by Joan Fleming
“It’s marrying I’m thinking about; you don’t realise, do you, that I have some natural aversion …” and he did in fact lower his voice to a whisper, ‘…to having a murderess as a wife?”
Then her head really hung, like a broken flower, he thought, or a snowdrop.
“But as a pizza-maker, I suppose, you’ll do, as there’s nobody else available.”
“That hurts!” she said.
He turned away, picking up the newspaper, sitting down and putting his feet on a vacant chair, taking out his packet of Balkan Sobranies and lighting one.
She went through the curtain and hung up her coat on one of the hooks. She was tying the string of her apron behind her back, or trying to and failing because of the tears pouring down, when Mrs. James Trelawny came out of the scullery and, taking the strings from her, tied the apron for her.
She clicked her tongue in sympathy. “I don’t know what you’ve done, dear, I’ve never seen him so angry!”
Madame Joan had finished her breakfast but continued to sit at the table, engrossed by the tea leaves she saw in her empty cup. Her daughter briskly cleared away everything and washed them up. Then she returned to the table for the cup and found her mother staring down at the tiger’s tooth which she was holding in the palm of her hand.
“Whatever’s that?” the daughter exclaimed, “it looks a nasty thing!”
“Do you think so? I like it very much. I’ve inherited it.”
“Who from?”
“That young man.”
“Which one?”
“He had a lot of very red hair. It went black. He’s dead.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” her daughter answered absently; she had finished washing up the breakfast things and was now looking at herself in a mirror over the sink. “What did he die of?” she asked absently.
“How should I know?” her mother snapped.
WINNER OF THE 1970 GOLD DAGGER AWARD
BRITISH CRIME WRITERS’ ASSOCATION
W. Sledge is a successful young criminal who has achieved too much, too soon. Living in a pleasant council flat in a London tower block, he owns a Jaguar, receives unemployment benefit and keeps an underage mistress. In his own eyes, W. Sledge has everything, until a routine robbery goes too far. The result is murder, and when the crime incites latent psychopathic tendencies, he murders again. As his path intertwines with a runaway girl and his childhood friend, this award-winning story comes to an immoral but extraordinary climax.
T H E L A N G T A I L P R E S S
w w w . l a n g t a i l p r e s s . c o m
