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

out with him. I’d go the next day so she wouldn’t suspect anything. If she knew, she’d only tell me to leave it. Good riddance to bad rubbish, she’d say. But I couldn’t. When we woke up and saw that terrible word written all over our garage, I just had to try to keep calm, pretend I didn’t know who’d done it. I saw her talking to you up by the car.

“I called the train station and was told Watts was on the afternoon shift that day, and later I tried to find Tina to tell her that I was going into town for supplies. This was all after you came around that morning. When I couldn’t find her, I went and parked at the bottom of the road that goes up to his place. I honestly don’t know what I thought I was going to do. I just waited. I figured I could follow him to work and then confront him. Only when the car came down it turned away from town. I waited and followed at a distance and saw the car turn toward the Harrop ferry. That’s when I saw her. She’d been in the back, hiding, I guess. Her head popped up right behind Watts so he wouldn’t have seen, and then went down again. I stopped there and then off the side of the main road, trying to think what to do. Why was he going to Harrop? What was she doing with him? Trees were blocking my view, so I couldn’t see, but I knew if I saw cars coming onto the road, it would mean the ferry was on this side. After some time, I don’t know how long, when I didn’t see any traffic coming out onto the road from Harrop, I drove slowly forward, and I saw the car off the side of the road, and he was in it. The rain was pelting down. I parked behind his car and went and knocked on the window. I thought he was asleep, but then I understood. He looked dead.” Van Eyck stopped, as though he had not breathed properly during his whole narrative. “I couldn’t see her anywhere. I called her, but it was like she had vanished.”

Terrell scribbled feverishly. “Something about what you saw made you think it was Tina who killed him,” Ames prompted.

Van Eyck nodded. “She was in the back of the car. I saw her. And that wasn’t all. Later, when I was looking in the window at him, I caught sight of this little change purse Tina used to have back when she was in school. It was lying just out of sight on the driver’s side. Her grandmother gave it to her when she was a child. A little pink thing with her name embroidered on it. As soon as I saw it, I knew. I grabbed it and drove off in a hurry. First I was going to go farther up the lake and throw it in the water and see if I could catch up to Tina. But I didn’t see her, and I just drove home and hid the purse and waited for Tina. I just couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t see how she’d pulled it off, but somehow she had. And that’s it. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Where is the purse now?” Ames asked.

“I have a barrel where I burn garbage around the back. I buried it there, knowing it would go up in the next burning.”

Terrell suddenly leaned forward. “You seem very sure it was Tina in the car with Watts.”

Van Eyck frowned. “The hair. I mean it was just a flash. I couldn’t sort in my head how she would have got in without him knowing. I think at one point I wondered if she’d hidden in the back of the car, or if they’d agreed to meet along the way, and he stopped and picked her up and I just missed it. I wasn’t following him really closely because there wasn’t much traffic, and I thought he’d see me. And the rain was heavy, so I might not even have seen if he stopped.”

“So, no sign of Tina. And the ferry hadn’t come over yet, so you knew she couldn’t have gone over to the other side of the lake. Did you think she might have hidden in the forest?”

Van Eyck shook his head, his expression puzzled. “I did call and search, but it was like she had vanished. Part of me couldn’t believe it would be her, but when I saw the purse, I panicked.”

They’d sent Van Eyck home, giving him strict instructions to recover the purse and bring it back to them forthwith, and now Ames and Terrell sat musing in Ames’s office.

“The purse isn’t necessarily a bad sign, sir,” Terrell said.

“It’s hardly a good one.” Ames, who’d been leaning back, clumped his chair down heavily and picked up the phone. He heard it ringing on the other side. “I’m sure the blonde in the car wasn’t Tina. It’s too much of a coincidence that the blonde buying the clothes wouldn’t be the blonde who killed him. But still . . .” He heard it picked up. “Van Eyck garage.”

“Miss Van Eyck. It’s Sergeant Ames. I need you to answer a question. Do you own a little change purse with your name embroidered on it?” He looked over the receiver at Terrell, who was looking askance at him, forming an unspoken “What?” with his mouth.

A long silence followed. Finally, in a voice as far as possible from the confident voice of the Tina he knew, she said, “Why?”

“Is it yours?” Ames was insistent.

“Yes. I mean, it was. I lost it before the war. It was something my grandmother gave me. I don’t understand. Why do—”

“When before the war? Do you remember exactly?”

Another silence.

“Tina, this is important.”

“I lost it the night—the night I went out with Watts. He pushed me out of the car at