The Case Has Altered by Martha Grimes

Author:Martha Grimes [Grimes, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Mystery, Animals, Cozy, Thrillers & Suspense, British Detectives, Thriller & Suspense, Suspense, Literature & Fiction, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense
ISBN: 9781476732978
Amazon: B00BW4OKGS
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-07-15T18:30:00+00:00

21

It was that ambiguous hour in the afternoon before dark, before dusk even, when the fens seemed to smoke beneath a layer of marsh gas. In the west the sky was an icy transparency, the early-risen moon was colorless as mist.

Out from under the roof of the Case Has Altered and the branches of old birch and one young oak showing its first green leaves, Jury stepped onto the public footpath. At this point it was muddy and lined on either side with buckthorn and sallow; it stretched before him across straight-furrowed fields to the left and the waterlogged pasture to his right. Across the field light itself was like water filling the furrowed grass. He wondered how near a river was—the Welland, the Ouse—and if its banks still overflowed. He wondered further if these flooded pastures showed him what the ancient marshlands had been like. No clouds, no wind. A vast emptiness. Except for Jury’s footsteps, there was a complete absence of movement, as if he were the only sign of life in a becalmed universe. He might have been in a boat drifting without sails or rudder, without breezes. Then suddenly a tempest of birds blew upward from distant scrub or water. He felt as if he were setting off on a journey whose destination was not a shoreline glimmering with lights, but the edge of a continent shrouded in fog. Jury could not shake free from the notion of a painful foreshadowing of unhappy events. Looking up at the blank white sky and the limitless fields beyond, he felt all of this strongly.

The path was straight as a die and he wondered if it had once been a drove used by fenmen who cropped the sedge. He had been trudging for perhaps a quarter of a mile before he saw what could have been Wyndham Fen off to the left. In all of this flatness, it looked as landscapes do in dreams, appearing suddenly and inexplicably.

He was wondering about Jack Price. And what he was wondering was whether his relationship with Jenny was more than either one of them—Jenny or Jack—had acknowledged. It told against her, he thought, more than anything else, that she had failed to disclose to the Lincolnshire police (failed to tell him, even) the nature of her relationship to Verna Dunn and about having known Jack Price. She would not keep such secrets from Pete Apted, that was certain. The evidence against her was circumstantial, true, but circumstantial had been known to convict defendants before.

He left this part of the public footpath and veered off to walk the roundabout way to the Visitors’ Center. From there he took the boardwalk to the dike nearest the building where the body of Dorcas Reese had been found. Jury had seen it before, but still he stood in an almost reverent silence, prompted not only by the end of Dorcas Reese, but also by the place itself. What a poignant setting for murder, he thought, looking

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