Rose in Darkness by Christianna Brand Page A

something cheaper, that was all, unless her beastly trustees would see reason and divvy up; just as long as it had a decent bit of acceleration—more than ever, now, must Sari have a car with speed...
    And they stopped at a chemist’s and she rushed in and emerged with a large packet of cotton-wool. What Sari could do with all the cotton-wool she bought, the Eight Best never could imagine, she was for ever dropping off at chemists’ and buying packages of it. ‘Well, I clean my face with it, don’t I?’ And she liked the kind that was made up in little separate blobs—for babies’s bottoms, actually, Sari supposed, but it did get used up much more quickly. ‘So now a quick wee, darling, at the public loo, there’s a lovely one just round the corner there, I know it well—and then off to go!’ The quick wee was on the whole quicker than usual considering that she’d had to take off all the reporter-off-putting make-up. ‘So now we really can get weaving. Wren’s Hill!’
    Charley obediently headed the green gravy-boat towards the road she had travelled two nights ago. ‘What we want is to find a man—a rather tall man, I did notice that much—who has a Cadmus Halcyon and—well, access, at any rate, to red roses; or who, anyway, had a red rose that night.’ She and Rufie had looked over the roses in the beds outside the flats and there were none so red as the one that had lain on Vi Feather’s humped dead shoulder. ‘Oh, but you don’t know about that, Charley, do you? And perhaps I’d better not tell you; it’s kind of Rufie’s secret. Forget about the rose.’
    But how could the rose have got there? How could it have got there? Like—well, sort of like putting flowers on a grave, she thought to herself. Had someone laid a red rose upon Vi Feather’s dead body, by way of farewell? She said, suddenly: ‘Charley! That car’s following us.’
    ‘Some car iss following us?’ said Charley in his sing-song way. One went to school and talked like the other kids there, but then one went home. His mixture of Scouse and Pakistani was part of Charley’s charm for his friends, and he retained the family habit of launching himself upon a long word or series of words run together.
    ‘That small black car behind us. Slow down! Come on, slow down! Now, look in the driving mirror— it’s slowing down too. Now accelerate—there you are, you see, they’re speeding up. I tell you, I know all the tricks. It’s following us.’ She reached out automatically for cigarettes and he saw that her hands were actually shaking. ‘When you come to the next turning, go left—never mind where it leads to, go left—then slow down; don’t stop, it’s too frightening in case they’re... But slow down. If they seem to do anything—then just step on the gas.’ She fumbled desperately, tearing at the packet of cigarettes. ‘Now! Turn here!’
    And sure enough the black car turned also and, finding them slowed down almost to walking pace, had nothing for it but to drive on past them. ‘You wait! When we come round this bend, we’ll find them dawdling, waiting for us.’
    For a moment, it had been genuinely frightening. Now Charley said: ‘But, Sari darling, thiss iss only a pol isscar.’
    ‘The police? What doing?’
    ‘Well, you are suspect, Sari, it must be, mustn’t it?’
    ‘You’re joking!’ said Sari.
    ‘But, darling, after all—’
    ‘Who would seriously think I could kill poor wretched Vi Feather?’
    ‘She iss being found dead in your car, Sari, after all.’
    ‘The police have lights on top of their cars,’ said Sari, suspicious again.
    ‘Not always. Not advertising themselfs.’
    ‘Oh, well, if it’s really the police, let them follow,’ said Sari. ‘It’ll keep us safe from—the others. Just turn round and carry on. I don’t care if they know what we’re doing.’
    ‘What exactly are we doing?’ said poor Charley.
    ‘Looking for a man and a car—and a rose,’ said Sari,