Marriage is Murder? by L.B. Hathaway

Author:L.B. Hathaway [Hathaway, L.B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781913531041
Publisher: Whitehaven Man Press London
Published: 2020-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

Seven

It happened very suddenly. Posie was aware of something hard being forced into her back, right between her shoulder-blades. Was that the barrel of a gun felt through the thin wedding dress silk?

‘Don’t move, Miss Parker. Or you’ll be sorry. Relax. Didn’t you get my message? This is going to be the happiest day of your life.’

A familiar voice, surely?

She didn’t have time to feel scared, as suddenly Posie was being dragged backwards and there were several hands pulling her across metal and over coils of ropes.

Downwards.

She smelt the pungent stink of engine-oil and fresh earth, the salty tang of the age-old tides of the river. She was onboard The Marguerite. On the open deck.

All about her she saw the snow coming down full-pelt; there was no cover here. It fell on her set-that-morning hair, nestling on her head like an inappropriate halo.

She could still see Scotland Yard’s turrets and towers rising up like something sacred in front of her, the twinkling lights of the Embankment. Nearer at hand, she thought she saw Inspector Oats’ dark police dress cap appear and then disappear behind a wall.

Suddenly she sensed that nobody was holding onto her anymore, and the pressure at her back had eased. She turned away from looking at the Embankment and spun to face her captor.

And then it all made perfect, horrible sense.

Posie held herself tightly, willing herself not to call out or gasp in surprise, although the shock was enough to almost send her reeling.

For she was looking at the face of a dead man, albeit a man who had been at her aborted wedding ceremony just an hour before, albeit in disguise.

But now she saw right through that disguise.

It was suddenly stripped away, pared back, like scales falling from her eyes. Even though he had not taken off a single part of that clever costume.

It was the flat-footed Reverend Gibbons.

Although, as Posie now knew, it was not the Reverend Jimmy Gibbons at all. Such a man did not exist. And the strange note delivered to Scotland Yard along with all her white roses had been a red herring which had worked a treat.

The whole notion of getting Posie to dash across London through the snow, to a helpless Richard Lovelace imprisoned in his office, had been a complete fiction of the best possible kind.

It seemed more than likely now – as Posie realised in a frightening burst of clarity – that Richard Lovelace had been nowhere near his office today. It had been an effective ruse. Something Posie had fallen for: hook, line and sinker.

How had any of this even been possible?

An old saying of Posie’s father’s was reverberating annoyingly around her head: where there is a will, there is a way.

Well: the will was strong in this case.

And if you wanted to scupper a wedding badly enough, of course you could do it. Posie and Richard’s ceremony had been announced, albeit with short notice, in a couple of the national newspapers, and there had been a feature about it in that week’s The Lady.

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