Ripley's Game Read Online Free PDF

he paused to ask how Jonathan was.
    ‘Quite well, thank you,’ said Jonathan, whose mind was on buying a plunger for the toilet from a shop a hundred yards away which also shut at noon.
    ‘M. Trevanny—’ Dr Perrier paused with one hand on the big knob of the bank’s door. He moved away from the door, closer to Jonathan. ‘In regard to what we were talking about the other day – no doctor can be sure, you know. In a situation like yours. I didn’t want you to think I’d given you a guarantee of perfect health, immunity for years. You know yourself—’
    ‘Oh, I didn’t assume that!’ Jonathan interrupted.
    ‘Then you understand,’ said Dr Perrier, smiling, and dashed at once into his bank.
    Jonathan trotted on in quest of the plunger. It was the kitchen sink stopped up, not the toilet, he remembered, and Simone had lent a neighbour their plunger months ago and – Jonathan was thinking of what Dr Perrier had said. Did he know something, suspect something from the last test, something not sufficiently definite to warrant telling him about?
    At the door of the droguerie, Jonathan encountered a smiling, dark-haired girl who was just locking up, removing the outside door handle.
    ‘I am sorry. It is five minutes past twelve,’ she said.

3

    T OM, during the last week in March, was engaged in painting a full-length portrait of Heloise horizontal on the yellow satin sofa. And Heloise seldom agreed to pose. But the sofa stayed still, and Tom had it satisfactorily on his canvas. He had also made seven or eight sketches of Heloise with her head propped upon her left hand, her right hand resting on a big art book. He kept the two best sketches and threw the others away.
    Reeves Minot had written him one letter, asking Tom if he had come up with a helpful idea – as to a person, Reeves meant. The letter had arrived a couple of days after Tom had spoken with Gauthier, from whom Tom usually bought his paints. Tom had replied to Reeves: ‘Am trying to think, but meanwhile you should go ahead with your own ideas, if you have any.’ The ‘am trying to think’ was merely polite, even false, like a lot of phrases that served to oil the machinery of social intercourse, as Emily Post might say. Reeves hardly kept Belle Ombre oiled financially, in fact Reeves’ payments to Tom for occasional services as go-between and fence would hardly cover the dry-cleaning bills, but it never hurt to maintain friendly relations. Reeves had procured a false passport for Tom and had got it to Paris fast when Tom had needed it to help defend the Derwatt industry. Tom might one day need Reeves again.
    But the business with Jonathan Trevanny was merely a game for Tom. He was not doing it for Reeves’ gambling interests. Tom happened to dislike gambling, and had no respect for people who chose to earn their living, or even part of their living from it. It was pimping, of a sort. Tom had started the Trevanny game out of curiosity, and because Trevanny had once sneered at him – and because Tom wanted to see if his own wild shot would find its mark, and make Jonathan Trevanny, who Tom sensed was priggish and self-righteous, uneasy for a time. Then Reeves could offer his bait, hammering the point of course that Trevanny was soon to die anyway. Tom doubted that Trevanny would bite, but it would be a period of discomfort for Trevanny, certainly. Unfortunately Tom couldn’t guess how soon the rumour would get to Jonathan Trevanny’s ears. Gauthier was gossipy enough, but it just might happen, even if Gauthier told two or three people, that no one would have the courage to broach the subject to Trevanny himself.
    So Tom, although busy as usual with his painting, his spring planting, his German and French studies (Schiller and Molière now), plus supervising a crew of three masons who were constructing a greenhouse along the right side of Belle Ombre’s back lawn, still counted the passing days and imagined what might have happened after that