A Bedlam of Bones by Suzette Hill

were also courting the company of one Horatius Clinker: a charming coincidence (you roguish little pervert, you!) and one that would not escape the vigilant eye of the Daily Smut , should news of it happen to pass that illustrious paper’s front door.
Your youthful misdemeanours within a certain London Turkish bath attracted much publicity at the time and you paid the price. But that is dead wood now and I feel that a revival of interest is in order. What better topic than a resurrection of the Horatian affair? Now that really would make the bishop move! (Yes, I grant, an egregious pun, but I fear irresistible to a veteran chess player such as myself.)
À bientôt,
Donald Duck
P.S. Financial requirements to follow.
     
    ‘Cocky little shit, isn’t he?’ Nicholas suddenly seethed. ‘I’ll give him Donald bleeding Duck if he ever comes near me!’
    ‘Yes, but he won’t, will he?’ I replied quietly. ‘The whole thing will be done from a safe distance. There will be messages, instructions, but he’s unlikely to get physically close. He’ll pull his wires by remote control.’
    ‘We’ll see about that,’ he snapped. ‘He’s not going to put one over on Old Nick. No fucking fear.’ He reached for the blended whisky. ‘Haven’t you got something better than this?’
    ‘Afraid not.’
    ‘Oh well, it’ll have to do.’ And so saying, he filled his glass almost to the brim.
    ‘Steady on! Clinker may want some.’
    ‘Should have got here earlier, shouldn’t he?’ was the brusque retort. He became silent and I reread the letter.
    Given my own discomfort at the hands of Nicholas, I suppose that seeing him so exercised should have given me a sense of schadenfreude . And yet curiously I felt none. His own brand of blackmail had been distinctly oblique, amiable even, and I began to wonder if perhaps the manipulation had rested more on my own fears than his serious intent. Such was the gravity of my crime that I had been ready to believe the worst and dance to the slightest of tunes … Assumptions are of course dangerous, but increasingly I was beginning to feel that Nicholas’s capacity to shop me was entirely abstract, and his sly innuendos simply an amusing way of recruiting my services.
    Well, whatever the case, he had exhibited no malice … Whereas the present operator certainly did. I found both letters distasteful in the extreme. Each held a note of gloating pleasure, almost as if the financial object were of less interest than the power to unsettle or humiliate. Nicholas was right – he was cocky enough. But dangerous with it, and I was concerned for them both.
    There was the sound of a car pulling up; and a minute later the front gate creaked open and the bishop appeared. He was clad in the dark raincoat with turned-up collar that he habitually wore when going undercover to play tiddlywinks with Mrs Carruthers. * Mercifully he was without the black fedora – an addition which invariably gave him the air of a rather plump Chicago hoodlum.
    I ushered him in and, rescuing the whisky bottle from Nicholas, offered him a glass.
    ‘Just a small one, Francis. A busy morning, and they’ve closed that shortcut to Molehill. Had to go the long way round – a tedious route.’ He took a sip, cleared his throat and nodded to Nicholas. ‘Glad you could come. Rather important. It’s not good this business, not good at all.’
    ‘You can say that again,’ was the acid reply.
    There was an awkward pause, broken by myself saying brightly, ‘Well I suggest you swap letters and compare notes, and while you’re doing that I’ll go and get lunch on the table.’ I hurried into the kitchen, leaving them alone to sort things out.
    There I hovered by the stove, stirring the ham and beans, watched intently by Maurice from the window sill. Of the dog there was now no sign. Presumably it was his day for the crypt or he had bounded off to the graveyard to bawl at the dead. I addressed a few polite words to the cat; and