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Wouldn’t hurt me to try harder though.” He spoke with hard r’s. “With marketing training a variety of jobs open up.”
    “Where are you from in the States?” Tom asked.
    “Bedford, Indiana. Then I worked for a while in Chicago. Always in the sales end of things.”
    Tom only half believed him.
    Janice Pritchard fidgeted. She had slender hands, nails painted a pale pink and well cared-for. She wore one ring with a small diamond that looked more like an engagement ring than a wedding ring.
    “And you, Mrs. Pritchard,” Tom began pleasantly. “You’re from the Midwest too?”
    “No, Washington, D.C., originally. But I’ve lived in Kansas and Ohio and—” She hesitated, like a small girl who had forgotten her lines, and looked down at her gently writhing hands in her lap.
    “And lived and suffered and lived—” David Pritchard’s tone was only partly humorous, and he stared at Janice in a rather cold way.
    Tom was surprised. Had they been quarreling?
    “I didn’t bring it up,” Janice said. “Mr. Ripley asked me where I’d—”
    “You didn’t have to go into detail.” Pritchard’s broad shoulders turned slightly toward Janice. “Did you?”
    Janice looked cowed, speechless, although she tried to smile, and gave Tom a glance, a quick glance that seemed to say: Think nothing of this, sorry.
    “But you like to do that, don’t you,” Pritchard went on.
    “Go into detail? I fail to see—”
    “What on earth’s the matter?” Tom interrupted, smiling. “I asked Janice where she’s from.”
    “Oh, thanks for calling me Janice, Mr. Ripley!”
    Now Tom had to laugh. He hoped his laugh relieved the atmosphere.
    “You see, David?” said Janice.
    David stared at Janice in silence, but he had leaned back against the sofa cushions, at least.
    Tom sipped his drink, which was good, and pulled cigarettes from a jacket pocket. “Are you people going anywhere this month?”
    Janice looked at David.
    “No,” said David Pritchard. “No, we still have cartons of books to unpack. Cartons are in the garage just now.”
    Tom had seen two bookcases, one up and one downstairs, empty except for a few paperbacks.
    “Not all our books are here,” Janice said. “There are—”
    “I’m sure Mr. Ripley doesn’t want to hear where our books are—or extra winter blankets, Janice,” said David.
    Tom did, but he kept silent.
    “And you, Mr. Ripley,” David went on. “A trip this summer—with your lovely wife? I saw her—once, and only from a distance.”
    “No,” Tom replied somewhat thoughtfully, as if he and Heloise could still change their minds. “We don’t mind staying put this year.”
    “Our—most of our books are in London.” Janice sat up straighter, looking at Tom. “We have a modest apartment there—direction of Brixton.”
    David Pritchard looked sourly at his wife. Then he took a breath and said to Tom, “Yes. And I think we might have some acquaintances in common. Cynthia Gradnor?”
    Tom at once knew the name, the girlfriend and fiancee of the now dead Bernard Tufts. She had loved Bernard but parted from him because she couldn’t bear his forging of Derwatts. “Cynthia …” said Tom, as if searching his memory.
    “She knows the Buckmaster Gallery people,” David went on. “So she said.”
    Tom could not have passed a lie-detector test at that moment, he thought, because his heart was beating palpably faster. “Ah, yes. A blondish—well, fair-haired woman, I think.” How much had Cynthia told the Pritchards, Tom wondered, and why should she have told these bores anything? Cynthia wasn’t the talkative type, and the Pritchards were a few cuts below her social level. If Cynthia had wanted to hurt him, ruin him, Tom thought, she could have done that years ago. Cynthia could have exposed the Derwatt forgeries too, of course, and never had.
    “You maybe know the Buckmaster Gallery people in London better,” said David.
    “Better?”
    “Better than you know