Читать книгу Mystery Lady - Paul Magrs - Страница 6

What we don’t know at this point, though, is that this journey is more than a quick jaunt to London for a meeting. This journey is going to go on and on. It’s going to turn into a dangerous quest, this one.

But as we set off from Manchester Piccadilly on that bright October morning, we have absolutely no inkling of this.

Which is just as well.

Ahh, I look back on myself that day and I think – Cassandra, you had no idea what was in store. You had no idea about anything at that point. You didn’t know anything at all, did you?

All around us, others were boarding the train to London, and finding their compartments and getting themselves comfy.

Everyone looked perfectly normal and respectable.

And so, once Dodie and the handsome Timothy are settled into their compartment, and he has divested himself of some of his layers of disguise, I drift along the corridors with the ostensible excuse of finding the dining compartment. Though I daren’t trust myself carrying tea things back to the others. Have I mentioned yet how terribly clumsy I am? I always seem to drop simply everything…

I had a little walk up and down the length of the train to stretch my legs once we were underway and I peeped through windows and had a good nose around. I’m a very curious person and Dodie says it’s one of the things she values about my being her assistant. I quite often notice things that she has been oblivious to.

And it’s while I’m on this little reconnaissance mission that I see a very strange pair of travelers indeed.

They are a few doors down from our compartment. They’re shut in together but they aren’t a pair, if you see what I mean. She is a very large lady with a vast shelf of a bust and very long, delicate fingers. Her hair is in a bun and she is wearing a tweed suit. Very businesslike, like a gigantic, drab old bird, pecking at the pile of papers in her lap. She’s working on the train, making marks on a vast typescript with a blue pencil.

The man sitting opposite her is staring furiously at every move she makes. When I look into his face I recoil at once.

He has blue-purple lips like old bits of liver, shiny and wet. He has a skinny black moustache under a scarlet hooked nose. He’s gurning at the large lady and blazing his eyes. A very skinny man in a business suit. Very smart. He even has a silver-headed cane with him. The woman in tweed isn’t paying him one jot of attention, but surely she can’t be unaware of him?

I open the compartment door and slip in, but neither occupant pays me the slightest attention.