Read The Old Contemptibles for Free Online Page A

forensics.”
     • • • 
    One of the ladies minding the desk showed Jury and Wiggins to the rooms in which the cats were kept in numbered cages. Cyril was in cage eleven.
    “Well, I’m ever so glad you’ve come to collect him. He sits that way all the time, hasn’t touched his food and sometimes I think he hasn’t slept a wink.” She moved to a cage on the end with a mother tabby cat and one kitten. She shook and shook her head, sticking her fingers through the wire. “These ones’ll be put down tomorrow. When people bring in mother cats and kittens it’s all I can do to holdmy tongue. See, they’ve got less chance to be adopted because all people want is kittens.” She was trying to stroke the cat through the metal webbing. “It makes me sick, it does.” When she turned back to Jury and Wiggins, she made quite a fuss over both the cat and his rescuers. Cyril watched them. “You can tell he was feeling hopeless. But he’s putting up a good front.”
    It was not a “front.” Cyril’s pose and slow-blinking eyes suggested that what the Fates had in store for him had better be reevaluated. And what the empathetic young woman had taken for stoic suffering Jury knew was simple disdain. Cyril was an adaptable animal, obviously, if he could put up with Racer. Even here he did not appear unduly upset by this new, restrictive environment, for he knew rescue was at hand. He sat in that statuesque pose that cats do, paws neatly together, tail wrapped around him like the robes of state. He yawned. It was only to be expected:
    Deliverance.

4
    They had returned Vivian-less.
    Well, thought Melrose, so had Lambert Strether returned Chadless. Except that Strether had seen through a miasma of social pretension and moral decay. Melrose could not lay claim to any Jamesian refinement of sensibility. He found that, somehow, irksome. He’d told Ruthven to stuff that white Armani suit somewhere that he’d never see it again.
    Still, it was heartening that Vivian would reschedule (yet again) her own wedding in order to come to London and talk Jury out of his. Trueblood had put on a first-rate performance, at one moment beating back real tears. The henna-haired woman was bad enough, given her seedy past. But the four children—well, that was not to be borne.
    They had been back from Italy for two whole days before Agatha got wind of it, but here she was this afternoon jamming up a scone while Melrose was trying to read his book and listen to his music.
    The new sound system was wonderful, including a Meridian 208 CD player and Spica loudspeakers. He had listened all of yesterday to Lou Reed ricocheting from windows to walls and back again while Lou really hammered on New York City:
    Get ’em out
    on the Dirty Boulevard
    Occasionally, Melrose sang along with him, punching his fists in the air for emphasis, and startling Mindy awake.
    Today, it was the Doors. Jim Morrison was a Rimbaud fan. Now, that was strange. Morrison’s grave was in Paris and his death a mystery.
    “Are you listening to that maniac again?”
    “No. This is a different maniac.” Ah, it was to be yet another viva voce afternoon with Agatha.
    “They all sound the same to me.” She was topping the jam with double cream.
    He didn’t answer. He was thinking again of The Ambassadors; Lambert Strether hadn’t told Chad Newsome that he, Strether, had been hit by a lorry or that the young man’s best friend had terminal pneumonia.
    And Melrose and Marshall hadn’t rung Richard Jury because they hadn’t yet made up the story they were going to tell him. Melrose only hoped that Vivian wouldn’t make a rash trunk call before they managed to disengage Jury from the woman and her intractable tots.
    “I cannot stand all of this racket!” Agatha was giving the silver tea service a rest by putting her hands over her ears.
    Melrose reached over and turned the volume down. The speakers were adjusted so that the music would explode in Agatha’s face.
    He