Contractual Obligations
Copyright© 2016 by Freddie Clegg
Prologue
It was an autumn evening in London. On Thames Embankment, the lines of plane trees were already shedding their furry seed balls and the first strong winds of the season were picking off the early leaf fall.
In the hall of a house in Clerkenwell, a man stood quietly. His clothes were less than fashionable and made him look older than his years. Even so, they were of a quality that suggested that he could afford to dress well. His face was serious. An observant person would have noticed the way in which he was passing the brim of his hat nervously through his fingers as he waited. As the chiming clock on the wall began to strike the quarter hour he looked up at it, startled by the sudden noise. “Ah, you’re here.” A woman’s voice drew his attention away from the clock and towards the top of the flight of stairs in front of him. Her voice seemed to communicate a level of indifference. Her bored expression suggested that she found his arrival an irritation. “I suppose you had better come up, hadn’t you?”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.