‘Thank Christ,’ she muttered.
‘Why do you call him Benny, not Theodore, now he’s dead, Alma?’ Iles asked.
‘Did I? It seems right. I’ll miss him like hell, and when I miss him I’ll be thinking of him as Benny. Theodore? Oh, that was part of the public relations.’
‘We’re very sorry about it all, Alma,’ Iles said.
‘I suppose you wish there’d been more. They could have wiped one another out – both outfits?’
‘Indeed not,’ Iles replied. ‘This is a tragedy, and we are only thankful it is not a greater one.’
‘We’ll be locking some of them up, anyway,’ Harpur said. ‘There’s another killing, and lesser things.’
Alma stood, still dry-eyed and in command. ‘His principal interest in life lately was the kind of charities I’ve mentioned – not just Save the Whale, but famine and so on. All major needs.’
‘He’s a loss,’ Iles replied. ‘Yes.’
A dead loss.
‘Shall I see him?’ Alma asked.
‘In due course, certainly,’ Iles said.
She went with them to the front door. ‘Yes, patch Benny up and make him look presentable, would you? I couldn’t bear to see him all –’ For a second she seemed about to cave in and weep properly. Then her body stiffened and she snapped her head back, like a drill sergeant. ‘He was a stickler about appearance. The Navy, you know.’
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The Murder Room
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By Bill James
in the Harpur and Iles series
You’d Better Believe It
The Lolita Man
Halo Parade
Protection
Come Clean
Take
Club
Astride a Grave
Gospel
Roses, Roses
In Good Hands
The Detective is Dead
Top Banana
Panicking Ralph
Lovely Mover
Eton Crop
Kill Me
Pay Days
Naked at the Window
The Girl with the Long Back
Easy Streets
Wolves of Memory
Girls
Pix
In the Absence of Iles
Hotbed
I Am Gold
Bill James (1929–)
Bill James is the author of numerous thrillers and crime novels as well as a critical work on Anthony Powell. In 2006 he was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger award for the year’s best crime novel for Wolves of Memory. His work is much loved and critically acclaimed; the Sunday Telegraph describes him as ‘bruisingly good’ and The Times as ‘subtle and riveting to the last page’. He lives in his native South Wales.
An Orion ebook
Copyright © Bill James 1989
The right of Bill James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook first published in Great Britain in 2012
by Orion
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4719 0294 9
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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Bill James, Come Clean (1989)
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