Last Step by Gwyneth Williams

Author:Gwyneth Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: crime fiction, women sleuths, cozy murder mystery, cozy mysteries, cozy mystery series woman sleuth, multicultural ficiton, cozy fiction, mystery crime novel, mystery books for kindle, mystery woman sleuth
Publisher: Gwyneth Williams

CHAPTER NINE

The Information Highway

Sara sat up in bed with a start, looking wildly around her in the darkness at the eerie shapes whose contours she could only guess at. Slowly she came to understand where she was and struggled to piece together what had disturbed her sleep. The final image was of the face of the commissaire smiling invitingly at her from a screen, like something from an insane rerun of the Red Dwarf…

Of course, she thought. Her unconscious mind was making connections that stress made her incapable of during the waking hours. She must find out what was happening in Paris; then her daughters might not need to become more involved. It would be easy enough, surely, to get information on the progress of the enquiry. One of her senior civil servant friends must know someone who knew someone and so on. They were all, after all, énarques, graduates of that highly exclusive French school for administrators, l’École nationale d’administration. Everybody knew that they remained forever a closely-knit group, moving from the top level at one ministry to the top level at another but always knowing what the others were doing. Putting that in hand would be her main task for the next day. Breathing a sigh of satisfaction, she lay down again and, wrapping the sheets around her, fell into her first easy sleep since the murder had been committed.

Up with the noisy birds again if not with the lark, Sara prepared their breakfast, setting it outside on their terrace and as usual exchanging with Victor the minimum amount of chat consistent with decency. Finally he left the house. Feeling somewhat revived after her several cups of strong Irish Breakfast tea, she quickly showered, dressed and booted the computer. She would check out a few new sites, see what updates there were on her Facebook page, and check out the latest literary reviews published in her favourite magazines and newspapers. She would follow that up with a few e-mails to friends.

E-mailing her friends was much better, she had decided, than attempting to explain over the telephone everything that had happened since she had seen them. A letter was certainly out of the question. Time, to quote Agatha Christie, was of the essence. She scrabbled in her purse to find the two e-mail addresses she had scribbled down somewhere, promising herself at the same time she would immediately transfer them to her growing list on the computer itself.

Success. She found the piece of paper she was looking for. But, as is too often the case with web-based e-mail programmes, her password was out-of-date. That meant inventing another she wouldn't easily forget. For a moment she panicked, afraid she'd never think of something no one else had heard of. Suddenly she decided to use the initial letters of the first line of a poem by the Welsh-cum-French poet she liked so much, Heather Dohollau.

Hastily she typed it in twice, then, when it was accepted, moved on to read the messages waiting in her “mailbox.

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