Death at the Sign of the Rook (Jackson Brodie #6)

by Kate Atkinson

“The guilty always masquerade as the innocent but it is rarely the other way round.” —Nancy Styles,

She seemed to have as little provenance as the missing portrait. Provenance was just an evidence chain of custody by any other name, wasn’t it?

“You know,” Simon Cate had said, his mouth full of cake, “in Celtic mythology the bees are intermediaries between this world and the world of the spirit. That’s why we tell the bees when someone in the keeper’s family is born or marries, or, perhaps more importantly, dies.”

It was true she could be a bit of a battle-axe, but that was the kind of sexist terminology you were supposed to avoid. Words like fishwife, harridan, crone, virago, vixen, witch, harpy, shrew. There were a lot of them. The male equivalent was just “man.”

For himself, he chose a forty-year-old Macallan from the drinks tray. (Cost a few bob, he thought.) “Water of life,” he said to no one in particular. He clinked glasses with everyone and said, “Here’s to a fun evening.” (Who was this person? Ben liked him. He might keep him.)