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

carefully modulated accent Adie had come to know as ‘grammar school’ elocution. It lacked the pebble-in-the-mouth rounded vowels Ruby had mimicked at the beginning of her interview, but in every other way sounded too stuck-up to be real.

A perfectly shaped eyebrow lifted as the woman took them in.

Cage held out his hand. “Yep, that’d be me. And this is my partner, Adie Reynolds. As I said on the phone, we’re moving to London for work and thought we might buy instead of rent. A good investment.”

The big blue eyes, beautifully made up, opened a little wider, as if the amount of information he was giving her up-front was more than she expected. “Absolutely. The London market is buoyant right now. Perfect time to buy in. I’m Elizabeth Graham, and I’ve been working in the industry here in London for more than ten years, so I know what I’m talking about. You’re American?”

She looked politely from Cage to Adie, trying to determine where to put her focus. At least she was wise enough not to flutter her eyelashes at a man when his partner was at his side. Especially when she couldn’t be sure who made the decisions.

Adie wished she wasn’t so cynical. Forcefully, she plastered on a smile and took the hand the woman offered her.

“Yes. London is very different from home,” she said, casting her eye around the neighborhood dubiously.

“This area is quite gentrified these days,” the woman rushed to assure her. “It just doesn’t look that way from the outside. Part of its charm, in my opinion. And so well situated. The West End theatres are only a few blocks away. You couldn’t get more central to the beating heart of the city if you tried.”

Elizabeth gave Adie’s hand a brief shake and then turned to lead the way into the old building.

Adie tried to imagine what it would have looked like to an eighteen-year-old girl leaving home for the first time. Minerva had been English, so it wouldn’t have been as much of a culture shock as it was for Adie. But she hadn’t grown up in London. The city would have to have seemed loud, crowded and overwhelming. And Minerva’s dad, the one Adie had come to know from his wartime journal, would have been hypercritical of her choice when he brought her up here for the first time. Soho would probably have had a bad reputation, but it would have been the only place an unemployed girl could find accommodation in her price-range. And only then if she shared with other girls in a similar situation.

“The flat is three bedroom and on the second floor. That’s the third floor to you, I imagine. There’s no lift, and the stairs are a little steep and narrow, as you can see. But it’s all been tastefully renovated and refurbished in the last ten years. Do you have problems with stairs?”

Despite herself, Elizabeth’s gaze had done the up-and-down thing with Cage before doing the same to Adie. It was only too apparent which one of them she assumed would have problems with stairs.

Adie could almost read the realtor’s mind. ‘The stairs will be good for you. Knock off a few of those extra pounds!’

“The stairs are no problem,” Adie snapped, surprising both herself and Cage.

Flustered, she tried to get her annoyance under control. The woman hadn’t said she needed the exercise. That was just how Adie had read her body-language and tone.

When she went on, it was far more politely. “How many floors are there?”

“Four, if you include the ground floor. Two flats on each. So, you’d have people above and below you. All soundproofed, of course. It always amazes me how much difference soundproofing makes to these old buildings. They were probably very noisy back in the past, but definitely not now.”

Adie remembered that Minerva’s flat had been 4B. So she would have been on the top floor. Young legs wouldn’t have been concerned about three flights of steep stairs.

“Are all the apartments the same size in the building? The same floor plan?” Adie pressed, starting up the staircase that was, in fact, beautifully carpeted, for all its steepness.

The black, wrought-iron handrail matched the front door, looking both old-worlde and trendy. The perfect, unadorned walls, painted a pale, neutral color Adie was sure wasn’t any kind of stock beige or cream, didn’t distract the eye from their ornate beauty.

“Pretty much. The As and Bs are mirror images of each other though. Eight apartments in all. Flats we call them. But the building’s owner had each decorated for uniqueness. Even their front doors are slightly different.

“As soon as they went on the market they were snapped up, even though the London residential prices were astronomically high at the time. This is the first one that has come back onto the market since then, as far as I know. People are very happy living here. The sellers of 3B are retiring to the Azores, otherwise they would have stayed on, I’m sure.”

Adie had no idea where the Azores were, but she assumed somewhere tropical. People tended to retire to the tropics, didn’t they? If they could afford to do so.

They made the rest of the journey up the stairs, with Elizabeth filling them in on the kind of information any prospective purchaser would need to know. Adie would have felt guilty for wasting her time had she not been ogling Cage every chance she got. If Adie hadn’t kept asking questions, she was sure the woman would have forgotten she was even there.

Was Cage flirting and encouraging her? Adie didn’t think so. Cage tended to have a mask he put on when he was meeting new people, and it was that mask he was presenting to the realtor. If the blonde read it as interest then that was probably just wishful thinking on her part.