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

by dating Violet Harding, another disaster. He admired April, after all, but she wasn’t really for him. Maybe Terrell, an honest, kind man who so far appeared to be a darned good policeman, would be a better match.

“I’ll pop down to the rail yard and see if anyone remembers a regular card game. That at least might explain why Galloway ignored”—he almost said Tina—“Miss Van Eyck. She might appreciate knowing it wasn’t her, if you see what I mean. And who knows, maybe some of Watts’s absences were for card games. Perhaps he cheated enough to have someone want to kill him.”

Griffin was brooding in his office. The restaurant had done good business the night before, the card games in the back room were as full as ever, but even as he was smiling and shaking hands and patting backs, he had felt the dark shadow of worry. The court case was in two days, his wife had left, and he had felt an unwelcome touch of insolence in the man he’d put in charge of keeping an eye on her. He was not used to feeling like he hadn’t quite got a hold on things.

He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and took out the bottle, splashing some of its golden liquid into the glass in front of him. Surprisingly, as he analyzed things with the help of the bourbon, it was Hidalgo’s behaviour that most puzzled him. Had he detected a hint of satisfaction in his spy, as if he was happy she had given him the slip? At least the court case was going to be fine. It was a nuisance to have to go sit in court, but there was no evidence, and it might even be great publicity for his business. His wife would be back. She’d always come back. She’d run out of cash. That gigolo she’d taken up with was no doubt broke, so he was no real threat. He refused to think about that slip-up. Best focus on her. Her stupidity was in leaving Holden. What the hell had she been thinking?

He gulped what was in his glass and winced. He’d come to the edge of the cliff where his control of events was shaky. His rage over her had propelled him to make his first really big mistake. He still teased at his anxiety over how near he’d come to catastrophe. Though he’d been saved by what he could only call a miracle, it was the fact that he hadn’t engineered the miracle that was causing much of the disquiet. He’d nearly banned one of his best men over it, and now, for reasons he couldn’t understand, a man he’d trusted completely, who’d never put a foot wrong—hell, he’d put him in charge of his wife, for God’s sake—had a tone he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

With a wave of anxiety, he wondered now if he should have permanently gotten rid of the guy, as reliable as he’d been over the years. He shook his head and pulled open the drawer again. The one thing he learned from his dad was that you can’t litter the place with bodies. In the long run, one of them will always come back to haunt you. He held up his glass to his dear old dad, who’d had to die so that he might live smart.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Darling and Lane climbed into the cab at the front of the inn, and Darling gave the cabby the instructions. They were just pulling into the narrow street when Lane saw a bank of clouds beginning to pile up in the west.

“Do you think it will rain today?” she asked the cabby. “It does seem cooler. I wonder if I should get my cardigan?”

The cabby stopped, backed up a few yards, and parked near the steps to the front door.

“That’s a good idea, ma’am. It can get cold if it rains. The hotel might have some umbrellas too.”

Lane got out of the car. A movement in the row of cars that was parked farther up the street caught her eye. Was the car blue? She shook her head, surprised, and hurried in to collect a sweater and umbrellas.

Once on the road again, she glanced out the back window. No flash of blue. It had been two years since the war had ended. Would she ever get over her professional vigilance? They were deposited on Church Avenue near the courthouse and given instructions for a pleasant historical walkabout and a suggestion for an authentic Mexican restaurant nearby.

“Now,” said Darling when they were standing gazing up at the courthouse. “What’s going on?”

“It’s all these men coming and going. It’s clearly worried Chela, especially when she learned one of them is a criminal.” She tried, even as she was talking about it, to put her finger on why it worried her so much. “I mean, out here in the open air, it really is just probably typical misbehaviour you’d get at any hotel. I think I let her make me feel a bit jumpy. I mean, for a moment I even thought we were being followed from the hotel. The whole thing is ridiculous.”

Darling weighed this. Lane had been trained in whatever the heck it was intelligence people had to do. He’d not known her to be ridiculous about anything. More disturbing to him was that it triggered an already brewing misgiving of his own, namely that trouble would come from Lane’s having helped Priscilla escape. He turned to her.

“I’ve never known you to be ridiculous. What made you think someone might be following us? Come, let’s walk around this confection of a building and see it from all angles.” He guided them along the front of the courthouse, but he began to watch the street.

“It’s just that when we stopped and went back to the hotel to fetch my cardigan, I saw what I thought was a blue car beginning to