In The Presence Of The Enemy by George Elizabeth

Author:George, Elizabeth [Elizabeth, George,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Suspense, Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9780553576085
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1996-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

18

WHEN HER ALARM WENT OFF at half past four the next morning, Barbara Havers awoke in her usual manner: She gave a star-tled cry and flung herself upright as if the pane of glass that was her dream had been shattered by a hammer and not by a noise. She fumbled for the alarm and silenced it, blinking into the darkness. A thin film of dim light the width of a finger seeped through a break in the curtains. She observed this and frowned, knowing she wasn’t awakening in Chalk Farm and for a moment wondering where the hell she was. She sorted her thoughts. They constituted yesterday, London, Hillier, Scotland Yard, and the motorway. Then she recalled a jungle of chintz, lace pillows, overstuffed furniture, sentimental aphorisms rendered in needle-point, and f loral wallpaper. Yards of f loral wallpaper. Miles of it, in fact. Lark’s Haven B

and B, Barbara concluded. She was in Wiltshire.

She swung herself to the edge of the bed and reached for the light. She squinted in its brightness and she fumbled her way to the foot of the bed for the plastic black mackin-tosh that did duty as her dressing gown whenever she travelled. She shrugged into it and crackled across the room to the basin where she turned on the water and, when her courage would allow, raised her head to the mirror.

She couldn’t decide what was worse: the sight of her sleep-puffed face still bearing the imprint of the pillow along one of her cheeks or the reflection of more of the Lark’s Haven wallpaper. In this case, it was yellow chrysan-themums, mauve roses, blue ribbons, and—

blithely defying all reason and botany—blue and green leaves. This charming motif was repeated in both the bedspread and the curtains with an abandon that suggested Laura Ashley gone mental. Barbara could just hear all those foreign visitors, eager to experience life among the natives, exclaiming at the perfect Englishness of the B and B. Oh, Frank, isn’t this just what we always expected an English cottage would look like? How delicious.

How charming. How utterly sweet.

How bloody nauseating, Barbara thought.

And it wasn’t a cottage at all, anyway. It was a solid brick house just outside the village on the Burbage Road. But there was no accounting for taste, was there, and Robin Payne’s mother seemed to like the place just fi ne.

“Mum did the redecorating last year,”

Robin had explained when he’d led the way to her room. A small ceramic plate on the mercifully unpapered door had announced her accommodation as Cricket’s Hideaway. He added, “With Sam’s tender guidance, of course,” and rolled his eyes.

Barbara had met them both below in the sitting room: Corrine Payne and her “recently intended,” as she called Sam Corey. They were billers and cooers of the fi rst order, which seemed somehow in keeping with the overall atmosphere of the B and B, and when Robin had guided Barbara from her car to the kitchen and from there to the sitting room, the pair had made short work of communicating to her their mutual devotion.

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