The Middle of Things

The middle of things is written by J. S. Fletcher and the book starts with a chapter that contains Viner's aunt, Miss Bethia Penkridge, who had an insatiable appetite for fiction. She had no taste for the psychological or erotic; what she loved was a story which began with crime and ended with a detection. Nothing pleased her better than to go to bed with a brain titivated with the mysteries of the last three chapters. A dead silence fell on the room, broken only by the crackling of logs in the grate. The silvery chime of the clock on the mantelpiece brought her work and her words to a summary conclusion. Unconsciously Viner walked back close to his own Square, but on the opposite side to that by which he had left it. He was about to turn into a passage, a dark affair set between high walls when a young man darted hurriedly out of it. Viner often walked through that passage at night and had thought more than once that after nightfall the doors looked as if they had never been opened, never shut. It was queer, he reflected, that he scarcely ever remembered meeting anybody in that passage.