Смерть на Ниле / Death on the Nile

Joanna nodded and helped herself to a cigarette.

‘Enemies, my sweet. You’re so devastatingly efficient. And you’re so frightfully good at doing the right thing.’

Linnet laughed.

‘Why, I haven’t got an enemy in the world.’

Chapter 4

Lord Windlesham sat under the cedar tree. His eyes rested on the graceful proportions of Wode Hall. There was nothing to mar its old-world beauty; the new buildings and additions were out of sight round the corner. It was a fair and peaceful sight bathed in the autumn sunshine.

Nevertheless, as he gazed, it was no longer Wode Hall that Charles Windlesham saw. Instead, he seemed to see a more imposing Elizabethan mansion, a long sweep of park, a bleaker background… It was his own family seat, Charltonbury, and in the foreground stood a figure – a girl’s figure, with bright golden hair and an eager confident face… Linnet as mistress of Charltonbury!

He felt very hopeful. That refusal of hers had not been at all a definite refusal. It had been little more than a plea for time.

Well, he could afford to wait a little…

How amazingly suitable the whole thing was. It was certainly advisable that he should marry money, but not such a matter of necessity that he could regard himself as forced to put his own feelings on one side. And he loved Linnet. He would have wanted to marry her even if she had been practically penniless, instead of one of the richest girls in England. Only, fortunately, she was one of the richest girls in England…

His mind played with attractive plans for the future.

The Mastership of the Roxdale perhaps, the restoration of the west wing, no need to let the Scotch shooting…

Charles Windlesham dreamed in the sun.

Chapter 5

It was four o’clock when the dilapidated little two-seater stopped with a sound of crunching gravel. A girl got out of it – a small slender creature with a mop of dark hair. She ran up the steps and tugged at the bell.

A few minutes later she was being ushered into the long stately drawing room, and an ecclesiastical butler was saying with the proper mournful intonation:

‘Miss de Bellefort.

’

‘Linnet!’

‘Jackie!’

Windlesham stood a little aside, watching sympathetically as this fiery little creature flung herself open-armed upon Linnet.

‘Lord Windlesham – Miss de Bellefort – my best friend.’

A pretty child, he thought – not really pretty but decidedly attractive with her dark curly hair and her enormous eyes.