The Package Included Murder Read Free Page B

experience in the investigating of murders. Must say, she seemed quite impressed.’ The Hon. Con smirked a sort of deprecating smirk. ‘Said she hadn’t realised I was a kind of unofficial adviser to our local CID.’
    â€˜You’re not, dear!’ Miss Jones’s affection for the Hon. Con was not allowed to blind her entirely to the latter’s faults.
    â€˜Near as damn it!’ protested the Hon. Con. ‘Is it my fault that the police force is so hide-bound and pig-headed? And I did solve two murders, Bones! Even you’ve got to admit that.’
    Miss Jones wasn’t, actually, prepared to admit anything of the sort, which was a wee bit naughty of her as the Hon. Con’s claim was not without some justification. Instead, she tried to change the subject slightly. ‘ Why don’t you just concentrate on writing your book, dear?’
    â€˜Book?’ The Hon. Con looked genuinely bewildered. ‘What book?’
    Miss Jones could have willingly shaken her until the teeth rattled in her head. ‘The book you were going to write about life and society behind the Iron Curtain, dear,’ she said through tightening jaws. ‘That’s why we came to Russia in the first place. After you’d decided to become a writer and when you’d reached the conclusion that novels weren’t your cup of tea. Don’t you remember, dear, how you said that you couldn’t write a white-hot expose of the Soviet system unless you’d seen for yourself how they mismanaged things? Your point was that …’
    â€˜All right, Bones, all right! No need to go on all night about it!’ The Hon. Con sat hugging her knees while she thought up some face-saving way out of this one. ‘Being an author’s all right,’ she said at last, ‘but crime’s my real métier.’ She made the whole thing sound rather pathetic.
    Miss Jones sighed and reflected that knowing a problem didn’t solve it. And the Honourable Constance Morrison-Burke certainly had problems.
    The Hon. Con had been born not only into the purple but into considerable wealth as well. It would be naive to claim that these two blessings had ruined her life though they were certainly far from having enhanced it. The Hon. Con was a positive powerhouse of energy, inventiveness and intelligence and, if she could have found an outlet for these qualities, she would have been an asset in any society. If she had married, for example, some of the verve and dash might have been soaked up in bossing a husband and kids around. If she had been an impoverished nobody, she could have worked off some of the surplus by carving out a career for herself. But, what do you do when you’re an unplucked rose and already have an annual income many a county borough council would envy?
    Not that the Hon. Con took all this lying down. On the contrary, she tackled her problems with such enthusiasm and violence that the pieces haven’t yet been put together. Plunging into voluntary work, the Hon. Con joined all the right societies and wrecked them in days rather than weeks. Looking for a hobby, she became a member of clubs which had almost immediately sunk without trace and with all hands. Unfortunately, Totterbridge, where she lived, was only a small provincial town and its resources were limited. In a distressingly short space of time the Hon. Con had gone through the lot and there was no cultural, educational, recreational, sporting or charitable organisation which wasn’t left licking its wounds. The Hon. Con, on the other hand, hadn’t changed at all and was still frantically searching for something worthwhile to do. It was during this quest – and really quite fortuitously – that the Hon. Con had found herself involved, on two separate occasions, in the investigation of a murder. The police hadn’t liked what they referred to as the Hon. Con’s unwarranted interference, but she