Edie Investigates Read Online Free Page A

benefits that a) he could have tea and b) it was a place so appallingly quaint he was reasonably sure any actual spywould be prevented from crossing the threshold by pure, aching shame.
    He went in and ordered a cream tea, which turned out to be enormous, and was struggling with a second five-inch scone and a vast quantity of whipped cream when his anonymous driver came in and handed him an aged foolscap file with no departmental crests or Top-Secret stamps and the single word BARIKAD scrawled in black marker along the spine.
    “Background, Tommy,” the driver said. “For your soonest consideration. Don’t leave it on a bus.”
    Edie Banister had not been aware that she was watching the young man by the window. She had slipped into a kind of timelessness, a collision of past and present which had been occurring all too often recently, and her mind had been looking back and inwards rather than at the room. Meanwhile, though, some part of her had registered a new face in the Copper Kettle: a lanky, bilious creature who had obviously caught Mrs Mandel’s eye, because she positively covered his plate with extra goodies. Edie suspected the proprietress was something of a terror with a certain sort of male whose tastes ran to the Oedipal, but either this lad was not that sort or Mrs Mandel had accidentally overcooked the situation by giving him enough cream to choke a family of cats.
    So she was surprised to find that her entire attention was focused—in a most elliptical and abruptly very professional way—upon the conversation now taking place between him and a stout, balding man with a boxer’s nose and the kind of suit which said he worked for a living: a one-time sergeant, Edie rather thought, or a chief petty officer—and now, by the keys in his closed fist, from which dangled the badge of an upmarket carmaker, driver to the bilious eater of scones.
    Well, all right. A civil servant, with a driver to keep him out of trouble, though what trouble one might get into in Shrewton was hard to say. It did not necessarily mean there was anything of interest to her here. And yet, the watchful part of her had seen something already, or half seen it, and was clamouring for her to keep looking, to order another pot of sump water and persist in her cow-eyed gazing across the room as if she were a truly dotty old baggage. She reached into her handbag and fussed briefly, then tapped the lid of the pot significantly at Mrs Mandel and raised her eyebrows. Mrs Mandel, perhaps unused to people asking for refills, bustled over post-haste, just as the driver passed his master some sort of sheaf of documents whose very familiar anonymity made Edie yet more suspicious. She had seen files like that, had handled and even compiled them. She had been fired, ultimately, by a man who told her she was past her prime and signed his name to a paper held in just such a file. But there were, surely, many departments which used them, especially now, when British government ministers had developed the alarming habit of wandering around in front of the press brandishing highly confidential reports in transparent plastic envelopes. If only she had been closer,close enough to read whatever was written in black along the spine, or better yet to grab a glance over the young man’s shoulder. Child’s play, it would have been to the white fish girl. Not so now. Well, needs must.
    Mrs Mandel’s heavy foot became improbably tangled in the handle of Edie’s venerable umbrella, and she staggered. She caught herself with both hands, which meant that the contents of her tray flew up into the air, and then—inevitably—down. Edie leapt backwards with a shrill bleat of “Oh, my stars and garters!” and everyone stared. Her table was a mess, a soupy muddle of torte and boiling tea. Mrs Mandel demanded loudly to know if she was all right, and Edie averred that she was, but what a shock, how terrible, and it was all her fault. Mrs Mandel became competitively