Never Pick Up Hitch-Hikers! by Ellis Peters

Author:Ellis Peters
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480443853
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Pheasant Hotel was in the tangle of small, dingy streets and lanes in the upper part of the town, close to where the railway station and the yards had been before the Beeching era wiped them out in the interests of economy. In the interests of economy, twelve years later, preparations were being made to lay a new line into precisely the same district, to give the new town the artery it desperately needed if it was ever going to be viable, even the lavish new road system proving quite inadequate to the traffic accruing from the influx of people and, less enthusiastically, of industry. The fact that all the bridges on the line had been joyously demolished to settle all doubts about its non-future was a trifling detail, considering what the overall cost was going to be, anyhow. However, the interests of economy had been virtuously safeguarded—twice, sparing no cost in the process.

In the meantime, however, none of this work had begun, and since no alternative development was possible because the area was already ear-marked, the Sidings district remained gently mouldering where it had always been, a rabbit-warren of lanes, alleys and yards, of small working-class terraces, minute corner shops, seedy garages and obscure and rather depressed-looking public houses, which owing to their fine cellars kept some of the best-served beer in Braybourne, or indeed in the county. The trendy modern inns that would some day replace them would never touch the standard again. They were not, however, fashionable, which suited their regular clients very well.

The Pheasant had a plain, stolid brick frontage on Dolphin Lane, and an unsurfaced and uneven car-park behind, approached by a narrow yard at one side, as well as room for just three or four vehicles on its flagged apron. The lane, like other main thoroughfares through the Sidings, was quite wide enough to accommodate traffic, but because of the buildings that hemmed it in it looked narrower than it was, and because of the sparsity of the street lights round those parts, and the number of dark, short-cut alleys that threaded the quarter, it had a ghostly quietness in the late evening.

Stan paid off the taxi at the corner, and towed Beattie across the road and into shadow. The second taxi, ambling behind at a cautious distance, had no difficulty in driving on past and turning into the next side-street, affording its occupant a good view of the two figures scuttling into cover under the sign of the Pheasant, and the large suitcase bumping alongside.

‘You wait here,’ Stan ordered, flattening Beattie against the wall, behind the rearmost of the three parked cars. ‘I’m only going to check in and dump this thing. We’re not hanging around here now, time’s precious.’

‘But I want a wash,’ she protested, ‘and a mirror. I only need five minutes.’

He knew better than that. If she got in front of a mirror she’d want to put on fresh eye-shadow, lashes, lipstick, the lot, as well as combing

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