“You’re welcome to it,” Alice said. “After this experience, I wouldn’t burn my finger on purpose for all the diamonds in South Africa.”
The customs official was cheerful, but brisk, and apparently unthreatened by a couple of middle-aged women with well-worn suitcases, one of whom had a finger immersed in a cup of ice. He was an expert on American eccentricities. He wished the ladies a pleasant stay in England and waved them through.
Frances Coles glanced at her watch. “We still have four hours before the tour assembles. How is your finger feeling now?”
Alice took a deep breath and eased her finger out of the puddle of ice. She shut her eyes, waiting for the stab of pain. Instead there was only a mild twinge of discomfort. “It’s better,” she admitted.
“Good. I think you should switch from ice to something else now. Aloe, if we can find any. Do you suppose there’s a drugstore in the airport?”
“Bound to be,” said Alice. “I suppose we’d better change some money first.”
Together they trundled off down the halls of Gatwick. The adventure had begun.
At two-fifteen that afternoon a small group of travelers began to assemble in the ground-floor lobby of the airport: a married couple, an English-looking mother and daughter in tweeds and sensible shoes, a pretty young nurse, a Canadian doctor’s wife, a silver-haired lady from Berkeley, Frances Coles, and her new friend Alice MacKenzie, whose burned finger was now shiny with aloe ointment.
Elizabeth MacPherson was the last to arrive, followed by the beautiful Susan Cohen, who had reached chapter thirty-one in the oral history of her life. “And then I got my
“Oh look!” cried Elizabeth, more with relief than surprise. “This must be the rest of the tour!” She wondered hopefully if any of them were hard of hearing. “Mystery tour?” she asked, striding toward the group.
Several of the travelers nodded.
Elizabeth and Susan added their suitcases to the pile of luggage in the circle.
“Is the guide here yet?” Elizabeth inquired.
“Not yet,” said the tall silver-haired woman consulting her watch. “Oh dear,” she said. “It’s still on Berkeley time.”
The rest of the tour members offered her local times ranging from two-twenty to two-forty. Elizabeth noticed that there was only one man in the group, a tanned and genial-looking gentleman with peppery hair. He wore a T- shirt that proclaimed ERIK BROADAXE RULES PRETTY GOOD. From this evidence, Elizabeth deduced that he was an American; that he had been to the Jorvik, the Norse exhibit at York (whence the T-shirt); and that he had a good sense of humor, always a pleasant discovery in a fellow traveler. His wife, who was half a head shorter than he, was blonde and smiling, and looked equally good-tempered.
“Is everybody here from California?” asked Mrs. Broadaxe (as Elizabeth had begun to characterize her).
“San Diego,” said the pretty, dark-eyed nurse.
“So am I!” said Alice MacKenzie. “And Frances is from La Mesa, which amounts to the same thing.”
“We’re from Colorado,” said the lady in tweeds. Her daughter nodded and smiled.
“Vancouver.”
“Berkeley,” said the silver-haired woman, eldest of the party.
“I’m from Minneapolis,” said Susan, “and our airport, the Minneapolis-St. Paul International, is much more-”
“Edinburgh,” said Elizabeth MacPherson-and instantly regretted it. She then had to admit that she was, in fact, an American; she started to explain how she came to be living in Scotland and why her new husband hadn’t come along.
She was still relating all this when a man in a beige leisure suit approached the group, carrying a canvas shoulder bag and a sheaf of typed papers. “Tour?” he said briskly. “South of England mystery tour? I am your guide.”
There was a moment of silence while the assembly took in the sight of their guide. He was a desperately stately five feet, eight inches, with longish blue-black hair that conjured up images of shoe polish in the minds of the beholders. Such a hue did, of course, exist in nature. Innumerable species of crows possessed it without resorting to artifice, and, among homo sapiens, certain bands of Comanches may in their youth rejoice in a similarly stygian shade; but in an aging Englishman whose face sported the crow’s-feet to accompany the crow’s color, the shade suggested hairstyling of a suicidal nature: dyed by his own hand and with a reckless disregard for plausibility. His eyes behind dark-framed glasses were similarly dark, and his expression radiated a confidence and self-esteem that belied his unevenly cut, safety-pinned trousers.
“My name is Rowan Rover,” said the personage.
With an exclamation of surprise Elizabeth held aloft her copy of
“Here,” mumbled Elizabeth, chagrined at having been mistaken for a groupie. She wondered if she could arrange for him to sit with Susan on the bus trip to Winchester.
“It may take me a while to learn your names. Ah, only one gentleman, I see.
“That’s right, and this is my wife Nancy.”
“Martha Tabram?” The well-dressed woman from Vancouver raised her hand.
“Frances Coles? Alice MacKenzie? Ah, there you are together. Very convenient. Both from California, aren’t you? How lovely. And two Colorado ladies, where are they? Miriam Angel and Emma Smith?”
“We’re mother and daughter,” said Miriam Angel.
“Splendid. No one’s mistaken you for the Judds, have they, dear?” Rowan said under his breath. He had become conversant in country music during the period he referred to as his exile in the academic gulag, by which he meant the state of Wisconsin. “Any more Californians? Kate Conway?”
The pretty young nurse in the red sweater raised her hand.
“And one more-Maud Marsh.” He nodded toward the silver-haired lady from Berkeley. “That’s it, I think.”
“Excuse me. You forgot me.”
Rowan Rover looked up from his list. “Did I? I thought I had read out all the names. You are…”
“Susan Cohen. From Minneapolis.”
Rowan Rover’s smile faded as he stared at the belligerent-looking blonde. He made a show of consulting his list again. “Susan Cohen. It’s here, of course. It’s just that I thought I’d already said it. No, I wouldn’t forget you.”
After a moment’s silence, during which the color grudgingly returned to Rowan Rover’s face, the members of the group picked up their belongings and surged at him with questions.
He held up a hand to forestall the onslaught. “I am told that the tour coach will be waiting for us in the loading zone just outside. Our driver should be there now unless he has been delayed in the interminable traffic that one inevitably encounters on the motorway. I don’t know who thought up the road system out here, but he evidently came from a family not known for precognition, because he certainly didn’t foresee-”
Alice MacKenzie interrupted his tirade. “Do you want us to go outside now?”
“Yes,” said Rowan. “Let us be optimistic.”
“And will there be a sign on the side of the bus that says MURDER TOUR?”
Rowan Rover sighed. “No, madam. Definitely not. We don’t want to be mistaken for the IRA.” He ended further discussion by turning and marching for the glass doors of the exit, while the tour members scrambled behind him, balancing suitcases and handbags as they ran.
Once assembled on the sidewalk outside, Rowan Rover turned and faced his charges. “Ladies,” he intoned,
With a reassuring wave, Rowan Rover hurried away. Once out of sight of the party, he took out a cigarette and lit it with trembling hands. Susan Cohen. There she was: undeniably real and unavoidably doomed. He had three weeks in which to kill her. Somehow, despite the arrival of a fiscally sound ten-thousand-pound check, the murder scheme had never seemed more than an idle exercise in theory. Until now. Rowan Rover had spent the past few years making a living out of idle murder theories, and this one had seemed little different from the others. “Suppose Florence Maybrick knew that her husband was an arsenic eater,” he would say in one of his crime lectures. “It
