A Match Made for Murder by Iona Whishaw (top 10 best books of all time txt) 📗

“Yes, ma’am. Mr. Holden ordered it.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to delay you, what is your name?”

“Consuela Ruiz, ma’am.”

“Oh, does your brother drive a taxi in town?”

The woman smiled and nodded. “Raúl, yes. You know him?”

“Yes, he drove us here from the train station.”

The woman hesitated a moment longer. “But I better get this to the guests.”

“Yes, of course. I was only going to ask if anything was ordered for Mrs. Renwick, next door here?”

“Oh. I don’t think so.”

Lane got up. “Okay. I’m going to see how she is getting on. Can you stop by when you’ve finished with the Holdens? I might ask you to bring something for Mrs. Renwick.”

“Of course. You are a very kind lady to think about her.”

Lane knocked lightly on the door of number 27 and called out, quietly. “Mrs. Renwick? Ivy? Can I come in?” She heard a shuffle from inside and let out the breath she realized she’d been holding.

The door opened slowly. Ivy Renwick, in a pale pink silk nightgown and peignoir, a sad testimony to the violent end of what was to have been her honeymoon, stood aside and let Lane come in.

“How are you? Did you sleep at all?”

Ivy shook her head and took the handkerchief she’d been holding clenched in her hand and pressed it to her eyes. She sat down on the bed. “Thank you for offering to stay with me last night. You’re very kind. I did try to sleep, but in the middle of the night everything is a jumble. You can’t think straight.”

There was a gentle tap on the door. “Oh, that’s the very nice woman who brought a tray for the Holdens,” Lane said. “I asked her to stop by. Will you let me ask her to bring you coffee and a little something to eat?”

“Coffee, I guess.”

Lane stepped out and said quietly, “Can you bring coffee for the two of us, and maybe some toast and a scrambled egg for Mrs. Renwick? Please put it on our bill. We’re in number 26.”

Consuela smiled. “Oh, I know that, ma’am. Everybody was talking about the brave lady in number 26!”

Back inside, Lane found Ivy sitting at the dressing table, smoking.

“You know, during the war I lost my brother and a cousin in the Pacific theatre. We were devastated, but I had work, and I just threw myself into it. But now I don’t know where to turn. I feel like there’s no point to anything. I just feel a confusion in my head, like I can’t seem to get a hold of it.” She rubbed a temple with her free hand. “Why was he shot?”

It almost seemed a rhetorical question. Lane, sitting on the bed, was silent for a moment. “You have your baby,” she suggested gently.

Ivy Renwick turned and looked at her with such sorrow that Lane reached for her hand. “I hadn’t even told him yet,” she said, tears beginning to pool in her eyes.

“Ivy, yesterday when you came back you said, ‘I knew he was crazy.’ What did you mean by that? Did you mean Jack, or someone else?”

Ivy gave no answer, and turned away from Lane, holding the heels of her hands to her eyes. “Did I say that? God, I don’t even know what I was saying. Just seeing him lying there . . .” She dissolved into a paroxysm of sobs.

Lane went into the bathroom and found a clean washcloth, which she soaked with hot water and folded into a compress. Ivy took it with a slight nod and held it against her eyes. After a moment, she looked at herself in the dressing table mirror. “God, I look a mess.”

Chapter Six

In the cold basement morgue of the police station, Mrs. Watts stood rigidly in front of the remains of her husband. She was dressed in a dark wool coat, her black-gloved hands clenched tightly at her waist. Ames stood back respectfully by the door. He had been anxious about this moment as Darling had usually handled this sort of thing, but the hysterics he feared he might have to handle did not materialize.

“He tried to leave us,” she said, staring at her husband’s face, which had a lurid greenish hue in the light of the morgue. “He was much older than me, you know. He always thought I would leave him. What happens now?”

To Ames, the woman’s calm seemed almost cold, but for the fact that she had burst into tears when he and Terrell had gone to her cottage to break the news. They had dropped the child at her grandmother’s, and the first thing Mrs. Watts had asked when they were alone was if he had committed suicide.

“We don’t know how he died. We’ll have to wait for confirmation, but according to the ambulance medic, he might have had something like a heart attack. There will be a post-mortem. He was robbed, and the car keys are missing, so we suspect someone else was either with him or found him like that and took advantage of the situation. We will need to get information from you regarding his health when you feel up to it. It may take some time to understand how he . . . what happened.” Ames thought about the word painted on the Van Eyck garage. Tina had thought it was Watts. He couldn’t bring himself to ask Mrs. Watts about it. It seemed almost unimportant in the face of his death.

With some hesitation, Ames asked, “You said your husband tried to leave you. When was that?”

She turned toward the door, her hands still clutched in front of her, her handbag hanging off her wrist, but she did not look at him. “In September, but I persuaded him that he had a daughter to think about. Thank you for telling me everything you know, Sergeant Ames. Would you be kind enough to drive me back to my mother’s? I must think of how I am to tell my daughter