The Dirty Duck by Martha Grimes Read Free Book Online Page B

know any, would you?”
    Jury was not sure whether she was referring to tits and asses or dukes and earls. “As a matter of fact I do know an earl.” He smiled.
    â€œNo shit!” She stopped and looked up at him, her face all wonder.
    â€œNo shit,” said Jury.
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    The birthplace was a pleasant, homey, half-timbered building of Warwickshire stone whose door was nearly flush with Henley Street. Outside that nearly sacred door, a double line of pilgrims waited, impatient parents and quarrelsome children licking iced lollies. Jury wondered how many of the people there actually read Shakespeare, but he had to admire them and their willingness to take genius on faith.
    â€œIt looks like the lines to E.T.,” said Penny, morosely. “It must be a hundred people ahead of us.”
    â€œI think maybe we can navigate round the crowd. Come on.”
    The woman at the door, wearing the emblem of the Shakespeare Trust, observed Jury’s warrant card with a kind of horror, even after he had assured her that nothing was wrong. She still looked up at him uncertainly, as if afraid he might drag into the birthplace, not only the girl at his side, but also the effluvia of Criminal London, which would be left behind to cling like a patina of dust to the precious collection within.
    There was as much of a crowd inside as out. Jury showed the picture of James Carlton Farraday to the guardian of the rooms downstairs, but met with no response. They made their way upstairs, to other small and cheerful rooms—white-plastered and solid-timbered. The furnishings were Elizabethanand Jacobean, but none of them unfortunately, Shakespeare’s (so a guide upstairs was informing the pilgrims), except for the old desk from the Stratford Grammar School, where young Will had had to endure no end of terrors. The desk was marked and pitted.
    Jury approached an elderly gentleman, another guardian, who was dispensing information to a disheveled young woman in shorts and sandals, regarding the leaded glass window, where the names of the famous of other centuries had been cut with diamond rings. The woman in sandals slapped away.
    Jury produced his identification. “I wonder if you might have seen this boy in here on Monday morning.”
    The gentleman seemed astonished that someone would be inquiring into the whereabouts of anything except furniture and windowpanes. Especially that Scotland Yard would be the inquirer. When Jury showed him the picture in the passport, he shook his head.
    â€œWe get so many schoolchildren on holiday and, especially now, with term nearly over. Well, you know, one schoolboy begins to look like another. There are so many of them and they ask so many questions . . .” He went on in this vein, prompted to overexplain out of some conviction that Scotland Yard might think he had this particular schoolboy locked up in the oak trunk beside him.
    Jury handed him a card, entering the number of the Stratford police station above the Scotland Yard number. “If you should remember anything, anything at all, give me a call.”
    The guide nodded.
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    The result was the same in the souvenir shop on the other side of the gardens, where the pilgrims were buying up all sorts of Elizabethan memorabilia: place mats, cut-outs of the Globe Theatre, postcards and pictures and pendants. None of the harassed salespeople recognized the picture of James Carlton Farraday.
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    Jury and an unhappy Penny were now standing looking down the central walk, bordered by flowers. There were quince and medlar trees and the summer air was pungent with the fragrance of flowers and herbs.
    â€œI read in this little book they got all the flowers here that Shakespeare talks about in his plays. I wonder if they got rosemary.” She pushed her long hair behind her ear. “That ain’t a flower, is it?”