Edie Investigates Read Online Free

cash machine and every traffic light has a little eye which peers out at you?
    “And she saw this car?” Rice asked encouragingly.
    Bright gave a nod. “But she’s not what I look for in a witness.”
    “Unreliable?”
    “Not as such, no.”
    “Fanciful? Or short-sighted?”
    “She’s an enthusiast,” Bright said shortly. “Keen. It doesn’t look well in court, keen.”
    Court, Rice reflected, was a long way away. He’d settle for a few facts. Or he would, if investigating this was his job. But he wasn’t sure that it was. “Natural causes,” the man from the Legacy Board had told him.
    “It’s been very helpful talking to you,” Rice said neutrally, and saw Bright flush as he registered the careful phrasing.
    Yes, well. Screw you very much
, he thought, as he shook Bright’s hand and departed.
    “This is Lizard,” Tom Rice said into his phone, “for Gravesend.”
    “Gravesend,” the familiar voice replied. “How’s your wife?”
    “Fine,” Rice said vaguely, because he was finding he had to concentrate quite hard not to mention or even imply food poisoning, and had a recurrent waking nightmare of tanks rolling down the main street of Shrewton blowing up whippets. The people ofShrewton seemed to be overly fond of whippets. Rice himself could take or leave them, but he did not wish to be responsible for a kind of doggy Culodden in which hundreds of innocent sighthounds were exploded by a battalion of armoured vehicles.
    Gravesend gave a sort of sigh.
    “Oh,” Rice said, remembering. “Yes, I mean, when I say she’s fine, I mean she’s not really fine at all, you know, got La Grippe, I’m afraid, still ailing somewhat. How are you? How’s that charming husband of yours?”
    “Still in prison,” Gravesend replied quellingly. “What about the job in hand?”
    “It’s not really in hand,” Rice said. “There was a definite thrust to my instructions, if you take my meaning, a will for simple resolutions implied if not actually stated.”
    “Yes, there was.”
    “Well, it’s reasonably clear that this isn’t that sort of job.”
    “How clear?”
    Tom Rice recalled the bits of head stuck in the wall.
    “Pretty clear,” he said.
    Gravesend seemed to ponder this. “Are the people on the ground taking it seriously?” Meaning, Rice assumed, the police.
    “Yes, they are. They’re not happy to see me, either.”
    “They wouldn’t be. All right, go and find somewhere to sit. I’m going to send you something.”
    “Shall I call in and tell you where I am?”
    “I know where you are.”
    Rice was about to clarify that he had meant to ask whether he should call her and tell her where he was after he had found somewhere to sit, but realised in time that she understood that and was telling him that she knew, all the time, exactly where he was. He held the phone out in front of him and eyed it somewhat suspiciously. When he lifted it back to his ear, the line was dead.
    He considered his surroundings. He could go back to his hotel, but if she’d meant that she’d have said, so there was an implicit instruction not to. Or possibly there wasn’t, and he was reading too much into it all, but given the choice of disobeying a sort-of instruction and appearing too willing to obey an imagined instruction, he chose the latter. Which left him with a small list of possible places to sit: a municipal bench in a bus shelter; a small local library; a pub called the Witch & Frog which he suspected had recently been modernised to provide a place for the young of Shrewton to spawn; and a tea shop called the Copper Kettle. He dismissed the bench out of hand—it was starting to rain—and considered the library before deciding that he would almost certainly draw the attention of the librarian in what was supposed to be a covert handover. The pub was not the sort of pub where a youngish man in a serious suit and shoes by Ducker’s of Oxford would go unremarked, leaving the tea shop, which had the added