sustenance. Alan, Mr. Pettifer isnât going to take this sitting down, I could tell. He was ready to kill that man Thorpe.â
Alan just looked at me and I grimaced.
âSorryâpoor choice of words. But honestly, if looks could kill, I should think youâd have another corpse on your hands. I suppose Thorpeâs been in Pettiferâs camp and now Pettifer thinks heâs a Judas.â
âProbably. Whereâs your car? I didnât ask my driver to wait.â
âThen weâre out of luck. I walked. For the exercise,â I added defiantly.
âOne of these days Iâm going to make you a present of driving lessons,â said Alan cheerfully, looking around. âAh, constable!â
The uniformed man just leaving the hall stopped in his tracks, trotted over, and saluted smartly, looking anxious. âYes, sir!â
âItâs all right, Wilkins,â Alan said, reading the name tag without missing a beat. âI simply need a favor, if you have your car.â
Wilkins nodded, mute in the presence of his Big Boss.
âThe lady and I need a ride over to the Cathedral Close, if itâs not too much trouble.â
âYes, sir. That is, no, sir, no trouble at all, sir. This way, sirâmadam.â
So we ended the evening peaceably at the Rose and Crown discussing leaky roofs and other domestic disasters, with not a word about murders or civic passions.
O VER BREAKFAST THE next day my mind reverted to the meeting of the night before. I wished I understood a little more about all the crosscurrents. Why, for example, had Thorpe done what looked like such an abrupt about-face? Why hadnât Farrellâs proposalâwhich sounded so reasonableâgained approval, or even discussion, over the past year?
And most of all, what had gone on at that meeting the Lord Mayor had held Sunday night? The tensions at the public meeting had been only thinly veiled; I could well believe in those heated private exchanges Barbara Dean had hinted at.
I considered my sources of information. Jane, of course, but Jane wasnât available at the moment; she volunteered at the animal shelter on Wednesdays. Margaret Allenby, wife of the dean of the cathedral, could sometimes be persuaded to talk about personalities in ecclesiastical circles, and Jeremy Sayers, the organist, was always open to gossip, the bitchier the betterâbut this wasnât a church matter. It wasnât a university matter, either, which left out dear old Dr. Temple, who knew everything about everyone academic, but wasnât interested in general gossip.
That just about exhausted the possibilities in my limited group of friends, which meant Iâd have to wait till Jane got home. Meanwhile, there were other worries to deal with, the foremost being Clarice. Archie couldnât have been feeling very pleasant when he got home last night after the meeting. In her present jellylike state, was Clarice in any condition to cope with him?
I groaned aloud and Samantha, in the corner of the kitchen by the Aga, interrupted her ablutions to stare at me through her huge blue eyes.
âItâs all very well for you,â I said glumly. âYou can sit there by a nice, warm stove. Iâve got to go out in the rain. Arenât you glad youâre a cat?â
Sam yawned; of course she was glad. No cat would even consider the infinitely inferior status of human.
So I emptied the buckets in the upstairs hallâthey were filling faster today, I noted with a mental curse for my landlordâand headed for the Pettifersâ new, watertight, sterile house.
I drove. The long walk in the rain last night had caused arthritic twinges in several joints Iâd never noticed before, and I was also smarting from Alanâs crack about driving lessons. I got insignificantly lost twice and, in desperation, drove the wrong way down a deserted one-way street to get to where I needed to be, but on the