Day of Vengeance: Dorothy Martin investigates murder in the cathedral (A Dorothy Martin Mystery) by Jeanne M. Dams Page A

Lynn. ‘Leave it on. And we need to hurry a bit if we’re to meet Walter and Sue on time.’
    We had agreed to pick up the kids at their flat in Bloomsbury before meeting our husbands at the restaurant. There was time for no more than introductions before we all piled back in the taxi and headed down Charing Cross Road.
    I hadn’t seen Walter for ages, so we had a lot of catching up to do. He was excited about the possibility of a job with the Museum of London.
    ‘I’m really interested in treasure trove and that sort of thing,’ he said, ‘so this is right up my street. It wouldn’t pay a lot at first, but there are lots of possibilities for advancement. And Sue just might be able to get in at the Museum of Childhood.’
    ‘Ooh, that’s the one with the dollhouses, isn’t it?’ I became interested in dollhouses – or dolls’ houses, as the Brits call them – some years ago and still enjoyed them, though I no longer had one of my own. So we talked toys, and miniatures, and London history, quite happily until we were jarred by a sudden stop.
    ‘Sorry about that,’ said our driver. ‘Bleedin’ idiots!’ He was plainly addressing not his passengers but the drivers ahead. ‘Oughtn’t to be allowed, if they don’t know how to drive in London.’
    We were nearing Parliament Square. Traffic on the other side of the street was moving, but nothing on our side. Lynn made a quick decision. ‘We’ll walk the rest of the way, thanks. Not your fault,’ she added to the driver. ‘Here you are.’
    ‘Thank you very much indeed, madam,’ said the driver with a broad smile that gave me some idea of the size of the tip.
    ‘Is there a parade or something?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never seen the traffic this bad.’ The pedestrian traffic was thick, too; we were not the only ones to have abandoned wheeled transport.
    ‘Not a parade,’ said Lynn. ‘The cabbie would have known. It could be a wedding or a funeral at the Abbey, I suppose, but only
really
important people are married or buried there, mostly royalty, and it would have been all over the news … Oh, good heavens!’
    We had rounded a corner and could see in front of us what looked like a riot scene. People everywhere, placards waving in the air, bullhorns blasting out slogans, on the one hand, and orders from the police to move along, on the other.
    ‘What on earth? Are those cardboard crowns they’re wearing?’ Sue, who was the shortest of us, craned her neck to see.
    ‘They’re mitres,’ said Walter. ‘A lot of women wearing cardboard mitres!’
    The signs were homemade, and were all different, but with the same theme: ‘The Church is Sexist!’, ‘Mitres for Women’, ‘Equality under God’. I saw one reading ‘Diana was Murdered!’ which seemed to imply some confusion on the part of the demonstrator, but for the most part the women were united in their demands, and getting quite raucous about it.
    As we drew closer, the chants grew better organized. ‘What do we want?’ shouted one woman with a bullhorn. ‘Women bishops!’ the crowd chanted back. ‘When do we want it?’ ‘NOW!’
    I didn’t see exactly what happened next, but one woman either dropped her sign or else deliberately hit a policeman over the head with it. At any rate, she fell, and immediately the women around her were brandishing their signs and shouting at the police. Others began running in that direction.
    ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Walter. I hurriedly took off my new hat and crammed it into its box, and then followed as he miraculously shoved his way through the gathering crowd, dragging Sue by the hand.
    More than anything in the world right then, I wanted Alan beside me.
    ‘Where are we?’ I asked after a few minutes, as we panted in Walter’s wake. I thought I knew London pretty well, but there were still plenty of odd backwaters where I could get lost in two minutes without my trusty A to Zed.
    ‘There’s a church just along here,’ he said. ‘I