The Horse You Came in On by Martha Grimes Read Free Book Online Page B

unusual, and very pleasant, this ability to coexist in perfect privacy, thinking one’s own thoughts, and not having to be filling up gaps and silences or straining to engage, to connect.
    She said, into the surrounding stillness, “That’s horrible; that’s awful.”
    The context was her own, in her own mind. Jury assumed she was still thinking about what he’d told her.
    â€œHow often have you done it since?” she asked.
    â€œDone what?”
    â€œPulled women from burning buildings.”

8
I
    â€œIt’s the Stendhal syndrome,” said Diane Demorney, holding her glass aloft as a signal to Dick Scroggs to run and fill it.
    They were sitting, the four of them—six, if one counted Lavinia Vine and Alice Broadstairs at a distant table—in the Jack and Hammer. The pub, its mechanical Jack freshened up once again with a coat of turquoise paint to his trousers, sat on the High Street next to Trueblood’s Antiques. The group sat at their favorite table, the one in the half-circle of casemented windows through which shone light, almost misty, a light suitable for a late-January afternoon. The Jack and Hammer had been open now for less than an hour, but the settled state of its custom made it appear that a substantial inroad had been made into the working day.
    Or nonworking one, since those who took up the two tables could not be said actually to work, if by “work” was meant some regular occupation of reporting somewhere in the morning and leaving at some time in the afternoon. Before Diane Demorney had dragged in her arcane topic, hoping for an audience, “work” had been the topic of discussion. Joanna Lewes denied that any work at all was involved in writing her books (in reading them, yes, plenty). Marshall Trueblood, on the other hand, being a shopkeeper, should have been able to lay claim to “work”; he, however, spent his time loafing about amidst his king’s ransom in antiques next door, his flexible hours allowing him to use the Jack and Hammer as his anteroom. (No one knew precisely what his background was; he made vague references to London, but Melrose Plant insisted he’d been found in a Chinese urn.)
    The subject of “work” having been raised and quickly dropped (none of them being, as Plant said, in any way expert in this area), the visit of Richard Jury was the next topic for speculation. Where was he, and when was he coming to Long Piddleton?
    Melrose Plant, having known Richard Jury for more than a dozen years, was again put in charge of Jury’s whereabouts. Melrose had no idea where Jury was or when he was coming, beyond a vague promisefrom Jury of “in a few days.” That had been a few days ago, so it could be any time now.
    What Melrose Plant said was: “He’s taken the 9:10 from Paddington.” He was glancing at one of the books in the pile near his pint of Old Peculier. “And he should arrive in Glasgow early this afternoon.”
    They were uniformly surprised. “Glasgow? What the devil’s he doing in Glasgow?” asked Trueblood.
    â€œA triple murder.” Actually, The 9:10 from Paddington was the title of Polly Praed’s latest thriller and a blatant theft of one of Agatha Christie’s titles. “In a prominent Glaswegian family.”
    â€œReally?”
    No, thought Melrose, not really, but now they wouldn’t hound him hourly for an update on Jury’s movements.
    Joanna Lewes lit a cigarette, frowning. “Thought he was working on that business at the Tate.”
    And it was just then that Diane Demorney, who’d been sitting in the fading limelight, dragged attention to herself with her comment “It’s the Stendhal syndrome.”
    The only thing that kept Diane Demorney from being a pathological liar (a role she would have relished), was that she didn’t need to be, since her particular cachet was marshalling esoteric and arcane