When Anthony Rathe Investigates by Matthew Booth

Author:Matthew Booth [Booth, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: crime fiction, crime, detective, Fiction, story, thriller
Publisher: Sparkling Books Limited
Published: 2018-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

The Quick and the Dead

Anthony Rathe had been sitting alone with his memories for the last half an hour. He had been provided with the glass of Pinot Noir which he had ordered but he had not tasted it as yet. He had hardly registered the waiter placing it down in front of him, although he knew that he had mumbled some words of gratitude. The people who passed his table barely glanced at him, as though the sight of a man drinking alone in a hotel bar was something so common that it failed to arouse anybody’s curiosity. Whether that said anything about the modern world or not was a question which Rathe might have enjoyed debating at any other time in his life, but now he gave it even less attention that those same people gave him. His mind was elsewhere, drifting back over time, taking reminiscences and reliving them as though they were his reality of this moment, as though months and years had not drifted away since the events which he now remembered had actually taken place.

It had been the phone call which had started it, a call which he had had no right to expect and certainly no reason to anticipate. Her voice on the other end of the line had brought Rathe’s past crashing into his present with such a fierce tidal wave of memory that he almost failed to understand anything she had said to him. He had stammered questions about why she was phoning him after all this time, about what she wanted from him, about whether she had known how much he had missed her, or how deeply she had affected him when they had spoken last. But she had not been prepared to discuss any of it. The call had to be brief, she said, and all it could be for now was a request she had to make of him which he would either accept or reject. The call was to be that simple. No more, no less. She had asked him to meet her that afternoon in the Artesian bar of the Langham Hotel at three and, as he reflected now that he always would have, he had accepted the invitation without hesitation.

The choice of bar was no accident. The first time he had taken Alice Villiers out for a drink, he had taken her to the Artesian. Eager to impress, with all the arrogance of those days demanding that nothing less than extravagance would do to demonstrate his worth, he had ordered cocktails and led her to the mauve settees which were placed beneath the grand chandeliers which descended from the high ceiling. He and Alice had stayed there for hours, their plans to move on for food or a different bar were soon forgotten. They had drunk, they had chatted, they had laughed. They had forgotten that outside the long, broad windows of the hotel bar, London had a life which it was living still, despite

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