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Chapter One
"'Poet,'" it says, "'died from stab of rose.' Must be a
thorn that stabbed him. Who do you suppose that is?"
Richard Jury looked up and across at Sergeant Wiggins. "Rilke. What is that, the
crossword? Rilke, if memory serves me." Memory served up entirely too much. Jury sat
reading a forensics report while Sergeant Wiggins, seated at a desk across the room, was
stirring up ever more esoteric means of dying. Wiggins was really into death, Jury
remarked not for the first time. Or at least into the ills that flesh is heir to. Wiggins
was heir to the lot, to hear him talk.
"Rilke?" said Wiggins. He counted the spaces. "That'd fit all reight.
You'd be a whiz at crosswords, knowing things like that." He poured out the tea.
"That's the only thing I know like that."
Wiggins was spooning in sugar, and, having dumped four teaspoonfuls into his own tea,
started in on Jury's.
"One," said Jury, not even looking up from his folder. Tea making in this office
had achieved the status of ritual, one so long undertaken that Jury knew where Sergeant
Wiggins was at every step. Perhaps it was the spoon clicking against the cup with each
teaspoonful that sent out a signal.
"Was he hemophiliac, then, this Rilke?"
"Beats me." Trust Wiggins to put it down to a disorder of blood or bone. A
lengthy silence followed, during which Jury did look up to see Wiggins sitting with his
hands wrapped around both mugs as he stared out of the window. "Is my mug going to
grow little mug legs and walk over here on its own?"
Wiggins jumped. "Oh, sorry." He rose and took Jury's tea to him, saying,
when he'd returned to his own desk, "I just can't think of other blood
conditions that would result in death from a rose-thorn prick."
Lines of a poem came unbidden to Jury's mind:
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm…
William Blake. He wouldn't mention this to Wiggins. One rose death was enough for
one morning.
Wiggins persisted. "A prick could cause that much blood to flow? I mean, the guy
could hardly bleed out from it." He frowned, drank his tea, kept on frowning. "I
should know the answer to that."
"Why? That's what police doctors are for. Call forensics if you're
desperate."
That flies in the night
In the howling storm…
Jury closed the file on skeletal remains and watched the slow-falling snow. Hardly
enough to dampen the pavement, much less a ski slope. Well, had he planned on skiing in
Islington? He could go to High Wycombe; they had all-season skiing around there. How
depressing. In two weeks, Christmas would be here. More depressing. "You going to
Manchester for Christmas, Wiggins?"
"To my sister and her brood, yes. You, sir?"
"You mean am I going to Newcastle? No." That he would not go to his cousin (and her
brood) filled him with such a delicious ease that he wondered if happiness lay not in
doing but in not doing.
Wiggins appeared to be waiting for Jury to fill him in on his Christmas plans. If
Newcastle was out, what then? When Jury didn't supply something better, Wiggins
didn't delve. He just returned to death and its antidotes, a few bottles and vials of
which were arranged on his desk. Wiggins looked them over, hit on the viscous pink liquid
and squeezed several drops into a half glass of water, which he then swirled into thinner
viscosity.
He said, "But we're on rota for Christmas, at least Christmas morning. I
won't get to Manchester until dinnertime, probably."
"Hell, just go ahead. I'll cover for you."
Wiggins shook his head. "No, that wouldn't be fair, sir. No, I'll be here.
Christmas can be hell on wheels for people deciding to bloody up other people. Just give
some guy a holiday and he goes for a gun."
Jury laughed. "True. Maybe we'll have time for a bang-up lunch at Danny
Wu's on Christmas Day. He never closes on holidays." Ruiyi was the best
restaurant in Soho.
Then came silence and snow. Jury thought about a present for Wiggins. Some medical book,
one that might define Rilke's "disease of the blood," if that's what
it was. A thorn prick. O Rose, thou ar't sick. He tried to remember the last
four lines of this short poem, but couldn't.
Wiggins had gone back to the newspaper. "They're starting to clear the old
Greenwich gasworks. To put up the dome, that millennium dome they're talking
about."
Jury didn't want to hear about it or talk about it. Wiggins loved the subject.
"That's years away, Wiggins. Let's wait and be surprised."
Wiggins regarded him narrowly, not knowing what to make of that runic comment.
Jury got up, pulled on his coat and picked up the folder which held Haggerty's
report. "I'm going to the City; if you need me I'll be at Snow Hill station
with Mickey Haggerty."
"All right." Wiggins drank his pink stuff and turned toward the window. He said,
as Jury was going out the door, "It sounds like something out of a fairy tale,
almost."
"What does? The millennium dome?"
"No, no, no. It's this Rilke fellow. It's like the princess who pricked her
finger spinning, falling asleep forever. Dying from the prick of a rose thorn." He
looked at Jury. "It's a sort of a breathtaking death, isn't it?"
"I guess I don't want to be breathtaken, Wiggins. See you."
Excerpted from THE BLUE LAST © Copyright 2001 by Martha Grimes. Reprinted with permission from Viking, an imprint of Penguin Putnam. All rights reserved.
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