Read Online Jerusalem Inn by Martha Grimes - Free Book Online

frowned. “Sorry it’s all I remember about her.”
    Jury stared at her and her husband patted her on the shoulder and said, “Canny lass is Nell. Never misses a trick.”
    â€œIf every witness were like you, Mrs. Hornsby, we’d have London cleaned up in no time.”
    Mrs. Hornsby blushed furiously and tried to drag her eyes away from Jury but found, apparently, that there were worse things to look at in this world. She smiled her transforming smile again. Jury bought her a drink.
    â€œClive might know something.” She pointed toward the door her daughter had just run through. “There’s a match going on in the back room. He’s playing. And Marie probably talked to her; Marie usually does with anyone new. Cadges fags and tells them her hard life.”
    Marie turned out to be the shark-faced woman, not bad looking, but the sort who made you want to take your money off the counter. You couldn’t blame them, he supposed, for gathering around. Anything to break up the monotony of pool and darts and workless days. Even police business was better than the joke-shop, as long as the business didn’t interfere with their lock-ins. Jury bet most of them were falling-down alcoholics. Drink was all they had and the dole money paid for it.
    â€œShe was living in Washington, she said.” Marie accepted a cigarette with alacrity and leaned partially against the bar and partially against Jury. For a drink, Jury imagined she could come up with something of questionable reliability. He bought her a Carlsberg, but it didn’t loosen her memory.
    Jury disengaged himself from the tangle of regulars and went over to the video game and sat down opposite Robbie, whose slack face he thought bore the traces of malleablehandsomeness, the puttylike quality of looks not fully formed, wavering on the other side of the table like a reflection in water. “You’re Robbie?” The boy smiled. He seemed to be in his late teens or his early twenties. The eyes were dull, but the manner very friendly. Jury showed him the picture and Robbie ran his hands through his brown hair, dull like his eyes, as if this were some sort of test he had to pass. “You remember this woman?”
    His answer was a stuttered, “Yu-uh-es.” And he nodded his head up and down several times, apparently pleased that he could remember.
    â€œWhat did she talk to you about?” After a moment during which his eyes roved the room, not in the purposeful way of Nell Hornsby’s, but in the painful manner of one who can’t do what is expected of him, Jury tried to jog his memory, but gently. “I just wondered if she mentioned her name, or something. Or why she was here. No one else seems able to remember much.”
    That was an obvious relief to Robbie. He looked down at the screen, watching the colored ghosts whiz out, followed by Pac-Man.
    â€œWant to play?” asked Jury, fishing some coins out of his pocket.
    Robby nodded. “Aa — ’m not ver-r-r-y g-good,” he said, despondently.
    â€œMe either.”
    Robbie chased Jury all over the board, ate up all of his ghosts, and was generally beating hell out of him, when Hornsby called across the room that the Superintendent was wanted on the telephone.
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    When he heard Deputy Assistant Commissioner Newsome on the other end of it, Jury was sorry he’d told the Northumbria station where they could reach him.
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    Not that he had anything against Newsome, a disarmingly laconic man, but he didn’t care for the DAC’s message. “Look, I’m not criticizing. But Racer’s kicking up a fuss because you’re supposed to be on vacation up there and now here’s the Chief Constable calling up wondering why Scotland Yard . . . you know what I mean.”
    â€œI cleared it with Cullen.”
    He could almost hear the shrug in