Free Trouble in the Town Hall by Jeanne M. Dams

sustenance. Alan, Mr. Pettifer isn’t going to take this sitting down, I could tell. He was ready to kill that man Thorpe.”
    Alan just looked at me and I grimaced.
    â€œSorry—poor choice of words. But honestly, if looks could kill, I should think you’d have another corpse on your hands. I suppose Thorpe’s been in Pettifer’s camp and now Pettifer thinks he’s a Judas.”
    â€œProbably. Where’s your car? I didn’t ask my driver to wait.”
    â€œThen we’re out of luck. I walked. For the exercise,” I added defiantly.
    â€œOne of these days I’m going to make you a present of driving lessons,” said Alan cheerfully, looking around. “Ah, constable!”
    The uniformed man just leaving the hall stopped in his tracks, trotted over, and saluted smartly, looking anxious. “Yes, sir!”
    â€œIt’s all right, Wilkins,” Alan said, reading the name tag without missing a beat. “I simply need a favor, if you have your car.”
    Wilkins nodded, mute in the presence of his Big Boss.
    â€œThe lady and I need a ride over to the Cathedral Close, if it’s not too much trouble.”
    â€œYes, sir. That is, no, sir, no trouble at all, sir. This way, sir—madam.”
    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 hadn’t Farrell’s proposal—which sounded so reasonable—gained 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 wasn’t 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 better—but this wasn’t a church matter. It wasn’t a university matter, either, which left out dear old Dr. Temple, who knew everything about everyone academic, but wasn’t interested in general gossip.
    That just about exhausted the possibilities in my limited group of friends, which meant I’d have to wait till Jane got home. Meanwhile, there were other worries to deal with, the foremost being Clarice. Archie couldn’t 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.
    â€œIt’s all very well for you,” I said glumly. “You can sit there by a nice, warm stove. I’ve got to go out in the rain. Aren’t you glad you’re a cat?”
    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 hall—they were filling faster today, I noted with a mental curse for my landlord—and headed for the Pettifers’ new, watertight, sterile house.
    I drove. The long walk in the rain last night had caused arthritic twinges in several joints I’d never noticed before, and I was also smarting from Alan’s 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