Rose in Darkness by Christianna Brand

been blown in by the high winds, muddy puddles had formed and been swept across the concrete floors. Little sign remained of the comings and goings of cars or of their owners and by the time the police had arrived upon the scene, there had been a good deal of the normal Sunday morning activity of other tenants. Such signs as had been identified served only to confirm the acknowledged actions of the night before. ‘Still, he’d be taking a chance.’
    ‘Rufie, there was this huge storm blowing, you know what the shed was like last night, you were there yourself coming back from Etho’s: dark as pitch and a howling gale blowing through. A man drives in, in a plain black car and gets out of it and then after a minute he gets into what looks exactly the same car and drives off again. He’s forgotten something or come back to get something or—who cares? Only, he hadn’t so much come back to get something as to leave something. And what he left was -what he’d brought. He’d brought a dead body in the back of my car.’
    ‘Why leave it there, Sari? In all that storm, he could just have pitched it out by the roadside.’
    Nicotine and black coffee were bringing Sari back to the surface. She stopped clutching her head and ran her fingers through her thatch of hair so that it stood up softly on the end and all a-glow. ‘Wherever he left it, there might be some connection found with him - he might have to account for it. This way— I do.’ And she kicked aside the leafless jungle and, staggering slightly with the awfulness of it being only half-past ten in the morning, heaved herself out of bed. ‘You promised! Come on, we’ve got to find him.’
    But Rufie, though last night he had been full of plans and promises, by this morning had changed his mind. Mr Cecil of Christophe’s had rung up and was ap-solutely blackmailing him, dovey, for these wretched sketches and he simply must work, honestly he must. Mad keen to come on the hunt, but, dovey-darling, truly, truly....
    ‘Oh, well, never mind, I’ll try and get Charley, then.’
    Charley’s car was a livid green sports model—it was like driving about, Sari used to say, in a glass gravy-boat filled with pea soup; but it did as well as any other, and the journalists thronged about the fiat up on the heights of Hampstead had taken little notice of a coloured gentleman and his bespectacled girlfriend driving off in a pea-green sports car. Sari had been clever with a mud-coloured make-up and Rufie had contrived to dig up for her a long-haired blonde wig. (‘Oh, darling, not one of the Visitors?’ But no, no, Rufie had resentfully replied, how often did one have to tell her, one ap-solutely did not go in for Camp; if she wanted to know, he’d been matching up material with the wig to be worn by the model of one of his creations.) ‘Marvellous, Charley, we’ve dodged the lot!’ They made a great pretence of gooping about like sensation-seekers, driving very slowly past the scene of yesterday’s ghastly discovery, Sari even leaning out to call to one or two of the reporters, ‘Anything new?’ From now on, the slightly dreary blonde, with or without Paki boyfriend, would go unnoticed in and out of the flats. ‘So now, darling, to the garage first and I’ll scream out to them to look around for a new car for me. The minute the police release the Halcyon, I’ll get rid of it. I couldn’t bear to set eyes on it, ever again.’
    So they stopped briefly at the garage and, minus the wig, she called out her message, promising to explain later. The garage who had read in the morning papers all about how the dead body of a woman had been found in the boot of Miss Sari Morne’s car—a fact apparently confided to this one reporter alone by the head of the Metropolitan Police himself—cried respectfully back that they quite understood. To Charley’s timid protestations that she would lose a great deal of money on a brand new car, she replied that she’d have to get