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

about why he came. He came here to ask, none too nicely, if I’d ever talked to anyone about what happened back then. He was angry and tried to intimidate me, stomping around like an ss man.”

“What did he mean by that? Who might you have told about what?”

Tina looked down. “You’ll have to know the whole thing, I suppose.” She paused and broke a scrap of wood off the table and threw it onto the ground. “I met him when I was sixteen. I was a bit bowled over, I suppose. I’m embarrassed about it now. He was older, good looking, had a car. What kind of a moron does that make me?”

“It makes you a normal sixteen-year-old girl who had no defence against a man like that.”

“He asked me out, and I knew it wasn’t a good idea. I knew it. I was scared even when I was sneaking out of the house to meet him on the top of the road. But . . . I don’t know. Why do we do stupid things when we are young?”

“Because we are young. You can’t judge yourself against what you’d do now,” said Terrell. “Did something happen on that night? Or some other time?”

“I never saw him again after that,” Tina said, skirting the question. “Not till he turned up the other day. It knocked ten year’s growth off me seeing him. Still acting like he owned the place. Then he had the nerve to say he’d missed me and how pretty I still was, that we should go out sometime. It was all I could do not to slug him with the spanner I was holding. I guess I shouldn’t say that. Won’t help my case, I expect.”

“So something did happen that night you went out?” Terrell prompted.

“He . . . he said he was going to show me a good time. I thought that meant we’d go to a bar or out dancing somewhere or something, but he was driving away from town. You can imagine the rest, I suppose. I don’t have to spell it out.”

“I’m sorry, this is a difficult question, but did he assault you?”

Tina turned away convulsively, got up from the table, and stood looking at the lake. Small whitecaps were just beginning to appear. Like trouble brewing, she thought. It shocked her to hear the word, because she had never said it to herself. She had spent the war fending off advances from drunken servicemen. “Tough Tina” she’d been called. She’d been proud of that reputation. But it hadn’t stopped her from falling for a charming Welsh infantryman who turned out to be married.

She turned and looked at Constable Terrell, who was sitting watching her with his head tilted. He looks kind, she thought, but he’s a man. He’d be judging her.

“Look, Constable, I’m not proud of myself. I tried to stop it, but he was so strong . . . I never should have gone off with him. Here’s the thing that’s really embarrassing: I already knew he had a reputation. I thought I would be different, that he really liked me. I can’t have this come out. If my dad ever found out what really happened, he’d have me out on my behind.”

“You don’t know that. He seems like a very understanding man.”

He was right. Her father being an understanding man only made it worse. It would be better to be thrown out. It would only be what she deserved. He would be understanding and angry on her behalf—and wonder why she’d never told him. It would be unbearable. Especially after her idiocy during the war with the married infantryman, she didn’t deserve anyone’s sympathy, especially not his.

She looked at him and shook her head. “Is there anything else, Constable? You know everything now. I presume neither you nor Sergeant Ames will be bothering us again?” Almost as an afterthought she looked at the ground and added, “I suppose he’ll have to know.”

“I’m afraid so, yes. Just one last thing: Did you go to the police at the time?”

Tina stood silently for so long that Constable Terrell had to prompt her. “Miss Van Eyck?”

She turned away to look north at the long stretch of dark, unsettled water. “That’s what I don’t understand. I did go one afternoon on my own because one of my friends told me it didn’t matter that I had put myself in that position, that what Watts did was still wrong. She drove me there. I talked to a guy at the station. He took some notes and said he’d look into it and I should come back the next day. When I went back, he was angry. He asked me why I was lying, trying to get a respectable man in trouble. He called me . . .” Tina turned to look at Terrell and then looked away again. “He called me a little tart who got what I asked for.”

Constable Terrell clamped his mouth into a grim line and made a note in his book. He kept his voice as dispassionate as he could. “Do you recall the name of the officer you spoke with?”

“I barely remembered my own name after that. He told me I could get in trouble with the law and that my parents would be dragged through court.”

Tina got up and pulled her thick shirt around her body and glanced at Terrell. “That was the end of who I used to be. That day. Not the day it happened. I was terrified by what he said. I decided that I would be tough, that no man would ever tell me what to do except maybe my own father. And I can tell you, when the chance came to leave and work in the old country during the war, I could not have been happier. I thought it was over and I’d got past it, till that bastard walked in the other day throwing his weight around. I don’t understand why