Death of a Wedding Guest by Anne Morice

Author:Anne Morice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2021-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWO

The front door was off the latch and I pushed it open with one hand, rang the bell with the other and marched inside.

‘Yes, we mostly do leave it unfastened nowadays,’ Jez explained, when I had tracked her down in the kitchen, where all her charts and reference books were spread out on the table. ‘Caspar likes to answer the bell himself, you see, and he can’t reach the handle. Ellen was always so patient about it, but I get madly bored trudging into the hall to do half the job for him, and then disappearing again while he finishes it off. Would you like some coffee?’

‘Yes, please. Where’s Caspar now?’

‘Asleep, so you may speak freely. Did you come to see me, or had you forgotten that Ellen had moved out?’

Having based my strategy on the assumption that Jez was both too lazy and too direct to give a crooked answer to a straight question, I did not hesitate to reply:

‘I am here to ask whether, in your considered opinion, Ellen suspects Jeremy of having attempted to murder her?’

‘No.’

‘Then how do you account for the current state of affairs?’

‘Wait until I’ve ground the coffee,’ Jez replied as placidly as though we were discussing the weather, ‘and you shall have my interpretation, but this thing makes a noise like a road drill.’

I waited while she flipped switches and pressed buttons and the scream of the coffee grinder filled the room. Then she tipped the contents into a paper cone, saying gravely;

‘Ellen would never believe that Jeremy could act in any way harmfully towards her. I am not sure that she was so dead set on marrying him, at any rate not so soon. I think she may have got steamrollered into that. His mother wasn’t taking no for an answer and Jeremy, having made his one tiny bid for freedom, which turned out so disastrously, had lost the will to stand up to her. I think it’s this feeling of being jostled along by all the family pressures which has tended to make Ellen a bit jumpy and withdrawn these days, not quite her usual serene self; but that’s not to say that she doesn’t trust Jeremy. She feels very strongly that they are right for each other and if the only way to get him was to marry him, then wedding bells it had to be.’

‘An attitude to which you have contributed your share?’

‘Well, that’s beside the point, isn’t it?’ Jez said mildly, as she handed me my coffee. ‘I happen to believe they are right for each other too, but it makes no difference where she got the idea from in the first place. You asked me if it was conceivable that she could suspect Jeremy of trying to murder her and I’ve given you your answer.’

‘Which does nothing to explain why they’re now skulking in Hans Place, instead of racing round France and Italy.’

‘I imagine the reason is that there would be no pleasure in it. The shadow is there all right, only it hangs over and not between them.

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