Free Murder Offstage by L. B. Hathaway

around a resourceful female street artist, who,
unable to sketch on the frozen pavements due to the snow, had resorted to
creating caricatures for a penny a piece. A large crowd had gathered around.
    Posie needed to send an urgent telegram. She had decided
that she could not and would not trust Babe Sinclair to do anything for
her anymore at work, so she walked into the big Post Office on the corner of
High Holborn opposite the Tube.
    It was busy, and as she waited in the queue she had time to
think about Babe. For the moment Posie decided she would do nothing. She would
just carry on as normal and quietly observe, and wait until the time was right
to confront her. Posie tried not to think about what she had seen last night,
and of how much her dislike of the girl came from pure downright jealousy.
There was an element of that, for certain, but there was something more
worrying: a niggling feeling which had been there from the off, which just
wouldn’t go away, that Babe was simply a rotten apple in their midst. But was
she just a lone troublemaker, or, as Posie feared, had she been placed somehow
by skilful hands puppeteering her from higher up the food-chain? And if so, by
who?
    Posie shivered in the damp cold of the Post Office hall and
snuggled into her thick brown tweed coat.
    She forced herself to think of more cheerful things as she
waited her turn.
    ****
    Posie was in a world of her own when she opened the
glass front door of the Grape Street Bureau and entered the waiting room. She
was determined to get to her office without seeing either Len or Babe, and she
was halfway across the room when she realised with a start that a man was
sitting waiting by the flaming fire, reading a newspaper. A real client!
    ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, removing her hat and gloves. Mr
Minks shimmied into the room and leapt onto the man’s lap, purring contentedly.
Sometimes he could be an incorrigible flirt of a cat.
    ‘Oh! I’m sorry about that! Mr Minks! Come here, now!’
    The man looked at her over the top of his Times . He
patted the cat and set him down again on the floor casually, brushing down his
trousers. He was short and stocky, with wild dark hair, about forty years old
and generally unremarkable-looking, but he looked a little familiar all the
same.
    When he smiled his eyes creased up in a friendly fashion. He
was smartly dressed but his suit and shoes were rather cheap. By his feet was a
large canvas sports bag, and a tennis racket handle poked out of the top. He
smelt strongly of mints, and Posie’s eyes were suddenly drawn to a bag of
humbugs bulging prominently out of his jacket pocket. He was not police, of
that she was sure. He was not obvious enough, somehow.
    ‘I’m fine waiting here by the fire, Miss Parker. You take
your time, get settled in. Bitterly cold outside, isn’t it? That your office
there?’ The man nodded companionably at her own door directly opposite. She
hesitated before nodding once.
    ‘I’ll knock in a couple of minutes, once you’ve had a chance
to take your coat off and thaw out. Perhaps your secretary can make us a spot
of tea?’
    He spoke with the accent of the educated middle-class
English gentleman, and he nodded in the direction of Babe’s small office, from
which the sound of ferocious angry typing came.
    Thrown by this strange situation, Posie found herself
nodding and walking to her office, wrong-footed somehow. She didn’t know
whether to be angry or pleased at the man’s strange conduct, but then she
hardly had any real-life clients to compare this man (she still didn’t know his
name) with. She stoked the fire in its hearth in her office and then settled
herself at her clear, clean desk. She took out a notepad and pen and waited.
    And waited.
    When the knock came after what seemed like ages, she called
out in a cheerful voice:
    ‘Come in!’
    Posie started in surprise as Len poked his head around the
door. She saw he was backing in nervously, carrying a heavy tray