Dead Man's Dinner - Una Gordon Page 0,19

exactly what had happened after he left Derwent's flat. He had to drag himself into work because he had an important client to see. He made an excuse about having some kind of bug and hoped the client would believe him and not take his very lucrative business elsewhere.

He was so concerned about how he felt that it was a couple of days before he started to think about Rachel, the card and the story. There was no doubt in his mind that they were all connected and he had to decide what to do about them. He did not relish the thought of tackling Rachel, but he couldn't just ignore it. He was a wronged man. He did an excellent whitewash job on himself, placing himself only slightly lower on the scale than the Archangel Gabriel. When Rachel phoned he would be cool with her and wait until she asked what was wrong and make her drag it out of him bit by bit.

When Rachel did phone she was obviously not much interested in how he felt. She was far too much taken up with the fact that her mother had had a stroke and a very severe one from the sound of things. Her mother was in hospital, but it had been made clear to Rachel that she could be kept there only for a limited time. There was a nursing home she could go to, but Rachel felt that she must stay there meantime. Graham agreed. He had never like his mother-in-law, but Rachel couldn't leave her at a time like this.

“You'll come down when you can, won't you? Rachel sounded almost pleading and Graham said that he would, but wondering how he could get out of it. He wanted to tackle Rachel on home territory and if he went to Devon how could he treat Rachel normally?

As it happened he needn't have worried. During the six months that Rachel was in Devon he went down only three times and Rachel was so concerned about her mother that she didn't notice anything odd about Graham's manner. His fourth visit was to be for his mother-in-law's funeral, but by that time he had been admitted to hospital himself and couldn't go. Rachel had to hurry from the funeral of one invalid to the side of a hospital bed of another, not even taking time to sell off her mother's house before she came home. There were so many things she felt she needed Graham's advice about.

When she arrived at the hospital in London she was met by a very apologetic sister who said they had been trying to contact her to tell her Graham had been transferred to another hospital. When Rachel asked why, the sister was very evasive. Rachel travelled to the other hospital in a kind of daze. Was Graham more ill than she had at first supposed? She had just lost her mother; she couldn't bear to lose her husband as well. He had a lot of funny little ways, but she loved him. The woman sitting next to her in the tube looked at her as a dry sob caught in her throat.

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At Derwent's funeral and on the night of the dinner Gresham had been told that Derwent had died of leukaemia and he wasn't very sure when he first heard the rumour that it was not leukaemia but Aids of which he had died. Gresham had never really thought about Derwent's sexual proclivities. Perhaps he'd been a drug addict which would account for some of the excesses of his behaviour. Did it matter now anyway? He was dead and that was that. Then Gresham remembered the card and his blood ran cold. He'd come to the conclusion that the card was some kind of sadistic joke of Derwent's, but was it instead a kind of warning? Gresham decided he had to speak to Fiona about it no matter what trouble it caused. The trouble might already have been caused anyway.

When Gresham made this decision Fiona was not in London. She was at their house near Edinburgh. On the day she came back to London, Gresham arrived back at the flat to find Fiona there, looking as attractive and lively as ever. She certainly didn't look ill. He decided to wait until after dinner to broach the subject, but it was she who brought the subject up.

“Do you remember Sally Appleton?” she asked.

“Yes, vaguely,” replied Gresham.

“Well, she was telling me that there was a