The Package Included Murder Read Online Free Page B

suitcase. ‘ Miss Clough-Cooper didn’t return by taxi though, did she, dear?’
    â€˜She jolly well didn’t!’ said the Hon. Con, waxing somewhat indignant at this slur on Penny Clough-Cooper’s character. ‘She’s like us – dead keen to see every aspect of Soviet life.’
    Or too mean to pay for a taxi, thought Miss Jones – and then blushed fiercely at her disloyalty. To cover her confusion she relocked the suitcase and scuttled back to bed. ‘Was Miss Clough-Cooper attacked on the underground, dear?’
    â€˜She certainly was, Bones! Makes you wonder what the world’s coming to, doesn’t it? I mean, in England you’d expect it. Any woman who ventures onto the tube in London takes her honour in her hands, so I’m told. The whole network’s positively riddled with those disgusting men in dirty raincoats who …’ The Hon. Con remembered Miss Jones’s susceptibilities in time. ‘Well,’ she concluded lamely, ‘you’d think things’d be different in Russia.’
    â€˜The underground was very crowded,’ remembered Miss Jones unhappily. She had not enjoyed her first abrasive contact with the ordinary people of the Soviet Union. Not that anybody, she acknowledged rather sadly, had actually tried to … ‘Er – what happened, dear?’
    â€˜To Penny Clough-Cooper?’ The Hon. Con was doing a few push-ups to while away the time. ‘ Well, you know how we all got split up even before we’d gone through those stupid turnstiles where you have to drop your money in. It was worse than a blooming rugby scrum,’ added the Hon. Con – and she spoke as an expert.
    â€˜You and I didn’t get separated, dear,’ said Miss Jones fondly. ‘I hung onto the belt of your raincoat. My word, it would take more than the might of the Moscovy rush hour to part us!’
    â€˜Poor old Penny Clough-Cooper wasn’t so lucky,’ grunted the Hon. Con and decided that bicycling on her back was more trouble than it was worth. She came up for air. ‘By the time she got down on the platform, she said she couldn’t see hide or hair of any of us. Couldn’t see much of those famous chunks of marble they’re so blooming proud of, either,’ added the Hon. Con with a snigger. ‘Packed like sardines in a tin, was how she expressed it. Deep in the bowels of the earth and surrounded by a mob of screaming peasants. And she was in much the same boat as us, Bones. No idea where the flipping heck she was going. You would think’ – the Hon. Con interrupted her second-hand story to voice a complaint that many a tourist in the Soviet Union had voiced before her – ‘you would think they’d use the same blooming alphabet as us, wouldn’t you?’
    â€˜They’re a very difficult people,’ sighed Miss Jones. ‘Everybody says so. Well, Miss Clough-Cooper reached the platform, dear. Then what happened?’
    â€˜She stood there, surrounded by the plebs, until a train came roaring in. Everybody surged forward, like they do, but Penny Clough-Cooper felt something more. Somebody was deliberately shoving her, hand in the small of her back, as hard as they could towards the edge of the platform. Gruesome, eh? If the poor lass hadn’t grabbed hold of a nearby soldier and hung on for dear life, she’d have been forced right in the path of the incoming train. Makes the blood run cold to think of it.’
    Miss Jones busied herself opening the writing pad and taking the blue plastic top off her ball point pen. ‘Clung onto a soldier , did you say, dear? Fancy!’
    The Hon. Con scowled. ‘You’ve got a mind like a cesspool, Bones!’ She climbed back into her own bed. ‘Anyhow, are you ready to take a few notes?’
    Miss Jones held her writing pad aloft.
    â€˜Right! Well, I propose to work on a simple process of