The Shadow in the Glass by JJA Harwood (any book recommendations txt) 📕

‘For the present,’ she said, blushing. ‘How may I help you?’

‘I’ve come to offer my condolences,’ he said, nodding to her armband. ‘When I heard you had discovered another body, I was most concerned for your well-being.’

There was a curiously flat tone to his words. With a sudden stab of fear, Eleanor wondered how many times he had rehearsed them.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said. She shifted her chair into the light, making sure he could see how pale her face was, and all the shadows pooled under her eyes.

‘You seem to have very bad luck indeed. Two murders in such a short amount of time.’

Eleanor folded her hands in her lap. She was sure he was watching them, waiting to see if they twitched.

‘But, happily, you have not been left out in the cold. I understand Mrs Cleary left you everything. How good of her to think of you.’

His voice was utterly empty, his dark eyes fixed on her face. Eleanor forced herself to look at him. If she looked away, if she shifted in her chair, she would seem suspicious. She must keep her face smooth and blank, or he would pounce.

‘It was good of her,’ she agreed, letting her voice catch in her throat. It was not hard. Whenever she thought about Mrs Cleary, grief, guilt and anger threatened to choke her. Mrs Cleary had tried to be kind, even if she hadn’t succeeded. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about the investigation? The local police haven’t told me anything.’

‘Nor should they,’ said the Inspector. ‘It would not do to make such details public.’

Eleanor’s hands were sweating. Could he tell?

‘Could you shed any light on the matter?’

‘I could not.’

Her insides were squirming. To think that he considered her capable of committing those murders – to think that she knew the real culprit, and could not tell! Eleanor stared into the corners of the room, and saw the black-eyed woman staring back. She was standing like an attentive maid, and her smile slid across her face like a knife. The Inspector said nothing, and Eleanor knew he could not see her.

He hadn’t taken his eyes off Eleanor’s face once. He was waiting for her to make a mistake, she realized, with the same quiet confidence of a hunter stalking his prey. Anger flickered beneath the fear. She’d had enough of being hunted.

‘Perhaps you ought to offer the local police your services,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘It is a pity this case is left to them, rather than coming under your jurisdiction. I feel sure that you, with all your experience, could bring the murderer to justice.’

A muscle in the Inspector’s jaw twitched. Eleanor had to fight back a grin.

‘An excellent notion, Miss Hartley. Perhaps I shall.’

‘I hope so,’ said Eleanor. ‘I shall never forget the way you offered me your help at Granborough House. Such a shame you were not able to give it, when I asked.’

The Inspector flushed. ‘That was not by choice, as well you know.’

Eleanor got to her feet, willing her knees not to shake. ‘I find there are few situations in which one really has no choice, Inspector. There is always something that can be done.’

She went to the door and held it open for him. He got up, but did not follow her.

‘No matter how unpleasant?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

The Inspector picked up his hat and went to the door. ‘I think, perhaps, you do.’

Eleanor tore through every paper she could get her hands on over the next few days. They were all filled with the grisly details of Mrs Cleary’s murder. She combed through the finer points of the investigation. Someone had to have killed Mrs Cleary; surely the black-eyed woman’s magic could not slit throats without a hand to wield the knife. But while there were plenty of outraged letters in the papers, and plenty of constables standing outside the doors to Mrs Cleary’s old house, Eleanor heard nothing about a suspect.

It unsettled her. Whenever Eleanor walked past a constable she felt their eyes on the back of her head. She seemed to be watched wherever she went: in church, at the post office, behind the glass of her drawing-room window. Her neighbours had always whispered about her but now they did not even bother to lower their voices.

Eleanor made sure they saw her grieving.

She worked up her old dress uniform into a mourning dress – with a few alterations and her armband, she did not look like a lady’s maid. She sewed black borders onto all her handkerchiefs, and used them extravagantly in church. She placed advertisements in the papers, asking for information and promising a reward – although how she was going to pay it, she didn’t pretend to know. In her black dress, Eleanor felt like a macabre magnet, but it was enough to turn the worst of the rumours away.

The performance of grief was stifling. Eleanor hated having to trim everything she owned with scraps of black to dull the sharpened glances of people who hated her. If there was any justice in the world she would be allowed to mourn Mrs Cleary in a way that suited her. But until a suspect was named in the papers, anything but extravagantly public weeping would mark her out as a killer.

Every day she went to the post office to ask for the responses to her advertisement. Usually, there was nothing but a smattering of badly spelled lies. But on one April morning, a damp spring fog clinging to the hem of her black dress, Eleanor received a telegram containing nothing but the address of a church in Pimlico and the words most important that we meet.

Excitement rushed through her. At last, something promising. All she would need to do was let the details slip to Bessie and Eleanor’s innocence would be proclaimed from the rooftops by lunchtime. Eleanor got on the next train to Victoria, elbowed her way