Still wearing his cabby’s cap-he ought to put it in his act, this cap, because it looked so unlike what a magician would wear-Johnny was sitting at the gaming table palming cards. He brought the Queen of Hearts to the top of the deck again and again, as if it were marching right up there of its own volition.
It was dead simple; it always astounded him that people couldn’t suss it out. Magic was kind of like murder or like a murder mystery: distract, dissuade-that was the way. Put a clue here and at the same time call attention to something quite different over there. The way a magician uses his hands. Keep looking at one hand and so will your audience. This leaves the other hand free and offstage.
He shut his eyes and leaned his elbows on the gaming table. Except for the trunk that sat in the window alcove behind him, the gaming table was the most interesting piece of furniture in the cottage. His Aunt Chris had inherited it, along with a few other pieces, from her own aunt’s estate. It was fascinating; it gave the place that “Vegas look,” Chris was fond of pointing out. The table was large and round and covered in green baize. All around it were small drawers in which you could keep cards, chips, or whatever.
Johnny went to polishing the slick card, la carte glissée. He liked the sound of it. La carte glissée. He stuck it back in the deck, pressed the deck with his thumb, and felt the break. Then he fanned out the cards and looked for the break. There was the slick card. A handy card for different tricks.
Chris looked a lot like his mother. They looked alike, but they weren’t alike. His mother had taken off years ago to nowhere. His father was dead.
This is the way life is, thought Johnny, slipping the King of Clubs to the top. Life is violent reversals in a nanosecond.
Turn your head, and you’ve lost it.
Blink, and it’s past you.
Wink, it’s gone.
Just bring me a pot of poison,” said the elegant man, replacing the Woodbine Tearoom menu carefully between the salt cellar and the sugar bowl.
Johnny’s face was straight as he wrote it down. “For one?”
The elegant man nodded. “And a pot of China tea for me. Oh, yes, and be sure to bring a plate of scones.” Melrose checked his watch. “She probably got lost.”
Johnny wrote down China tea, scones. “One China tea, one poison, one scones.”
“Might as well make that two cream teas. Since we’re in Cornwall, we can’t pass that up, can we? And better make sure the pastry plate’s always within arm’s reach.”
Johnny wrote down the order, nodded. “I’ll hold up on the scones; wouldn’t want them to get cold. Until your friend gets here, I mean.”
“Uh-huh. The poison’s for her.”
“She must be a real treat.”
In the act of polishing up his specs, the elegant man gave him a long look. (A long green look, Johnny would say, if he ever had to describe it. Some eyes he had.)
“Oh, she is.”
The Real Treat came quick through the door of the Woodbine Tearoom with the wind and the rain at her back, pushing, pushing, as if the weather bore her a personal grudge.
The Real Treat removed her cape, shook it to displace the raindrops from her person to someone else, and succeeded, a goodly number of them landing on Melrose Plant’s face.
Then the Real Treat sat herself down and waited for Melrose to put the tea in motion.
Melrose was relieved of thinking up conversational gambits because the lad (the quipster) was back, as fast as if he’d arrived by skateboard. Melrose was grateful.
Although he did wonder, Who is this kid? Tallish, dark, quite handsome, mid-teens maybe? Probably had to peel the girls off; they’d stick like limpets. Confident air-that was certain. He wore the white apron without appearing to feel silly. God, most boys his age wouldn’t be caught dead waiting tables in a tearoom, much less in an apron.
“Madam?” He gave Agatha a quick survey: bird’s-nest gray hair, brown wool suit, ankles like small tree stumps. “The gentleman suggested separate pots, the full cream tea; that’s scones and cakes, double cream, and jam.”
Agatha brightened. “Why two pots, Melrose?”
Melrose shrugged, unwilling to solve the little problem.
The boy answered. “He thought you might want a different kind of tea. Instead of black tea, an oolong perhaps?”
This kid, thought Melrose, spends a lot of time in fantasyland. He wished he could accompany him now Agatha was here, but youth has wings and age is shackled. How she had found out he was going to Cornwall, who had spilled the beans, Melrose was still trying to work out. At least, she didn’t know his reason for coming here.
He had seen the property advertised for rental in Country Life and had, on the spot, rung the listing agent Aspry and Aspry and made an appointment with a Mrs. Laburnum to see the house in three days. He had booked his first class seat on the Great Western from Paddington/London and felt mightily pleased with himself that he’d acted on impulse for once. “Something I seldom do,” he had said (smugly) to Marshall Trueblood as they sat drinking in Long Piddleton’s favorite pub-that is, in Long Piddleton’s only pub-the Jack and Hammer.
“You?” Trueblood inhaled his drink and started coughing. When he stopped he said, “That’s always what you do. You hardly do anything that isn’t impulsive.”
Melrose sat back, surprised. “Impulsive? Me?”
“Well, for God’s sake, it wasn’t I who suggested going to Venice that time when Viv-Viv had set the wedding date for marrying Dracula.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, that’s totally different, totally. That’s just-you know, like joking around. I’m talking about doing something suddenly, such as packing up and going to Ethiopia. Something one does with hardly a moment’s thought.”
“How much thought did you give to telling Vivian that Richard Jury was getting married and she’d better hotfoot it back home? All of ten seconds, if memory serves me.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. That was your story; you invented it.”
“No, I didn’t. Well, maybe I did. All right, then. How about the time you-?”
Melrose leaned across the table and clamped his hand around Trueblood’s Armani tie and tugged. “Marshall, what’s the point of this? What?”
“Nothing. There is no point.”
Melrose flicked the tie back against Trueblood’s pale yellow shirt. He looked, as always, sartorially perfect, a rainbow of rosy tints and amber shades.
“Except of course to point out you’re totally impetuous. The only reason you think of yourself as one who carefully plans his moves and maps things out beforehand is because you hardly ever do anything anyway-what, what?-there are the times you’ve helped out Superintendent R.J. Talk about impetuous! Ha ha! Whenever Jury drops the dime you’re off like a kid on skates.” Trueblood shot his hand out and made whoosh-ing noises. Then he asked, “Where is Jury, anyhow?”
“In Ireland.”
“North? South? Where?”
“Northern Ireland.”
“God, why?”
“He was sent there on a case.”
“Oh, how shabby.”
Melrose frowned, thinking. “What were we talking about? I mean before… Oh, yes. Cornwall.” Melrose took out a small notebook, black and spiral-bound at the top, the kind Jury carried. He leafed up some pages. “Bletchley. It’s near Mousehole. Ever hear of it?”
“No. And can’t imagine why I’d want to. Nor can I call up a picture of you there, either. You are not at all Cornwallian.”
“How would you know? You’ve never set foot in that county in your life. How do you know what is and what isn’t Cornwallian?”
“Well, for one thing, they’re completely unimpulsive. You wouldn’t last a week-Ow!”
Back in the Woodbine Tearoom, Agatha asked, “What’s wrong with you, Melrose? You look a sight.”
Whatever that meant. He smiled and stirred his tea, dropping another lump of sugar into it, and thought of the dreadful train ride he’d just taken from London. He had been looking forward to it; he enjoyed the anonymity of a train-no one knowing who you are, where you’re going, anything.
Well, he could stuff the anonymity back in his sock drawer. No chance of that.
Melrose had not climbed aboard a train in some time. The first thing he asked of the conductor was the location of the dining car. The conductor had said, Oh, no, sir, no dining cars anymore. But someone’ll be round in a tic with sandwiches and tea. Thank you, sir.
One illusion shattered. No lolling about over your brandy and coffee and a cigar at a white-clothed table anymore. And the old compartments, where if one was lucky he might be the only passenger or, luckier, would meet a mysterious assortment of others. The outer aisle, where one could lean against the railing and watch the green countryside flash by. Sometimes he thought the only reason trains had been invented was for films. Murder on the Orient Express. It would be fabulous to be here in this insular, sinister, almost claustrophobic atmosphere when a murder was committed.
Or just observe those two youngish gentlemen, leaning toward one another, quietly talking. Scheming. Strangers on a Train. They could be exchanging murders.
Or that old gray-ringleted lady he had passed, knitting, he would soon see on a stretcher being borne from the train at a stop up the track-
The Lady Vanishes!
These days he was always waxing nostalgic-old films, old songs, old photographs. In this Hitchcockian reverie he did not see her coming, did not register her presence until he heard, “What on earth are you looking so squinty-eyed for, Melrose?”
He was yanked thus from his reverie with such a vengeance, he dropped his paper and his mouth fell open and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. “Agatha!”
Throw Momma From the Train!
If ever there was an antidote to nostalgia, it had just burst through the door of the Woodbine Tearoom.
It put him in mind of another old film he had seen on late-night TV called The Uninvited, the “uninvited” being a ghost who hurled back doors, laughed and sang, and presented its unseeable self to the horrified young heroine.
Unfortunately, his ghost was seeable.
For the last thirty-six hours she had accompanied him in his hired car round the bottom of the Cornwall coast. He had kept putting off the estate agent who was to show him the rental property, waiting for Agatha to find some entertainment other than himself that would keep her busy for half a day. He certainly did not want her around when he viewed the house, casting her accursed shadow over it. To say nothing of her endless carping. You won’t want this, Melrose. Look at that thatch; you’ll be needing a whole new roof. Whatever would you do with all of this rocky land? No, Melrose, it won’t suit. Et cetera, et cetera.
Fortunately, the young lad’s arrival with the tea broke into these morbid reflections. The boy held up one pot, asking “Regular tea?” and Melrose smiled as he tapped his own place mat. The waiter set the other by Agatha’s hand. Then he brought the tiered cake plate from the window embrasure and set that on their table also.
Melrose watched him stop at a neighboring table, say something, move to another table and another. The Woodbine was small, but it was crowded. He worked the room slick as any politician.
In a few moments, leaving Agatha to the scones and double cream, he rose and walked over to the cash register where the lad was ringing up bills. (He appeared to be both the serving end and the business end of this place.)
“I beg your pardon.”
The lad smiled broadly. “Tea okay?”
“Fine. I just wondered: Do you have any free time during the day? I’m asking because I need someone to do a bit of work for me. Wouldn’t take more than, say, three hours.” He held up a fifty-pound note he’d pulled from his billfold.
“For that I’d take a dive off Beachy Head.”
“It will be neither that heady an experience nor that dangerous. The lady I’m with, and don’t look at the table for I fear she reads minds, is also my aunt and sticks to me like Crazy Glue. I need to be rid of her for a few hours, and as you seem extremely resourceful, I thought you-”
“I could take her off your hands.” The boy shrugged, smiled. “I could do. When?”
Melrose handed him the fifty. “Well, say in an hour or so?”
“Done.” Holding up the note, he added, “You trust me with this?”
“Why not? You brought the poison.”
The car was a newly minted silver Jaguar with ox-blood-red leather seats. These people probably had to impress their clients with proof of the agency’s solvency. Esther Laburnum was the agent for this particular property, named Seabourne.
Melrose had seen the picture in Country Life as he was flipping past articles on gardening and on the country’s “Living National Treasures,” artisans who continued in outlandishly arcane avocations such as thimble-chasing or making rock gardens for doll houses. Then there was an article on the hunt and its grave importance to the country. The print practically bled entitlement.
The properties shown usually took up a page apiece and as often as not failed to give the asking price; instead, the copy indicated the property’s price would be given “upon request.” This bit of showmanship Melrose imagined was from the “if-you-have-to-ask” school. Melrose didn’t. He’d torn the page from the magazine and gone to the telephone.
That had been several days ago, and he was pleased with himself for undertaking to see the real thing. He discovered now, as he stood looking at it, that the picture of Seabourne hadn’t done it justice.
But, then, it would be quite impossible to capture the atmosphere, the slight menace, the rather edgy romanticism that the place stirred in him. He told himself he was being overimaginative. It did no good.
Architecturally, the house wasn’t especially imposing. It was Georgian, built of gray stone that worked as a kind of camouflage, making it fade into the land and woods around it. It sat on a cliff, a craggy rock-strewn promontory above the sea. It had been this setting that particularly appealed to him, as it surely would to anyone with an ounce of romance in him. The whole prospect-house, woods, rocks, sea-looked drained of color, which added to the romance. If a grim-faced chatelaine in black to her ankles had opened the heavy oak door, it would have added even more. Melrose was fully prepared to be swept away.
But it was Esther Laburnum of Aspry and Aspry who swept back the double doors to the largest of the reception rooms (there were three) with a flourish, saying, “There!” in a pleased-as-punch tone suggesting she had just worked some sleight of hand and had called up a fully furnished room, right down to the pictures on the wall.
Three of the walls were papered in a serene gray and the fourth, with a fireplace at its center, was given over to shelves for books and niches in which were displayed various pieces of sculpture: Etruscan heads, marble busts. A mahogany sideboard, flanked by walnut armchairs, sat beneath a portrait of an undistinguished old man with a churlish look that said he’d sooner be anywhere at all other than sitting for his portrait. The hound at his feet sported a similar look.
Except for the sculpture, nothing else suggested any interest in the exotic; the room was as English as English could be. Easy chairs and sofa were covered in linen and chintz, patterns of bluebells or intertwining ivy and hollyhocks. One of the chairs was drawn up to a kidney-shaped writing table with marquetry inlay. Against one wall between long windows was a campaign chest, a fine example of its kind.
“Isn’t it lovely?” trumpeted Esther Laburnum. She was a large woman with a boisterous voice, the sort that carries through a restaurant and condemns the other diners to hearing its business.
The room looked so lived-in, thought Melrose. It was as if the occupants, hearing the approach of Mrs. Laburnum’s Jaguar, had decided to run and hide.
“Is the rest of the house this comfortably furnished?” When she assured him it was, Melrose said, “But the owners have left so many of their personal belongings behind.” He nodded toward the portraits and pictures.
Esther Laburnum agreed but said the house was on the market when she’d joined Aspry and Aspry. It had been on the market for some time now, and she hadn’t known the owners. She was new to the area. “In any event, the owners are apparently open to letting it or selling it or some combination of both. I mean, if you’d want to let it for a while to see how you get on.”
They walked from the living room to the dining room, in which stood a twin-pedestaled dining room table and two sideboards opposite each other on facing walls. If he pulled out drawers and opened cabinet doors, he bet he would find silver, napkins, china.
From there they went to the rest of the house and the study (or, as Esther Laburnum called it, the “snuggery” or “snug”). Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined three walls. In front of one a refectory table of English oak stood upon a carpet that Melrose thought he recognized as Turkestan (a payoff of those countless hours spent being taught antiques by Marshall Trueblood). Against the fourth wall sat a large desk, its top covered with the tools of writing: letters, accounts, journals.
It was a smallish and clearly much-used room. One could almost sense the impress of bodies against the stuffed armchairs. “Snuggery” here was rightly applied. With the fireplace alight, especially on days such as this one (rain-lashed, wind-lashed, he thought in melodramatic terms), snug is what he felt. Melrose walked around checking the many leather-bound or gaudily jacketed newer books; it was quite a library, one appealing to diverse tastes. One end of the refectory table held another half-dozen small silver-framed pictures.
“Are these the family?” he asked her, picking up first one and then another.
“I expect so. Would you look at that fireplace mantel! What carving!”
Melrose followed his own line of thought. “I don’t understand why people would go off and leave behind such personal things. One ordinarily tucks them safely away in a locked cupboard or trunk or some such place. One doesn’t leave them out.” He sounded quarrelsome, as if such behavior shouldn’t be condoned.
Mrs. Laburnum answered with no more than an uninterested “Um,” leaving Melrose to peruse this little hoard of pictures and pursue his little mystery. There were four or five people represented here, all informally caught on film. The core group appeared to consist of a fortyish couple, very handsome; an elderly man who looked like the one in the portrait-yes, there was a trace of that squinty look; a pretty little girl of perhaps six or seven; and a little boy, probably a year or so younger, shown with his father on a sailboat. Several other pictures were taken aboard this boat. Melrose wondered how well off they were; judging by this house and the size of the boat, very. One or the other of these four was in the other photos with relations and friends. The grand-parents seemed to be represented wholly by the old man.
Rarely did Melrose envy other people, for at home he was surrounded by friends more or less like him-unmarried, childless, unattached, really-and if anyone in his circle was to be envied it was he himself, with his manor house, his land, his money. What struck him about the family in these snapshots was that they seemed so hugely happy. Even the old man finally dropped the bad-humored look. Their smiles were not the camera’s but their own. Melrose envied them no end.
“Lovely little family, aren’t they?”
He had forgotten Esther Laburnum in his absorption in the pictures.
“So sad about the children. I believe they drowned.”
“Drowned?” Melrose took this awful news almost as he would a personal loss.
“It was all extremely sad. It happened-oh, five years ago. What must have made it worse for them-the parents-was that they were out when it happened. I wasn’t here then.” She had already told him this a couple of times. It was as if she were trying to dissociate herself from the house and its owners. “Would you like to see the upstairs now?”
He told her he would. Yet he hated leaving the father and mother to the hellish knowledge that they hadn’t been around to save their children. Obediently, Melrose followed Esther Laburnum (in whom he detected now an impatience to get the house “viewed” and out of here).
There were five bedrooms, none of which Melrose lingered in, but just glanced around standing at the door. He saw some more framed photographs in the master bedroom and would have liked to have a look at them, but with the agent at his heels like a terrier, he didn’t.
One room facing the sea intrigued him. It was entirely empty except for a grand piano. Sheet music sat on the piano stand and lay on the floor, as if a breeze had drifted it there. Yet he detected no drafts; indeed, the house was amazingly tight, given its age and size.
“I believe he was a musician; I believe he wrote music.”
Melrose heard the emphasis on “believe,” as if she didn’t want to take the responsibility for supplying incorrect data. He walked over to look at the music on the piano stand. He agreed with her. “This looks newly composed-was, I mean, before they left.” Melrose played no instrument, but he could read music and could pick out tunes with one finger. He sat down at the piano and did so, painstakingly. It ended right in the middle of a bar on the second page. It was as if the composer had been temporarily called away.
“I don’t want to hurry you, Mr. Plant. But I dare-say you do want to have a look outside at the grounds.”
What he really wanted was for her to go away and leave him here, trying to pick out this music and to hear a whole orchestra supplying the background in his head.
He rose and followed her.
The day was uneven, uncertain. Intermittently, rain stopped and started, becoming more gauzy and misty as the afternoon wore on. Each time it stopped, weak sunlight tossed a veil of light across the gravel, barred by the density of the woodland. The light would have to be stronger to see through those branches.
Melrose was drawn by the rasp of the water and stood on the rocky promontory looking down at the sharp collapse of water spewing against stone. A stairway had been fashioned from the cliff and led down to the sea. Light glimmered on the wet stones. Melrose stood there looking and feeling he was getting down to the bedrock of existence. Unbidden, a few lines of poetry came to him about a woman looking out to sea: Ever stood she, prospect impressed. Who had written it, Hardy? Perhaps he’d find the poem in Seabourne’s library. He was pulled from this reflection by a voice fluting at his elbow.
“There are steps going down to the sea. Right down there, see?”
Melrose turned away from the stark display, which had suited his mood far more than the voice of Esther Laburnum. “Yes, I saw them.”
“You have to be careful on them. The rocks are slippery.”
“I hadn’t intended to go down there.” He picked up a thin stone and pitched it over, as people will do when they come upon water. He wondered why and picked up another.
“They must have slipped; that’s what I heard.”
His pitching arm froze and he looked at her. “Who slipped?”
“Didn’t I tell you? The children. They found them down there.” She sighed. “Isn’t it terrible? Can you imagine such a thing?”
“I cannot. No.” He stood on the edge of the cliff and tried to. He tried to fathom the grief of the mother and father. Having no children, he found it difficult; still, he could imagine himself receiving such news about a friend-say Vivian, say Richard Jury-and imagine trying to live in a world where they no longer were. Even though all of this was indeed his imagining, he was surprised that the sense of loss could cause him pain. But it did. “How old were they when this happened?”
“I’m not sure.”
Nor did she seem moved to guess. Esther Laburnum, who at the beginning of their voyage round this house had been talkative enough to be annoying, seemed to have decided to clam up completely. Melrose sighed. That was always the way of it: people holding forth until you could have swooned in boredom and then stitching their lips shut when it came to something so fascinating it could hold a deaf man in thrall. Well, perhaps she thought the tragic accidents would jeopardize a sale. Or perhaps her silence was owing to her growing desire to leave and show others round other properties.
“Was that why the owners left?”
“It might have been.”
Blood out of a stone. Melrose wanted to shake her. “How long has the house been empty?”
“Four years, about.” She had her day-planner open, consulting something. “No, I’m wrong. There was somebody rented the place about two years ago. Decorators, they called themselves.”
Esther Laburnum sniffed and Melrose smiled and turned his attention back to the sea. Standing there, looking down, he could have slipped into a fugue state. It was too much, wasn’t it? The house, the sea, the rocks, the stairs, the boy, the girl. Too much. He disliked the thought, but he couldn’t help it: The place was irresistible. Had he not been set on taking it, at least renting it, the story of the family would have hooked him for certain. He looked back at the house again, gray and windswept, and thought he’d been right before: It was like a film set. The girl in the white dress could come rushing out across the grass straight to the cliff’s edge. Ah, it was all too movie perfect.
They stood, staring down at the rocks. Or at least he stared; a glance in the agent’s direction showed him she was looking at her watch. There was always a clock or a watch. Melrose wanted to see the inside again, the photographs, the portraits. He suggested they return to the house.
As if on cue, the sky darkened; the rain, which had stopped, now began to drizzle. Given the house, Melrose wondered if it should be seen in any weather but wind and rain.
“Melrose!”
If anyone could drag one from the haunts of memory and romance, it was that voice. He turned to see Agatha timorously making her way toward him. He had better get away from the cliff’s edge before she got any closer. But she had stopped; he, naturally, was to breech the gap; she would walk no farther; if he wanted to speak to her, he must take the lead. Well, of course, he didn’t want to speak to her, but he moved forward in spite of that, being a gentleman.
“Melrose!” she called again, as if they were on opposite ends of King’s Cross Station.
The car she had come in was Cornwall Cabs, driven-much to his surprise-by the same lad who had served them in the tearoom. Melrose wondered how many times the boy changed hats in a day. Right now the one he wore was a cap pushed back slightly at a jaunty angle. He was leaning against the car, and when he looked at Melrose, he smiled ruefully and gave a dramatic shrug. What could I do, mate?
Agatha demanded, “Melrose, what on earth do you think you’re doing?”
He didn’t bother asking how she knew he was here. All roads led to Rome except for hers, which led to Melrose. Maybe she’d planted some sort of electronic bug on him so she could track his movements. Melrose introduced Agatha to Esther Laburnum, who was put to the task of answering Agatha’s questions. The agent told Melrose she had an appointment in Bletchley and had to leave. She handed over one of her cards. Then the two women, of nearly the same age, moved down the gravel, talking all the while.
It surprised Melrose that she’d leave without securing his signature on a lease or other document, given his clear interest in the place.
Agatha turned and started back to where Melrose stood with her driver. The lad stood up straight and pulled his cap down, snapped it down, really, in the manner of a chauffeur presenting himself to his employer.
“You pop up everywhere.” Melrose smiled at the boy. “Your finding me was, I take it, part of your act?”
The lad opened his mouth to answer, but Agatha did it for him. “What are you talking about? I told him you’d driven off with someone in a car belonging to an estate agency-who else would be driving people around in a Jaguar but an estate agent? I stopped in at the agency and asked where their agent-Esther there-was headed.”
“I see,” said Melrose. “It was part of your act. Richard Jury could use a good profiler.”
“What is this place? Why are you here?”
He let her question rest on bated breath as he manufactured an answer. He said, “It’s a family seat, Agatha. Haven’t I ever mentioned it? Pure chance led me to it.”
“Fate, like.”
Melrose looked at the driver in surprise.
Agatha said, “Family seat? What family? Whose family?”
“Mine, obviously. It’s a branch Uncle Robert probably declined to mention, given we were never proud of the Ushers.” Melrose dug his hands into his trouser pockets and gazed back, over his shoulder, at the great gray pile of stone. “Imagine my surprise to see the place was up for sale.”
Agatha twitched her light coat farther up on her shoulders. “You’re making it up. Well, you can stay for all I care. Esther has offered to drive me back to Bletchley.”
A first-name basis already. That was quick, even for Agatha.
Forgetting the lad who’d driven her here (probably assuming Melrose would pay for her ride), she turned and walked toward the agent’s car.
“Apparently,” said Melrose, “we’re exchanging rides.”
The boy smiled broadly. “Okay with me.”
“I don’t know your name. Mine’s Melrose Plant.”
The boy put out his hand. “Johnny Wells. Are you ready to leave?”
As the Jaguar shot down the drive, Esther Laburnum put her arm out of the driver’s side window and waved to Melrose, who waved back. Agatha, naturally, made no sign.
“I’d like to have another quick look round, unaccompanied.”
Johnny smiled. “Can’t say as I blame you. Take your time.”
“And I’ll certainly pay you for yours.”
“It’s okay. I’ll sit in the car and read. Never seem to get enough reading time.”
Melrose walked back up the steps prepared to savor the house. He had not seen the kitchen, so he walked to the rear, through a butler’s pantry, with wine racks still stocked with Madeira and port. The kitchen was very large, very gloomy, and yet very habitable. Like the rest of the house, it bore signs of recent habitation. Cooking utensils lay on the island in the center of the room and a large pot sat on the stove.
He had seen the snug but not the library proper. He felt the place was really getting to him, seeping into his bones. If he were to turn a corner now he wouldn’t be surprised to come face-to-face with a portrait of a hauntingly beautiful woman who had either died or disappeared, the face in the misty light. Laura. He was close to holding his breath as he entered the library. There he came face-to-face with a painting of chickens.
Chickens? It hung above the fireplace, a large watercolor of a farmyard and chicken coops and a rooster striding amongst them. Whoever had hung that was in no danger from the face in a misty light. He sighed, not knowing whether he was sad or glad.
The room that really fascinated him was the one on the floor above, the empty one with the piano. He wondered if the house had been used as a movie set for that film. He walked over to the long bank of windows, looked down at the water smoothing over the rocks, foaming up, receding, and moving in again. He mouthed a line or two of poetry. He would have liked to speak of its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” only Andrew Marvell beat him to it.
He pictured himself here alone, reeling off cascades of notes up and down the keyboard, swaying to the music. He couldn’t play the piano. But he could take lessons. That sounded a worthwhile project. How long would it take to learn? It would be worth it to drown out Agatha. He left the room and walked back downstairs and into the living room, the first room Esther Laburnum had shown him. Passing the portrait of the old man, he wondered if he was the patriarch of this family but couldn’t quite match him up with them. The others were so smilingly beautiful. He picked up the silver-framed photograph, saddened again by the terrible fate of the children.
The double door opened suddenly. He reeled.
The Uninvited!
No, merely his cabby, saying, “I’m really sorry to interrupt you. It’s just that Shirley-she’s the dispatcher-is on about needing the cab to go to Mousehole.” Apologetically, he held out his arms and shrugged.
“Oh, quite all right. I’m finished. Let’s go.”
As they drove away, Melrose turned for one last glimpse of the house. “It’s quite a place. I’m thinking of renting it. Tell me, who’s the old man in the portrait? He doesn’t seem to go with the rest of it.”
“That’s Morris Bletchley.”
Melrose was surprised. “Bletchley? His family is related to the village somehow?”
“I guess there have been Bletchleys here forever. Funny, as he’s American himself. He’s the chicken king.”
“The what?”
“Haven’t you ever eaten in Chick’nKing? They’re all over. It’s a chain.”
Melrose thought for a moment. “I guess I’ve seen them along some of the A-roads. You mean, Seabourne belongs to him? Mr. Chick’nKing himself?” Melrose was a trifle disappointed. Chickens. How unromantic. “Now I see the reason for that chicken painting.”
“Never saw that, but it sounds about right.” Johnny negotiated a blind turn on the hedge-enclosed and narrow road.
Melrose sighed. “Well, I suppose it’ll keep me from getting soppy. Chickens. Good lord!”
“You don’t strike me as the soppy type at all.”
Melrose felt obscurely flattered. He started to take out his cigarette case, but stopped. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Not me. Long as you give me one. I know it’s hell for my lungs, but…”
Melrose passed the case and Johnny took one, still with his eyes on the road. Melrose lit both cigarettes and sat back, comfortably watching the dense woods pass by. “Tell me, how many jobs do you have?”
“Oh, three, I guess. Four, if you count the magic.” Puzzled, Melrose said, “I’d be glad to count it. What do you mean?”
“I’m an amateur magician, that’s all. I really love it. My Uncle Charlie used to be a professional. Now he has a magic shop in Penzance. Every once in a while I do an act up at the Hall. That’s a kind of hospice-nursing-home place. I’m not bad.”
“I believe it.”
“The other jobs, they’re only part-time. We’re winding down now from the tourist season.”
“Well, how else could you handle them except part-time? And what do you do in the jobless off-season months? Tutor at Oxford?”
Johnny laughed. “Not likely. Next term I’m hoping for a grant. Scholarship. It’s why I work so much. To pay for whatever the scholarship doesn’t cover.”
“What about your family?”
“There’s only my Aunt Chris. Chris Wells. She owns that tearoom, you know, the Woodbine. Oh, and there’s Charlie, my uncle, but I don’t see him much. Chris is partners with Brenda.”
“Brenda?”
“Brenda Friel. She’s tops. Her daughter used to baby-sit me.”
“Baby-sit you? You sure it wasn’t the other way round?”
Johnny laughed, then said more soberly, “It was years ago. Ramona died when she was only-what?-twenty-two or twenty-three? It was really sad, that. She was pregnant, too.” He reddened slightly at this passing along of gossip. “Chris told me. Brenda, well, you can imagine. But Brenda and Chris, they’re a good team. Chris works harder than anyone I know.”
Except you, Melrose wanted to add.
“I know she’d pay my way through university; she’d pay the whole thing. Only I can’t keep taking from her. A fellow’s got to stand on his own two feet, right?”
“Which you appear to do admirably.”
“She’s really pretty, too,” Johnny said, following his own line of thought. “Not very old, either… your age, maybe.”
Melrose turned his head toward his window, not wanting the boy to see him smile.
Johnny went on, enumerating his aunt’s virtues: amiable, wonderful cook, patience of a saint.
Melrose had never known a person of this age to pay such compliments to a member of the family. It was not that he doubted the virtues of the aunt-after all, someone had provided an excellent role model for this lad-it was the boy’s playing Cupid.
Melrose was flattered. He did not think Johnny recommended just any unmarried stranger for his aunt.
“It’ll be nice if you rent Seabourne. We could all get together, maybe.” Johnny looked at Melrose almost imploringly. “Have some chicken, maybe.”
They both laughed.
Remember the chickens, Melrose thought, the next time I start going broodingly romantic. Do you remember -?
But remember was not a good word to turn one’s self away from romantic lunacy.
Remember was a goad, a bully, and a trap.
The Drowned Man was a typical country pub, but tipping its hat toward inn, since they let out rooms. It was pleasantly dark and quiet-perhaps a little too much of both, as an inn or pub or hotel calls for a bit of bustle, and it was clear Mr. Pfinn, when he had finally appeared to give Melrose a room assignment, was not the bustling type. Slope-shouldered, wispy-haired, small, and wiry, he had seemed to resent Melrose’s taking him up on the offer made by the sign outside: ROOMS TO LET. It was as if Melrose had burst into a cherished private home, ignoring the black wreath on the door. It was a sad and solemn pub. Over the two days he’d been there, Melrose saw no other people about, but there were dogs. They had all come to an inner doorway to watch Melrose check in and make his way unassisted up the darkling stairs.
There were five of them, and they liked coming to the door of the lounge bar when Melrose was there. They stood and stared. This appeared to be their chief form of amusement, a bit of cabaret that Melrose supplied. He tried to ignore them, but it is almost impossible not to succumb to a dedicated stare; one simply has to look up. The dogs did not come to the doorway together, but separately. He had identified a caramel-colored Labrador, an Alsatian, a sheepdog, and two huskies. They came one by one as if each were handing back information to the next in a kind of relay. It was disconcerting.
He had broached this topic of the dogs’ queer behavior to Mr. Pfinn. No joy there. Mr. Pfinn was, for a publican, strangely taciturn. He was a moper, disliking equally every topic introduced, including the weather reports. Small talk, around Mr. Pfinn, was nearly microscopic.
Melrose sat debating where he would have dinner and decided here was probably as good as anywhere. Last night he’d tried Bletchley’s other pub, the Die Is Cast. Wondering at this penchant for names of ill omen, he remarked on it to the pub regulars but raised no smiles. So he bought a round of drinks and still raised no smiles. Melrose thought of himself as a fair raconteur and a fairly generous one. His ego really took a beating in the Die Is Cast. There was also a café called the Poor Soul up the street in the opposite direction, but seeing on the menu in the window that “fish fingers” figured prominently among the selections, he decided against it. Bletchley might be “village noir,” destined to become a turning point in Britain’s representation in films.
Agatha had rung and left a message she was dining with Esther Laburnum. He would be dining alone. Oh, happiness! Agatha had put up at a bed-and-breakfast called Lemon Cottage, which was owned by one Miss Hyacinth Rose, who was quick to tell them she was processing milk into clotted cream and pointed out the pans all round the house sitting atop radiators. This was the real way of making the Cornish clotted cream that tourists went so daft over.
Mrs. Laburnum would probably come away from the meal with a quite different view of (the profligate, the irresponsible, the dandified) Lord Ardry from that which she had formed earlier of (the easygoing, well-heeled, thoughtful) Melrose Plant. Indeed, given the dramatic difference between Ardry and Plant, he might have been the Scarlet Pimpernel. There was nothing, though, that Agatha could say that would put Esther Laburnum off letting Seabourne to him; he had the money to pay the rent all at once, if she chose. Also, given the house had been standing there for four years or more, she would probably simply like to get it off her hands.
Throughout these warm and pleasant ruminations before the fire, where licks of flame were turning the gray logs black, the Pfinn dogs had now come to join not Melrose but themselves, one by one to flop down on the hearth like big beanbags, snoring or whinnying in the grip of some dream. Why was it that dogs could fall asleep in five seconds? Mr. Pfinn could start a kennel. Another husky or two and there’d be enough of them to run the Iditarod. He enjoyed that image, picturing himself in a fur-lined hooded parka, yelling mush as the dogsled knifed its way across some frozen tundra.
He yawned. Time for the Drowned Man’s dining room. He hoped there was a decent bottle of wine. Lord knows there would have to be a decent piece of fish. He polished off the excellent malt and hove himself up from the wing chair. The dogs did not mark his exit except for the quarrelsome sheepdog, who bared her teeth and growled halfheartedly and put her head down again.
“I don’t believe it!” exclaimed Melrose.
“Mr. Plant,” said Johnny Wells, filling up his water glass, setting the jug down, and whisking both menu and tasseled wine list from under his arm.
“Do you ever stop in this job-crazed life you lead?”
“Not much custom this time of year.” Johnny extended his arm out over the dining room. “As you can see.”
“Yes. Still.” Melrose studied the menu. Not bad, really.
“The special tonight’s the cod with cucumber sauce or apricot confite. That’s kind of emulsified apricots.”
“I prefer the word confite, thanks.” He was going over the wine list with some care. “This is extensive, I must say. Here’s a Côtes-du-Rhône ’85, here’s a Côtes-du-Lubéron ’86, here’s a Bourgeuil from Domaine des Raquie‘res.” Melrose looked at Johnny over the top of his gold-rimmed glasses. “Tell me another.”
“What about the Puligny-Montrachet?” Johnny dusted the table a bit, whisking imaginary crumbs.
“Yes, well, that’s certainly another!” He closed the list. “Do you have a nice little Bordeaux? In a bottle, I mean?”
“That’s doable. But depends on what you’re having, doesn’t it?”
“What would you recommend?”
“The cod, hands down.”
“Since that’s the only thing you’ve mentioned, I believe I’ll have it.”
“Righto. And a white Bordeaux?”
“Whatever.”
Johnny left for the kitchen. He was back within five minutes with bread and the bottle of wine. And an elaborate corkscrew which he seemed to enjoy working. He got the cork out, poured a bit into Melrose’s glass.
Melrose pronounced it excellent-of its kind-and asked, “Listen, in addition to the chicken king, what do you know about the Bletchley family? Incidentally, is this village named after them?”
“Could be. Way back in time immemorial, there was a Bletchley gave the place its name. Maybe they’re descendants, I don’t know.” Slapping the napkin over his arm, Johnny said, “I heard it’s a bit of a strange family.”
“All families are strange until they’re something else. I was thinking of the children.”
“Oh, aye. That was awful. I wasn’t here when it happened; I was away at school. The house has been empty since that. I mean, the parents moved back to London or Penzance or somewhere. There was a spell when a couple of men moved in, always spoken of as ‘the Decorators,’ wink wink nod nod, you know. Gay, I guess. They were quite nice. They did things to the house-decorating, I mean. Moved out suddenly.” Johnny frowned.
He did not ask why. It’s written in the script. Somebody always moves out suddenly.
Johnny shook his head. “That’s all I know. I’ll get your starter.”
“Did I order one?”
“You’ll want it. It’s avocado baked with Roquefort. Outstanding.”
“I’ll take your word. As in all things.”
Melrose sat looking out over the empty room at the dozen white-clothed tables, each with its small vase of blue cyclamen. He turned his spoon over absently, thinking about that house. He would be insane to buy it. If not structurally unsound, it must still have a lot of problems-with the heat or the water supply or the electricity. And there was that eerie atmosphere…
… which he himself was fabricating, as he’d been doing ever since walking into the place. No, it was not sinister, not macabre. His trouble was that he was bored at Ardry End, and this was Cornwall, this was Daphne du Maurier territory, Manderley-inflames country.
Johnny brought his starter and then whizzed off again as Melrose was entertaining thoughts of hauntings. Could any serious spirit choose to haunt the house of Chick’nKing? He wondered how chickens were dispatched around here. Tell them they were going for a weekend to Brixton-on-Sea and slam the door of the crate down?
He was beginning to feel sorry for the chickens. Were it not for this divine avocado and Roquefort dish, he’d be unable to eat. If he started identifying with doomed fowl he would be setting his feet straight on the road to vegetarianism. He would have to send back his cod! He hit his head with the heel of his palm, trying to dislodge these morbid thoughts. A little compassion is fine; too much and you wind up calling a dish of peas or potatoes “veggies.” He could end up carrying a sign in front of poor Jurvis the Butcher’s shop. Nobody would boycott Jurvis (“What? Give up my Sunday joint? You must be mad!”).
“Something wrong, sir?”
Johnny stood with his dinner, steam rising from the fish and from the divided dish of cabbage, roast potatoes, peas.
“No, no. Just trying to get water out of my ear.” He took another swipe at his head as Johnny set down his plate. It looked delicious, the pearl-white flesh just done enough to make it segment. The sauce was in a cup on the side.
Melrose picked up his fork and the conversation they’d been having. “What about this, John, if they’re heirs to the Chick’nKing fortune, why even bother with selling or renting? They’d hardly need the money.”
Johnny thought about this as he filled Melrose’s glass again. “Maybe that’s why the fortune got to be one in the first place.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Mr. Bletchley might have been a man who understood money. Might be, I mean. How’s the cod?”
The cod was silky-smooth and so fresh-tasting it might have leapt from the water and into the pan. “Excellent. My compliments to your chef.” He saw the smile begin on Johnny’s lips, one that lent itself to only one interpretation. “Don’t tell me, please. You’ve already shamed the entire working world into silence.”
“Only when we’ve just one or two. Mr. Pfinn, he doesn’t want to call in the real chef unless there’s several customers, which there isn’t very often in the fall and winter. I don’t do any cooking in the summer, only when it slacks off like this. I learned from years of watching Chris cook. She’s sublime. Really.”
“Chris?”
“You know, my aunt who I told you about.”
“Oh, yes. She owns the tearoom.”
“Along with Brenda Friel. Chris’ll be doing the baking right now for tomorrow. About three times a week she makes meringues and scones and things. When I finish here I’ll go home, give her a hand.”
“I hope I’m not holding you up!” Though Melrose doubted there would be very many things or people that could hold up Johnny Wells. He would find his way out of or around them.
“No, not at all.” Johnny checked his watch. “There’ll be a bit of a floor show in just a few minutes.”
“Need I ask who-”
“I’m a magician, remember?” He sighed. “I don’t have enough time to practice, though. You know where I’ve always wanted to go? Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s a place for magic! Siegfried and Roy, ever heard of them?”
“Does sound familiar.”
“I figure with a name like John Wells, I can’t miss.”
Melrose frowned. “I don’t follow.”
“Here you are, such an educated gent, and you’re saying you never heard of John Wellington Wells?” Johnny started in singing.
“My name is John Wellington Wells,
I’m a dealer in magic and spells,
In blessings and curses,
And ever-filled purses,
In prophecies, witches, and knells.
If anyone anything lacks,
He’ll find it all ready in stacks,
If he’ll only look in
On the resident Djinn,
Number seventy, Simmery Axe!”
Johnny finished off with a flourish of the white napkin draped over his arm.
“It’s showmanship, magic. It’s all showmanship.”
He called out “Chris!” as he always did when he got in. There was no “In here!” called back from the kitchen.
Johnny walked across the small front parlor. The cluttered Tudor cottage was still warm from a fire that had recently gone out. The kitchen was warmer yet. On the long white porcelain table and the top of the cooker were pans of freshly baked cookies and scones. The oven door was open, and another cookie sheet of meringues sat inside the oven. Lightweight and sweet, they vanished quickly and magically on the tongue. A bit too sweet for him.
Johnny looked around for some sign of his aunt and found an apron tossed across the back of a chair. He studied the pastries and recalled that meringues took an hour to bake and then another hour to cool down. Chris did this by turning the oven off and leaving the meringues inside. The oven was cool but not cold.
Right now it was a quarter to ten. That meant she had probably been here until nine o’clock, maybe even later. That meant she’d just left.
But for where? Nothing was open now except the pubs, and she didn’t often go to them, and never as far as he knew on a bake night. What she did was to go upstairs, get in bed, and read. She loved to read. She loved routine. It’s just another word for “ritual” and ritual’s always a comfort. She was right; it was a comfort knowing you were expected at certain places at certain times. That people depended upon you. He could have guessed at Chris’s movements on any given day and more than likely been right. It was a comfort, he thought, that she was like that, always right where you expected her to be, a person you could hang on to.
Johnny tried to emulate her in this way. If he didn’t appear at the Woodbine exactly at 10 A.M. or at 3 P.M., the old ladies would complain. The girls who served there were a bit scatterbrained and couldn’t seem to get in the spirit of afternoon tea at the Woodbine.
It was another ritual that Johnny understood. Chris had once said, “See, it isn’t just food and drink; it’s more like regeneration. I’m not sure how it works, but I’ve seen these customers come in out of sorts and grumpy and leave renewed in some way.”
Although he was sure she wasn’t upstairs (he would have heard her), still, he had to check. He went up the narrow, dark, piecrust staircase to the bedrooms above. There were three. His bedroom and her bedroom had a view of Mounts Bay. Although the door was open a crack, he still knocked. Perhaps she was in bed, sick. But he knew she wasn’t. The mind tossed up all sorts of flotsam for one to cling to before it started to sink.
He looked at her dressing table with its three-sided mirror, hoping something-spilled powder, open lipstick tube, uncapped cologne-would give him a clue as to where she’d gone, what she was doing. But it was as neat as always.
He sat down in a rocker that faced the window that faced the square. Beneath the moon, the grass was silvery, the square luminous. He tried to think of emergencies. Maybe she’d cut herself and had to go looking for a doctor. Up to Bletchley Hall, maybe. There was always a doctor on the premises there, or so he thought. Or maybe something had happened to one of her “ladies,” as she called them, one of the old people she volunteered to help at Bletchley Hall. An emergency, that must be it. Or maybe his alcoholic Uncle Charlie had called her from Penzance for help. He’d done it before.
Ridiculous. Chris hadn’t gone on a trip, for God’s sakes. Not without leaving him a note.
“Ah, dear, I hope she’s not sick, sweetheart,” said Brenda, over the phone. “Shall I call the Hall? Could she have-?”
Johnny had already done it. And the pubs; he’d called them too.
“How about the newsagent’s?” said Brenda.
“Compton’s? It’s half-ten, Brenda. Anyway, why would she go there at this hour?”
“For cigarettes?”
“No. She stopped smoking.”
Brenda sighed. “Sweetheart, I know for a fact she’s sneaked round there a couple of times.”
Johnny had to laugh. Chris’s vanishing had not settled on him fully yet. It hadn’t reached the point of hardening into fact. It was still fiction, a vaguely alarming story that would of course resolve itself into just that: a story. “Come on, Brenda. Can you really see Chris sneaking round?”
“Well… no, I expect not. But I know you think she’s always fine. I mean that she’s got no problems. But she does. Same as us.” She said this without a trace of sarcasm, said it with a kind of sadness.
“You’re not helping, Brenda.”
“I’m not, am I? What about your Uncle Charlie? Maybe he got tossed in the nick again and she went to rescue him.”
“Without telling me? She wouldn’t do that.”
Brenda sighed. “I just can’t think of anything. Would you like me to come round, sweetheart? Keep you company? We could worry together that way.”
He would like it, actually. But saying that made him feel impossibly childish. What he liked about Brenda was that she didn’t dismiss other people’s sadness, anxiety, or fear with banal sentiments like, “You’ll see; it’s nothing to worry about.” So he told Brenda no, he’d be all right by himself. Which he wouldn’t.
“Well, you needn’t come in in the morning if you don’t want to, sweetheart.”
“It’s okay, Brenda. I’ll be okay. Thanks.”
In the way of the suddenly awakened, he thought, Things must have changed; they can’t be the way they were when I went to sleep. But the conviction that they were, were exactly the same, stole over him as he lay stiffly in bed, still in last night’s clothes. He lay there not so much seeing as feeling the morning light, feeling the sea fret pressing against his window.
He rose and padded shoeless to Chris’s room.
Nothing had changed, as he knew it wouldn’t. He went downstairs, careful on the treacherous steps, and into the kitchen to put on the kettle. Meringues and scones still gave the impression that the person who had put them there would be back at any minute. He filled the kettle, plugged it in. A cup of tea, a cup of tea, a cup of tea. As if it were a mantra (and it very nearly was), he repeated the words over and over under his breath.
There was a phone on the wall over the kitchen table, so he sat down and unhooked the receiver to call Charlie. It really was the last thing he could think of.
“John-o! How are you?”
Even if it was only Charlie, his obvious delight in hearing from him made Johnny feel a little better. “Fine. Listen, Chris doesn’t happen to be there?”
Yes, yes she is. Right here; I’ll just put her on. Johnny didn’t realize how intense was his wish to hear these words until he heard the others.
“No, I haven’t seen Chris since that last time she bailed me out.” Charlie’s tone changed then, became more urgent. “Why? What’s going on, Johnny?”
“She isn’t here. She’s cleared off and forgot to tell me where to.” Johnny tried to laugh, but it was more of a choke.
“That’s bloody awful. Did you try that place she does volunteer work? I seem to remember once the old dame she was carting back home having some kind of fit and Chris staying overnight. You remember that?”
Johnny did, now. “I did ring them up, but they hadn’t seen her.”
Charlie seemed to hesitate. “What about police?”
It was something Johnny had hoped no one would suggest.
“Here, that’s PC Evans. Not someone you’d want to have to bet your last dollar on, Charlie. Thanks, though.”
“Sure. And let me know, okay? Seriously. I can be there in an hour and a half if you want me.”
“Yeah. Okay. Thanks again.”
He hung up. As far back as he could remember, he’d never heard Charlie talk seriously and sober.
The following morning, Melrose sat in the Woodbine Tearoom at ten-thirty, sans Agatha, who didn’t show. She and Esther must have been on the razzle last night.
He drank his tea and watched John Wells move from table to table. The boy’s face, which was by nature pale-handsomely, Byronically pale-seemed to be whiter this morning. His manner was certainly subdued. Melrose watched him move between and around tables-all of which were occupied-with none of yesterday’s ebullience, move in a lurching, almost drunken fashion as if he were a little boat pitching in choppy waters. When he stopped, he seemed to be staring at nothing, but then at what (Melrose realized) was something: the door. He looked as if he was waiting for someone to walk through it.
Melrose motioned him over to his table. “When do you finish up here, Johnny?”
“Soon. ’Bout an hour.”
“Could I talk to you? Could you come across to the Drowned Man?” The pub was directly across the street.
Johnny scraped the hair back from his forehead. “Sure.” He sighed.
Melrose thought it was almost a sigh of relief.
“Morning, Mr. Pfinn,” said Melrose cheerily, as he walked into the saloon bar sometime later. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
“Easy for you to say,” retorted Mr. Pfinn, as he continued wiping the pint glass in his hand.
Easy for him? It was as if Melrose the tourist, the just-passing-through person, could revel in this fine day and then leave, leaving Mr. Pfinn to be plagued by the rest of September. Mr. Pfinn did not ask Melrose what he wanted but merely looked at him from under his hedgerow of eyebrow.
Melrose sat down on a bar stool. “Half-pint of Old Peculiar if you have it.”
“Bottled.”
“Fine.”
Mr. Pfinn slapped the bar towel over his shoulder and plucked out the bottle from a shelf beneath the beer pulls. Morosely opened it, morosely poured.
“I expect there’s a big change in custom, summer to winter, isn’t there?”
“Depends.”
Most things do, thought Melrose. “On what?”
“Why, on the weather, man.”
Melrose thought that was what he’d just said.
Mr. Pfinn saw fit for once to elaborate. “Too many tourists.”
Melrose always marveled at the ability of inn- and shopkeepers to bite the hand that fed them. He excused himself and took his half-pint to a corner table, darker even than the bar. Wavering lights pooled on surfaces; slowly turning shadows gathered in corners. Nothing moved but the publican’s hand wiping the glassware. They could all be under water.
Half an hour passed in this way, during which time a few regulars entered and sat at the bar, all of them turning to eyeball Melrose. Johnny Wells came in from an Indian summer brightness to the cold shades and shadows of the Drowned Man.
He looked done in, thought Melrose, as he waved Johnny over.
“Obviously, something’s gone wrong for you. What is it?”
“It’s my aunt.”
Melrose waited.
“I don’t know where she is.” He shrugged. The gesture didn’t do much to minimize his trouble. He told Melrose about the previous night. “Something’s happened to her, I know it.” Johnny looked everywhere but at Melrose, as if seeing concern in another’s face mirroring his own would be too much for him. He’d break down.
“Not necessarily. From the way you describe it, it sounds more like she happened to something.”
“What do you mean?”
“That she apparently left under her own steam, for one thing. You say there was no sign of anyone else’s being there. It might not be your Uncle Charlie’s emergency, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t somebody’s.”
“She’d’ve called.”
“Hard to believe, but there still are places and people that don’t have phones or fax machines or even e-mail.”
“Well-”
“As well as you know her, you can’t know everything about her.”
“I’ve lived with her most of my life,” Johnny protested.
Maybe that was what rankled: that his aunt might know someone who was more important than Johnny.
Then he looked up, his expression changed. “She wasn’t at Bletchley Hall, either. Or at least that’s what the nurse said. I’m not sure she even asked around.”
“Bletchley Hall. Just what is that?”
“It’s a sort of hospice-nursing home the other side of the village. Chris helped out there with things like transport, giving rides to ‘her ladies,’ as she called the ones she dealt with. And other things. Still, that doesn’t explain why she didn’t call.”
“Call the place again, then. Mr. Pfinn”-Melrose raised his voice-“have you a telephone in here?”
As if he were taking up a challenge, Pfinn pulled a black telephone out from under the counter and brought it over to the table. “That’ll be a pound to use it; that’s besides the call itself.”
Melrose put a five-pound note on the table and moved the phone over to Johnny.
Johnny talked to a different person this time. She hadn’t seen his aunt for several days. Johnny asked her to check with some of the others to make sure. Yes. Thanks.
“How about the police? Have you talked to them?”
Johnny nodded. “They can’t do anything, or won’t do anything, until more time’s gone by.”
“You mean the Devon and Cornwall police have to wait for twenty-four-” Melrose stopped. Of course. He pulled the telephone closer.
Divisional Commander Macalvie, according to the police constable who’d answered the phone at Exeter headquarters, wasn’t in his office, but he’d see if he could find him. In another minute, the constable was back.
“He’s gone to Cornwall.”
“Cornwall?”
The constable reminded him this was the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.
Melrose ignored the sarcasm. “Where in Cornwall?”
The constable didn’t know. Sorry.
“Is there any way he can be reached?”
The constable’s irritation was obvious. Of course he could be reached. But not by the public.
“Could you get a message to him? It’s rather important.”
Yes, that could be done.
Melrose gave him the message.
Brian Macalvie was not there to take Melrose’s call because he was at that moment on a public footpath that stretched between Mousehole and Lamorna Cove, a path that made its rocky way along the cliffs above Mounts Bay and the Atlantic. One would find, if taking this two-mile walk, that the sea air acts as a restorative unequaled in other parts of England, untainted and unpolluted air that results in a pleasant light-headedness.
But the sea air had not served as tonic or restorative for the woman who lay on the footpath. One could not, however, blame location or light-headedness for her death, as she’d been shot twice in the chest with a twenty-two-caliber semiautomatic pistol. There was not much damage done to the chest area. The precise caliber of the bullets had not been discovered, of course, before the medical examiner and firearms expert had been given a chance to examine the body.
The chance was hard to come by.
“Are we stopping here all day, then?” asked Gilly Thwaite. She was the scene-of-crimes expert and the first one permitted the opportunity to examine both the body and the scene. The first one, that is, after Divisional Commander Macalvie. Until he gave her the go-ahead, she couldn’t even set up her camera equipment or take pictures with the hand-held. It was as if a camera flash would contaminate the scene.
It was extremely rare that any of his investigative “team” got smart with Brian Macalvie, who had eyes of a near-unholy cerulean blue, a hot blue that could strip you with a look. Macalvie was famous for his long and inflexible silences when first viewing a body and its context, its mise-en-sce‘ne. No one was permitted to get close enough to examine anything at the crime scene until he was done with looking. No one in the CID could look the way Macalvie could look. Macalvie seemed to get lost in looking. Until he had seen everything seeable, no one was supposed even to breathe on the crime scene.
They had all been standing first on one foot, then the other, for nearly fifteen minutes while (Gilly Thwaite had said) “the whole damned scene erodes.” This had earned her another long blue look.
The medical examiner, a local doctor from Penzance and not officially with the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, had been one of those waiting in silence for Brian Macalvie to finish looking, and it irked him to no end. He’d objected more than once to being kept here, an objection that fell on deaf ears. Macalvie was now kneeling near the body. The woman was in early middle age and quite pretty, though in a rather hard way that bespoke the backlash of too much makeup over too many years. Same thing for the hair, the bright gold of a crayon. She was wearing a designer suit, now darkly stained, and an expensive watch, but no other jewelry. Near her right hand lay a piece of black plastic that looked like the corner of something. Macalvie took out one of the small plastic bags he carried around and dropped the plastic into it.
The good doctor was chirruping away about his whole surgery full of patients, it being Monday, his busiest day of the week, people having caught the flu or broken bones falling out of boats over the weekend. Weekends were disaster areas in Penzance, he said.
Macalvie couldn’t care less about Penzance weekends or the doctor’s heavy schedule.
This place on the public footpath was not far beyond Lamorna Cove and perhaps a hundred feet from the nearest house. They knew this because they’d had to leave their cars in its parking area. Two men had been dispatched to go back and have a look round.
“We don’t have a warrant.”
“So look around the outside.”
These two were back and telling Macalvie that the place was unoccupied. No sign of life. They could make out that the fireplace in the living room hadn’t been used in a while and no wood was stacked there. In a place as cold as this one in late September, one would expect to see fireplaces in use.
“Okay, Gilly. Go ahead.”
They might have been playing at statues till then, for everyone seemed to want to move arms and shake out legs as if numbed. Gilly started moving around the body with her camera.
“When she’s through, it’s all yours, Doc,” Macalvie said. “Then yours, Fleming.” He gave the forensics man a punch on the arm. “I’m sure you’ll turn up something.”
“Maybe, guv,” said Fleming. “But not whatever it was you stuck in that Baggie.”
Macalvie could inspire terror in incompetents (of which Devon and Cornwall police had more than their share, he was fond of pointing out). Fleming wasn’t one of them. Neither was Gilly Thwaite, though he could still have her wishing sometimes that she’d never joined the force. The good ones, the crack technicians, Macalvie kept by him. He smiled ruefully at Fleming and handed over the Baggie. “Sorry,” he said.
He watched Gilly as she moved in for the close-up shots. He wished the victim could tell him something with a look. But the faces of the dead wear no expression, no matter whether they’re looking down the barrel of a gun or at a charging bull. Except in the case of a spasm, which freezes the victim in instant rigor mortis, the expression on the face gives nothing away.
Death is the great expression leveler.
Melrose was coming to the bottom of his third Old Peculiar while sitting at the bar of the Drowned Man. There had been a very brief debate with Mr. Pfinn as to whether he had any more, an argument hardly supported by the fact he had half a case of the stuff on a shelf beneath the bar. He hated this whole business and what it was doing to this seventeen-year-old kid, whose entire family consisted only of an afterthought of an uncle in Penzance and this dearly loved aunt, Chris. And now she was gone.
How had he gotten embroiled in this boy’s life, a boy he had known for only a day?
As if time mattered. Melrose had always believed you could meet and fall in love with a woman in the time it took to put out your hand and say hello.
It disturbed him that he could reach that point immediately where Johnny had landed: abandoned and betrayed. Not that his aunt had abandoned the lad, of course not. No more had his own mother abandoned Melrose; of course she hadn’t. Nor his father. But Melrose still loathed public schools and the British penchant for sending children away to them.
There was Harrow. What he remembered most about Harrow was the midnight vigil. He could never get to sleep before then. He’d lie in a narrow bed, crying soundlessly. He hadn’t dared make any noise or he’d wake up his roommate-what had been his name? He could not understand this reaction to public school-or, rather, to leaving home. About as independent as a baby penguin, he’d been.
Harrow wasn’t the first time, either. Before that, when he was eight, there’d been a boarding school in France. Why in God’s name had they packed him off to the south of France? It still made him blush to remember how he held on to his mother that day in Paris-her hand, her skirt, cool skin, warm wool. And his father’s embarrassment: “For heaven’s sakes, lad, be a man! Get a grip on yourself! Soldier on, lad!” And despite the fact his father would say it, Melrose was trying to do just that: get a grip. So hard was he trying that the voice at his elbow gave him such a start he nearly fell off the stool.
“Plant!”
“Commander Macalvie! My lord, how are you?”
“Me? I’m fine. You don’t look so hot, though. Where’s your sidekick?”
He meant Richard Jury. “In Northern Ireland. Sidekicking.”
“Christ, how’d he wind up there?”
“I don’t know. CID matter, some kind of inquiry connected with something in London.”
“Wiggins go with him? If he didn’t, I could use him here.”
Macalvie’s partiality for Wiggins had always mystified Melrose, as it mystified Richard Jury.
Pfinn came down the bar, drawn perhaps by Macalvie’s static electricity, the copper hair, the cobalt-blue eyes. Pfinn asked him what he’d have. If anything.
Pfinn always managed to make it sound like an imposition.
Macalvie asked for lager. “So what’s this emergency?”
“A woman’s missing from here, from Bletchley.” Melrose told him the details. “It hasn’t been your requisite twenty-four hours.”
As he’d been talking, the expression on Macalvie’s face changed.
“What’s she look like?”
“I don’t-” It was only then that Melrose realized her looks had never come up, not around him at any rate. Brown hair? Possibly. No, he did recall Johnny saying she was around his age.
“I can never tell what your age is, Plant. You still won’t eat your peas.”
“Very funny. I honestly don’t remember Johnny’s describing what she looked like, except to say she’s pretty.” Melrose paused. “Why does that look on your face bother me? Why, incidentally, are you in Cornwall? I don’t expect you’re sightseeing.”
Macalvie cleared his throat. “Where is this boy?”
“Working one of his several jobs.” Melrose consulted his watch. “It’s probably the cab at this hour… or else he’ll be getting the dining room ready here.” Melrose called to Pfinn, asked him if Johnny had come yet. No, he hadn’t. Not for another hour, most likely.
Melrose asked again. “So what are you doing in Cornwall?”
“Having a dekko at a body found not far from here. You know Lamorna Cove? It’s about five miles away.”
“A body. Male or female?”
“Female. We haven’t ID’d her yet.”
There was a silence before Melrose asked, “How long had she been dead?”
Macalvie took his lager, handed over some money, drank off a third, and said, “Not that long. No more than twelve, sixteen hours. Pathologist has to do a postmortem, of course.”
“Well.” Melrose’s stomach turned over. That really was the sensation.
“The nephew must have a picture of her.”
“I’m sure he does.”
“Well, I’d rather see that before I show him mine.”
“Yours?” Melrose said, his tone anxious.
“Can you get hold of him?”
“I’ll try his house, and if he’s not there I’ll call the cab dispatcher. There’re all of three cars to dispatch.” He turned to Mr. Pfinn and asked for the telephone and Johnny’s telephone number.
Giving out employees’ telephone numbers was not something he did. The same telephone ceremony was repeated as had been that morning. It would cost him a pound.
“No, it won’t,” said Macalvie, riveting the man with his eyes, then producing his identification. “And we’ll have that number, thanks.”
Johnny heard the telephone as he was coming up the path to the cottage. He fairly flew through the door and snatched it up as the last ring echoed in air.
Hell! He slammed the receiver down. The phone had become Janus-faced; on the one hand it might be Chris; on the other hand, bad news about Chris.
He did not know, for all of his worry, how he’d been able to go about his daily routine of the caff, the cab, the pub in such a humor as to be-or at least make things appear to be-perfectly normal. To keep it down, the anxiety, the fear. “Deny” as Uncle Charlie was always saying. Deny, deny, deny. But this wasn’t denial; if it had been he wouldn’t be anxious or fearful.
He sank down into a chair at the gaming table and let his gaze wander around from the fireplace mantel, to the bookshelves, to Chris’s favorite armchair covered in blue cotton with a design of white phlox. Rather, the background had once been blue. It had gone through so many washings and been exposed to sunlight long enough that it was hard to make out the flower pattern. He supposed you could drain the color from anything over time-the aquamarine from the ocean, the blue from the sky-
Shut it! Johnny ordered himself. This was self-pity and it kept a person from thinking. He yanked one of the small drawers in the table open and got out his cards. He riffled them several times, liking the feel of the rush of the edges against his thumb. He cut the deck twice, pulled out a nine of diamonds, made it look as if he were putting it atop one of the thirds, when he wasn’t. He stacked the three parts together, shuffled, shuffled again. Voilà! He pulled out the nine of diamonds.
A basic little trick anybody should be able to see. Surprising how little people did see.
He left the cards on the table and started an aimless circuit of the living room. Looked at the fire screen, the books, the basket full of magazines and another of embroidery which Chris scarcely touched, so busy was she. He stopped at a glass-fronted étagère full of cups and saucers (“A Present from Lyme,” “A Memory of Bexhill-on-Sea”) and bisque figurines and tiny animals and was taken by the number of places they’d been. Nothing elaborate-no Paris or Venice or anyplace-just little seaside resorts here in England. He stopped at the trunk in the window alcove and ran his hand across the top. Opened it, looked inside. He had to do a lot of work to perfect this illusion.
The rain still came down and made the day dark and the room darker. He had been in here in half shadow and hadn’t turned on any lights. He stood looking out the window of this cottage that now seemed sorrowful, the objects in it wasted, as if Chris’s absence had deprived them of purpose or usefulness.
He turned on a silk-fringed lamp, which cast its buttery glow on part of the room. He stopped at the fireplace mantel and looked at the snapshots and three larger photos framed there. One of Chris and Charlie, one of Chris and him, one of her and his mother. She looked like his mother and his mother had been beautiful. This was a photographer’s posed shot, which was not as alive as the others; these formal posed shots never were. He studied the picture of the two of them, the two sisters. He knew he thought of Chris as a mother; he couldn’t help it. So this was like losing his mother all over again.
Johnny rested his head on his arms for a moment, then marshaled what energy he had left and plucked up his beaked cap. He liked to wear it in the cab. Shirley had asked him to take an extra shift this evening because Sheldon was sick. “Read: Hangover,” she’d said.
“Read: I can’t, Shirley. Sorry. But I’m going to Penzance.”
Shirley was all right about it; she knew something had happened to Chris.
He put the cap on, looked in the mirror over the mantel, softly sang:
“My name is John Wellington Wells,
I’m a dealer in magic and spells-”
But for once it didn’t cheer him. He grabbed up his jacket and was out the door.
He was getting into the cab when the telephone rang again, but this time he didn’t hear it.
Who else could ID her, then?” asked Macalvie, gulping at his beer as if it were the last one he expected to see for a long time.
“If it’s Chris Wells, a number of people. Almost anyone in the village.” Seeing Macalvie about to move to question Pfinn, Melrose shook his head. “I shouldn’t start with him. He’ll set your feet on the wrong path if he can help it. If there’s such a thing in your police lexicon as an antiwitness, it’s him. Let’s go across to the Woodbine. Chris Wells owns it, along with another woman, Brenda something. She could identify her partner.” Melrose looked again at the photo. Whoever she was, she was good-looking. He wished he’d listened more closely to Johnny’s description of his aunt. No, he didn’t; he didn’t want to be the person who said, Yes, that’s Chris Wells. He didn’t want to be the despised messenger.
Macalvie drained the rest of his beer, set down the empty pint, and regarded it as intensely as he might’ve regarded a fresh clue. He did everything intensely. He had those blue eyes that turned their surroundings dull and drab and burned away any extraneous matter in Macalvie’s line of vision. Melrose wouldn’t relish being the suspect he interviewed. In the half minute since Melrose had spoken, Macalvie had leaned straight-armed against the bar, staring at whatever scene was unfolding in his mind. If Melrose had ever wondered what aspect of his job-if any-Brian Macalvie disliked, showing a police photo to the victim’s friends or relations was clearly it. Melrose was relieved this particular relation was not around.
“Let’s go,” said Macalvie, moving away from the bar and digging a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket. He still smoked an unfashionable pack and a half a day. Melrose took out his own case, glad he could share the sin.
Brenda Friel was such a sweet-tempered woman that not even the presence of the Devon and Cornwall police in her kitchen disturbed her. The two men took up whatever room was left over from an island of butcher-block table and her big Aga cooker. She was not concerned about the scones and cookies she’d just removed from the oven, only about Johnny Wells. Thinking that Chris was the reason police were here in the Woodbine, she said she was glad they had come straightaway.
Brenda pushed a lock of brown hair from her forehead with the back of her hand as Macalvie told her about the dead woman in Lamorna Cove. Her face grew very still, that petrified stillness one adopts when terrible news threatens to topple your world and any movement will bring it on.
As Macalvie produced the picture, she closed her eyes, then opened them and expelled a long breath. “No.” She all but whispered it. “No, that’s not Chris.” Relief nearly overwhelmed her, and she staggered back and leaned against the table, upon which rested the scones and cookies, giving off a gingery aroma that, in its suggestion of the homey and ordinary, seemed to mock them, faced with possible tragedy.
Melrose let out his own breath, surprised he’d been holding it. Chris and Johnny Wells must call up powerful emotions in people. “That’s another thing,” said Melrose, speaking his thoughts. “Where’s her nephew? We’ve been trying to get in touch with him. He doesn’t answer his phone. I know he works at various jobs, but-”
“I think he’s gone to Penzance. A relation there just might know something. This is the first time Johnny’s ever asked for time off. He’s so dependable. Like a rock.” She tore a couple of small plastic bags off a roll; then, holding them, she said, “That woman, she doesn’t look much like Lamorna Cove-” Brenda stopped, then, frowning, said, “Let me see that photo, will you, sweetheart?”
Macalvie assumed he was the sweetheart here and again produced the picture.
“I can tell you who it looks like: a woman that lived in Lamorna Cove as a girl. Her name was Sadie May. She worked here awhile. But she married since, anyway. Name’s Sada Colthorp, her married name. Believe it or not, that girl married into the aristocracy. I think she married an earl or viscount or one of those.”
The smile she gave Melrose acknowledged him as “one of those.” Though the smile, he noted, was a trifle ambiguous.
“Did you ask round at the Wink? The pub there?
It’s probably their one topic of conversation now.” When Macalvie nodded, she went on. “I expect they didn’t recognize her grown up. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’d talk to police about it. People can be so close-mouthed, can’t they?”
“They can, yes,” said Macalvie. “How is it you yourself recognized her?”
“Because she came back.” She looked slightly surprised, as if police should have known this. “It was about four or five years ago she came to Bletchley. For old time’s sake, perhaps. She worked for us once. Fifteen, twenty years, it must be. Ramona, my daughter, was just a little thing then.” Brenda smiled at the memory. “I never knew Sadie that well, but Chris did. None of us ever liked her that much.” Brenda shrugged.
“And what?” asked Macalvie.
Her eyes widened. They were a pale, swimming blue. “I’m sorry?”
“None of you liked her that much. I feel an and or a but hanging on the end of that comment.”
She shook her head. “Nothing, except Chris really disliked her.” Then, possibly to turn Macalvie’s attention to the photo and away from the person in it, she asked to see the picture a third time. She appeared to have no qualms about looking at a corpse, as long as it wasn’t her business partner. She stood with the biscuits in one hand and the picture in the other. “Nothing ever happens around here, and Lamorna’s only five miles away, and nothing ever happens there either. But now a woman is missing from here and another found murdered there. I was sure when you handed me that photo it would be Chris I’d see.”
“Thank the lord it isn’t,” Melrose, who’d said nothing thus far, put in.
“Your daughter, she’d be in her twenties now? Maybe she could tell us-”
It was, Melrose thought, like peeling a layer of light from her face. The words seemed to have stunned her. “Ramona’s dead.”
“I’m sorry,” said Macalvie. “She must have been young.”
“Twenty-two. It was leukemia. She’d been sick a long time before we even knew what was wrong with her.” Brenda stopped and took a deep breath. “She was seven months pregnant, too.” Here, Brenda cast Macalvie a reproachful look, as if to say, Police might not be able to stop women from getting murdered and disappearing, but couldn’t they have done something about a dying young mother-to-be?
“I’m sorry,” Macalvie said again and clearly felt it wasn’t adequate. “Really sorry.”
Brenda shook her head, then she handed each of them one of the little plastic bags. “Ginger. They’re the favorite.”
They were still warm. Melrose right away took a bite out of his. He saw Macalvie looking at his bag, curiously, as if anything given him must be a bribe. Then he shot Brenda a smile straight through the heart. “Thanks. And if you think of anything…” He handed her a card. “You’ll let me know.”
“I will, yes. But what about Chrissie, sweetheart? This Lamorna business doesn’t tell us a thing about where she is.”
“No, but it damned sure tells us where she isn’t.”
NOW YOU SEE IT. The white sign lettered in marine blue was nailed above the door to Charlie’s magic shop in Penzance. Johnny really liked Charlie, which Chris said was to his credit, given that they were so different. But he wondered if they really were, the way they both loved magic and illusion. The place always fascinated Johnny, even now, when his feelings were at such a low ebb.
The place had been advertised as containing a “flat with sea views,” but the sea view was there only if you craned your neck and got smack up against the window, turned your head sideways, and looked through trees; that way you could see a small slice of the sea.
Charlie had much of Chris’s manner, even if he didn’t have much of her character. Lean on her and she would never let you down. Try leaning on Charlie and you’d hit the ground. He wasn’t very dependable; he was a raging alcoholic and because of this Chris “cut him some slack.” (“Poor Charlie. He can’t help it; we’ve got to cut him some slack, love.”) Yet most people would feel exactly the opposite, heaping on Charlie’s head recriminations and reckonings.
They just didn’t understand addiction, Chris would say. Neither did Johnny, really. He wondered how it would feel to be an addict, hung up on booze or crack or heroin. The closest Johnny had ever got to heroin was Lou Reed’s song.
Charlie had shown Johnny a few new tricks-lord, but he was fast with his hands. After he’d put the cards up, he reached under the counter and pulled out a gun. Johnny staggered back.
“Oh, hell, John-o, it’s not real. Just part of an act a friend of mine’s putting together. Looks authentic, doesn’t it?” He slapped it down on the counter and said, “You know what Chekhov said, ‘If you put a gun on a table in Act One, it better go off in Act Three.’ ”
Johnny picked it up. “I’m glad this one won’t.”
“Lousy play, then. Come on.”
They’d closed the shop and gone along to the Lamb, where they were now sitting, Johnny drinking ginger ale, Charlie a club soda. Johnny wondered how difficult it was for Charlie to be so close to booze and yet not drink it. Charlie never drank around Johnny, anyway. It shows his regard for you, Chris had always said. Charlie did not know any more about Chris now than he had earlier. But he could understand Johnny’s need to talk to him; he and Chris were the only family left. He asked Johnny if he’d notified the police.
“Yes. But it’ll be twenty-four hours before they’ll do anything.”
“That’s to eliminate all the unhappy husbands or wives who’ve left out of choice.” Charlie was helping sort through the various options and the only alternatives. “Okay, she either left under her own steam or was taken.”
“It could be a combination, couldn’t it? I mean, she could have thought she was leaving on her own when really she was tricked into leaving. Like maybe somebody called up and said I was in hospital, something like that. And on her way she’s abducted.”
“Uh-huh.”
Johnny sighed. “That’s pretty melodramatic, I guess.”
“Melodrama happens. She didn’t leave you a note, you said, but remember Tess.” Charlie read a lot of books and spoke of the characters in them if he and they were on intimate terms. When the name didn’t register with Johnny, he said, “Hardy’s Tess, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The whole tragedy could have been averted if the note to her boyfriend that she’d shoved under the door hadn’t gone under the rug. He never saw it. Are you sure she didn’t leave you a message? Did you check under the rug?”
“No.” Johnny smiled. “There aren’t any rugs near the doors.”
“I meant that metaphorically. Could she have left a message anywhere you might not have come across it? Could she have told someone to make sure they told you? That sort of thing.”
Johnny nodded. “But if she had, they’d have told me.”
“Okay, let’s take it from another angle. Forget about the note.” When Johnny opened his mouth to object-Chris would never have done such a thing, left without letting him know-Charlie held up his hand. “I’m just thinking out loud, running down possibilities. Say someone out of the past comes to the door, convinces her that she has to go with him immediately. Now, I can’t think of anything in her past that might warrant such an extreme action, but you-”
Johnny shook his head.
“Don’t be so quick to dismiss it. Chrissie’s had a tough life, tougher than she probably ever told you about.” Charlie had shifted his position; he sat sideways facing the bar, one leg crossed over the other at the ankle.
Johnny watched him. “If you want a drink, Charlie, go ahead; don’t mind me.”
Charlie smiled. “Thanks, but I’m testing my will.”
“Chris says it’s nothing to do with willpower. That’s a mistake most people make about-” He shrugged.
Charlie was looking at the bar, shaking his head in a wondering way. “That’s Chrissie.”
And in a way it did sum her up; that really was Chrissie, who never rushed to judgment, never condemned out of hand, had an open mind and a great sense of fair play.
But she wasn’t soft, hadn’t that sticky sweet manner that one might expect to find in such a person. Chris could be sardonic and ironic, so that some people thought her too edgy. What a mistaken impression! What she had in abundance was patience. Like the way she treated Charlie. No, you could tell Chris anything and not be misunderstood or judged or told not to feel that way.
“What do you mean Chris had a tough life? Tough, how?”
“She had to put up with a lot. After her mother died, it pretty much fell to Chris to take charge, she being the oldest. I guess, though, there’s some good that comes of that kind of responsibility. Once you undertake it, you don’t forget it.” Charlie stared glumly into his glass.
There was a silence as Johnny thought Charlie must have been mourning the loss of a pint. After all, he depended on it, as alcoholics say, “like a friend, a best friend.” It was perfectly possible Charlie missed beer and whisky as much as Johnny missed Chris. He said, “She hadn’t been gone long; I mean, she’d only just taken things out of the oven.”
Johnny’s tone was so dejected that Charlie reached across the table and put a hand on the boy’s arm. “This sounds like hollow comfort, but I bet when we know what happened, after she comes back, we’ll be amazed we didn’t see it.”
“It’s like she just-vanished. As if there’d been some sleight of hand, a huge trick played,” Johnny said.
Charlie smiled. “Sleight of hand’s our stock-in-trade. Given what’s going on, you’d better have this.” He pulled the fake gun from his pocket and put it down on the table.
“I thought you said a friend needed it for his act.”
“I’ve got another.” Charlie flashed a smile. “Forget Chekhov.”
He had crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s on the lease. He had handed over a wad of money (in the form of a draft on his bank) and received the keys in return.
Melrose was again at the house he was free to inhabit for the next three months, happily without the estate agent following him about or Agatha erupting on his horizon. Tomorrow he would take back the hired car, jump aboard the train to London, from there to Northants, collect his Bentley and some clothes, and return and live here for three months, or longer, or less.
How fortunate he was to be rich. He only partly agreed with that glib saying that money can’t buy happiness. It certainly made misery a lot more bearable. Money was at the moment freedom to live here, or to live there, or to take a lease for three months and leave after only one.
But that did not answer the question, Why was he using his freedom in this way? He had wandered into the large living room and was standing now before one of the long windows looking out over the weedy garden. He wondered if he was coming up against a midlife crisis and this move was the first sign of it. No, he decided, midlife crises were not an option with him; he was too sanguine. He was simply overpowered by the melodramatic quality of this house and its situation. He certainly was given to regard himself in more melodramatic terms. It was quite fun, really, to picture himself standing on a shelf of rock, looking out over the swell of the waves folding over the rocks: Ever stood she, prospect impressed. He couldn’t get those lines out of his head.
He turned from the window in this smaller reception room and looked at the sheeted furniture, at its ghostly glimmer in what was fast becoming dusk. He moved over to an armchair, took hold of a corner of the sheet, flicked it off like a matador provoking a bull. He then went about removing the sheets from sofas and chairs, wondering where people put the laundry. At home, Ruthven and Martha took care of such things, made them disappear from sight (Melrose’s, at least) as if a party of elves had been at work while the house slept. Could he make it on his own? Perhaps he should advertise for a housekeeper. Yes, it would be good to have a housekeeper, not so much to keep house as to bring him up to speed on gossip. Although he would not have wanted anyone like Agatha’s char, Mrs. Oilings, he thought he could strike a happy medium between capable housekeeper and capable gossip.
He wondered where he should dump the sheets. He considered putting the kettle on (so nice to have all of this equipment furnished) but decided to take a long, long walk round the house before tea. It rather delighted him, too, that he could do his own tea and drink it in the living room or library with no other company than portraits and pictures of those absent.
He found himself trying to absorb what traces there were here of the lives of the Bletchleys. Maybe it was because the family depicted in those snapshots had been so beautiful-before the double tragedy-that he wished in some way he could join them.
Melrose’s memory of his own father was fitful, fluid and vague. He had not been terribly fond of him, nor had he greatly respected him. His feelings were all for his mother. The seventh Earl of Caverness had spent most of his time riding to hounds and only occasionally taking his seat in the House of Lords-with, as far as Melrose knew, no particular effect on the country or himself. He remembered a distant man, if not an absolutely cold one; Melrose had wondered, when he was old enough to wonder such things, how his mother, a very warm and loving woman, a woman who had these qualities in abundance, could be happy with him.
She had not been; she had been happy, but not with her husband. And knowing this had weighed Melrose down. He didn’t really know why.
Nicholas Grey. Melrose had deliberately distorted the image of Nicholas Grey, again without understanding exactly why. Even knowing who and what he was, Melrose still at times hated the man, saw him as an interloper in the Belgravia house. Would it have been easier to accept his mother’s affair if Grey had been a seducer, a rotter, and a layabout? And his mother a woman caught in his spell? Or was it simply that the real Nicholas Grey was none of these things but was instead the sort of man it would be difficult to live up to?
He had seen Grey several times in the Belgravia house, which Melrose had since sold. He had sold the house for that reason-it was where Nicholas Grey had come. The sale had taken place a few years after the solicitor had handed over a letter that his mother had directed be given to Melrose long enough after her death to give him time to get over the worst of it. His mother had been dead for five years when the lawyer had given him the letter. And he hadn’t gotten over it.
He returned to that letter time and again, reading it so often he had worn down the fold so the two parts barely hung together. Nicholas Grey was Irish (the letter said), and it was that which one could say killed him. He had died in Armagh in a skirmish with the IRA. He had himself at one time when he was younger been a member of it, until he finally couldn’t put up with what he felt were random and arbitrary assassinations. Grey himself had been a hot-head but not an anarchist. He was a man sublimely caught up in his cause and had the reputation of being a brilliant strategist, a matchless orator, and an inspiration to the men under him. Grey had disliked the aristocracy, not in theory but in fact; he had hated it for what it had become.
What Lady Marjorie, his mother, had done was to trade a fairly amiable and undemanding man born to wealth and leisure for one who it would be very hard for Melrose, his son, to live up to, a father who had stamped Melrose with a nearly impossible romanticism for which he could find little or no outlet.
He thought she had been wrong to tell him, and yet her motives, if clouded, had been good ones. His mind, he hoped, was large enough to allow for this. His own motives he felt were equally cloudy. He told himself that in relinquishing the title of eighth Earl of Caverness he was squaring things with his nominal father, the seventh earl. But he suspected what he was really doing was squaring things with Nicholas Grey, though he couldn’t say why.
He wondered if it was his vanity, rather than his heart, that had been bruised.
He would much rather weigh in as the real Melrose Plant than as the bogus Earl of Caverness.
She had said:
I make no apology for my behavior (which might strike you as arrogant and selfish), except insofar as you’re being made unhappy; I did not want you to read this until some years after my death-when you would be over the worst of it… There is so much of Nicholas in you, your looks, your moods, that it haunts me.
She was not telling him “to unburden myself and thereby place a heavier burden on you” but to fill in what she saw as a tremendous distance between what he, Melrose, really was and what he had to think he was, “gentleman, an aristocrat without a past-” Melrose still wondered what she meant here-
and an uncertain future, the Earls of Caverness having been unremarkable in their lives and legacies. They were perhaps what people think of when they think of the aristocracy. You do not fit this mold and never will, I think.
Even as a child you showed no interest in aristocratic trappings. You wanted to be a “plain old fellow” (your words) and go to the local comprehensive school. Your father, of course, wouldn’t hear of it; he was, he said, “scandalized” by the very notion.
Once you went missing for a whole day and we found you in Sidbury on a picket line demanding more government subsidies for the farmers. You carried a sign you had made yourself. Every word in it was misspelled except for “the,” “and,” and “Hell.” Your father was mortified.
I asked him if it was because of the spelling.
Melrose laughed. He always did, here.
You were always “organizing.” You organized the servants, the dogs, your friends, my clothes. The servants you said could all have a better time of it if they were on strike. More money, more time off. (Ruthven told me and with a straight face that there was something in what you said. It was one of the few times Ruthven tried to be witty.)
I don’t know what you told the dogs, but I did see you outside by the hydrangea bush, lecturing them. Their behavior, however, remained pretty much the same.
You organized your school friends, and all of you marched into the kitchen at school to complain about the sticky toffee pudding. You organized me, too: my luncheons, my Women’s Reading Club, my days in London, my clothes.
You always seemed to see a world of possibilities, things that needed changing, the sort of thing the aristocracy wanted to keep at bay. Change made us anxious and uncomfortable. “We’ve got to get organized, Mum. We’ve got to get organized.”
It could still catch him unawares, this letter, the concreteness of it, which made him live these scenes over again, or the sense of loss, washing across him like those waves at the bottom of the cliff. The letter answered some questions but opened up others: Why hadn’t she divorced her husband or, at least, gone off with Nicholas Grey? He remembered her as a very independent woman. Had she been stopped by her husband’s threat to keep Melrose? She had left these important issues unexamined.
Or perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps she felt that the “important issues” were exactly what she had written: Nicholas’s idealism, the sticky-toffee pud, the dogs being lectured, the sign with the misspelled words.
He must have been very important to her, even more than Nicholas Grey had been.
Melrose had all but forgotten the drab landscape at which he’d been looking; he had certainly forgotten the bunched sheets, but they were now doing service as a handkerchief he could wipe his eyes on.
Remember, remember.
Here he was, a gloomy person in an empty house looking out on gray cliffs and sea, wondering what he was doing here…
Just trying to get organized, Mum.
He took the pile of sheets into the big kitchen (getting closer, surely, to some meaningful laundry-disposal system). He deposited the sheets by a door that led down to some underworld he had no intention of venturing into unless Dante were with him. He would have made a hopeless detective, if a cellar could cause him such trepidation.
Turning to the making of tea, he took an old tin kettle from a shelf above the cooker, filled it, and set it over the gas flame. He watched it. Would a watched kettle ever boil? He decided not to subject it to this particular laboratory study and turned again to the shelves. Crockery abounded; he saw three tea-pots of various sizes. Cups ranged from stout white to slender floral ones. From a small market in town he had purchased the bare necessities (tea, milk, sugar, butter) and from the Woodbine Tearoom had bought several hot-cross buns.
When the kettle boiled, he poured water over the tea leaves and then arranged everything on a metal tray that he carried into the snuggery. This was the small library, with a view similar to the one above in the piano room (as he had christened it). It looked out over the broad-shouldered rock, the edge of the cliff, but had not that feeling of suspension above the rocks. If one were given to vertigo, the view from the piano room might present difficulties.
Melrose sipped his tea and ate his bun in perfect peace. How wonderful! Solitude even at Ardry End was hard to come by. Perhaps he was fit for the life of a hermit. Give up all of his worldly possessions and go live in a hut on a shelf of rock and watch the sunrise every morning. Up before the sun! What a dreadful idea; he shuddered.
He thought of the Bletchleys. He could empathize with them and their painful memories; what had happened in this house was too painful for them to continue here. And yet… memories could never be eradicated. Was it even possible that they gathered force from having been torn from a place one no longer came to?
He regretted selling the Belgravia house. He saw that gesture now for what it was: an act of revenge or, worse, spite. Punishing his mother and Nicholas Grey. His memories of Nicholas Grey were even more abundant or, at least, more finely wrought because now they couldn’t be diffused.
Melrose tried not to think of this Nicholas Grey-of heroism and courage and self-denial-preferring instead to picture him as the snake in the Eden grass, the betrayer of his father and seducer of his mother.
The trouble was, he could not love his father much because he always drew back from Melrose. This did not happen because his father knew the boy was not his son; Lady Marjorie would never have admitted this. Had his father known, she would have had to pay a high price; there would literally have been hell to pay. He would not have divorced her, no. That would have rewarded her behavior, for she could then have gone immediately to Grey.
What he realized now was that he had rescinded the titles not because it was the honorable thing to do but because he hadn’t wanted them. It would have been nice to believe that he felt like an impostor, unfair to the Caverness line and especially unfair to his father. He would have preferred to believe he was doing the honorable thing, only it wasn’t so. He just wanted to be rid of the Earl of Caverness and be, as his mother had written, “a plain old fellow.”
Melrose was seated at his regular table in the Drowned Man’s dining room, trying to stare down the dogs in the doorway, when Johnny Wells slapped through the swinging door of the kitchen with a jug of water and a basket of bread.
“Ah!” exclaimed Melrose. “We’ve looked for you at your various places of employment. That is to say, the Devon and Cornwall police looked.”
Johnny took a step back, wide-eyed. He still held the jug of water, slices of lemon floating on top like pale flowers. “Me? Why?”
“I’m glad you were gone. Police were called to a place-Lamorna Cove, you know it?” Johnny nodded, waiting. “A woman-not your aunt; not, I repeat, your Aunt Chris-was found dead, probably murdered. I was, as I said, extremely glad you weren’t here to be asked to look at the police photos taken at the scene.” Melrose went on to describe what Brenda Friel had said.
“Christ! I’m glad I wasn’t here, too.” He filled Melrose’s water glass and handed him the tasseled wine list. “I was in Penzance. My uncle lives there, and I thought he might know something.” Johnny shrugged. “He didn’t. I didn’t expect him to. I’d already rung him up once. I guess I just wanted someone to worry along with me. And you: you’re leaving, Mr. Pfinn says.”
There was that note of accusation in his tone over Melrose’s hurried-and irresponsible?-return to Northamptonshire. He was flattered to be included in those people Johnny chose to worry along with him, and said, “But I’ll be back in no time, within the next few days, as soon as I can pack up a few clothes and my car. I’ve rented Seabourne for three months.”
At this Johnny looked relieved. “Good. I’ll look for you, then.”
“I’ll be coming here on a fairly regular basis for dinner. I’m not much of a cook.” Melrose felt abashed at the truth of this and looked down at his napkin. Was he much of anything when it came to looking out for himself? He removed a card from his silver card case and wrote his telephone number on the back and held it out to Johnny. “If you hear anything about your aunt, give me a ring, will you? I’d truly like to know.”
“I will.” Johnny studied the card.
“This detective, Divisional Commander Macalvie, is head of homicide and is very, very smart. If anyone can get a lead on your aunt, he can.”
“But isn’t his time going to be taken up by this murder in Lamorna Cove?”
Before Melrose could respond, Pfinn stuck his head round the swinging door to the kitchen and motioned to Johnny.
“He doesn’t like me being friendly with guests. Do you know what you want?”
“Certainly. Same as last night. The cod and a salad.”
“Wine?”
Melrose opened the list, ran a practiced eye down the page (doubting that the Drowned Man could really be host to all of these wines), said, “the Puligny-Montrachet.”
“Right. Is your friend going with you?”
Friend? What friend? Oh, God-Agatha. Having been Agatha-free for the last twenty-four hours, he had managed to forget her. “You mean my aunt? Yes, I expect so, unless she’s joined the staff of Aspry and Aspry.”
Johnny laughed-not loud, not long-but a laugh nonetheless, before he left to get Melrose’s wine.
Melrose sighed. He did not fancy another BritRail experience with her. But then he brightened at the thought that he would be free of Agatha for three months!
Except he wouldn’t be.
Melrose could not absorb what she was saying. It was such freakish bad luck that he went blank. This was in the Woodbine the following day where morning coffee was the excuse for collective gossip. The talk was, of course, about Chris Wells’s sudden leave-taking. They avoided words such as “disappear” and “vanish,” feeling them too weighted with dread. “Up and gone” or “left without a word”-these were the phrases used, and they were bad enough.
The news had spread quickly; Chris Wells’s leaving was the most dramatic thing that had ever happened in Bletchley. Combine that with the murder in Lamorna Cove, and they had enough to talk about for months. The village was aghast-pleasurably so, as Melrose inferred from the buzz going on around him, talk as rich and spicy as the gingerbread and tea cakes.
Not, however, at the table where Melrose sat with Agatha, since death and disappearance took a back seat to anything befalling his aunt. She was saying, “The flat is quite a nice one and being let on a month-to-month lease, so it should suit me quite well.”
Melrose made no comment. His mouth felt as if it had just gotten a shot of morphine. But his lack of commentary didn’t bother Agatha.
“Anyway, it’s only a month, as I’m not sure how I’d take to the sea air, and besides I have much too much business to take care of in Long Pidd to permit me to stay away longer. I’m not like you; you’ve nothing whatever to keep you from stopping here. And I think it would be good for me to learn a trade. Esther is an excellent agent and will teach me the ropes.”
That what he had said jokingly to Johnny last night about Agatha and estate agents was coming even partly true made him want to laugh himself sick. Agatha, who couldn’t sell cod to a cat-Agatha, selling property?
“Since Mr. Jenks closed his Long Piddleton branch of the agency in Sidbury, there’s been a real gap in the Long Pidd offerings.” Jenks was the estate agent who had once had an office in Long Piddleton. “That building has been up for letting for ages.”
“That building, if you remember, is next door to Marshall Trueblood.”
As much as she loathed Marshall Trueblood, this announcement didn’t appear to dent her enthusiasm. “I needn’t see him; I’ll be working. And he spends half his day in the Jack and Hammer, so I shan’t be troubled with him.”
Melrose swallowed the taste of hemlock and tried to reason. “Agatha, nothing ever comes on the market in Long Piddleton. Why in God’s name do you imagine Mr. Jenks left?”
“Obviously, the man wasn’t very good at his job. There’s the Man with a Load of Mischief, for one example.”
“That’s been up for sale for donkey’s years. You’ll never sell that pub.”
Agatha ignored this. “There’s one of the almshouses. You know how popular listed properties are with Londoners. Long Pidd could do with some gentrification.”
“I also know Londoners would be living next to the Withersby lot. There’s gentrification for you!” Mrs. Withersby was the Jack and Hammer char and chief moocher.
“There’s Vivian’s place. She’s getting married, or have you forgotten?”
Melrose heaved a sigh deep enough to bring him out of a coma. “No, I haven’t forgotten. But you have, apparently. Vivian’s been about to get married for years. She’s not going to marry the count; surely that’s obvious. She had the cottage listed once several years ago when she must have been a little closer to marriage than she is now. Maybe she just likes an excuse to keep going to Venice.”
“This is just like you, Melrose. The glass is always half empty to you!”
For once, she was right. If he wanted to look at Agatha’s being in Bletchley for a month, he should remember it was only a month. And in Long Piddleton, instead of her turning up at Ardry End, she would be turning up at her workplace. That would certainly be a boon. Even if she tried to get him to buy the Man with a Load of Mischief, and she probably would.
So the glass-praise be-was half full!
“All I need to do now is return to Long Pidd and gather together a few things. Then we can motor back to Cornwall together.” She jammed up a tea cake and added a dollop of clotted cream.
The glass was half empty once more.
Property? An estate agent? Ouch!” Marshall Trueblood was so enthralled by Melrose’s Cornwall story he hadn’t noticed his pink Sobranie burning down to his fingers. He dropped the stub in an ashtray. He pulled the dark green handkerchief from its pocket and rubbed at his finger. Trueblood’s colors changed with the seasons. Today, he looked molten: dusky gold French-cuffed shirt, russet-hued silk wool jacket, pine-green tie speckled with fiery little leaves. He looked like autumn in flames.
“She probably just caught a London train,” said Diane Demorney. Then, as if this comment were too much exertion, she yawned. If a yawn could be called “elegant,” Diane’s was.
Melrose’s look was puzzled. “Who, Agatha?” Agatha-as-agent had been the last thing under discussion.
“No, this boy’s beloved auntie. Haven’t you been following your own story?”
“To London? What makes you think that?”
Diane looked at Melrose wide-eyed. “To shop, of course. To buy clothes. You can’t buy clothes in Cornwall, for heaven’s sakes.” This reminded Diane of her own, apparently, for she looked down at her white suit. Her clothes were the antithesis of Trueblood’s.
She always dressed in some combination of white and black. This further set off the contrast between her pearly skin and jet-black hair, which looked carved more than cut. The clothes were extremely expensive. So was the skin. So was the hair.
Diane’s gestures were elegance personified, thought Melrose. If only her brain would follow suit.
She said, “You’re making a mountain out of a mole-hole, Melrose.”
“Molehill,” said Melrose.
“Anyway, I’ll bet there are a hundred perfectly easy explanations for all this.”
“None of your hundred reasons will work because she didn’t tell her nephew she was leaving.”
Diane took a leisurely sip of her martini. “Good lord, can you imagine me alerting a nephew?”
“No, but I can imagine me alerting the vice squad,” said Trueblood.
Diane rinsed the olive in her martini and studied it as if checking its marinade status. “How frightfully unfunny, Marshall. My point is that the aunt would be sure to tell him-well, that’s his story.”
Frowning, Melrose asked, “Meaning?”
She cocked her head and raised a satiny eyebrow. “Well, for heaven’s sakes. Meaning it’s the nephew who’s telling you this. It’s he who says she’d never leave without letting him know. How can he be so sure?”
Melrose sat back, a mite surprised. There were times when Diane demonstrated a sort of nuanced thinking. Anyway, it was hard to look at her in the same light after her heroics in saving his life. For her, bored heroics, but heroics nonetheless.
“Perhaps she went to London to shop; perhaps she went to Paris with a lover.” Diane tended to measure others’ intentions or actions against her own.
“This lad, John, is very responsible, very reliable, and-”
“Very intense.” Diane finished for him. “Too much so for his own good, it sounds like.”
The door to the Jack and Hammer was blown open by wind and the entrance of Vivian Rivington. Without saying hello, without removing her coat or sitting down, she said, “Melrose. I just met Agatha in the street and she says you’re going back to Cornwall.” As she said this she sat down, still with her coat on.
“For a few months, yes, that’s right.”
“Months?” Vivian stared at him as if the body snatchers had come and carted off the real Melrose Plant and put this thing of caprice in his place. “You can’t be serious!”
Diane said, “Ridiculous, isn’t it? There’s no reasoning with him when he gets like this.”
“Like what? I don’t ‘get like’ anything.”
Diane went on. “I’ve told him his stars are not up to it.”
“You make it sound as if they’re too decrepit to go with me to Cornwall.”
Diane was still entertaining readers of the Sidbury paper with her astrology column, largely because she knew nothing about astrology and was therefore free to invent. “You know what I mean.” Diane ate her olive.
“No, I don’t, Diane. Nobody understands what you mean in that column. ‘Get a life’ is hardly using the stars to predict-”
Vivian fairly shouted, “But you can’t go to Cornwall!”
They all looked at her and her deeply blushing face.
Surprised by this outburst, Melrose said, “I can’t?”
Now Vivian was momentarily tongue-tied. Finally she said, “Because Franco is coming here and we’re getting married!” Having apparently frightened herself with her own outburst, she looked round the table to see if their various expressions confirmed the fact she’d said it.
No one spoke. Even the normally unflappable Diane looked at Vivian open-mouthed.
When they did speak, it was all at once.
“Count Dracula-”
“Good God! When did this-?”
“If you’re going to London for your gown-”
Trueblood lit a jade green Sobranie and said, “Tell me, Viv-Viv, when was all this decided?”
“Ah… not long ago.”
Melrose said, “How soon is this to be? When is Count Drac-” Vivian’s look at him was as blood-curdling as anything Count Dracula could scare up. “I mean, when is Giopinno arriving? Dear God, this is something!” exclaimed Melrose.
“He’s coming in… a few days. Maybe a week…” She studied her hands.
“Ah,” said Trueblood. “And exactly when does this wedding take place?” He smiled, wolfishly.
Vivian looked at him with suspicion and reflected. Her blushes were replaced by a kind of death’s-head gray. “The exact date hasn’t been set yet. But it’ll be either this month or next. September or October,” she added, in case they hadn’t got their months in order.
Do you remember another September…? Whatever the words, the song played sadly in Melrose’s head, all humor fleeing him in an instant. He said, “But of course I’ll return for the wedding. Cornwall isn’t halfway round the world.”
“Return?” She said it dejectedly, as if it were as rueful a word as “remember.” “Return? I would think you wouldn’t even go.” Vivian regarded Melrose sadly. “It’s the last you may see of me single.”
“Yes, well…” Melrose hardly knew how to respond to this.
Vivian rose. She had still not removed her camel-hair coat, the caramel color blending beautifully with the browns and deep reds of her autumnal hair.
“I’m certainly thunderstruck,” said Diane, in a thoroughly unthunderstruck tone. Still, it must be so, for she’d forgotten her glass, which sat empty before her; even the olive had gone. Thunderstruck, indeed.
“Well, I’ve got to go and… do things.” Vivian turned and walked out of the pub. Her expression was not a happy one.
“Well. Well,” said Melrose. “I’d say this calls for another round.”
“It has done for the last ten minutes,” said Diane, blowing thin columns of smoke through her nostrils.
Melrose called to Dick Scroggs, still reading the Sidbury paper-his favorite was the astrology column-and made a circular gesture with his hand indicating drinks for all.
Scroggs looked at him as if Melrose were calling on him to work out a message in semaphore.
“It never occurred to me Vivian would actually do it,” said Melrose, morosely.
Trueblood said, “Uh-huh.”
“Marry that smarmy Italian? After all this time? Not only that, but to do it here! That’s a turnup for the books!”
Diane said, “I expect she’ll have to live in Venice where she won’t understand a word. They speak Italian there.”
“It’s their second language,” said Trueblood. “Do you mean you actually believe that story?”
Melrose and Diane stared at him.
“She was making it up.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” Melrose said uncertainly.
Trueblood shook his head at his friends’ gullibility. “Listen, old bean, if she were really going to marry Dracula, we’d have heard long before this. She would have wanted plenty of time to think up excuses not to do it. She’d also want to allow us plenty of time to work out a plan to prevent her.”
“Excuses?” Diane looked at Trueblood in disbelief. “Why would she need excuses? Good lord, it’s easier just to divorce someone than to think up reasons for doing it. I should know; I’ve done it often enough. Dick!” She called over to Scroggs. “Are we ever going to get our drinks here?”
Melrose said, “I still don’t get it. Why would Vivian make it all up?”
Impatient with Melrose’s obtuseness, Trueblood said, “It’s obvious. She wants to keep you here.”
“A wedding in a few weeks would hardly keep me here for three months.”
“Oh, don’t be such a twit, Melrose,” said Diane. “There’s nothing rational in all of this-thank you,” she said to Dick Scroggs, who was setting fresh drinks before them.
When Dick left, Trueblood said, “Go on. Tell us more about this Cornwall murder.”
“There’s no more to tell. Someone in Bletchley thought she recognized her. I don’t think the victim will be hard to trace.”
“What was she wearing?” Trust Diane to sweep away extraneous matter and go directly to the heart of the matter.
“I don’t know. Macalvie didn’t tell me. But in the police photos it looked like a suit, amber or ecru, maybe-God help me! I’m getting as bad as you, Diane.”
“Who is he, anyway? Macalvie, I mean,” asked Trueblood. “I think he called here, to the pub once, looking for Jury.”
“He’s very high up in the Devon and Cornwall police. Jury’s known him for years. They worked cases together. Or as much together as one can ever get with Mr. Macalvie. He’s brilliant, though.”
“Speaking of Richard Jury-” said Trueblood.
“He’s in Northern Ireland.”
Diane looked absolutely scandalized, as if they were watching the Pope kiss a pig. “God, Melrose! What is he doing there?”
“I don’t know the particulars. New Scotland Yard hasn’t ever put me on a need-to-know footing.”
“Did Sergeant Wiggins go with him?”
“No. Macalvie’s trying to get in touch with him, though.”
“I knew it,” said Diane. “I warned him.”
Melrose frowned. “Wiggins?”
“No, no. Richard Jury.”
“His horoscope playing up again, is it?”
“His Venus is in a peculiar position in relation to Mars.” She tapped the ash from her cigarette into the metal tray.
“Whose side is he on?” asked Trueblood. “The IRA? The Provs? Catholics? Protestants? Irish? English?”
“The side of the dead, I imagine. He’s not helping the RUC, it’s just that something happened there that’s connected with something in London. At least, I think.”
Diane was still worrying over the fashion sense of the dead-and-gone in Cornwall. “You don’t know if it was a designer suit she wore, then?”
“What? You mean the unfortunate victim in Lamorna?”
“Yes. If it was, you know, a Lacroix, it would certainly narrow the field.”
“Narrow it to where? London? Paris? Rome?”
Diane’s patience was being tried. “Not only there. There are some quite fashionable shops in Edinburgh. And the Home Counties. One would have to broaden the base a bit.”
Melrose shook his head. “Whatever the base is, you’re way off it, love.”
“Actually, old sweat, she isn’t,” said Trueblood.
“Are we breaking now for an Armani commercial?”
“If the woman was wearing Ferre or perhaps Sonia Rykiel, the garment could almost certainly be traced. You know, through the place where she bought it; or, if someone else bought it, then through that person.”
Melrose hated it when Diane made a sensible suggestion.
“I wouldn’t mind knowing someone who’d buy me Ferre,” she said, and returned to the matter of Chris Wells. “Now, she sounds Cornwall through and through; what’s in her closet is probably cardigans and plaid things and Barbour knockoffs from Marks and Sparks. Anyway, the question of her outfit doesn’t really apply, does it? Are you sure she didn’t just go off on her own?”
“No,” said Melrose. “I’m fairly sure she didn’t. From what I’ve heard about her, she isn’t a capricious person.”
“Then you think she was abducted? Or lured away somehow?”
Melrose nodded.
Diane sipped her martini, tapped her cigarette into the ashtray, and said, “I expect one has to make some sort of arrangement.”
Surrey,” said Macalvie. He had called Ardry End to tell him that they’d ID’d the dead woman. She was Sada Colthorp, former wife of Rodney Colthorp, Lord Mead. He lived in Surrey. “For God’s sakes, that’s only a hop, skip, and jump from Northants.”
“I don’t know how you hopped, skipped, and jumped as a lad-if you ever were; you were probably just a little policeman-but my hopping and skipping did not cover a hundred miles. That’s how far Surrey is from here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s hardly fifty.”
Melrose knew he’d do whatever Macalvie asked him to, but it was more fun arguing about it first. Besides, he felt he deserved to let Macalvie know how much he was being put out. “Anyway, you said you’d already talked to Colthorp when he came to identify the body. So what good would it do for me to talk to him?” He knew the answer to that, too. For the same reason Jury was always asking him to step into the role of eighth earl.
“Because aristocrats have that in common-the aristocracy.”
“I stopped being one years ago. I’ve forgotten how.”
“Oh, come on. It’s like riding a bike. You never forget.”
Melrose sighed. “I would if people let me.”
“Colthorp collects cars. Vintage autos. That’s why you want to see him.”
“I do?”
“Sure. That old Bentley of yours. Isn’t that an antique by now?”
“It may not be, but I am. Let me get this straight: it’s because I too have an interest in vintage automobiles that I want to see this Lord Mead-what’s his name?”
“Rodney. Rodney Colthorp.”
“Right. It’s really his cars I’m interested in, and he’d be damned interested in my Bentley. Do you realize I know absolutely nothing about cars, including mine?” Knowing Macalvie couldn’t care less, Melrose sighed and got out his pen. “So, which part of Surrey?”
As Macalvie told him, Melrose had the happy thought that if Surrey was not close to Northants, it was certainly close to London and, therefore, to Bethnal Green. He smiled.
Lord Ardry.” Rodney Colthorp, Lord Mead, put out his hand and looked at Melrose with an enthusiasm that was flattering. He had answered the door himself, which testified to his being long on humility or short of cash. Staff did not include a full-time door opener, or, if it did, Rodney Colthorp had given the man a good deal of elbow room. Ruthven would be scandalized.
Lord Mead couldn’t resist looking past Melrose at the latter’s Bentley, one of the prewar models, or at least Melrose believed it was. It had been in the family for ages. He wondered if this man was astute enough to tell that Melrose-and his Bentley-were flying false colors. But all Rodney Colthorp said was, “What a beautiful automobile,” as he pulled at his gray mustache, a nervous, contemplative gesture. Then, as if he had forgotten Melrose was there, said, “Oh, sorry to keep you standing on my stoop. Come in, come in.”
Stoop was not the word Melrose would have chosen to describe the area at the top of the two dozen marble steps he had ascended to reach the door. The house was on a much grander scale than was Ardry End, which it resembled.
Perhaps more glorious than the house was the expansive garden and lawn at the back, dotted here and there with sculptures, a gazebo, and a folly or two. It stretched as far as the eye could see. It was both windswept and sheltered by internal hedges, with broad brick paths and gate piers. There were bold tall grasses backed by young pines, box hedges, and long vistas that drew the eye to the steeple of a church somewhere. One path between low walls made its convoluted way, vanishing somewhere in the distance.
“Is that path there for walkers?”
“No. It’s my butterfly corridor. I’m trying to keep species from disappearing completely and help them migrate. The Adonis blue is one. It’s simply beautiful.”
Rodney Colthorp said this while they were comfortably seated in one of the several drawing rooms, this one furnished more informally than the larger room they’d passed whose furnishings were dark, heavy, and priceless.
Melrose drank Lord Mead’s hundred-year-old Scotch and felt expansive.
Colthorp leaned his head back on his chair and sent both words and pipe smoke toward the ceiling. In a sort of meditation on the merits of aristocracy, he said, “Of course, you know this as well as I… but there are certain rituals, silly as they might seem to others, which should be retained or the whole damned boiling will go down. I know a lot of it seems like claptrap: the hunt, for instance. We do get a lot of these hunt saboteurs knocking about, being damned rude. I don’t ride myself, but I can understand the appeal of it. What I fail to understand is why the great hue and cry of these animal liberationists doesn’t concentrate on the real horrors of experimentation and slaughterhouses. I can only think the-” The cell phone, whose resting place must have slipped Colthorp’s mind, was finally rescued from a spot between cushion and arm of the overstuffed chair. He excused himself and pulled up the wobbly antenna. The call was not to his liking, apparently, for he began it with a huge sigh, followed by a series of grunts, growing more and more impatient over the thirty seconds or so of the caller’s comments. “No. No, Dennis, I’ve told you time and again I do not want to speculate, certainly not in a diamond mine in South Africa.” He shook his head, as if the caller could see how much he didn’t want shares in a diamond mine, and shoved down the antenna, his expression registering extreme impatience.
Melrose smiled. “Your investment banker?” He wondered what such people did, actually.
“No. My son. He’s the youngest, he’s twenty-two. He’s always on to me about the market. Day trading, futures, selling short, selling long-I haven’t the least idea what the boy’s talking about. He himself does quite well by it, has done for years. But that doesn’t mean I’d be as lucky. Now. Where did you say you were from?”
“My home’s in a village near Northampton, but at the moment I’m renting a house in Cornwall. Place called Bletchley.” Melrose waited while the name hit home. It took five seconds. Colthorp stopped in the act of tamping down his pipe.
“But that’s where Sada-you know about the woman who was murdered near Lamorna Cove?”
“Yes, yes indeed. Quite a stir that’s causing.”
“Police from Devon and Cornwall have been around here, and I’ve had to fly to Penzance to identify the body.”
Melrose feigned surprise. “Police here? Why? Did you know her?”
“I was married to her.”
Melrose managed to look appropriately shocked.
Colthorp went on. “Poor girl. Sada wasn’t a very substantial person. I don’t mean anything was wrong with her mind; rather, she had so little substance. Marrying her was-well, the purest folly. Looking back, and I’ve done a deal of that, I can’t remember why I thought it a good idea at the time.”
“Who can? Not I, certainly. Hindsight would save us all, wouldn’t it?” Melrose smiled sympathetically and held back from asking questions about Sada. On the contrary, he turned the conversation away from her before Colthorp began to wonder exactly why Melrose was here. “I’d love to see your cars.” Once around the grounds, as it were, Melrose was sure he could find occasion to reintroduce the subject of the dead wife into the conversation. Colthorp certainly seemed willing to talk about her.
“Yes, of course,” said Colthorp. “That’s what you came for, after all. We’ll go out to the garage. Sorry I rattled on.”
“Not at all,” Melrose was quick to put in. “How could you not speak of it, after all?”
Colthorp rose, set down his glass. “A bad business.” He shook his head. “A very bad business. Sada might have been troublesome, but lord knows she didn’t ever deserve this.”
Troublesome. Melrose made a note of that.
From the house they walked across the circular drive to a ten-car garage, although garage seemed the wrong word to describe such an elegant building, with its high windows gathering the late-afternoon sun and dashing it across the highly polished bonnets of the cars sitting inside. Melrose knew nothing about automobiles, other than how to drive them. He was, though, fairly certain that the first of them was one of the old Fords, a Model T, its black metal polished to within an inch of its life. This at least he could identify.
“Ah, yes. The old Tin Lizzie. They drove it to the top of Pike’s Peak, if you can believe it. Those others”-Colthorp’s gesture took in the next two cars-“there you’ve got an Overland Touring Car and a 1912 Cadillac Touring Car. Something, aren’t they?”
Melrose fussed over them, hardly knowing what the fuss-which consisted of mumbled words of praise, peering inside, and noting the appointments-was about. He commented on the myriad once-felt-to-be “luxuries” of the cars, the turquoise and blue varnishes, the wonderful scent of old cracked leather, the big wheels, the running boards. “Marvelous, marvelous.”
They moved on to a cherry-red Lamborghini. “That’s Dennis’s. And that one farther along, there”-Dennis’s father pointed out a black Porsche-“it’s the latest model, one of their XK-Eights, quite a fabulous car. Fabulous price, too.”
Melrose bet he was looking at something in the neighborhood of 75,000 pounds. Fabulous indeed.
Colthorp went on. “He’s young; he goes for that slick Italian stuff. Myself, I much prefer the more substantial ones, the touring cars, that kind of thing, or that Wolseley farther along.” He nodded toward a dark green car, its body of a graceful roundness that had long since fled the automobile scene. “It was Dennis who put me onto the Cadillac, courtesy of an American friend of his, ’bout-oh, ten or eleven years ago.”
Melrose calculated: if Dennis was twenty-two today, that would have made him twelve ten years ago. He could not help commenting on this.
Lord Mead laughed. “Oh, the friend himself wasn’t a child. No, no, he was a grown man. But Dennis knew him, right enough. Dennis always has had a lot of unlikely friends-for a boy, that is. A boy back then, I mean.” Colthorp chewed at the gray mustache and seemed to be ruminating on this point, as if he too were wondering about Dennis’s unlikely friends. But what he said was, “He never could like Sada, though.”
That didn’t surprise Melrose, not with inheritances and changing of wills in the bargain. He ventured a guess here, trying to keep it as tasteful as possible. “I expect that’s true of most children when a new mother-in-law comes along.”
“Loss of love and money, you mean? Oh, Dennis is quite sure of my love, and”-here he made a noise both of amusement and dismissal-“he doesn’t care a fig for my money.”
Melrose thought this rather disingenuous, considering the Lamborghini sitting there. “He has expensive tastes, though.”
“Mmm? Oh, I didn’t say he hadn’t. It’s his money bought that and the Porsche.” Colthorp chuckled. “For all I know, Dennis has more than I. He invests. Or did I tell you? That’s what the phone call earlier was about. No, Dennis didn’t trust Sada, didn’t trust the old friends out of her past who came here. Sleazy film folk, a few of them. When I met Sada, she was doing the occasional bit part in bad films. Might even have been a pornographic film or two, Dennis found out. One friend was a film producer who came here several times. Funny chap. What was his name? Bolt, I think. Bit of a wide lad, that one. Untrustworthy, bad influence. Good car, though. Dennis tried to buy it. Jaguar-mmm, can’t recall the model. Sporty little car, two-seater, I think.” He meditated on this for a moment and then got back to his ex-wife. “Sada had been down on her luck, as they say, when we met.” He sighed. “She wasn’t all that interested in automobiles, for some reason.”
Melrose smiled. “Hardly a suitable companion, then.”
Colthorp laughed. “Time we nipped over to that car of yours for a good look. Hack through the underbrush and lead the way!”
If there was a way to lead-considering the exquisitely kept lawns and gardens-Melrose led it. He hated the Bentley’s intervening on mention of the “troublesome” Sada. But as Colthorp seemed really to want to talk about her, the subject would come up again.
When he came abreast of the old Bentley, Lord Mead shook his head as if words couldn’t cover the subject. For once, Melrose was glad that Ruthven (or Momaday, when the spirit moved his grounds-keeper) kept the car polished to mirror brightness.
Colthorp walked twice around it before settling into staring at the car, tweeded arms folded across his chest. As Melrose had done earlier, Colthorp uttered appreciative words; unlike Melrose, they could be understood. “Where did you ever get it?”
“My father did, actually. It was the year before he died. He rather liked cars himself.” He remembered it now, the way his father had really been smitten with the car, how he had been like a teenager with his first ride. This was one of Melrose’s few fond memories. “He really did love this one.”
“And no wonder. Well, if you ever want to sell up, you know who to call.”
This might have sounded a little vulgar, had Colthorp not been so intensely drawn to the old car.
Now he rubbed his hands and said, “We’re due for a drink, I’d say.”
They retraced their steps to the house. Overhead, the whirring buzz of a helicopter stirred the eucalyptus and tall grasses. Colthorp looked up, muttered, “Bloody noisy old thing.”
Melrose had not thought the house that near to Heathrow.
Whisky in hand, they settled back into the same seats they had left, and Colthorp picked up the thread of the conversation about Sada. “We separated-oh, five years ago; she managed to go through the money I settled on her and in a year she was back, wanting more. I expect I should have told the police about that, but you know, it slips my mind most of the time. She actually threatened to sell the story to the tabloids. About me and… well, never mind, it’s not all that juicy a story. I must say, it made me queasy in my stomach to think she’d do something like that. Dennis threw her out with a ‘publish-and-be-damned’ attitude. He’s quite forthright, Dennis is.”
Melrose smiled. “Sounds it. But her trying to blackmail you, that must’ve been extremely painful.”
“It was, it was,” answered Colthorp, tossing back the rest of his whisky and rising to get another. When he motioned to Melrose’s glass, Melrose raised his and shook his head. “So she was on, you might say, her last legs?”
Colthorp sat himself, dug into the cushions at his back, and said, “Dennis put a private detective on her.”
Here was a treat! How he wished the omnipresent yet absent Dennis were with them now.
“Found out that most of those films were not just bad B films, but bad pornographic B films. Not that that’s something the Dirty Squad might cut you a look for, but she had form on a number of counts. Sada, it’s funny to think, was more impressed by her social standing when we were married than she was by the money. She adored being Lady Mead and being given place to when we entered somebody’s dining room. Funny how the frills and furbelows of aristocratic doings are lusted after by those who want to bring it down. Not that Sada wanted to, oh, no. It fit her to a ‘T’ even if she didn’t fit it. No, Sada’s nose would be much more out of joint than mine if that bill doing away with hereditary peers ever passed.”
This was interrupted by the cell phone’s brring again, insistent as an insect. Again, Lord Mead scooped it up from underneath the cushions, answered, listened, and sighed. “No. No. I do not want shares in a racehorse. Where he came in at Newmarket Saturday doesn’t interest me in the least… Dennis, for God’s sake, do not keep bothering me with your fly-by-night silver mines and horses and all the rest. Anyway, I’ve company here, good-bye.”
Colthorp was about to sign off when he brought the phone back to his mouth and said, “And for God’s sakes, get that helicopter out of my butterfly corridor!”
He had never known the sun to glare in London, but in this early evening it did, as if trying to deliver the knockout punch to the encroaching dusk. Coming out of it and into the museum evoked in Melrose a feeling of being submerged, dark and cool.
He had been once before to the Museum of Childhood when he’d come months ago to take Bea to dinner. That little restaurant-what was it? Perhaps she’d like to eat there again. Dotrice, that was it, the name of the restaurant. French, very classy, and she’d ordered steak and frites and talked about her “blue period.” Not her feelings but her painting. He had been surprised to discover just how good she was when he’d seen her paintings hanging on a wall of a Mayfair gallery.
Beatrice Slocum, he was told by a kindly elderly lady in rimless glasses, had gone out to the chemist’s but would be soon back. Melrose had the impression that this woman was someone who would be especially good with children. Indeed, she reminded him of a nurse he’d had as a small child…
There, he was doing it again, remembering. And he seemed prepared to be reminded of anything by anyone these days. He wondered if this lady truly was like his nurse, Miss Prescott. Nurses to their graves have gone… He gave his head a sharp little shake, almost afraid of himself and his penchant for nostalgia. It had to stop.
Melrose concentrated on the displays. The doll-houses were the first thing one saw upon entering. He’d thought before how charming they were, the bits of furniture reflecting the taste of a particular time, the tiny appointments, the little figures going about their business of housekeeping. The child in the photographs, the Bletchleys’ dead daughter, would have loved this. Quickly he banished that thought from his mind and walked up to the second level.
Here were the trains and games. Watching the long train move sluggishly around a track was a grave-looking boy of perhaps seven or eight. Melrose almost saw in his back the shape of the boy who’d been here over a year ago when he’d visited it. Nostalgia reinforced by déjà vu, that’s all he needed. He was simply too suggestible.
But, no, this was a different boy, watching as the train stopped between green fields, one with a cow cropping the grass, the other with a couple of horses, taking their ease at this ambiguous hour.
The boy exclaimed, “Hey! It’s s’posed t’stop at the station”-(pronounced by him “stye-tion”). “So wot’s wrong wi’ it? I put in twenty p, me. Twenty p oney got it ’alfway round.”
Perhaps he thought Melrose a member of the museum staff. Or did children merely turn to the nearest grown-up to demand recompense for their losses?
Melrose said, “Let’s get it going again, then,” as he slotted a twenty-p coin into the slot. The train stuttered to a fresh beginning and started up. They watched it in silence, snaking its way past the little station, past crossings and through tunnels, and finally giving out again beside the field with the one cow.
“It ain’t supposed t’stop there, mister.” He threw Melrose a baleful glance, as if things had been jolly good before the coming of this adult.
“Well, it ain’t my fault, is it? Come on, let’s see the peep shows.”
The boy sighed. A peep show was a poor second to a train ride, but it was a free poor second, so the boy followed Melrose.
They were side by side and with their heads lowered, looking through the peepholes at the intricate interiors of the boxes, when Melrose heard a voice behind him.
“Oughtn’t to be showing that child the peep shows, it might give him ideas.”
Melrose turned. “Bea!” he exclaimed. She looked to him, at the moment, quite beautiful. The hair that had been dyed an awful eggplant purple when he’d first seen it was its own self again, browny-gold and warm like buttered toast. There was something of solace in it.
The boy, seeing what must have appeared to him an especially boring interlude between two adults, walked away, back over to the train.
Melrose saw the boy’s back was turned and, in one of the few ungallant acts of his life, took Bea by the shoulders, pushed her back against the row of boxes, and kissed her unmercifully. She did not protest.
Not until the fun was over, that is. When he finally set her free, she was all indignation. “Never would’ve thought it. Fancy you!”
“Which you do, I hope.”
“Never mind. Fancy doing that in a public place, and you an earl!”
“I’m not. And why do I find your outrage unconvincing?”
She shrugged. “Because you’re so pleased with yourself, I expect.”
He denied this, but she disregarded his denial as she walked away. Turning and seeing he still stood there, she said, impatiently, “Well, come on. I’m off.”
Melrose followed. “Where to?”
“Home. I’ve got some steak and potatoes fritz.”
Melrose was entranced. Home. “Not ‘fritz,’ it’s frites.”
Bea ran down the wide stairs. “Don’t know why you bother with me, someone clever as you.”
Melrose smiled. He knew why.
“Home” was a roomy flat up three flights of stairs. No elevator. He would gladly have driven a Tin Lizzie up Pike’s Peak had Beatrice Slocum’s flat been at the top of it. Once inside, she flicked on the light and he flicked it off.
“There you go ag-”
He kissed her. It was a very long and lush kiss, and she joined in, after scant resistance.
“So,” he said, separating only long enough to say it, “where’re the potatoes frites?”
“In the bedroom.”
“Mm.”
This time she kissed him. “With the steak.”
Her arms were still wrapped around him and her chin on his shoulder when he said, “Do you ever think of marriage?”
“Me? Sure. A lot.” She rolled away and looked up at the ceiling, sighing. “We’re not good marriage material, us.”
He turned to look at her. “No, I expect ‘us’ aren’t, not if you look at us like bolts of cloth to be cut and stitched.” After another moment’s reflection, he said, “I’m pretty rich.”
“Uh-huh.” Peacefully, she yawned.
Melrose turned to look at her as she yawned again and did something blubbery with her lips. “You look like a fish.”
“Ta, very much. That’ll really get your proposal up and running.”
“Who said I was proposing?”
Bea spread her hand to catch a beam of moonlight. “What are you trying to sell, then, if not yourself?”
Melrose reached up and took her hand and kept it. “I’m doing an inventory.”
“Of what?” She yawned, loudly.
“Myself, my things.”
“Sure.”
“It’s true. I try to do one every year. It’s quite extensive. For instance, down in my wine cellar, I have a whole case of a Premier Cru from Puligny-Montrachet. And that’s just for starters.”
She lay in silence, turning this over. She said, “Down in my basement cubicle I have a case of Malvern water, fifty cans of mixed nuts, and a giant cactus. Just for starters.”
He looked at her sideways, surreptitiously. She’d found some gum-not, he hoped, a plug from under the end table. She was chewing raucously: crack crack crack. “I could never marry a woman who did that in my ear all day.”
“Good thing, ’cause I could never marry a man who’s so snobby.”
This brought Melrose up and resting on his arm. “A snob. Me?”
“Um.”
“Well, I’m not.” He fell back on the bed again. “Haven’t we strayed from the point?”
“We? You’re the one strayed; I was just listening to you go down your wine list. You should’ve been one of them blokes like at Dotrice’s.”
Dotrice was her favorite restaurant, French and expensive. “The sommelier? Thanks. Anyway, we were talking about marriage-in a general, very hypothetical way.”
She did not reply. Her eyes were closed.
“Are you asleep?”
“No, but I’m considering it.”
She was just trying to irritate him. “What are you thinking?”
“About this painting I’m stuck on.”
Not terribly complimentary that here he was maybe proposing and all she thought about was work, work, work. However, he’d humor her. “Exactly what are you stuck on?”
“The mouth. It’s a portrait.”
“Who of?”
“A friend. Just a bloke I know. But I know a lot of blokes. Friends-like, you know.”
This friendly bloke-ness irritated him, as he knew the bloke himself would.
“Come on, get up”-she was sitting up herself now, pulling at his hand-“and I’ll show you.”
“I don’t want to get up.”
“Suit yourself.” She was out of bed and putting on a man’s white shirt that she kept on a hook behind the door as if she were used to wearing it. Melrose frowned. Given the size, the shirt must belong to a very big man. Now she was out the door. “Hell,” he said to himself and fell back against the pillow. He heard her rummaging around in the living room. Crash. Clang. Bloody hell. Was she so enmeshed in her art she couldn’t leave it behind for one night?
Then she was back lugging a large painting, which he was quite prepared to dislike. She turned it around for him to see and his mouth opened in astonishment. “My God. It’s me.” He could scarcely believe it.
“Clever of you to recognize it.” She was chewing gum again and trying not to smile.
In the painting he was seated in a leather wing chair, but leaning forward a little as if talking to an invisible companion. The viewer might have been that companion. The eyes were a gritty green that stonewalled any attempt to glamorize him, just as she’d kept the firelight from sparking his hair.
“My God, Bea, how on earth did you do this without me?”
“I guess I wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t what?”
“Without you.” She grinned and chewed. Crack.