Death in Zanzibar Read Free Page B

silver and inscribed largely across one corner ‘To Lash — with all my love for always — Elf’. It was not, however, the film-star features or the extravagant inscription that was surprising, but the fact that someone had draped the frame in a length of black crêpe, drawn a heavy line through the word ‘always’ and substituted tersely above it, and in red ink, ‘September’.
    Dany was engaged in studying these interesting additions when her eye was caught by something else: a familiar coloured label on a suitcase that stood on a chair by the dressing-table. Lashmer J. Holden, Jnr, it would appear, was also intending to fly to Zanzibar via Nairobi.
    Holden … Why, of course! Lorraine had mentioned him. American and something to do with publishing. He was going to see Tyson about some book or other, and to spend his honeymoon in Zanzibar. Although if that photograph was anything to go by … A cold draught of air blew through the room and billowed the curtains, and a quantity of letters that had been carelessly propped against a china ornament on the writing-table fluttered to the ground and lay strewn across the carpet.
    Dany rose and replaced them, noting as she did so that Mr Holden’s correspondents appeared to be numerous, but unexciting; the large majority of the envelopes being of the strictly utilitarian variety with the address typewritten on them, and having apparently come from various secretarial agencies.
    She stacked them in a neat pile and put them back, and then stopped to retrieve the discarded sheet of newspaper. And as she did so her gaze fell on a word in black type: ‘Murder’.
    â€˜Man Murdered in Market-Lydon. Retired Solicitor Found Shot. Mr H. T. Honeywood…’
    But it couldn’t be! There must be some mistake. It couldn’t possibly be Tyson’s Mr Honeywood. That small, dried-up, disapproving solicitor. It must be someone with the same name. People one had met — people one knew — were never murdered. But there was no mistake. Here was his name. And his address: the prim grey-stone house standing back from the road behind a high wall and an ugly screen of wet laurels. Dany sat down slowly on the bed and read the incredible column of close print.
    Mr Honeywood had been shot through the heart at close range, presumably by someone whom he had no reason to fear, for there were no signs of a struggle. The safe in his study had been open, and certain sums of money — the funds, apparently, of local societies of which he was treasurer — had vanished, though no one was in a position to say if anything else had been removed. Mr Honeywood had virtually retired from active work and seldom visited the office in the High Street, which was in the charge of a junior partner, Mr John Honeywood, a nephew; but he occasionally saw an old client at his house. It was this scarcity of visitors, allied to the absence of his housekeeper, that accounted for the fact that the crime was not discovered until so late …
    The police were of the opinion that he had been killed some time during the morning, possibly between eleven-thirty and twelve, but his housekeeper, who was elderly and deaf, had asked for the day off to visit a cousin in Tunbridge Wells, and had left the house shortly before 10 a.m. She had not returned until late in the evening, and it was she who had eventually found the body. There was also a charlady who came every morning for two hours and who had left about the same time, but neither lady could say for certain if Mr Honeywood had been expecting a visitor, and the sole entry in his engagement pad for the day read ‘D.A. between 3 and 4.’ The police were anxious to interview a young woman who had been seen leaving the house shortly after half-past eleven that morning, and whom they thought could give them some information …
    Why — they mean me! thought Dany, horrified. But I