The Missing Party-Girl: A Rags-to-Riches Cozy Mystery Romance by Nhys Glover (read after .txt) 📗

“Can we see if there’s any record of her anywhere? If she’s still alive... that sort of thing.”

Cage nodded. “If she’s still alive, she might be more willing to tell us what actually happened that weekend. If she’d been paid off or was covering for a boyfriend, who later dumped her, she might be more willing to come clean now.”

He returned to his laptop on the floor and began accessing information. “Okay, there really was a Ruby Embers born in 1946 in Brixton. That makes her Minerva’s age, and she was only eighteen at the time she was interviewed. Barely legal.” His disgust was apparent.

“Is she still alive?” Adie asked with excitement.

If she was Minerva’s age, she could very well still be alive.

“There’s no record of death. Hang on… okay, we have a recent address here in London. I’ll check it another way,” he said, getting serious and pulling his laptop onto his lap so he could type faster.

After a few minutes, while Adie busied herself reading through a few of the other sheets on the coffee table, Cage looked up, his expression triumphant.

“Bingo! She’s living in an assisted living complex in Spitalfields. Feel like taking a trip to visit her?” Cage asked. “I can give the place a call and see if there are visiting hours or any other restrictions.”

Adie nodded excitedly. This was the first piece of real police-work she’d ever done. The idea of questioning someone involved in an old crime was thrilling!

Cage rang the complex, and after a few questions he hung up. “No problem. Miss Ember, she’s still a ‘Miss’ it seems, is wheelchair bound but sharp as a tack, so the nurse told me. She doesn’t get many visitors, so she’d likely be happy to have someone call by at any time before dinner. That’s at six, it seems.” Cage looked at his phone. “It’s just one now. Let’s go.”

“Should we have other places to look at as well?” she asked. “While we’re out.”

Cage nodded. He consulted his laptop again, this time pulling up Google Maps. “Okay, I have the address for The Den nightclub. And the flat the girls shared in Soho. What if…”

He stopped talking while his hands again flew over the keyboard with the kind of ease Adie could only envy.

When he looked up he was smiling in triumph. “There’s a flat for sale in the same building the girls lived in. We could get a look at it, if you want. We could even do the walk between Georgie’s nightclub and the flat. She would have had to walk or get a cab in the early hours after a shift. Not the safest neighborhood, I imagine.”

For a moment Adie considered the possibility. Would a flat in Soho have changed a great deal in fifty years? Cosmetically, yes. But the layout, size and outlook would all be the same. It might help her get into Minerva’s head when she was reading the journal, if she’d seen her flat. Or a similar flat in the same building.

“Okay. We could pose as buyers. I’m starting to feel like a real PI!” She laughed.

“We don’t always playact and bend the rules to do our job,” he muttered in annoyance.

Adie grinned. “But it’s the fun part of the job, you have to agree.”

Cage shrugged, letting go of his annoyance. “I’ll give the estate agent a quick call. We can go see The Den and the flat in Soho after we visit Ruby Embers. Seriously, who would name their kid Ruby when the family name’s Embers? The other kids might be Rosy and Garnet.”

Adie laughed again, her excitement building. “You get hung up on the oddest things!”

Cage grinned and shrugged. “What can I say? Odd things attract my attention. It makes being a PI fun. After playacting and bending the rules, of course.”

Adie considered this gem of information for a moment. She’d never heard him talk about his work being fun. All she knew was that he’d been her watcher from a distance ever since he left the forces eight years ago. What other cases he took on, while he watched over her, she didn’t know.

“Cab or Tube?” Cage asked as they headed for the door pushing the trolley ahead of them. They’d replaced their empty plates and mugs on it and planned to leave it just outside their room.

They’d ridden the Tube from Kings Cross Station to Westminster. It had reminded her a little of the New York subway system, except that the train carriages were rounded. The carriages and the tunnels had been very tubular, making the name The Tube seem perfectly fitting.

As to cabs,  she’d seen a lot of the big black boxes on wheels that passed for taxi cabs in London as they’d walked from the Tube station to New Scotland Yard and then on to the Savoy Hotel on the Strand.

Vehicular transport seemed to crawl along, she’d observed, making it faster to walk. If it had been raining or the distances had been greater, they would have opted for a cab that morning. But everything in Central London was close by, and walking had been her go-to form of travel most of her life, so it had made sense to walk. It had been more fun, too. Not to mention cheaper.

“Can we walk?” she asked.

Cage shook his head. “Not if we want to get to all the places on our list. Spitalfields is a couple of miles to the north east of here.”

She nodded reluctantly, even though she knew she’d have no trouble walking a couple of miles. But if time was an issue then she supposed a cab would work. Cage did have his credit card, after all. It was probably not all