It's Murder, On a Galapagos Cruise: An Amateur Female Sleuth Historical Cozy Mystery (Miss Riddell C by P.C. James (the best ebook reader for android TXT) 📗

of Maria’s arms and trying to escape the knife under his chin while reaching for the solid railing. Could he have been forced far enough back by the knife to lose his balance? Or when he tottered on the gate, hanging between this world and the next, did Maria flip his legs up and achieve her justice. On balance, pardoning the pun, Pauline thought it didn’t matter to her decision. She had no doubt that, had Jose lived, Maria would not have survived that night. He couldn’t risk her staying silent for the whole voyage.

A week later Pauline said goodbye to Freda at Toronto Pearson Airport.

“You will come home next year, won’t you, Polly?”

Pauline nodded. “Of course, and we’ll have a family re-union at the Raven Hall Hotel. You’ll organize it. Get everyone together.”

“I’d like that,” Freda said. “We don’t see the boys as much these days. Not since mum died.”

“Mothers keep families together, it’s true.”

The line at the departure gate had gone and the staff were giving Freda ‘that look’.

“I have to go,” she said. “I don’t like leaving you here all alone, Polly. Look after yourself.”

“I’m not alone,” Pauline said. “I have colleagues at work and new friends in the neighborhood. And if I get lonely, I can call you on the phone at any time or be home with you all in a few short hours, thanks to the magic of jet travel. Have a great flight, Freddie.”

Pauline watched Freda exit down the tunnel, waving as she went, before making her own way back to her car. Her sister’s words had hit a nerve. One that had been jangling since that last morning on the ship. Her life, her real life, had been solving the puzzles that had come her way. Her job had always felt secondary to that. Helping people to get justice had been her passion and her whole reason to be. And now it was gone. Murdered by her betrayal of her own principles. What right did she have to hold others to laws that she was prepared to flout when the occasion arose?

She sat in the car staring at the rows of vehicles parked in the garage. Surely, she thought, her self-disgust would pass soon and she could begin investigating again? She started the engine and drove out into the sunlight. She felt she’d betrayed herself and she must never investigate again for she could not be sure she wouldn’t choose to follow her feelings instead of the rule of law. Once you start down that path, it becomes simply vigilantism. That life, it seemed, which had sustained her through the long, lonely years as Stephen’s ‘widow’, felt over.

It was strange to be thinking of Stephen again so vividly. It was this case and how it felt like that first one. A sudden faint smile came to her lips when she remembered the letter she’d received at the end of that first case, asking for her help. In a way that’s how it all began. Not with Marjorie’s murder but with the letter from Mrs. Elliott. If she’d never received that letter when she did, she would never have become ‘Miss Riddell’ and all that entailed.

Her smile deepened. Today’s mail hadn’t arrived before she’d driven Freda to the airport. Could history and the mail service repeat itself? For the first time in days, she felt herself awakening, hope rising and the belief she still had a role to play returning. There would be a letter, she just knew it.

The End

(of this book anyway)

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Bonus Content

Here’s an excerpt from my next book in the series, A Murder for Christmas

North Riding of Yorkshire, England, Christmas 1962

Pauline Riddell gritted her teeth and stared out of the window. The afternoon looked like it would be more snow by the time they were returning home. Maybe, the Land-Rover with its four-wheel drive was the better choice for this journey. As it bumped over the frozen, rutted farm road, however, jarring every bone in her body, she found that little comfort. And imagining the drive back to her parents’ farm, gave her the shudders.

At the manor, an old-fashioned stone-built house that hadn’t been upgraded in any of the architectural styles of the past four hundred years (and was all the better for it, in Pauline’s opinion) she met Frank Thornton, the soon-to-be lord of the manor. Or at least that was what had been expected until the family solicitor had hurried up to the manor on the death of Frank’s father only two days ago with some disastrous news.

“So, you see, Miss Riddell,” Frank Thornton said, “we’re in a pickle.”

“Let me get this clear in my mind,” Pauline said. “Your father has been training you up to take over the estate all your life. He never suggested any other course of action was being considered?”

“That’s correct.”

“The Will has been lodged with the Family Solicitors for decades, since your older brother was killed in World War 2, in fact. No one else has had access to it?”

“That’s correct.”

“And the Will, so far as everyone understood, named you as the heir to the estate and your younger brother, Anthony, would have had an annual remittance?”

“That’s correct.”

“But when your father died, the solicitor drew the Will from the safe, preparing to bring it to read out after the funeral, he found that it named Anthony as heir and gave you a single bequest of five hundred pounds?”

“That’s it?”

“The solicitor called you and has agreed to hold off reading the Will until an investigation could be made.”

“Yes, and the Police came, listened to what we had to say and took the Will