Frog in the Throat by E. X. Ferrars

Author:E. X. Ferrars
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Felony & Mayhem Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The hotel to which he referred was in the marketplace of Wandlebury. It was market day and the square was full of stalls of vegetables and flowers and cheap cotton dresses on hangers and brightly coloured plastic goods and a slow-moving stream of buyers, looking for bargains which they were most unlikely to find. One side of the square consisted of a not very impressive Victorian Gothic church, flanked by two banks, one side of the usual row of chain stores, Boot’s, Woolworth’s, Smith’s, one of small, cosy, remarkably expensive shops, and one of the hotel to which we made our way once Felix had parked the car, a few more banks, a post office and two or three travel agents.

The hotel was nearly the only Georgian building left of those that surrounded the marketplace. It was a square, pleasant-looking building of weathered red brick, with a handsome portico and a glimpse through sash windows of a spacious dining room, in which tables covered with white tablecloths were set agreeably far apart. It had a look of peaceful comfort and of considerable expense, but luckily I had brought a fair amount of money with me, because I had known that when it came to paying the bill, Felix, although maintaining the fiction that he was host, would reach for my handbag and help himself from it. He always did it when we met for a meal, just as if we were still married.

We had excellent steaks, a carafe of red wine and coffee. I remembered that Felix intended to make a goulash that evening and thought that I should not want much of it. All the same, the good food made me feel better after the distressing morning.

We had arrived at the hotel late for lunch and by the time that we were finished we were the only people left in the dining room.

“What now?” I asked.

“I’m going to make that telephone call to the office,” Felix said. “Then I want to go to the post office.”

“What for?”

“I want a couple of registered envelopes.”

“One to send your client’s letters to the office in,” I said. “Why d’you want the other one?”

“To send Barbara Gabriel her photograph, of course. You didn’t think I was going to keep it, did you?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it.”

“That’s why I wanted to come to Wandlebury. If I’d posted it in Stillbeam she might have guessed who it came from. Naturally I’d have liked to give it to her this morning to put the poor woman out of her agony, only I couldn’t do that without giving it away that I’d been in Deering’s house. But if I post it to her now, without any covering letter, there’s no reason for her to guess who sent it.”

“Has it struck you,” I said, “that once Carleen was dead, Barbara was back in Basil’s power? She’d a hold over him as long as he’d a wife whom she could tell about his unpleasant activities, but with her gone, Barbara was back where she was before.

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