Read Even the Dead for Free Online

congenital and not due to her recent bereavement. She wore tweed skirts and floppy silk blouses and sensible flat shoes. She was what Phoebe imagined she herself would be, one day, except, she hoped, for the hairstyle.
    Phoebe put the plastic cover over her typewriter, wondering if Mrs. Jolly was getting an extra beating today, and if that was what had delayed her husband. In fact, she suspected there was no Mrs. Jolly, except in Mr. Jolly’s fevered imaginings.
    The day was hot but there was a cool breeze coming down from the mountains, the pale outlines of which she could see far off past the end of the street. She walked along by the green railings of the square, savoring the smell of cut grass—the petrol mower had already been going when she arrived at the office that morning. At the bottom of the street she turned left and walked along Merrion Row to St. Stephen’s Green.
    She hadn’t been to the Country Shop since Jimmy Minor’s death; it was the place where she and Jimmy used to meet. Now as she went down the steps she recalled fondly how he would come rushing into the café and fling himself down at the table and launch straight off into a scurrilous story about some politician or businessman, heedlessly dropping ash on the table, while his tea got cold and his sandwich began to curl at the corners. Poor, dear Jimmy, beaten to death one dark night and flung into the canal like a dog.
    She sat at a table by the window and ordered tea and a ham sandwich, in Jimmy’s honor. She took out her packet of Gold Flake and her lighter and put them on the table. She had taken up smoking again, she wasn’t sure why, on her last day at the hat shop. She wasn’t a real smoker, and hardly inhaled at all. She just liked the image of herself sitting on her own at a café table with a cigarette and a book, looking mysterious, or at least interesting. She had always been solitary, and was so still, despite the fact that she was going out with David Sinclair. He was solitary, too. The result was that they were never really together, only side by side, like two trees growing close by each other in a forest.
    The waitress brought her order. She was a plump, friendly girl with a wen on the side of her nose who had been working here for as long as Phoebe could remember. “Oh, and miss,” she said, “there’s this for you.” She handed Phoebe a folded slip of paper. “A person asked me to give it to you.”
    It was a half sheet torn from a copybook, like the copybooks they used to use for shorthand practice at the agency when she was doing her course there. The message on it was scribbled in pencil and was, indeed, in shorthand, as she saw with a small shock of recognition.
    Could we meet? I’ll wait in the Green, on the bench at the pond. I need to talk to you. You will know me from the agency. Please come. Lisa.
    Phoebe read it three times, then beckoned to the waitress. “Who was it that gave you this?” she asked.
    “A girl, miss,” the waitress said, a little nervously.
    “What sort of girl?”
    “Just a girl, miss. A young woman.”
    “Where was she? Was she here, in the café?”
    “No, she was passing by. I think she saw you, through the window, and came down and called me over to the door and gave the paper to me and pointed you out and asked would I give it to you.”
    “What did she look like?”
    The girl frowned, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t know, miss. Ordinary.”
    “What age?”
    “The same as you, I’d say.”
    “Was that all she did, give you the message and ask you to pass it on to me?”
    “Yes, and then she went off. She seemed in a great hurry, and agitated, like.”
    “Thank you.”
    Phoebe read the message again. Yes, there had been a Lisa in her class at the agency. She couldn’t recall her second name, if she ever knew it. A quiet girl, unremarkable, brown hair; that was all she remembered. Why the note, why not come to her table and talk to her? And why had she hurried away? It was