headlines. And given the general suspicion of women living alone, not to mention lesbians and prostitutes, it would be easy to secure a conviction for someone of Bernice’s dubious character. Playing a sex goddess at artists’ balls. Habitual cocaine user and partygoer. Multiple lovers, including refos and dagoes. Writer of erotic plays and trashy lurid novels. Mother of two abandoned sons. (‘It was a mercy that my mum took Angus and Philip,’ Bernie had confided in Joan one evening. ‘I was a terrible mother: self-absorbed, obsessive, moody. All good qualities in a writer, perhaps, but catastrophic in a mother.’ Her sons were the sacrifice Bernice had been forced to make to escape a loveless marriage and find the freedom to be a bohemian. Joan sometimes wondered if Bernice protested too much about her unfitness for motherhood: tears stole into her eyes and her voice cracked on the few occasions she talked about her boys. But there were times when Joan agreed that Bernice’s children were much better off without her.)

Having made her confession, Bernice felt compelled to unburden herself. She and Joan had returned to their own flat and sat up for the next two hours talking feverishly over nips of sherry. While Gordon was almost certainly Ellie’s knight in shining armour, there was still no proof it was he who had killed her. And as Hugh had said, such men rarely pulled the trigger themselves when they committed crimes; they had people to do that for them. Had Gordon paid Frankie to do the job? The murder had all the hallmarks of Frankie’s psychotic violence.

‘Ruby said something that has been bothering me,’ Joan confided to Bernice. ‘She told me that Jess was no friend of Ellie’s.

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