Martha Grimes - The Black Cat

No answer. The girl was chewing bubble gum and blew a big bubble right toward him, probably in lieu of sticking out her tongue.

The train shuddered to a stop at Rickmansworth. Wiggins came back from whatever expedition he’d been on. “I’ve liaised with all the divisional people. Talked to vice in case she’s a pro-”

“Bit sexist of you, isn’t it?” He smiled, and the smile accidentally took in the bubble-gum-blowing child, who stopped blowing and did stick out her tongue. “Anyway, I’m bound for London, going back to my flat. It’s gone seven, Wiggins; why are you still at the Yard? Go home.”

“Right, guv. I’m off. And you be sure and check your messages.” There came a snuffling laugh.

Ha-ha, thought Jury as the train finally pulled away, heading into the City.

In the doorway of the small living room of Jury’s Islington flat, Carole-anne Palutski, upstairs neighbor, stood rubbing her eyes as if he’d just dragged her down here from a deep sleep. The fact that she was dressed not in pj’s and bathrobe but for a night on the tiles undercut the sleepy winsomeness. Her dress was a sapphire blue that matched her eyes; the neckline, low enough to sink a ship, was studded about with tiny bits of something flashy. In oilcloth and gum boots, Carole-anne would look sumptuous; the dress was gilding the lily. And in place of gum boots, she was wearing strappy sandals. They seemed to be the only thing on the streets these days.

Jury had called her in.

“Sit down, sweetheart. I want to read you something.”

Daintily, she yawned and took her time arranging herself on his sofa. He thought of the gorgeous drift of hydrangeas in Bobby Devlin’s flower stall. Gorgeousness, however, was not about to get 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?”

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: “Waif.”

He had, amid these reflections, gone on reading-or pretending to-while the little Dickens revenant eyed him. Well, he should at least be nice enough to say, “Hi there,” or, “And you’re staring at me because…?” No, that didn’t set the right tone. How about, “My name is Melrose Plant, and you are…?” But he was saved from coming up with something when she said:

“My cat was murdered.”

That dropped his Times down! Surely it was not the child who had spoken. Surely it was the old woman at the corner table with the racing form, whose hand crept toward her half-pint. Or the old, rough-looking fellow with his equally rough-looking dog at one of the side tables.

“She got murdered or kidnapped.”

He was forced to acknowledge her. “Well, that’s rum, isn’t it? You mean your cat died, is that it?”

A shake of her mousy brown head. “Murdered.”

“That’s really bad. How did it happen?”

She was full of the details, and having scored a listener, she said, “Maybe Sally took her to the cat hospital and they-” Here, she made a gesture of a hand with a needle plunging into flesh. The small finger came down hard on Melrose ’s jacket sleeve. “That’s what.” She stepped back.

The Black Cat, in Chesham, was short on customers save for he himself and the horse-betting woman and the surly man and dog, but then it had just gone eleven a.m. He had been finding this lack of custom supremely restful-this lack of complication-until the little girl dropped her cat on the table.

“Well, but that’s not really murder,” Melrose said loftily.

“If it happened to you, you’d say it was.”

He frowned, looking for reason where there likely was none. “Was the cat sick?”

“Yes. I’m sick, too. You’re probably sick. Everything’s sick. Everybody is sick, but we don’t get murdered for it.”

That was on a lofty philosophical level Melrose didn’t choose to ascend to. “The thing is-”

“She didn’t want to die. She looked and looked at me and her eyes said it. She didn’t want to.”