Parting Breath Page 20

  ‘None of the students could have heard what Pringle said, so it was more likely to be someone from – what do you call it, miss? – the Combination Room.’

  ‘John Wordsworth could have been the man she loved,’ said the Professor of English Literature. ‘All the evidence – what there is of it – fits. It’s just the proof that’s missing.…’

  ‘It happens to us, too, miss, sometimes, down at the station,’ said the Detective Inspector with fellow feeling. ‘What’s evidence is one thing, and what’s proof – that’s different altogether. Sometimes …’ He paused.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said awkwardly, ‘you just have to make do with knowing.’

  Superintendent Leeyes was sitting at his desk in Berebury Police Station when Sloan got back from Tarsus College. He looked up at the clock as Sloan walked into the room.

  ‘Your wife’s been on the phone, Sloan. If you look sharp about it you’ve just got time to get her to her relaxation class at the antenatal clinic.’ He picked up a piece of paper and waved it in front of Sloan. ‘Would you say that the university sit-in was “Tumultuous Petitioning”? Because, if so, our legal people say there’s an Act of 1661 which says you shouldn’t do it.…’

  About the Author

  Catherine Aird is the author of more than twenty volumes of detective mysteries and three collections of short stories. Most of her fiction features Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan and Detective Constable W. E. Crosby. Aird holds an honorary master’s degree from the University of Kent and was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to the Girl Guide Association. She lives in a village in East Kent, England.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The hypothesis advanced by Miss Hilda Linaker, Professor of English Literature at the University of Calleshire, in the course of the story is taken with the kind permission of the author from Dear Jane, a biographical study of Jane Austen, by Constance Pilgrim, published by William Kimber, London, 1971.

  Copyright © 1977 by Catherine Aird

  Cover design by Tracey Dunham

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-1065-8

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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