Free The Old Contemptibles by Martha Grimes

pocket.
    Then he hoisted himself onto the roof, highly practiced in this maneuver. It was not that he’d ever needed an escape before; he hadmerely wanted to defy gravitational pull. This roof, like all the others, was steeply pitched and roughly slated. And tonight, also wet.
    It had never occurred to him that the skylight escapades would be put to use for anything but clinging to the old chimney pot and staring at the stars. Alex did not commune with the stars or any other part of nature. He got his fill of that just from listening to his grandfather talking relentlessly about the Lake poets. Nature was something to be dealt with in practical terms, as in how his favorite would move on a muddy track at Aintree races. Nature was something to be overcome. Wordsworth had missed a lot of golden opportunities if all he could do was talk it to death.
     • • • 
    Fifteen minutes later, having jumped two of the roofs in order to shimmy down the sturdiest of the downspouts (it was copper and strong), Alex was sitting in the private park directly across from the house, watching the policeman up on the roof and two more running out of the front door. Three cars were angled up against the curb, the front was now cordoned off, and at least a dozen people were standing behind the strip of tape, enthralled. There had probably been even more before the ambulance had done its run through the rain.
    The rain had stopped now. Alex had taken off the slicker and put on a cap to change his appearance slightly in case the eyes of the coppers grazed the park. The last place they’d look; the kid would have run down the street one direction or the other, and this was where two of the cars were heading now, turning cones rainbowing the slick pavements.
    He lay down on the end of one of a pair of green park benches, the other already occupied by a slumbering drunk under a raincoat he must have nicked; it looked pricey.
    Alex lay under his coat, the brim of his school cap pulled down on his forehead, but not too far down that he couldn’t get a view across the street.
    Just two old bums sleeping it off is what police would think, if they bothered looking into the park at all. Hardly worth investigating.

7
    It wouldn’t do his grandparents any good. Not unless they locked him up in that house they claimed was “ancestral.” Did they really think he’d live with them?
    Still, he could remember a summer’s day in the Lakes and the lure of the spotted mare, the trout stream, the cascading waters, the incredibly blue and glassy lakes and the whole wide northern sky when he had been—what? seven? eight? It was amazing how he could take off and run straight across the land with his arms stretched out, his eyes closed, a terrier at his heels, and no fear of running into anything, of smacking into fences or colliding into trees. It was the great emptiness of the place he loved, for it seemed to match something within himself, as if (he thought now, staring across the street) he had finally found a landscape out there to escape the one within. Out there was cool, dry, full of distant light, uncluttered. He could have run forever.
    And there was his great-grandfather, whom he loved. And Millie . . .
    Standing on the steps, Inspector Kamir was talking to one of the other policemen. He was looking up and down the street as if he expected Alex to come walking along. Another of the cars pulled away, so the one left must be the inspector’s. The street had quieted; the thrill-seekers gone back to the telly or whatever. Alex lookeddown at his hands; he seemed unable to unlock them, as if he were handcuffed and needed a key.
    The bundle of clothes on the next bench moved and moaned and cursed.
    Why didn’t they leave, the police? Get out and leave him to the empty house so that he could continue his own investigation. Take their stupid photos, markings, measurements, dustings, notebooks and conclusions away? He could see, in his mind’s eye, the