The Black Cat

Начало книги

It was already in the bloody London tabloids, the case not yet three days old and his own face plastered all over the paper when it was really Thames Valley police, and not the Met, not he, who owned the case.

Superintendent Richard Jury, high-ranking detective with the Metropolitan police, but without much feeling for rank, and who’d climbed the ladder without much feeling for the rungs, found himself at the moment in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, in a mortuary looking down at the body of an as yet unidentified woman.

What had made it so fascinating, he supposed, was not simply that the glamorous girl (woman, surely, only “Glam Girl” made much better copy) had been shot dead in the grounds of a pub not far away, in Chesham, but that forty-eight hours on, they hadn’t discovered who she was.

Jury looked at her and wondered why the portrait of Chatter-ton came to mind; then he remembered Millais had also painted Ophelia, or his idea of her. And there was that larger concept that had looked so familiar-the Pre-Raphaelite period-that Romantic period of Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Millais, and rich fantasy, vibrant colors, and the death of youth. The Pre-Raphaelites were really into dying young.

Читать дальше →