Murder in Venice: A totally addictive 1920s historical cozy mystery (The Posie Parker Mystery Series Book 6) by L.B. Hathaway

Author:L.B. Hathaway [Hathaway, L.B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Whitehaven Man Press London
Published: 2018-04-18T22:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

Excitement tore through Posie. ‘So come on! Who is she, sir?’

They had stopped on a bleak, unsheltered corner. A group of four black-cloaked musicians, instruments shrouded, hurried past. A freezing wind was rustling the tree-tops of the walled garden opposite, and Posie and Lovelace found themselves subconsciously following the musicians, entering the great carved slab of fancy icing which was the Church of San Vidal.

A small veneered visitor’s bench was jammed into the tiny entrance. Posie moved a bouquet of heavily-scented dead lilies off the bench, the orange pollen staining the dank stone floor, and they sat down, nestled between a stack of printed music programmes and packages of greasy white candles. In the main church, over near the altar, the musicians were setting up on a small platform, putting out sheet music and adjusting stands. A few nuns were sitting expectantly in the front row.

‘She looked familiar to me, too, sir. But I couldn’t place her. Again and again I wondered if I’d met her before.’

The Inspector shook his head. ‘I doubt you’ve ever met her in the flesh. But it probably feels like it. Who could forget those great, dark eyes? They stared out at us from newspapers for a whole summer long.’

‘She’s famous?’

‘I’ll say. Do you remember the Robert Gattling murder?’

Posie frowned. It didn’t sound familiar. She didn’t like to appear ill-informed though and her annoyance obviously showed. The Inspector laughed grimly:

‘Don’t worry about the name. You would have been a mere whippersnapper of a thing at the time, probably not even twenty. I remember it clear as a bell. It was before the Great War broke out, must have been about 1912. I was a Sergeant in London, but I was doing my Inspector’s exams all that summer. I barely saw my Molly from one week to the next although we were courting. It was deadly dull and I often looked at the daily papers for a bit of light relief. The Robert Gattling murder, or ‘The Ice Cream Girl Murder’, as it became known, had everything to cause a sensation.’

The Ice Cream Girl Murder. Posie gasped: of course she remembered it. The hazy details, at least.

She had been at home in Norfolk then, keeping house for her father in the small, closed world of the Norfolk Rectory, missing her brother, Richard, away in the glitteringly remote world of Cambridge. The war which would obliterate life as they knew it was not even on the edge of their imaginings yet. Posie had read the daily papers with almost a religious fervour, feeling a need to connect with a world bigger than her own. She had started to step out with Harry Briskow, the kind, funny man she would later become engaged to; just another man who would die pointlessly in the Great War alongside most of his generation. Back then, Harry was newly-qualified as a solicitor, and he’d been looking around for a suitable wife. Although Posie had a feeling now that she certainly would not

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