Death in the Round by Anne Morice

Author:Anne Morice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2021-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

By the following morning Toby was still rattling around in the Royal Metropolitan, having been called on by Inspector Watson, when on the brink of departure, and served with a subpoena for Melanie’s inquest at the Town Hall on Tuesday morning.

‘Don’t they want me as well?’ I asked him.

‘Funnily enough, no. I explained that you were far better at that sort of thing than I am, but he was not interested. So here I am, getting terribly behind with my work and now this horror hanging over me.’

‘Oh well, only a couple more days,’ I reminded him, ‘and it will be a pure formality, you know. Just a couple of questions, then the medical evidence and they’ll probably wind up with an adjournment.’

‘And adjourned is where it is likely to remain, I imagine.’

‘Shouldn’t wonder. Did the Inspector give you any hints about what headway they were making?’

‘Certainly not. Why should he take me into his confidence?’

‘Not deliberately,’ I explained. ‘Inadvertently is the word I had in mind.’

‘Well, it wasn’t in my mind, I assure you. I don’t possess your gift for drawing the inadvertent out of people, specially policemen. However, it would be logical to assume that they are concentrating their efforts on the young man she was seen on the cliff with, and the still, small voice of reason tells me that they have a fat chance of catching up with him.’

‘I agree. The trouble is that, so far as I know, the only one who did see him was Jamie and the best description he could give was that he had fair hair and was wearing jeans. That’s a big help, isn’t it? He could be absolutely anywhere by now, wearing dark hair and a pink suit, for all we know. And he may not have been a local boy either; more likely someone she’d picked up with on an earlier adventure and kept in touch with. She’d been on the move quite a bit during her short lifetime, so there’s no telling when and where they might have met.’

‘Which makes me feel even more inflamed at being kept here forcibly for such a pointless exercise. In fact, I wonder they bother to have an inquest at all.’

‘Don’t be so pessimistic. Something interesting may emerge. In fact, I don’t see how it can fail to and it’s the medical evidence which I’m depending on you to listen to most carefully.’

‘How ghoulish of you!’

‘Not the gory details, I’m not concerned with them, but I would very much like to know whether she died before Elfrieda or after.’

‘Yes, I can see that, but isn’t it a foregone conclusion? If this young man was the one who did it, there must have been a gap of nearly twenty-four hours between the two, with Melanie first past the post.’

‘But the fact that no one appears to have seen her after Jamie got that glimpse on the cliff path doesn’t necessarily mean she was killed the same evening. The carrier bag, for instance,

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