The Palace Guard: A Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn Mystery by Charlotte MacLeod

Author:Charlotte MacLeod [MacLeod, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9781453277393
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

tersohn bundled Sarah and her assorted garments into the elevator, took them down, and got them a cab. Using what he fondly believed to be a British accent with weird sibilant overtones, he directed the driver to the palace of Madarn Wilkins, Then he settled back to develop his role while Sarah huddled in the opposite corner wondering whether to die of embarrassment right away or wait until she was hooted into extinction at the Madam’s.

She needn’t have fretted. Nobody noticed her at all. Mrs. Sorpende had arrived immediately before them. Even the ticket taker at the door was sighing. “Gripes, 1 didn’t think they built ‘em like that any more.”

Sarah was hurried through the turnstile, then left to string along as best she might. Perhaps Indian wives were expected to trail submissively behind their spouses. Anyway, Bittersohn’s efforts to get close to Mrs. Sorpende were unlikely to attract remark either, since every other man in the palazzo was trying to do the same. Hatless women in sensible drip-drys threw angry glances as she sailed up the Grand Staircase with her entourage.

Like Sarah, Mrs. Sorpende had left her coat in the cloakroom as the vast skylights provided an effect of solar heating inside the palazzo. She had on her one and only black daytime dress, a garment that would have been sedate enough if it hadn’t happened to fit so divinely. At throat and cars were pearls so discreet as to seem genuine. On her intricately dressed hair perched a whimsy of creamy satin and veiling that would have driven Anatole of Paris to screaming frenzy. On her hands were gloves of a dazzling whiteness. About her wafted a subtle hint of roses. She was, in a word, sensational.

C. Edwald Palmerston was beaming. He kept patting Mrs. Sorpende’s arm to call her attention to one exhibit or another, and orating about the paintings with as much gusto as though he hadn’t been informed they were copies. As they reached the Grand Salon and he started gushing about the Romney, a remark of Dolores Tawne’s flashed through Sarah’s mind: “If you can’t tell, what difference does it make?”

So that was how he planned to handle the situation. If Max Bittersohn should fail to recover the stolen paintings, and there were so many of them gone for so long a time that how could he possibly get them all?—then Palmerston would simply go on pretending no robbery had ever happened. The copies would

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