The Horse You Came in On Read Online Free

it.” Infuriated, Jury stood up. Usually, he had more patience. Not lately, though.
    â€œYou don’t have to get so damned shirty about it. No one’s telling you you have to do anything. Just go along and see this woman and mollify her. That’s all.”
    The AC wasn’t there. “His temp sec”—Fiona always loved it when someone higher up had temporary help—“wants to know, didn’t you get the fax?”
    â€œWell, did I, Miss Clingmore? How the fucking hell should I know, if I’ve been out of the office?” Racer was peering at the facsimile machine. “And where in hell are my air tickets, Miss Clingmore? I left them right here tucked into the blotter!”
    Racer’s hols, naturally, took precedence over anything else.
    Jury thought he heard a series of cracks of Fiona’s gum, like tiny pistol shots. “You’re the one wants that fax machine in his office. Maybe it fell on the floor.”
    â€œI’ve looked on the floor.”
    â€œWell, she says she sent it, that’s all I know.”
    â€œStop wasting my time arguing, and call her back. Bloody hell!” Racer flipped off the intercom. “I don’t know how this goddamned place operates with these civilians who can’t even count their toes. That effing cat would make a better typist.”
    The fax machine burped and then stuttered out its message. Racer ripped it out, read it, said, “SW3, Jury. Warminster Road. Belgravia. Her name’s Cray.”

5
    She opened the double doors of the elegant sitting room with both hands, one on each of the brass doorknobs, making an entrance that would have seemed theatrical if it had been any woman other than Lady Cray.
    And she looked, thought Jury, exactly as she had the last time he’d seen her in the Lake District. That had been at the inquest. Her well-tailored suit might have been the same one, a silvery-blue-grayish material of wool silk that exactly matched her eyes, eyes that were precisely the tint of crystal, that elusive gray called “Waterford blue.” The January afternoon was in league with Lady Cray. Slants of silvery light lay in decorous oblongs along the pale blue Chinese rugs and sparked the Waterford bowl on a little rosewood table. The sun, unusually clear for this time of year, striped the twin sofas and upholstered side chairs, all of them done in a shimmering crystalline-finished material the shade of Lady Cray’s suit.
    â€œSuperintendent, I am overjoyed you have come!” She looked brightly from Jury to Sergeant Wiggins.
    If any miserable case could be said to have in it a pleasant turn of events, Lady Cray was just such a turn. He took her hand and accepted her offer of tea or champagne or both.
    After she had settled them into chairs of cloudlike comfort, she said, “I know you haven’t called to talk about old times, but my God, those were the days, weren’t they?!”
    No, thought Jury, they weren’t. Jane Holdsworth appeared to him, not as he had last seen her but as he first had, standing there in Camden Passage in a white macintosh, inspecting something from one of the rain-wet antiques stalls. The piece of clothing she was holding up, an amber-colored shift or something, exactly matched the color of her hair. A shift—or something? He remembered, of course, very precisely that it had been a negligee, taken from a rack of vintage clothing. And there had been a brooch she had held to the coat, testing its color and shape. That had been amber, too. This scene of a lifetime ago unrolled in his mindwith a torturous slowness, as if warning him that, having remembered at all, he would have to look at every glint of light in the brooch, every wavering shadow that fell across the cloth, the folds becoming more palpable, as if each little fold were statue drapery set in marble. He felt this in a moment of blinding acuity. And this was a mercy, really: that he had