The Town in Bloom Read Free

of it.’
    This complicated operation took some minutes. Then Molly reported she was on my side. ‘That crone’s too croney to be true. And she’s taking a suspicious interest in us. I saw her look up – twice.’
    Lilian said, ‘Wouldn’t it be ghastly if it’s Zelle and she’s not in disguise – if those clothes are the best she’s got? That coat, with those square shoulders, has been a good one. She might have saved it from her better days. Suppose she’s sunk to the depths? She’d never let us know, not after the way things ended.’
    ‘Well, anyway, I don’t see what we can do,’ said Molly. ‘Either it isn’t Zelle, or it is and she doesn’t want to meet us – in which case we can hardly rush out and force ourselves on her.’
    I suggested one of us should walk past the woman quite casually.
    ‘You do it,’ said Lilian. ‘Zelle would be more willing to meet you than us. It was you she left the note for. Oh, God, she’s moving. We’re too late.’
    I sprang up. ‘Perhaps I can overtake her.’
    ‘You’ll have to run,’ said Lilian. ‘She’s walking fast.’
    It is not the kind of hotel one runs in, but I ran – along the corridor, across the hall and out into the street, then back along the front of the hotel until I could turn into the park. The woman was a considerable way ahead of me but I thought I could catch her if I ran full tilt. The distancebetween us was narrowing when she looked over her shoulder at me and then herself began to run. That settled it for me: she must be Zelle. I tried to increase my speed – how many years was it since I had run like that? Zelle’s legs were longer than mine but she wasn’t running as fast as I was. I should catch her—
    Then she reached an exit from the park. I followed her through it only in time to see her getting on a bus.
    A cruising taxi slowed up beside me. As I opened its door the driver said, ‘Thought you might need me. Saw you sprinting.’
    I jumped in and said, ‘Follow that bus!’ It sounded so melodramatic that I felt I’d better explain. ‘There’s someone on it I want to catch, a friend I’ve lost touch with.’
    The driver said the bus would probably get held up at the next traffic lights and so should we. ‘Do you want to get out then and jump on it?’
    Did I? No, I couldn’t talk to Zelle amidst other people. I said I wanted to follow the bus until my friend got off it. ‘And then we’ll follow her and I’ll make up my mind what to do. What I want most is to find out where she lives. I’m not really sure I ought to rush at her. You see, she was running away from me.’
    He was a kind man and quick on the uptake; I always seem to get nice taxi-drivers. He asked if my friend was the old girl he’d seen hop on the bus – ‘Looked as if she’d come down in the world, and that can make people touchy.’
    ‘Exactly. So it might be wiser to write to her rather than force her to talk to me now.’
    ‘Hope the bus doesn’t get through traffic lights where I get held up.’
    By good luck that never happened; and in not much more than five minutes Zelle got off the bus and turned into a street lined with expensive flats.
    ‘Now we’ve got to be clever,’ said the driver. ‘If she knows we’re following her she might give us the slip. Lucky there are no shops round here where she can go in at one door and out at another. That’s the way you lose them.’
    I asked if he often had to follow people and he said quite a lot of it had come his way. ‘Usually detectives following husbands or wives – though sometimes wives do their own sleuthing. Needs a bit of knack when you’re following someone who’s walking or they spot you. I don’t think your friend has yet, still we’d better pull up and let her get ahead.’
    He waited until she turned the next corner, then drove on quickly. When next we caught sight of Zelle she was crossing a well-kept old square. I said, ‘Surely she can’t be as poor as she looks