Murder at Sandringham House by C. C. Benison

Author:C. C. Benison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bantam Books

"I hate reporters."

We were upstairs in my father's room and he was reaching into the wardrobe for his coat while I sat on the bedspread flipping through a couple of papers he had bought at a newsagent's earlier in the day, The Times and The Daily Telegraph, each of which carried restrained accounts of Jackie Scaife's death below the fold on page one.

"Mom's a reporter," I responded unthinkingly to my father's rare burst of animosity. Or was. She's an editor with the Charlottetown Guardian, not that the newspaper of a city with less than fifty thousand people has a huge staff.

There was silence but for a metal hanger scraping along the bar of the wardrobe.

"I didn't mean your mother, Bird," he said softly.

I looked up. He was shoving his arm purposefully into the sleeve of a navy blue parka. He did look like a cop. Sigh. No getting away from it. But it was the little pause that troubled me more. The significant little pause. However reasonably and rationally and unemotionally my father presented to me his separation from my mother after nearly thirty years of marriage, I knew (my whole generation knew, for it seemed like most of my friends' parents had been to, or were heading to, Splitsville) all kinds of nasties percolated away in subterranean depths that could bubble up through the surface calm unexpectedly. Hates reporters, eh?

Macgreevy was fairly off-putting, it was true, but Macg. seemed to have got up the ancient paternal-unit's backside fairly sharpish, which was odd. You'd think having a reporter for a wife all those years would have inured him to such people. A cop and a reporter was not a marriage made in ideological heaven, true. While Dad was busy maintiening le droit, to mangle the RCMP's real motto, maintiens le droit (uphold the law—not 'they always get their man'!), Mom increasingly over the years, or at least it seemed to me, was questioning le droit—a kind of reporter-y thing to do but not one inclined to charm your police officer husband. Still, they seemed to get along on the credo & convictions front, or at least agreed to disagree, not that I was paying a huge lot of attention, being a somewhat—but not completely—self-absorbed teenager person for much of the time.

"Are you coming? Bird? Hello. Dad to Bird. Come in, Bird."

"Sorry."

"You can keep those papers if you like."

" 'S'all right. I got the gist."

"We'll take these stairs," he said, indicating a door leading to a set of fire stairs. "It's actually quicker to the parking lot, and if you want to avoid your reporter pal…"

"Hume came and went to the village hall this way," he added as he pushed the door against a volume of chilly, damp air and we descended the stairs. The wind had fallen in ferocity and a few stars were noticeable for the first time since I had arrived in Norfolk, portending perhaps a clear day for the shooting party.

"And you thought that was odd."

"Yes and no.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.