Tremor by Winston Graham

Ramadan reluctantly and, he suspected, sometimes only in part, but feasted noisily as soon as dark fell and stayed so feasting and drinking into the small hours.
    He said ill things would come, and instanced as a warning a couple of earth tremors which had occurred earlier in the month. The rest of the population treated them as nothing important. The last really serious upset had happened more than two hundred years ago: these latest rumblings, like the rumblings of thunder, raised no more than a lifted eyebrow and a philosophical shrug.
II
    Laura legrand woke at seven on this first morning of her holiday, and saw the sun shining through the slats of the venetian blind. She rolled over, looked at a pink pouting face beside her and remembered that she had taken Françoise into her bed last night.
    There was often competition among the ‘girls’ for the other woman’s loving attentions, and while Laura generally preferred Vicky it was necessary to spread her favours. Vicky was the youngest of the three, and she was more or less responsible for this holiday, having had a stroke of luck with one of her clients. A rich property owner had stayed long enough to be confidential and Vicky had learned of a new development that was planned near the Quai de Varennes in Bordeaux. She had consulted her old friend Laura who only two years ago had come from Paris, in despair at being hounded by the police, and opened a maison de passe , quite near where Vicky operated. Unlike Vicky, Laura was a businesswoman, and she at once consulted a lawyer, and found a small é picerie for sale in the centre of the proposed development area. Having ascertained that it was a propriété foncière libre de toute obligation , she had then approached Françoise, another refugee, and together they had persuaded Vicky to buy the shop; the three of them had pooled their limited resources to pay for it. It didn’t matter, Laura argued, if they must temporarily carry a large mortgage. She could put her cousin in to run the é picerie ,and they would hardly lose in the long term even if the development didn’t come off.
    But the development did come off, and the powerful property company found itself thwarted by a solitary shop whose freehold it could not buy and which held up the project. Having carried the mortgage and the responsibility for nearly a year, the three ladies were in no mood to be hustled, or even intimidated, and negotiations had gone on for a further six months before a bargain was struck. As a result, and even after paying off the cousin and the bank and all the legal fees, they were richer than they had ever been in their lives, better off probably than they had ever dared to hope, and were now determined to celebrate and to spend money while the sun shone.
    The sun was certainly shining this morning; a shaft of it fell directly on Françoise’s snub nose, but it did not wake her. Laura regarded her friend dispassionately. She was the least attractive and the least successful of the three; she had a thick Burgundian accent, which she had never tried to amend, and broadening hips which her clients did not seem to mind. She was a good-natured young woman and not choosy about whom she took in. But she had never run a house, like Laura, nor had private clients, like Vicky. For a while, when she first worked in Paris, she had been a battery tart, getting through as many as a hundred clients daily.
    Like Laura, she had been driven out of Paris by the over-zealous attentions of the police. Laura had known with a sense of foreboding, when votes were given to women, that they would exert pressure on their menfolk to close the high-class maisons de passe , where you could put on a show of elegance and it was not just bang, bang, bang all day long. Girls were expected to talk to their men in such superior places, if the men so wished. Great elegance and the strictest cleanliness prevailed. No girls ever went outside