Cheating at Canasta Read Online Free PDF

went downstairs they were talking about the death of someone whose name she did not know. ‘Who?’ she asked, and the taller of the two policemen said Sharon Ritchie and Phair said nothing.
    ‘Your husband has explained,’ the other man said, ‘that you didn’t know Miss Ritchie.’ A Thursday night, the eighth, two weeks ago, they said: what time—could she remember—had her husband come in?
    She’d faltered, lost in all this. ‘But who’s this person? Why are you here?’ And the taller policeman said there were a few loose ends. ‘Sit down, madam,’ his colleague put in and she was asked again what time her husband had come in. The usual misery on the Northern line, he’d said that night, the Thursday before last. He’d given up on it, as everyone else was doing, then hadn’t been able to get a taxi because of the rain. ‘You remember, madam?’ the taller policeman prompted, and something made her say the usual time. She couldn’t think; she couldn’t because she was trying to remember if Phair had ever mentioned Sharon Ritchie. ‘Your husband visited Miss Ritchie,’ the same policeman said, and the other man’s pager sounded and he took it to the window, turning his back to them.
    ‘No, we’re talking to him now,’ he mumbled into it, keeping his voice low but she could hear.
    ‘Your husband has explained it was the day before,’ his colleague said. ‘And earlier—in his lunchtime—that his last visit to Miss Ritchie was.’
    Katherine wanted to stay where she was now. She wanted to sleep, to be aware of the man she did not know well beside her, to have him waiting for her when she woke up. Because of the heatwave that had begun a week ago, he had turned the air-conditioning on, an old-fashioned contraption at the window.
    ‘I have to go,’ he said.
    ‘Of course. I won’t be long.’
    Below them, another horse-race had come to its exciting stage, the commentary faintly reaching them as they dressed. They went together down uncarpeted, narrow stairs, past the open door of the betting shop.
    ‘Shall you come again?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes.’
    And they arranged an afternoon, ten days away because he could not always just walk out of the office where he worked.
    ‘Don’t let me talk about it,’ she said before they parted. ‘Don’t ask, don’t let me tell you.’
    ‘If you don’t want to.’
    ‘It’s all so done with. And it’s a bore for you, or will be soon.’
    He began to say it wasn’t, that that was what the trouble was. She knew he began to say it because she could see it in his face before he changed his mind. And of course he was right; he wasn’t a fool. Curiosity couldn’t be just stifled.
    They didn’t embrace before he hurried off, for they had done all that. When she watched him go it felt like a habit already, and she wondered as she crossed the street to the Costa café if, with repetition, her afternoons here would acquire some variation of the order and patterns of the work she missed so. ‘Oh, none at all,’ she’d said when she’d been asked if there were prospects yet of something else. She had not said it was unlikely that again she’d make her morning journey across London, skilful in the overcrowded Tube stations, squeezing on to trains that were crowded also. Unlikely that there’d be, somewhere, her own small office again, her position of importance, and generous colleagues who made up for a bleakness and kept at bay its ghosts. She hadn’t known until Phair said, not long ago, that routine, for him, often felt like an antidote to dementia.
    She should not have told so much this afternoon, Katherine said to herself, sitting where she had sat before. She had never, to anyone else, told anything at all, or talked about what had happened to people who knew. I am unsettled, she thought; and, outside, rain came suddenly, with distant thunder, ending the heat that had become excessive.
    When she’d finished her coffee Katherine didn’t leave the