A FATAL FALL an absolutely gripping classic British whodunnit by JANET NEEL

Author:JANET NEEL [NEEL, JANET]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joffe Ostara Classics
Published: 2024-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Robert Vernon, occupying himself with telephoning his managing directors while being driven to the Department of Trade and Industry, knew he was causing agitation. Anxious men all round the United Kingdom were being contacted in their cars and hauled out of their meetings. In one case, where disquieting rumours had been reaching Head Office, the earnest candour with which the secretary explained the difficulties attendant on getting her boss to a telephone had left Robert Vernon grimly convinced that Jarvis was even now being sought frenziedly through the afternoon drinking-clubs of Birmingham. He made a note, and looked up to find that his driver was parked on Victoria Street outside the DTI’s glass frontage, carefully avoiding the eye of a traffic warden. Robert Vernon reluctantly decided that the errant managing director would have to be let off the hook this time; in the hour or so that he would be with these types at the DTI, that competent young woman would most certainly have found her wandering boss, dried him out, and provided him with a decent briefing. Time, however, to go and see that office without giving any notice.

He got heavily out of the car, aware that he had been distracting himself with work to avoid thinking about his daughter, and found himself explaining his business to a middle-aged uniformed messenger with an uncertain command of the English language.

‘That one, there,’ he said, exasperated, as he read his own name upside down on a pink slip of paper among a dozen laid out in a random pattern on the table-top inside the glass cubby-hole. The man looked at him in wild surmise and picked up a wholly different piece of paper. Robert Vernon sighed and suggested he ring Miss Francesca Wilson. The man’s face cleared happily and three minutes later Francesca appeared, demurely grey-suited.

‘Thank you, Charlie,’ she said kindly to the messenger. ‘Can I take the chitty?’ She reached into the box, extracted the right slip and took Vernon across worn flooring and up the stairs to the central lifts. The whole operation, he thought, looked incredibly run down and shabby, and he was signally unimpressed by the company in the lift. Francesca was nicely turned out, though wearing much less make-up than the girls in his office, but the rest of this shower looked like a dole queue gone live; not a decently cleaned pair of shoes among them and two dirty collars. His gaze shifted to a smallish older man hunched into the far corner of the lift, whose grey hair had needed cutting for months and who had cigarette ash and what looked like mince down the front of his jacket.

‘I want you Francesca,’ this personage said malevolently. ‘Your colleagues are producing for me great nonsense on these rescue cases.’

Robert Vernon gaped disbelievingly as Francesca courteously assured this aged derelict that she would attend upon him late that afternoon.

‘Gerhard Bukowsky — Sir Gerhard — Chief Statistician,’ she explained as they got out on the seventh floor.

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