The Blue Last Read Online Free PDF Page A

hell they’re not.
    Jury drained the coffee cup in one go, put more than enough money on the counter and turned to leave. The cold-eyed brunette was still there, putting another cigarette between her lips. So the one before had been the next-to-the-last cigarette in the world.
    This one was the last.

Four
    T he dog Stone preceded Carole-anne Palutski into Jury’s room and lay down in front of Jury’s easy chair and fell asleep. Dogs amazed Jury.
    Not as much as Carole-anne Palutski amazed him, though. She stood in the doorway, dressed in a short dress of burning blue. Standing in her vibrant rays, Jury thought he ought to be wearing sunscreen. Wordlessly, he held the door wider. She entered.
    He did not know why she had hesitated on his doorsill, since she immediately plopped herself down on his sofa. Invisible strings seemed to pull and tug Carole-anne from place to place, as if even space wanted a taste of her.
    â€œIt’s Saturday night and I don’t expect you’d like to go down to the Nine-One-Nine?”
    This was Stan Keeler’s regular gig when he was home. The flat directly overhead was home. “Don’t be so defeatist. When did Stan come back?”
    â€œLast night. You weren’t here,” she added, accusingly.
    The second-floor flat had been empty for years as a result of Carole-anne’s managerial skills. She had convinced the landlord that he should put its letting in her hands in order to keep out the riffraff, the riffraff being females, married couples and all men who failed to meet her standards. So there was silence overhead until Stan Keeler had come along with his guitar and his dog Stone, a caramel-colored Labrador now draped across Jury’s feet, dreaming of empty fields—
    Which brought Jury back to the present, or, rather, to the past. Carole-anne reminded him a little of the redheaded girl, though Carole-anne’s hair had more gold mixed in with the red. And she hadn’t a mean bone in her gorgeous body.
    She put her feet up on the paper- and magazine-strewn coffee table. Picking up a copy of Time Out, she started flicking through it and yawned as she said, “Am I to take ‘I-shouldn’t-be-defeatist’ as a yes?”
    He loved her feigned indifference. “Yes.”
    â€œGood. Elevenish?” The Nine-One-Nine never really got going until just before midnight. Then she was frowning over Time Out. “I don’t see why you buy this, seeing you never go anywhere.”
    â€œBut I do. I go many wheres. You just don’t happen to be with me when I go.” Resting his head against the back of his chair, he was aware of her narrow scrutiny. A secret life? she’d be thinking. That’s what worried her.
    â€œLike where?”
    â€œTo the City, for example, which is where I was today. To visit an old friend, hit the pubs, the coffee shops. All over. Found a nice waitress, really pretty.” She was looking at him avidly. Jury smiled. Carole-anne sometimes seemed unsure but what Jury might just vanish before her turquoise eyes. “You’d be surprised at some of the things I get up to. Even though you see no life beyond these four walls for me”—Carole-anne had a job at the Starrdust in Covent Garden, telling fortunes. Costumes like a chorus girl—“I do have quite an eventful life.” He went on to tell her some wild tale about a case he’d just wrapped up, exaggerating his own Scarlet Pimpernel role in the proceedings. From the wide-eyed way she was looking at him, he wouldn’t be surprised if he was becoming to her more myth than man.
    â€œWhat waitress?” she said.

Five
    S unday and Jury could not shake off the depression over Mickey Haggerty’s fate. Fate, doom. Terminal disease. Interminable sorrow. He tried to put himself in Mickey’s shoes, but he couldn’t. He lacked the imagination.
    At the moment it was his own shoe, dangling from his hand, that