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

now,” she said. “I should probably tell you, he likely was the one who shot that poor Mr. Renwick.”

Martinez frowned and turned to look at Idaho scowling in the back of the car. “Is that right? Why do you say that?”

“Oh, it’s a long story, hon. You’d better bring me in too. I can probably help you. I’m married to Artie, or as you call him, James Griffin. As to why he shot him, it’s because Artie found out about my boyfriend, and that stupid jackass thought it was Renwick, just because we were standing together having a chat.”

Darling and Lane sat at dinner, bracing martinis before them.

“This is something they do very well in this country,” Lane said, holding up her glass, and then grimacing. Her ribs, now bandaged, were throbbing faintly underneath the painkiller she had taken. She took a sip and then put her glass down.

Somehow, they’d all been got down the hill and sorted out. Martinez had been surprised to learn from Meg that it was Idaho who likely shot Renwick under orders from Griffin. The mobster heard from his spy that Meg was playing outside the lines of their arrangement to fleece Holden.

“You know what absolutely astounds me?” Darling said.

“What’s that?”

“Martinez told me that, among the papers he’d found in Galloway’s office, there was a letter from someone called Watts threatening to reveal something that went on while he was in Nelson in the thirties just before I arrived there. It was a blackmail letter, effectively, demanding cash.” Darling took a sip of his martini. “And wasn’t Watts the name of the man that got killed just now that Ames is dealing with?”

He was making normal conversation with his wife, but his insides were in turmoil. He’d paced anxiously at the hospital waiting for the doctor to finish treating Lane. Even hearing that the bullet had only grazed her scarcely soothed his anxiety. She’d been sent home with a packet of painkillers after she had refused to spend the night to get a proper rest.

“We can phone Ames in the morning. It would be a shocking coincidence, certainly. But maybe not so much. I mean, you and Galloway used to work together in the Nelson police force. If he is crooked here, he was crooked there too.”

“God, don’t remind me,” Darling said glumly, grimacing at the strength of the martini.

“Cheer up! You accomplished something you normally are deprived of, saving the day and rescuing me—well, and all of us really, by subduing that cowboy. A dangerous killer by all accounts.”

“Thank you for pointing that out. It was not difficult. I put into it all of the rage I had bottled up at watching him shoot you while you were giving yourself up. I think it is one of the most satisfactory moments of my career.”

“Yes, it was funny, his shooting me like that. Ordinary soldiers seemed for the most part to understand the rules during the war. I wonder if the ones who shot people giving themselves up in combat ended up in gangs in civvy street?” She put her glass down and grew silent then.

“What is it?” Darling asked.

“You know, when I got hit, I think I passed out for a minute, maybe from the shock of it. Certainly not from this flesh wound. But I was suddenly back there, you know. In France, in ’43. I can’t really give you the details of why I was there, but I was supposed to meet some people in a safe house, only I found the dog shot outside and three of the four people I was expecting to see were dead. I probably narrowly missed the killers, but I managed to throw myself on the ground as they rode away on a motorcycle. It turns out there was one man hiding in the outside privy. He was beside himself, furious at me for not being armed. I worried that the motorcycle would come back, and it took everything I had to persuade him to get away. When I was lying there, today I mean, I thought I was back in France and that he had been shot and it was my fault. Only as I was coming to did I realize it was I who had been hit. I felt such a relief, I can’t tell you, to be free for that one moment of the guilt over the thought that I’d caused his death.”

Darling sat, holding her hand, realizing the importance of this moment. In his heart he did not believe he would ever really learn about the details of her war, and yet these few had been shaken out of her by . . . he wasn’t really sure what. Perhaps by being shot herself?

“What did happen to him in the end?”

Lane looked down and took a deep breath. “That’s the thing, you see. He was shot as we were fleeing. They did come back. He was behind me and he went down. I lay, terrified, waiting for my turn, but they disappeared on the bike again. I realized, of course, they hadn’t known about me, so they hadn’t bothered to look any further. They must have figured out that they’d missed one and gone back for him. I have believed it was my fault ever since.”

“How could it have been? You know that, surely.” He wanted to say that it was nonsense, but he’d seen policemen suffering the same sort of trauma after violent incidents, and he knew logic didn’t come into it.

She so wanted to tell him. How before she’d left on that particular mission, she’d been offered a revolver and had said absolutely not. If the Germans had found her, it would have been the final proof that she was not the local French girl she was pretending to be. She’d have been done for. She wasn’t the only one. Lots of the women didn’t want them. The great advantage for the women of special operations was that the