A Match Made for Murder Iona Whishaw (pride and prejudice read .TXT) 📖

got to relax and catch up, then,” Martinez said, moving to his desk and then stopping. “What do you mean about the assistant chief?”

“He was here the night before last. Came in late in a pretty bad temper. Closed himself up in his office. I heard him on the phone. I mean, I heard him raise his voice, but I didn’t hear what he was saying.”

“What time was this?”

“One, one-thirty? Stayed for about an hour and left again. I’m used to it now. He was here maybe two weeks ago storming around as well. Doesn’t talk to me. I’m nobody.”

Martinez watched Bevan go back to his desk. He’s here practically on his own on the night shift. He shook his head as if to clear it. But the thought persisted. Had another cop taken his notes? Had Bevan? He’d gone over every possible thing he could have done with his notes, and he knew he would not have been careless. The inevitable conclusion meant someone else must have made them disappear. Had Griffin gotten to someone at the station? He’d open up a can of mental worms with this kind of thinking. He’d be suspecting everyone now.

And why was the boss hanging around the station so late? Was it the Griffin case? He had said in no uncertain terms that he wanted a conviction. It was the one thing Martinez had seen Galloway really angry about. But who would he be on the phone with at that time of night? Maybe something at home. He’d seen Galloway with his wife at the Christmas parties. A beautiful woman. Galloway had joked more than once that she was a handful, whatever that was supposed to mean. He couldn’t imagine making remarks about his own wife at the police station. Martinez understood that the best policy for someone with his background was to be as correct as possible at all times.

Martinez put Galloway out of his mind and used the momentary solitude in the main office to make one last search for his notes. He would have to begin recreating them and get something very solid on where Griffin was putting his money. He’d better let Galloway know what he suspected, though he knew it wouldn’t go over well. With a sinking heart he realized he would also have to interview the Renwick woman about the gun and try again to find out why Edward Renwick had been hanging around town four days before he claimed to have come. He had been promised a ballistics report that morning on the bullets they’d recovered from the victim. That should speed things up.

Chapter Fifteen

It was desperate, Lane knew. And it could cause an irreparable break between herself and Darling. She had walked to the edge of the hotel property before he awoke and stood shivering in the morning cold, watching the golden edge of light on the Catalina Mountains. She had slept little and had felt the confinement of being in a hotel, however luxurious—and even, for a moment, the confinement of being with someone else. On her own, sleepless nights had been a fairly frequent occurrence, especially since the war had ended, and had ranged from long spells of vague anxiety to panic and attacks of violent shivering. She had struggled to try to understand the source of these attacks. Lord knew her intelligence work provided enough fodder for any amount of shell shock. She’d seen men incapacitated by it when she was a child. She never could have imagined she’d be coping with something similar.

She sometimes felt she understood the root of her trauma. It must have originated with the murder of three people in a safe house by Bretagne nationalists in the spring of 1943. Lane’s assignment had been to liaise with members of the French underground at a safe house and deliver a coded message. The whole thing had been catastrophic. She’d arrived just after the people inside the farmhouse had been shot, and she had seen the shooters race away on a motorcycle. She’d been unable to protect a fourth person who’d been hiding when his mates were assassinated. But she always stopped short of reliving the whole thing, overwhelmed by the powerlessness and regret of never being able to go back and change what had happened. On her own, at home, she could turn on the light, read, warm up milk, go sit in front of the fire. At least there she could creep out to the sitting room or kitchen and not disturb Darling, though that had not been necessary in the brief weeks they’d been married. His presence did provide a comfort she had not fully expected, but she did not fool herself that her attacks of panic would be gone forever because she was certain that her own sense of guilt would never be gone.

Her relief at seeing the grey light of morning under the edge of the curtain had been profound, and she’d gotten up, dressed quickly, and taken herself outside. She wanted more than anything, she thought, to tell as few lies as possible. Indeed, she had never lied to Darling. It terrified her to think of doing it now. It opened a great black chasm in her mind from which she feared there might be no escape. But what was the alternative? If she told Darling what she was planning, it would create a further rift between himself and Galloway. He would be forced, perhaps, to lie to someone else because of what she had done. She could not possibly put him into that position.

The sun breasted the row of mountains, sending light spilling across the desert, suddenly shaping the peaks with gold and shadow. Praying that he would understand, that he would in the end agree there was no other solution, she turned away from the direct light of the sun. Whatever the outcome, she could not turn her back on Priscilla. The fallout with Darling would have to