The Blue Last

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“ ‘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 Detective 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 right. 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.

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