After The Husbands
What do you do when you’ve buried four husbands and not yet found a fifth?
Wealthy Lady Bumstead takes a cruise down the Mekong in Vietnam with a hired female companion, Anne de Tonkin. Annie is not just a kind old lady, she is a brilliant listener and soon knows all about the other travellers. But, on the last day of the cruise she is murdered.
Lady Bumstead, unable to see any reason why Annie should be murdered, is convinced the killer was after her. She hires the See Ms Detective Agency to protect her and find the killer. At the same time she decides to do some sleuthing herself, and, with the help of her high powered hearing aid, she begins listening to all the conversations around her.
As the SeeMs Detectives investigate the crime, they find Annie had a rich past and connections with almost everyone else on the boat. There seem to be plenty of reasons for killing her, but who did the deed?
Will Lady Bumstead and the SeeMs Detectives find the killer before he/she strikes again? Will Lady Bumstead find a fifth husband? Or will she become another victim?
Written in the first person by Lady Bumstead this novel will be particularly enjoyed by readers of Agatha Christie and A Man Called Otto. Or anyone interested in whodunnits.
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Excerpt
This is from the prologue of After the Husbands by Gina Cheyne. We do not yet know who the girl is, or why she is running but only that she is being pursued. In the course of the book all these questions are answered.
Prologue: Singapore 1967
Slithering down the fire escape she stopped at the balcony outside her room; their room. The French windows were open, the curtains blowing in and out. Odd. She had closed both window and curtains when she left.
She stopped, teetering on the metal platform and peeked in. An unknown man was turning over the bed, ripping the sheets. Looking for something? But what? And where is my husband?
The man pulled her Revelation suitcase from under the bed and his parang flashed in the lamp light as he slashed through the hard leather as though it was paper.
Giving an involuntary gasp she stumbled back. Her heel caught in the grid, her shoes clacking.
The man’s head shot up. For a moment she saw his face. Young. Her own age perhaps. European. Then he turned, speaking to someone in the other room.
‘What was that?’ His accent was English.
‘I didn’t hear anything.’ The second voice was too faint to analyse, but they were still speaking in English, not Cantonese.
She didn’t wait for any more but slid down the fire escape and on to the gravel.
Stepping away from the hotel she put out her hands instinctively; for a moment she had slipped into total darkness. Here, in the kampong, it was different from the streets outside the Raffles Hotel where the glare of lights had blinded her. The night was black but not silent: the noise of the cicadas competed with the endless insistence of the jammed traffic. She ran across the gravel and dashed into the choking fumes of the crawling cars.
Backlit by the slow-moving headlights, the men saw her. She heard a cry behind her, low though it was. Almost a whisper.
‘There she is!’
Then the drumming of their feet as they started to descend the fire escape in the semi-darkness.
Weaving in and out of the virtually stationary traffic, oblivious to the hoots and curses of the drivers, she aimed for the smaller streets opposite.
Entering an alley, she saw night stalls. Slowed her pace, skipping, half-running, moving quickly past the sellers who carried everything from satays to tee shirts. Weaving a little to avoid tripping over the rubbish drinkers threw onto the street behind them, but the smell of rotting vegetables made her pause even before she saw the dead dog. She swallowed and climbed over. She was not planning to escape the parang only to die of some banal infection here amongst the rubbish, and the satay sticks.
Past the stalls, she began running again. Here the edges of the alley crowded together, almost touching now, too narrow for anything more than a bicycle. Her feet felt sore. She was still wearing her evening clothes, her elegant heels. Blisters were better than exposing bare feet to the mounds of rubbish. This was a very different side of town to the one she was used to seeing. Her Singapore had theatres, dances, racecourses, glorious fashions. This was the opposite side of a strangely fetid coin.
A clang behind her forced her forward like a hurricane pushing on her back. She had not fought out of a life of poverty to die in someone else’s deprivation.
And then, just as her instinct told her she was approaching safer streets ahead, a blockage emerged from the darkness. The lane ended. She was trapped.
She turned. Her pursuers had entered the top of the alley – two men lit up by the streetlights behind. One man still held the parang, which glittered threateningly. She sensed a wave of testosterone as though the men were excited by the chase. Shrouded by the darkness she edged along the wall feeling its roughness.
Something hard cut into her back. A door handle. She forced back the nervous laugh that rose into her throat and pushed the door. She fell into a black space, stumbling down some stone steps. As she hauled herself back onto her feet, a hand shot out and grabbed her arm. Thin fingers like a claw gripped her flesh, hurting the bone. An unrecognisably accented voice said, ‘Quick, here.’
Two claws grabbed her hands in the dark and put them on someone’s waist. Uncertainly she clasped the body, feeling the protruding hip bones. A woman. Malnourished. Chinese or Malay, possibly Eurasian. Too narrow for European. She mirrored the small steps through the total darkness, pairing the girl’s slender thighs, being led to who knows where. Conjoined twins. A curiously close dance where she could no longer see, only feel.
The journey through the blackness seemed endless. The smell almost overpowering. What was this place? A mixture of putrefaction. Of sweat. Of bodies. Of incense. Of opium.
And then the guide stopped. So quickly her arms slipped around the thin body in a spooning embrace.
The girl opened a wooden door and pushed her into the light. She turned quickly enough to see a lined face. Eurasian. The voice sounded old, but hips and claws had been young, adolescent.
‘Go,’ said the girl brusquely, again in accented English. ‘See it?’
As she turned and looked down the street the door slammed behind her. She saw a flashing sign. She was near the embassy. Thank Heaven. She put her hand in her skirt pocket and felt the sharp outline. Her passport.
She sighed and accelerated into a sprint she had never achieved at school. Here she would be safe, at least for a while.
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