Missing Susan by Sharyn McCrumb

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,
“and
Charles.” He nodded toward the lone gentleman in the party. “If you will all stay here, I will attempt to locate the coach.”
    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 would be very easy then for her to purchase some arsenic, or even to steal some of his own private stock …” It was great fun to speculate. But he, Rowan Rover, had never had to buy any arsenic. Or to watch the death throes of the subsequent victim. Now, suddenly, he had to move from the theoretical to the practical—and to accomplish the task before ten potential witnesses, all of them avowed crime buffs. Was he mad?
    He looked up to find that a large tour coach had pulled up alongside him. “Mr. Rover?” the driver inquired in a working-class twang. “Mystery tour?”
    Rowan took a long drag on his cigarette. “Right,” he wheezed. “They’re just around the corner.”
    “Climb aboard, then, and we’ll go and get them.”
    Rowan Rover hesitated. “Mind if I smoke?”
    “Not me, mate. But if you’re ferrying about a load of American ladies, there’s sure to be objections. Regular health nuts, some of them.” He was young and blond and he looked as if he should be running across a rugby field rather than driving a bus. He smiled again as Rowan Rover mounted thesteps to the coach. “My name’s Bernard,” he said. “I’m from Kensington.”
    “And you know where you’re going, I take it?”
    “Complete instructions,” said Bernard. “Not as if it ever changes, though. All the tourists want to go to the same dreary places.”
    Rowan Rover smirked. “I think this lot may surprise you.”

“Alas, regardless of their doom
,
The little victims play!
    No sense have they of ills to come
,
Nor care beyond today.”
    —T HOMAS G RAY

CHAPTER 5

    WINCHESTER
    W HEN ALL THE luggage had been stowed into the undercarriage of the coach, and the travelers had boarded the bus two by two, like Noah’s passengers on an earlier tour, Rowan Rover turned to address the group. First he introduced Bernard, their friendly and experienced coach driver, who would be the final authority on where the bus could and could not go. “England is not all motorways yet,” he reminded them. “Medieval towns were not constructed to accommodate lorries. Some of the rural counties are quite unspoiled. When we get down into the West Country, you will see some narrow lanes that wouldn’t take horses two abreast, much less allow this tin beast an unscathed passage.”
    They looked up at Rowan with polite interest, possibly subdued by the fact that as far as their bodies were concerned it was ten A.M. after a grueling transatlantic all-nighter. Although the coach would have held three times their number comfortably, they still insisted upon sitting two by two, and they