The Black Cat by Martha Grimes Read Free Book Online Page B

her off. Jury unfolded the by now heavily creased scrap of paper and read phonetically: “ ‘S.W. c’d sed high w. ds rep. w’mn mss in Chess. Thought U should know.’”
    Carole-anne just blinked at him. Then she said, “ ‘Thought you should know’ what? The first part’s gibberish. The way you read it, nobody’d know what it means.”
    “That’s the way it’s written.”
    “Don’t be daft. Here, give it to me-” She reached out her hand. Her eyes, beneath eyebrows that fairly twinkled, scanned the scrap of paper. In a tone one might use for the recently comatose, she read, “ ‘Sergeant Wiggins called, said High Wycombe DS’-detective sergeant that means, I’d think you’d know that, at least-‘reported woman missing in Chesham. Et cetera.’ Perfectly clear.”
    “Of course it is to you. You wrote it. Let’s begin with ‘S.W.’ Now how am I supposed to know who that is?”
    Adjusting a couple of pearly bangles round her arm, she said with more than a little impatience, “Well, how many S.W.’s do you know, anyway? ”
    Hopeless, but Jury soldiered on: “The odd thing is you took the trouble to spell out ‘Thought U should know,’ but what I ought to know is written in code.”
    She rooted in her blue satin clutch and came out with a nail file. “The idea was this-”
    No, it wasn’t; there’d been no idea until she’d had these few moments to come up with one. “If by some chance a person-an unauthorized person-”
    (That was good.)
    “-were to get in here looking for classified information-”
    “Like Jason Bourne, you mean.”
    “Him I don’t know, but, okay, there’s an example. If Jason were to get in here, he’d make straight for your personal phone book and message pad. He’d know all your business.”
    She seemed satisfied with that explanation, so he said, “Why did you leave it on the fridge door?”
    There was a pause as she filed away at a troublesome bit of nail. “Well, I took the added precaution of taking it off the message pad; see, no one would think, with the other stuff on the fridge, that there’s an important message they’d want to read.”
    “Brilliant.” He sat there looking at her looking smug. Then he said smoothly, “You forgot something.”
    That raised her eyebrows. “Such as what?”
    “The impression.” Pleased with her confusion, he got up and went to the phone table, returning with the message pad. “See this?” He tapped the blank page on which there was a faint image of penciled words. “Right there. Spies always do that; they look at the imprint left on the page underneath.”
    “They do?” The news did not bother her.
    “Absolutely. Jason would have this sussed out in five seconds.” Carole-anne sighed, dropped her nail file into her bag, clicked the bag shut, and rose. “And you said no one could understand it.” Then, in a swirl of sapphire and scent, she sashayed out of the room.
    Jury listened to her strappy sandals tapping down the steps, got up, and, accompanied by his sturdy six-year-old self, stomped to his door and yelled down the stairs: “I’m not bloody Jason Bourne, am I?”

11
    The little girl standing uninvited by his table in the window was the untidiest Melrose had ever seen. More of a scrap than a girl, as if she were among the leavings of material cut away from a gown, a ragged piece, mere oddment. Her doe-colored eyes, large and clouded with tears either past or to come, were fastened on him as if he were expected to do something.
    What could he do? He was only a middle-aged man-granted a rich one, he reminded himself, in case she wanted a house of her own in the Highlands or Belgravia so she could get away from this pub and her parents (of whom he’d seen no sign). So in what way could he serve this child who got left behind when Charles Dickens shut the book? She got tossed out of his pages, left to wander the narrow streets ofChesham, to pop in and out of pubs with a sign on her back: