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

Winslow and, she amended her thought hastily, her nice husband, Inspector Darling. They were only gone for three weeks, but she had become used to Lane coming around to the post office, exclaiming over Alexandra, eating sandwiches or scones, and drinking tea.

Sighing, she picked up a sheet of newspaper she was about to consign to the wood box to start tomorrow morning’s fire when something caught her attention. She brought the paper closer and looked at the date. She glanced out the window and saw that Kenny had taken up an armful of wood and was making his way back to the house, Alexandra running ahead to clear the way. Eleanor opened the door and pushed the screen door to let them through.

“That should keep us a little longer.” He dumped the wood into the wood box and wiped his face with his handkerchief.

“Did you see this?” Eleanor asked, holding up the paper. “I don’t know how I missed it. Do you remember when we were going into town last Tuesday and we stopped to pick that woman up? We had to squeeze her into the cab with us. Blond thing.”

“I do. Why is the paper interested?”

“It’s not the paper, it’s the police. I wonder if it’s to do with that fellow they found dead in the car at the ferry?”

Kenny looked hopefully toward the sink where the kettle had stalled after being filled. “Why don’t you put that thing on, and I’ll go let them know. I hope it’s not too late! I bet Lane and her fellow will be sad to have missed the action! It doesn’t seem like a proper case unless she’s at the centre of it.”

“I’ll let him know, sir,” O’Brien said into the phone. “Can he phone you if he wants to follow up?”

Assured that he could, O’Brien put the receiver in the cradle and then looked up the stairs, contemplating a good loud shout. Considering the men on shift were quietly catching up on paperwork, he picked the receiver back up and dialled upstairs to Ames.

“Sarge, we’ve had a call from up the lake. A Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong did pick up a woman hitchhiking on the day in question. Blonde, curly hair, ever so nice. Knew it couldn’t be anything, but thought it was their duty to call. Dropped her about two miles north of Willow Point.”

“Armstrong? From King’s Cove?” Ames asked.

“That’s the place.”

“Did they say where they picked her up?”

“Sorry, I missed that bit. You could give them a ring back. Poor things probably have nothing to do all day. It’d be a treat.”

Ames smiled momentarily, thinking of the unceasing industry of everyone up in King’s Cove, and thanked O’Brien. His mood fell again immediately. A woman with curly blond hair. He picked up the phone.

“Oh, no, dear me no, certainly not Miss Van Eyck. Nothing like. I remember her from the wedding, of course,” said Eleanor in answer to his anxiously asked question.

Relieved, though logic would have told him immediately that it couldn’t have been Tina, already exonerated at the dress shop, Ames asked, “Do you remember where you picked her up?”

“Yes, Mr. Armstrong and I were trying to remember. I’d say it was between Balfour and the Harrop ferry turnoff somewhere. She’d gotten a lift, she said, to visit her friend up the lake, and her husband was supposed to pick her up, only he hadn’t arrived, so she thought she’d better get back on her own.”

Ames leaned back in his chair and rubbed his chin. “Not very helpful,” he said to Terrell, who sat opposite. “For one thing, the woman was farther down the road from the ferry. For another . . . I don’t know. I haven’t got another.”

“It is singular that she had curly blond hair. That’s twice now that a woman is described as having curly blond hair.”

“Okay, let’s assume it is the same woman who bought the clothes. That puts her right in the middle of the thing, especially as we are looking for someone who might have left the car and had to get a lift back. Why is she coming from farther away when she gets picked up? It’s as if she’s continued down the lake and then turned around and comes back. Where does she go?”

“Maybe nowhere,” suggested Terrell. “Maybe she wants to throw off the scent.”

“Possibly. But here’s the other thing. This woman has twice been described as, well, a woman, not some young thing like Ada Finch, which is where the victim’s tastes clearly lay,” Ames said.

“They could be two entirely different curly blondes,” Terrell suggested. “I imagine the local beauty shops turn out a lot of curly blondes who aren’t that young but are trying to look it.”

“So, he’s either killed by a curly blonde, or, and we haven’t pursued this yet, someone he cheats at cards, or . . . or what about some other woman from his past . . . a blonde who was young once, had been seduced and discarded and never forgot, and has come back to get her revenge?” Ames said, animated again.

The phone on the desk jangled, and Ames picked it up impatiently. “Yes?”

It was O’Brien. “Sarge, I think you better come down here. A fellow has come in to confess to murdering Barney Watts.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The pain was sharp and excruciating. Lane instinctively reached for the back of her head and found she could not. She had a momentary delusion that she was in a pram that rocked as it travelled, except she could not understand why someone would be yodelling. She opened her eyes slowly and was looking at the back of a car seat. She was lying on her side. She tried again to move her hands, if for nothing else but to locate and comfort the pounding pain at the back of her head. It was then she realized she they were bound behind her. Clarity began to reassert itself. The loud yodelling