The Blue Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

table.
    “I think you shouldn’t be in here,” I said. “Not right now.”
    She smiled, but her eyes were bright and sad, and there was no amusement in them. “I’ve seen her already, Mr Pringle. But I thank you for your chivalry.”
    “She wasn’t choked to death after all,” Kingsley said. But I didn’t turn around.
    “How can you tell?” I said.
    “Will you look at her lungs? I have one of them here on the table to show you.”
    “I have seen it and would prefer not to see it again.”
    “May I describe it to you?”
    “Will you be discreet about it?”
    “You are a strange sort of policeman.”
    “I’ve finished being a policeman for the day. At the moment I’m just a man trying to finish some business before retiring somewhere warm with someone pleasant and drinking my fill of strong ale.” I thought of my shopgirl. She had blond curls that hung loose over her ears.
    “They are spongy.”
    “I beg your pardon.”
    “The girl’s lungs. This is the left lung, if you will only turn around and look at it.”
    I heard the sound of flesh smacking lightly against flesh, but I didn’t move. Fiona set her tablet down on an unoccupied table. She reached out and took my hand and held it. There was nothing romantic in the gesture; it was a simple human thing. I relate this with a certain degree of shame, but I feel sure that decency and propriety are more important traits for a man than a hard heart and a cast-iron stomach. I closed my eyes.
    “Very well,” the doctor said. “When I press on this lung, water gushes forth as if I were crushing a canteen. These lungs have absorbed a great deal more water than they would have done if she had been choked and her lifeless body thrown into that canal.”
    “The marks on her throat?” I said.
    “They are finger marks. But she went into the water alive.”
    “Damn it all.”
    “Yes. She was quite cruelly used by someone.”
    I was surprised by the emotion in his voice. It was soft, but I heard it. I had the realization then that Kingsley took no great joy in his work. In his way, he was doing his duty for the girl. And, of course, I had my duty to do as well.
    I opened my eyes and pulled my hand from Fiona’s grasp.
    “Did you discover anything else?” I said.
    “Only her teeth.”
    “What about them?”
    “They’re nearly perfect.”
    “Good for her.”
    “I mean she’s had quite a lot of expensive dental work.”
    “Money, then?”
    “I’d guess she had a good deal of it. Or her family did.”
    “It didn’t help her in the end, did it?” I said.
    I reached into my jacket pocket and produced the small blue book Fiona had given me. I placed it in her hand and nodded. “Thank you.”
    “You’ve read it?”
    “Parts of it. As I said, I’m not much of a reader and today has been a horribly bookish sort of day. But I have my own copy now.”
    “You surprise me.”
    “You sound like someone I just met.”
    “Who?”
    “Never mind.”
    I left without saying good-bye to the doctor, and without seeing that desecrated blue body again.
    •   •   •
    The Cream residence was enormous, a sprawling castle set back from the road and surrounded by a high wrought iron gate. Shrubberies guaranteed a degree of privacy from passersby, but when I arrived the gate was standing open and I stepped carefully onto the crushed gravel path that led to the door.
    I’d nosed about the neighborhood until I found an old woman who remembered where the writer had lived. She was certain he had died, and almost as certain that his house stood empty now.
    The place did have the flavor of something long abandoned, but there were lights visible in the windows and so I pressed forward. I thought of
The Robber Bridegroom
and shivered. I pulled my jacket tighter around me, reminded of the girl on Kingsley’s table. The blue-grey fog still swirled about my ankles and crept along the hedges like a feral animal waiting for sufficient numbers to attack, and I could