He had driven back to Northants, packed up the Bentley, and made the long drive to Bletchley (sans Agatha, who had blessedly decided to remain in Long Piddleton a bit longer). Melrose kept his eye out for Chick’nKings along the A-road, but saw only Little Chefs.
He parked the car in the garage, which sat some distance from the house and which might once have been a caretaker’s cottage, although the size of the property did not seem to warrant an extra building.
Melrose had not brought much, only a couple of largish suitcases with clothes in one, books and CDs in the other, the CDs mostly Mozart and Lou Reed. He had not noticed a stereo system in the house, but he could always go to Penzance and buy one. Maybe he had skinhead inclinations, this love of loud brash music, but probably not, since it was all Lou Reed (or, of course, Mozart); he imagined the skinhead population was far less discriminating.
He lugged the suitcases through the door and set them down. He saw that in the room to the right, drawing room or living room, someone had started a thriving fire whose flames shot straight up the chimney and whose light thrust portentous shadows across the walls.
Who had done this, Esther Laburnum? He doubted it, but she had mentioned a caretaker or gardener; he seemed a more likely person. The fire was such a welcoming touch, a stranger attending to one’s needs.
There was central heating; still, some of the rooms were so large, so cavernous, that the fire gave not only warmth and light but comfort. He took the suitcase of clothes upstairs and disposed of its contents in several dresser drawers in the careless manner that one might do when one hadn’t a Ruthven around to stack perfectly ironed shirts and handkerchiefs in drawers. Melrose did not think of himself as an aesthete, but he admired Ruthven’s aestheticism. Ruthven (and his wife, Martha) established an order that went ticking along, hardly ever a beat missed. One got used to it; one got spoiled, too. Melrose dumped a dozen pairs of socks in one of the drawers where Ruthven would have tucked them in like babies in bassinets. Then he went back downstairs.
He commenced another wander through the house, allowing himself a much slower pace than last time. He went from drawing room to dining room, thence to the library and the little room the agent called a snug and isn’t it dear?-a locution that made Melrose wince. Along the way, he studied each of the silver-framed photographs he had but glanced at during his first visit. He looked longest at the one of the Bletchley family gathered on the dock near the boat. They were a handsome group. The small sharp face of the elder Bletchley (Mr. Chick’nKing) jutted out from under a brimmed cap that left it half in shadow. The face struck Melrose as shrewd. How happy the two children looked. Losing a child must bankrupt one emotionally. After that loss washed over one, would there be any feeling left at all? A little, perhaps; perhaps enough to be going on with. And in the Bletchley case, it was not just death but death cloaked in mystery. His thoughts went to places where wholesale wipeouts were a daily occurrence, an hourly anguish. It was unimaginable to the observer, whose mind could not possibly encompass the depths of sorrow into which a mother or father might sink.
He was overtaken, as he looked around, by a sense of the familiar. Initially, the house had reminded him of Ardry End; now, it did even more. It was not as large and hadn’t as many rooms, but the feeling was the same. Was he one of those people who, upon venturing into something new, are actually rein-venting something old? A person so attached to the past that whatever path he takes leads back to it, rather like fresh footsteps on a course of already trammeled ground?
He went from the small library to the winding staircase and upward. These rooms he had scarcely glanced at. He looked in on each of five bedrooms gathered round the stairwell: two on each side and one at the front of the house. The bedroom at the front had its own bathroom; the two on each side shared bathrooms. He had stowed his belongings in the first bedroom to the left of the stairs because it gave the best view of the sea, a very dramatic view. Melodramatic, he should say; it depended on who was doing the looking. Thus far in his Cornwall experience, things seemed to be shaping up with melodrama to spare.
The bedrooms were fundamentally the same except for a variation in furnishings and color. He had chosen one with a thick four-poster bed and worn leather easy chair, which he had pulled over to the window and set beside it a glass ashtray on a bronze stand. He designated this room as a smoking room.
The other bedrooms did not yield anything in particular in keeping with his mawkish mood, but upstairs as well as down he was struck by the rooms’ readiness to receive visitors. Satin quilts and counter-panes; books on night tables. (By his own bed, volumes that leaned toward rigorous self-improvement: Emerson, Thoreau, and The One-Minute Manager, whose advice he was sure he should follow and equally sure that the lessons in the first two would shine in print but not in action. Really, these Americans could be so self-involved.)
In the piano room (which continued to fascinate) he was impressed anew by the sense that someone had left it just a moment ago. Bletchley-if it had been he who had last used it-might have only a few minutes ago inked in the notes on this score resting on the piano stand. Melrose wondered about him, wondered what the deaths of his children had done to his music. He wondered if the composing was a comfort. He stood by the casement windows and watched the sun going down. The tops of the clouds looked wet with light; the waves were edged in silver.
The position of the windows, the way they seemed to overhang the rocks so that one was looking directly down at the sea, made it, of course, impossible to see what was on the cliff directly beneath him. It had hidden the woman down there from his gaze until she moved on to a spot where the side window, the west-facing window, revealed her.
Melrose was dumbstruck. He had been so much in the company of ghosts, or at least had entertained ghostly thoughts, that a human presence now seemed unreal. It had started to rain since he’d returned, and he found himself looking down through a rain like floating gauze at the crown of this stranger’s light hair. She was wearing a fawn raincoat. He turned the fixture of the casement window, rolling it open. He called, “Hello!”
The woman looked behind her, seeing nothing.
“Up here!” Melrose shouted.
Then she craned her head upward, one hand tented over her eyes.
Melrose recognized her as the woman in the photographs, the mother of the two drowned children.
Please come in,” said Melrose, finding her still outside, waiting.
Stepping into the kitchen, she introduced herself as Karen Bletchley and added, “I’ve been seeing Esther Laburnum about the house. You’re Mr. Plant.”
“I am indeed. Are you very wet? Let me have your coat.”
She thanked him as she removed her raincoat and afterward ran her hands through her hair, shaking it a bit, getting out the raindrops. Her expression, which Melrose imagined she meant to make light and transparent, was instead grave and opaque. The smile she mustered was wintry. So were the eyes, their sadness seeming to spill over like tears, but she did not cry. She looked hurt enough to cry, though, as if Melrose had delivered a blow. The look seemed permanently stamped on her face.
He said, “I’m just going to make some tea. You look as if you could do with a cup.”
“I surely could. Thank you.”
“There’s a fire in the library-I mean the smaller one, the one you call a snug. Why don’t you go in and I’ll be along?”
It showed her acceptance of his place in the house- he was now the one living there-that she did not try to take over the tea preparation but was content to sit and wait. She was not a fusser.
He got the tray ready, using the good china, the cream-colored Beleek that always struck him as too delicate to use, as vaporous as breath. When he entered the library, she was looking at the books, replacing one and taking out another.
“I hope you don’t mind?”
“But of course not. They’re your books.”
“Still.” The one she held, she laid on the table as she sat down across from him.
The two easy chairs were drawn up to the small table as if sharing tea were their exclusive purpose. He raised the pot. “Shall I be Mother?”
She laughed. “By all means. I’ve always loved that expression. It’s so antiquated.”
For a fraction of a moment, Melrose could have kicked himself, remembering that the word “mother” would flood her with memories. But she seemed too sensible to go looking for unexploded bombs at her feet. Her eyes moved here and there, taking in the library’s books and furnishings as if it were she rather than he who was the prospective tenant.
“Where have you been living since you left?” He offered her the plate of biscuits he had tumbled from a fresh box he’d bought.
She took one and bit down before she said, “London. We have a house there, too. And one in Majorca. But this house, this house…” She shook her head as her eyes focused on the framed photographs. She took up the one of the two children and herself. “I expect Esther Laburnum told you…”
Melrose leaned toward her across the tea tray. He said, “I’m terribly, terribly sorry. I have no children, so I won’t say I can imagine how you feel. I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine the well of sorrow this opens up in you, but it must be bottomless.”
Karen Bletchley looked at him, looked at him deeply, her gray eyes turned on him full force so there could be no mistaking that this was a person barely able to draw back from the precipice she had literally stood on an hour ago. That the feelings she had for her dead children would never, ever, be eased by the passage of time. She had started in to taste her tea, but the cup trembled too much and she replaced it in the saucer. Her hand seemed unable to let the teacup go, as if the very air had taken on a Beleek fragility and might crack if she moved.
She shook her head. “But it’s been four years, after all. I should-”
“No, you shouldn’t, and no, it hasn’t. It was only yesterday.”
She sat back then and picked up her cup with a firmer hand. She drank the tea, set the cup down again. “Thanks for saying that. Truly, thanks. I seem to be surrounded by people who tell me either time will take care of the pain, or that I shouldn’t dwell on it, or not to be morbid. Time does nothing, at least it hasn’t up to now.”
“It doesn’t apply. If you remember it just as clearly, why wouldn’t you feel it just as much? It’s hardly a comfort to be told you shouldn’t feel it.” Melrose poured out more tea for both of them.
Accepting the fresh cup, Karen Bletchley settled now in the chair as if taking comfort in it and sipped the tea. After a long silence, she began the story. “I don’t know why Noah and Esmé went out. When I left sometime around eight o’clock, they were in bed, as usual. Mrs. Hayter, our cook, sometimes took care of the children when we were gone, or we got a sitter in. Mrs. Hayter was beside herself when I came back. Poor woman, she blamed herself for their leaving the house.” She fell silent, coughed, and went on. “Mrs. Hayter said she’d heard a sort of cry, and that’s what woke her up. She got into her robe, found her electric torch, and went downstairs; her room’s on the second floor. It’s really more of a flat I fixed up for her so she’d have more privacy. She came down and there was no one here. She couldn’t understand that and wondered if she’d dreamt the voices. She went to Noah’s room, found he was gone, and then to Esmé’s. She was gone too. The woman was in a panic, looking in every room up and down, until finally she went outside. At that point she said she was terrified, just terrified. Of course, she would be.
“The sea was very rough that night and there was a blowing rain, the sort where sounds get lost on the wind. She thought she heard crying but couldn’t be sure and couldn’t determine the direction the sound came from. The last place outside-the last place she wanted to look was over the cliff’s edge. A combination of vertigo and fear kept her from it until she’d searched the grounds as well as she could. But she finally did, she said, and saw them. Down there in their bathrobes, side by side, a little curled up even, as if they were in bed asleep. Waves washed over them; the tide had come in. They drowned. She knew they were dead. She knew it.”
Karen paused, shook her head. “She was afraid we’d think she hadn’t done everything she could in not going down the stone stairs, she said. But she couldn’t, she was too terrified. Then she called the police; I came back first, and later Daniel. I can tell you this, though, I can tell you this.”
She had a way of saying things twice that had the effect of incantation, as if she might charm answers out of the dreadful night’s events. Melrose leaned forward.
“The children meant almost as much to Mrs. Hayter as they did to us. It would have taken colossal fear for her not to go down to them where they lay. Imagine her fright.” Karen stopped.
“And the police?” Melrose prompted.
“Were baffled. It’s odd, you know, to see that look on the face of a policeman.” Here she turned from seeking images in the fire to look at Melrose again, and smiled a little. “If the police hadn’t arrived before we did, probably there’d be two more bodies fallen down those steps. I tried to get down but they wouldn’t let me. That was just before the ambulance attendants brought the-brought the children up. It was hard maneuvering the stretchers-” She stopped, took a sip of lukewarm tea. Then she said, “There’s something horrible about all of this.” When Melrose opened his mouth to comment, she shook her head. “No, not just Noah and Esmé’s deaths, but the circumstances, the reasons. They couldn’t have fallen or been pushed from the top; there was no damage like that to their bodies. Police leaned toward its being an accident, yet they couldn’t understand why two little children would go out voluntarily in their night-clothes to clamber down those stone stairs. It made no sense. The only thing I could imagine was their trying to get to the boat. We keep a boat tied up down there to get us to the sailboat, farther out.
“This huge, unanswered question hangs over me. I can’t stop wanting to know.” She sat back. She picked up the book she had taken from the shelves. Poor Harry was the title. “Noah’s favorite.”
She handed it across to Melrose as if it could help him understand or explain the whole dreadful business. As if at least he could contribute a modicum of wisdom, or a fresh vantage point, or a new answer. “Poor Harry,” he said, smiling and going through the pages, stopping to look at one or another of the illustrations, which pictured a round little boy in a variety of tight spots. He looked up. “Harry was the fall guy for poor Noah?”
Her laugh was genuine; she appeared pleased that he’d got this much. “A broken cup, a trampled rose-bush, a torn place in a jacket sleeve. ‘It was poor Harry, Mum, that did it.’ Oh, yes, we were awash in poor Harry’s escapades.”
Melrose smiled and handed back the book.
She went on. “Daniel really couldn’t stand living in this house afterwards. He didn’t want these constant reminders of the children. He did try, but he had finally to leave. The London house was easier, not so many memories.”
Melrose nodded toward the displays of photographs. “You left everything behind, even these pictures.”
She let her eyes wander over them again. “I know. It’s because-I wanted to keep the house as it was when they were here. I wanted it to be familiar to them.” She shrugged and looked away. “I don’t expect you believe in”-another shrug-“ghosts, do you?” This was said in an offhand conversational manner. With her eyes trained on something past him-desk or window-she said, “I’m just casting about. How about séances?”
When he laughed, she smiled. He said, “You want me to believe in something of the paranormal.” Melrose drew in a little, turned thoughtful. “It’s odd, though. I could almost say, ‘Funny you should ask.’ When I first came into your house I was immediately put in mind of an old film which I must have seen on late-night television years ago-are you sure this house has never been used as a film set? No, I expect not; it’s cheaper simply to use what’s near to hand. Anyway, the winding staircase, the double door to the living room, and the piano room-at least that’s what I call it-are so much like a house in a film from the forties or fifties. The Uninvited is the name of it. It’s perfectly sappy, the story and the whoosh-ing special effects: doors thrown open by unseen hands, a young lady named Stella with a dreadful British accent-the actress was American, I think-always on her uppers, hearing things, seeing things, things floating about rooms cold as ice. Anyway, I spent a few lovely moments wondering if the house was haunted and, if so”-he shrugged-“why so?” He smiled.
So did she. “Nothing as far as I know has ever happened. Of course the place hasn’t been lived in for years except by a couple of-decorators, I think it was.”
“Ah! The Decorators.”
She leaned back, looking comfortable now. “Anyway, I’m glad you haven’t a closed mind to this sort of thing.”
He raised his eyebrows. “In case-?”
“In case, that’s right.” She looked at the window.
“It’s dark. My lord, I’ve been here ages.” She started to gather her things up.
“Where are you going?”
“Into the village. I’ll stay overnight. I can get a room at the Drowned Man.”
Melrose said, “I don’t know that Mr. Pfinn would thank you for requesting one.”
“I do remember he had the reputation of being a bit hard to get along with.”
“Why he wants a line of work that forces him to deal with the public, I can’t imagine. Of course, he has five dogs to back him up in any negotiation with guests; still, the dogs are friendly enough. It’s just that they’re always with one; they strike me as being preternaturally interested in a guest’s comings and goings. They attach themselves to one. Listen: why don’t you stay here?”
“Here?” The suggestion seemed to take her breath away. It was also clear she was pleased by the invitation. “This is very kind of you, but-”
“No, it’s no trouble. It’s also the most sensible thing to do, since I want to ask you about something, or tell you something, and I need time to talk about it. I don’t know if there are sheets on the other beds, but there’s plenty of linen-well, you know that. And that’s the only chore. That and helping me cook dinner. I’ve brought a mountain of groceries in, things I really like-potato-y things-and fish.”
“Potato-y things? What did you find in the potato line that isn’t potatoes?”
“Well, they’re all potatoes, strictly speaking. Only different colors and different sizes. I love potatoes. I love mashed spuds, but one doesn’t feel comfortable requesting them in Daphne’s.”
She laughed. “I see. We live very near Daphne’s; we live right off Pont Street. When you come to London sometime, we’ll be happy to have dinner there with you. I’ll insist on mashed spuds.”
“With lumps in them.”
She laughed again. “That might be more than Daphne can bear. But you must still have dinner with us. You’d like Daniel; he’s awfully nice.”
“I’d like that,” said Melrose. “Then it’s agreed: You’ll stay the night here and we’ll divide up the cooking chores. The potatoes will be mine, so they’ll have lumps. I don’t like potatoes beaten to within an inch of their lives, as most people do. You can do the fish. I have Dover sole, and the fishmonger told me the very best way to cook it is to grill it with a little butter and salt and pepper and nothing else. He was determined on that point: nothing else.”
“I can manage that, certainly the nothing-else part.”
“Now we come to the salad. I got a lot of salad stuff. I got a wedge of Stilton and one of bleu cheese with a thought to making bleu cheese dressing.”
“You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?”
“Possibly I was expecting you. Now, I remember having a particular bleu cheese dressing, probably in another life, for I only came across it once, which was thick and smooth as velvet, not the kind you get with the dribs and drabs of cheese in it; no, this was magnificently smooth. I have no idea what ingredients to use.”
“I do. I think I know just what you mean.”
“Good! Then why don’t you check the beds out and I’ll go in the kitchen and put on a pot to boil.”
The kitchen had everything; it was the kitchen of a serious cook. Copper-bottomed pots and kettles of every size hung on a rack suspended above the butcher-block table; there were an exemplary and massive cooker and a refrigerator at a subzero temperature that would have satisfied Byrd and his men; there were tiers of herbs and spices.
Melrose dumped one bag of potatoes-new potatoes, he thought-into a colander and turned on the water. He was not totally ignorant of food preparation techniques from his rare visits to his kitchen and Martha, his cook. He knew he was supposed to clean the potatoes, but he did wonder if he was supposed to cut out all of the tiny eyes. They were not at all disfiguring. He thought, If I were a new potato, would I prefer my eyes removed before boiling? No. Satisfied with that answer, he set about scrubbing them.
While he performed this lowly task, he thought about Karen Bletchley and the unceasing sadness that must have been her lot for these four years. While he was thinking this, she appeared in the kitchen doorway to say that she’d found the sheets and made the bed.
“Then that,” said Melrose, dropping a potato in the simmering water, “calls for a drink.”
They sat down in the places they had occupied before, with whisky instead of tea, to continue the story.
Having lighted up cigarettes, she said, or started to say, “What did you want-”
Melrose interrupted. “You said there was something horrible in all this, apart from what happened to your children.”
“Well-” She seemed uncertain of going on. “The children told me, perhaps a month or so before this happened-it was this time of year, in September-that more than once somebody would stop to talk to them. I mean somebody taking a walk in the woods. They loved to play out there.” She nodded to the wood to the left of the house. “It was fun for playing hiding games, you know, and for fantasizing. This person, or persons, came upon them in the woods. A man, a ‘nice man,’ they said. And, once, a ‘nice lady.’ ” Karen sipped her drink. “I didn’t always pay the strictest attention to what they said because they invented so much; Noah and Esmé were always pretending; they had a number of imaginary playmates. And tourists like to walk in those woods, too.”
Melrose was thoughtful. “This Mrs. Hayter. She’s reliable?”
“I’ve never had reason to think she’s not. Believe me, I asked myself that question many times. But why wouldn’t she tell the truth?”
“Perhaps to make it appear that she wasn’t here alone, that other people were involved. It could even have been you and your husband. The police must have questioned you pretty thoroughly. It’s the parents who immediately come under suspicion.”
“That’s dreadful.” She looked away, toward the window.
“Yes, but it happens all too often. Yesterday I read in the paper an account of a mother whose boyfriend didn’t want her child around. The mother first fed the boy barbiturates to knock him out before she drowned him in the bathtub.”
In dismay, Karen shook her head. “No.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “You said you had something to tell me.”
“It’s rather strange. Do you know a woman in the village named Chris Wells?”
“Chris? Of course. She owns the Woodbine tea place.”
“Her nephew-”
“Johnny?”
Melrose nodded. “Says she’s disappeared.”
“What?”
“He pretty much exhausted every place she might have gone and reason for going there.”
Karen shook her head again in disbelief. “Did he try Bletchley Hall? Chris does a lot of volunteer work there. But when did this happen?”
“Before I went to Northamptonshire to collect my gear. So it’s been over a week. Clearly, the boy’s right: she’s disappeared. And there’s something else. Perhaps you’ve already heard about the murder in Lamorna Cove.”
“Murder?” She sat forward, eyes wide. “My God, you mean Chris-?”
“No, no. A woman named Sada Colthorp.”
“Lamorna. I’ve been there; it’s not much, just a few cottages and a pub and a little café operated for tourists. And a hotel, I think. Lamorna Cove’s popular with tourists; it’s quite lovely.”
“This Sada Colthorp was murdered at the same time Chris Wells disappeared.”
Karen looked at him. “Police think there’s some connection?”
“I don’t know what they think.” He changed the subject. “You mentioned Bletchley Hall. It’s owned by your father-in-law?”
“Daniel’s father.”
“The elder Mr. Bletchley.”
“Morris, his name is. He seems to prefer Moe. He bought the place and donated it to the village, by way of a trust. He gave it his name, as he does everything. Except for Chick’nKing. I suppose even he couldn’t see ‘Chick’nBletchley.’ He lives at the Hall. That does not mean he’s dying. Far from it. Having told everyone he knows how to live, he’s now telling them how to die.”
There seemed to be no rancor in her tone. Only amusement, a half-remembered smile.
Melrose smiled too. “Domineering.”
“You’ve no idea. Can you imagine choosing to live there?” She made a sweeping gesture with her arm, taking in the whole room. “This wonderful house is his. He could live here or anywhere. The man’s a billionaire. That fast-food chain; I can’t begin to estimate how much it’s worth. And he’s got a large investment in real estate. I can’t comprehend it: living at Bletchley Hall among the dying.”
“Perhaps,” said Melrose, reflecting, “he’s overwhelmed by the fear of death.”
She’d been about to sip her whisky; her hand stopped in midair. “Moe? He’s not afraid of anything. And if he were of that, I’d think he’d steer clear of a hospice, to say the least.”
“Not necessarily. Someone with business genius might think he could master anything, including death, by meeting it head on. You know, to gain some sort of control. We don’t think about death nearly enough. We run from it.”
She frowned. “Isn’t that rather morbid?”
Melrose was disappointed. The “isn’t-that-morbid response” was what he’d expect of a mind cluttered with clichés. It was also begging the question. “No, it isn’t.” Inwardly he sighed. No wonder he had problems with women if he were going to contradict them at every turn. Anyway, Karen Bletchley was a woman he shouldn’t be considering as a “problemswith-women” candidate. Melrose lighted her cigarette, then returned to the subject of Lamorna Cove and Sada Colthorp. “Does she sound at all familiar to you? Her maiden name was Sada May. Or Sadie, she seemed to have called herself. I mean, you wouldn’t have known her, would you?”
“I? Why should I have known her?”
The question had been innocent enough. Melrose thought she was being defensive. “Only because she’s from Lamorna, apparently.”
The silence now was not particularly companionable. She wore the look of one who, having accepted an invitation, was wondering how to renege on it. Melrose felt not so much uncomfortable as sad, the sadness attendant on something at best ephemeral, unnamed or unnameable, finally slipping away. A little too heartily, Melrose slapped the arms of his chair and said as he rose, “Time to get to the spuds. They’ll be mush, but who cares, since they’ll be mashed anyway.”
Her frozen look melted a bit as she said, “The sole won’t take long. By the time you get the lumps in the potatoes, it’ll be done.”
It was a shot at the former easy exchange that didn’t quite make it.
At dinner, they both pronounced the sole good enough to pass the inspection of the fishmonger and the potatoes properly lumpy and the wine exquisite. Bletchley had a wine cellar which Melrose hadn’t known about until he apologized for the Nouveau Beaujolais, which he claimed could hardly be considered “nouveau.” Karen asked, why, if he didn’t like it, had he bought it?
“Because the Oddbins fellow was so thick in his praise of it; I didn’t want to seem to be doubting him.”
She laughed. “Good lord, but you are a pushover. The fishmonger, the wine merchant.”
It was then she had told him about the wine cellar and invited him to choose his own. They went down together. He had found half a dozen bottles of Puligny-Montrachet, a Premier Cru, and his favorite Meursault. He commented upon her husband’s excellent taste.
“More his father’s. Though it’s not necessarily his knowledge of wine. It’s more Morris’s insistence that if it costs a lot, it’s good.”
Melrose was dusting off the bottle. “It’s true, though, isn’t it? At least when it comes to wine.”
Her tone was a trifle acidic. “You sound like someone Morris would like.”
“Oh? But then I must sound like someone you wouldn’t.”
Having drunk a bottle and a half of the Montrachet between them, Melrose said, “Who was the investigating officer when the… accident occurred?” He reproached himself for the coldness of the question.
Karen flinched, but she gave it some thought. “I’m afraid I don’t remember their names. I do remember, though, the high-ranking one was very… intense. A chief inspector or superintendent, he was. I remember his eyes. It wasn’t just that they were very blue, they were a burning blue. I could almost see the tiny flame. I also remember he made me feel that his priorities were mine.”
“They were. You’re talking about Commander Macalvie. Another thing about him: He never gives up.”
Brian Macalvie breathed police work. For him it was like the advertisements of carpenters and handymen: “No job too small.” A divisional commander, Macalvie was one of the highest-ranking officers in Devon and Cornwall. Yet he would happily chase a speeding car and hand out a ticket.
He was demanding-how could he not be?-perhaps too much so, for the people under him often applied for transfers. As far as Melrose was concerned, if these lesser lights couldn’t tell the difference between arrogance and commitment, maybe the CID was well shut of them.
Melrose was speaking to Macalvie now; he’d called him after Karen had left the next morning to report on his visit with Rodney Colthorp.
“Bolt. Simon Bolt. There was an investigation-” Macalvie paused, musing. “Years back he lived in Lamorna. Which is where I am now. You’ll be interested in the crime scene. Come along.”
Melrose was taken aback by this invitation. Although he had always gotten on with Macalvie, it was usually when Jury was on the case. Macalvie disliked amateurs, but then he disliked most professionals, too.
It must be instinct.
His earlier question still unanswered about the death of the Bletchley children, he asked it again: “Couldn’t they have been-say-drowned in their own bathwater and then moved to the rocks?”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The little kids were holding hands.”
Macalvie hung up.
Johnny Wells sat in the kitchen of the Woodbine, taking some small comfort in the familiar aromas of baking scones and freshly brewed coffee, and taking comfort also in the familiar movements of Brenda Friel.
Brenda stopped her hard beating of a pastry dough that already shone in the light like satin and looked at him. “Sweetheart, you ought not to worry so much. I know Chris will be back.”
How? he wanted to ask her. But she was only trying to lift his spirits, so he said nothing about Chris. Instead, he said, “What about that murdered woman in Lamorna?”
Brenda’s eyes widened. “You aren’t thinking that has anything to do with Chris?”
He sat studying the worn place on the vinyl floor and went back to sampling one of the Sweet Ladies. “These are terrific; no wonder people like them. What’s in the meringues?” He thought he should be generous enough to make Brenda feel her Sweet Ladies had gotten his mind off Chris.
She laughed. “I don’t give out my recipes, sweetheart. People have been trying to get this one out of me for years. The scones are done; you can take them right on the cookie sheet as proof positive that they’re fresh-made. You know how particular Morris Bletchley is.”
Johnny smiled for the first time that day, thinking about Moe Bletchley.
They bent to get under the tape that cordoned off this section of the footpath, then walked on wet leaves to the place where the body had been found. Macalvie hunkered down and looked with such intensity, the body might still be there.
“What are you looking for?”
Macalvie grunted. “Rest of this.” He held up the fragment of black plastic he’d retrieved from his forensics man, Fleming, who’d exacted a promise from Macalvie that he return it.
“What is it?” Melrose turned it over and over.
“Probably a piece off the top of the plastic box that holds a tape. You know, video tapes.”
“Oh.” He waited for Macalvie to continue, but he didn’t.
Macalvie stayed in this kneeling position, motionless, for what seemed a long time. The place didn’t lend itself to measured time. All that could be heard was the low soughing of the waves below them and the slight rustle of the trees around them.
Macalvie rose and looked behind them in the direction of the house where they’d left the car. A large front garden had been converted to hard standing to accommodate several cars.
“Who lives there?” asked Melrose.
“No one, now. Sada Colthorp’s friend Simon Bolt used to. So there’s a connection with our murdered lady. With some checking-well, say more of a lucky break I had running into a detective in London who works Vice. He told me Bolt was in the filmmaking business. Producer, director, scriptwriter. He managed to do all of it because he wasn’t making Titanic. Or anything else that might be shown in your local cinema. He made zip films: a lot of blood, S and M, that sort of stuff. His sideline was pornography-though it all sounds pornographic to me. They tried to get him on vice charges but couldn’t make it stick. Anyway, that’s who the house belonged to.” He frowned. Even Macalvie’s frown was intense, as if more were stored in his expression than was common to a frown. He divested himself of what was superficial, shallow or oversimple. Everything not case-specific was burned away, and that included the suppression of his Scots accent and Glaswegian upbringing. He seemed to be getting down to cases and roots.
“This where the tape comes in?”
“Probably.”
Melrose looked at the trammeled ground where police had worked. What was it Rodney Colthorp had said about Bolt? Bit of a wide lad, that one.
The usual frisson of apprehension ran like a ripple through the crowd when Macalvie walked in the bar of the Lamorna Wink, time stopping for a second so the scene looked like a frieze rather than a room with flesh-and-blood people.
Melrose got the drinks. Some of Macalvie’s fame had rubbed off on him, for the regulars watched him walk up to the bar and signal the barmaid. They had taken a table in the corner near the fireplace, though even the corner offered little escape from the inquisitive eyes of the customers. Macalvie, however, didn’t appear to notice his celebrity as he went up to the jukebox, slotted in some coins, and punched up a tune. He was still wearing his coat even though the fire poured out heat as if it came from a pitcher.
One might suppose the man was always cold, as some people are. But Melrose felt as if Macalvie were instead always leaving. He was surprised by the deep anxiety this provoked in him, as if a support kept threatening to give way. In this respect, Macalvie was different from Richard Jury; Jury seemed cloaked in a sort of melancholy, yet always seemed to leave some of his comfort behind; when Macalvie left, consolation left with him. And it seemed to have something to do with that coat which he never took off.
Macalvie said, “There was so much lying going on in that house, I didn’t know who not to believe.” Arms crossed on the table and looking at his drink, he went on. “We got there a few minutes after midnight, the ambulance before us. I told them not to take the bodies up before the ME and I looked at them. It was raining this time and the steps were like glass, bloody slippery. The little kids were lying on their stomachs. The bodies didn’t sink or get carried away because they got tangled up in the rope that anchored the boat. They were side by side, their faces turned toward each other as if they’d been talking; probably they had, before-well, whatever happened, happened. They were wearing cotton pajamas, hers white, his blue, and flannel robes that would have been some protection against the cold but not much. Slippers, too. Two of them-the slippers-had been washed away by the choppy water. Their feet weren’t any bigger than the palm of my hand.” His elbow propped on the table, he held up a hand for Melrose to judge. “They were holding hands.”
He stopped at this image, which was clearly disconcerting, as if he had no choice but to reenter the scene.
“So what had happened? Did they go down the stairs because they wanted to get into the boat? I didn’t believe that. Why did they, then? They must’ve been told to go down the stairs. Or been told-something. A trick? A treasure? No one in that house had any idea of what they were up to.
“Karen Bletchley got back to the house a half hour after I got there. There’d been trouble getting hold of her, the housekeeper told me, because the people she was having dinner with in St. Ives weren’t on the telephone. Hard to believe, in this day and age, with that kind of money. But maybe that’s what the well-heeled call roughing it. Daniel, the father, was purportedly in Penzance on business. He didn’t get home until an hour later.”
“Purportedly?”
“When a man goes out at nine o’clock at night, it might be for a beer or smokes, but I have trouble thinking it’s business. I also doubted it was business when he stalled on producing the name of this business associate. I assumed it was a woman but didn’t want to make a point of it then. He was too cut up, remorseful, and-as the Irish say-destroyed. The sort of man who blames himself because he lacks hindsight.”
“But later?”
“Did I pursue this line of inquiry?” Macalvie smiled and took another swallow. “Of course. Finally, he admitted it but refused to give the name of the woman. Bletchley’s stubborn, believe me. Even when I threatened him with obstruction, he refused. Anyway, Dan Bletchley was away when he was needed and the man probably never will get over it. To be gone when you know you were desperately needed: I know what that’s like. I felt sorry for him. All of his life he’s going to hold himself responsible.”
They sat, whiskies in hand, the main source of light and heat coming from the fireplace. They had drawn as close as they could to it.
“Karen Bletchley was hysterical at first. It took two WPCs to hold her back from the clifftop, to keep her from going down those stone steps. I told the ME to sedate her, just enough so I could talk to her.” He looked up when Melrose made a sound of disapproval. “You think cops are heartless? Give somebody twenty-four hours to think things over, and you won’t get a proper statement. Too much will be suppressed, not necessarily intentionally.”
Melrose said he was going to get refills. While he stood at the bar, waiting for the fresh drinks, he wondered if Karen Bletchley had told Macalvie the same things she’d told him.
“What did she tell you?” he asked when he’d returned to the table.
“After the initial questions had been answered about where she was”-Macalvie accepted his refilled glass from Melrose-“she asked did I believe in evil spirits? In hauntings? In premonitory occurrences? ‘It’s not what I believe, it’s what you do,’ I said. She said there was something wrong at Seabourne-which I was only too willing to believe, given what happened, but not that ghosts were responsible.” Macalvie paused for a drink of beer.
“She went on. ‘I thought at first I was simply too imaginative. Or reading into behavior things that didn’t exist. Furniture moved around in their school-room, for instance. When I asked them why’d they done it, they said, “We didn’t,” and tittered. Noah and Esmé, are-were-very close.’ Then she said, ‘Every once in a while I’d see some new bit of clothing, like a handkerchief or a bracelet they claimed to have found in the woods. One day I was watching them and saw them talking to a strange man. At least I thought it was; I couldn’t see very well into the trees. I was rather frightened. It all seemed so-menacing. And one day I saw a figure in dark clothes and dark hair across the pond farther along. A woman was standing there. Were these people putting them up to their tricks? The children did silly little things, like putting a tiny tree frog in Mrs. Hayter’s apron pocket. The poor woman had a fit! But when I asked them, they just denied it and looked… sly. That’s the only way I can describe it-sly. It was almost like a campaign to make us uncomfortable.’ ”
Melrose studied his glass and thought about Karen Bletchley, there in the library, but did not interrupt.
“I asked what her husband’s response was to all of this. She didn’t answer for a moment, but finally said that Daniel brushed it aside as a series of childish pranks. ‘Good lord, Karen, a tree frog in someone’s pocket and you think we’re in the grip of evil spirits!’
“It’s Daniel Bletchley’s father, Morris Bletchley, who actually owns Seabourne. He went to live at the Hall-a kind of nursing home, which he also owns-not long after the death of the kids. They were his grandchildren. At the time it happened he was living with them. He’s used to controlling things. He’s apparently a hell of a good businessman, given the success he has with that chicken franchise.
“I’m mentioning this only because now he was confronted with an action-and its horrible consequences-that was out of his control. He said the least of any of them and seemed to be affected most. At least more than his daughter-in-law-despite the hysterics. Anyway, that was my impression.”
The proprietress was calling time.
Macalvie said, “You hardly ever hear that anymore, do you, what with the new licensing laws.”
Melrose gathered up their empty glasses. “Is it too late?”
“No, but I’m in the chair this round.”
Melrose made a face and took the glasses. The woman behind the bar pursed her lips but got the drinks. As he stood there, Melrose looked back at Macalvie and thought he look stranded in the room now emptying.
He went back and set the drinks down. “This case never closed for you, did it?”
Macalvie was lighting another cigarette. “They don’t, my cases.” He stared at the fire, smoked his cigarette.
“But this one, especially. You’ve been reporting conversations verbatim. How could you do that after four years?”
“My notes. I’ve read through them so often, trying to work out what I missed, you could see light through the seams of the pages they’re written on. That’s why.”
Melrose thought of the letter his mother had written. “Why do you think you missed something?”
Macalvie cut him a look. “Because it hasn’t been solved, so I must’ve.” Ash fell from the cigarette he wasn’t attending to. He said then, “Let me tell you something: I was a policeman in Glasgow for several years, started out as a PC but wanted to be a detective. That was my great dream, to be a detective.” He looked over at Melrose. “I bet you never thought I’d have a great dream, right?”
“You don’t strike me as a dreamer.”
Macalvie smiled and went on. “I got to be a DI pretty quickly, mostly because of a particular case I worked. Pretty big case, it was. In a shootout, the suspect’s daughter got caught in the crossfire. She was eleven or twelve. It wasn’t my gun that did it but he thought it was, and held me responsible because I was the one who’d been plaguing him all along.
“Anyway, I was transferred to Kirkcudbright. I guess to get the heat off. It was bad, the pressure. You can imagine there weren’t a hell of a lot of homicides in Kirkcudbright, which is a kind of artists’ haven; I guess artistic jealousy is about the top rung on their crime ladder.
“But I met someone. She was a painter and a beautiful woman. I moved in with her. She had a daughter, Cassie, who was six years old. Maggie, my girl, always used to tell me how much safer she felt with a copper in the house, how she could sleep easier. Then one night Cassie was taken right out of her bed and out of the house.”
“God, how awful!”
“We kept expecting a phone call, a ransom demand, some word. But there was no word. Nada. Nil. Nothing for two weeks. Maggie was nearly crazy, forced into this limbo of not knowing. So was I.
“Then I got a message slipped into the paper we had delivered. I was to go to an old cottage in the Fleet Valley. There was a map, a route I was to follow. Eventually I found the place. It was a derelict cottage, birds nesting in the thatch, windowpanes broken. The most intense silence; I’ve never known such silence. It smelled of death. I moved very slowly, had my gun ready. I thought it was a trap. Why it might have been a trap, I had no idea. I found Cassie in the kitchen. She was propped up in a chair, shot in the chest. On the table was a piece of paper, and on it was written, How does it feel? And then I knew. The bastard had plenty of friends on the outside; this was payback for collaring him.
“There was a bowl of Wheetabix in front of her, half eaten.” Macalvie paused, looked at Melrose. “The body was warm, the milk still cold fresh.” Out of electric-blue eyes, he stared at Melrose. “See, they’d added that little detail, that coup-de-grâce, in case I hadn’t suffered enough, making me think, If I’d only got there fifteen minutes earlier… But I couldn’t have. They’d obviously monitored my trip. One of them probably called ahead to give my position.”
A flicker of pain brushed Macalvie’s face. “Fifteen minutes earlier I could have heard her voice, heard her cry. That was how I was supposed to think. The only consolation was she appeared not to have been mistreated.
“I called it in. Police, ambulance, they were there in under twenty minutes. While I waited I kept thinking, If I’d been smart I wouldn’t have taken the route they gave me-”
“No. Then they wouldn’t have gone through with it. They’d have stepped up the anxiety even more and then put you through it again. I don’t think there’s a way to outwit a person whose only motive is to make you suffer.”
Macalvie sat back. “That’s why I never dropped this case. Those two kids-”
“I know.” Melrose thought how Brian Macalvie never talked about himself. And yet you always knew exactly where you were with him. You might not know where he came from, where he lived, who his mates and girlfriends were, but you knew his mental geography. You knew his territory.
Macalvie shook his head, drank the rest of his whisky as if preparing to go, but still sat looking at the floor, or his shoes or shadows. “She felt so much safer with me in the house. Christ! Having me in the house was like having a ticking bomb there; I brought all that grief down on the poor girl’s head.”
“What happened to her? Maggie?”
“I don’t know. We broke up, of course, soon after the kidnapping. I begged her to stay. I thought I could help her, which was arrogant, I guess, but she wouldn’t; of course she wouldn’t. There was no way she could ever think it wasn’t my fault.”
The proprietress, toweling glasses behind the bar, had been giving them hurtful looks for half an hour now. The rest of the place is empty; there’s just you lot that’s keeping me up.
Macalvie looked her way, palmed his cigarettes back into his pocket, and said, “Let’s go.”
Outside they stood for a moment looking up at the stars and out over the water. Melrose said that not even the most vivid imagination would see such a bizarre murder here in Lamorna Cove.
“Not in Kirkcudbright, either.”
Setting his electric wheelchair on a collision course with Matron, down at the end of the long gallery, Morris Bletchley released the brake and sped down a highway of oriental carpet.
Here she came, stomping toward him, looking less and less confident that she would win this game of chicken. She had a great ski slope of a bosom flying downhill from some stiff lace thingamabob at her throat. Her hair was in its usual punishing bun, stuck sharply with several silver-headed pins, pulling her scalp back to within an inch of its life.
Just pray your maker has gone to prepare one of those rooms always on offer, thought Morris Bletchley, arrowed straight at her. Why had he ever hired her? Probably for the same reason he kept her on: With the name MATRON pinned to her chest, she looked like she’d come from central casting. You just knew that’s what a matron looked like. He’d had to put up with so many of those creatures when he was growing up, it satisfied his sense of the rightness of things that he should now be able to call the shots. There! she’d chickened out and was pressing her bosomy self flat against the wall. Moe stopped just short of her feet and asked innocently, “You wanted to see me, Matron?”
“Mr. Bletchley! I cannot put up with these ridiculous games you play.”
He loved the way she talked-such pomposity. “But that’s part of your job, to keep us old fools in line.”
“I wanted to see you about the Atkins woman. She’s come, she’s here, but she hasn’t-or her family hasn’t-her part of the fee. Which is small enough,” she added disapprovingly.
Moe Bletchley used a sliding scale; it was pretty much pay-what-you-can. Sometimes they couldn’t. He subsidized the rest. The scale in Mrs. Atkins’s case had stopped sliding at ten percent, which amounted to thirty pounds per day. Given it cost more like three hundred to provide rooms, medical care, full-time nurses, and gourmet food, thirty pounds was a drop in the bucket.
Well, it was Moe’s bucket and he could have whatever he liked dropped in it. He cocked his head and said, “So?”
She seemed astonished he should ask why. “How can we admit her when she hasn’t fulfilled the terms of her contract?”
“Why didn’t you tell her to sell her first-born grandchild?”
Matron drew herself up, tilting her breastplate even more. “Mr. Bletchley! If you insist on bending the rules and relaxing standards, our job will become impossible.”
“I’ve been bending and relaxing for four years and you’re still here, ain’t you?”
She pressed the bridge of her nose, one of several mannerisms denoting victimization. She said, “If you feel my services are no longer necessary-”
“Oh, but they are, they are! You are a formidable presence; you set an example!”
Still higher went the bosom, but this time with pride. “I certainly hope to keep the younger and less seasoned staff on their toes.” She ventured a wintry smile. “Now, if you care to come and speak with Mrs. Atkins?”
Moe flapped his hand. “I’ll talk to her later. You show her where her room is. I’m off to visit Linus Vetch.” Moe removed his baseball cap, rubbed the top of his head, and slapped the cap back on. He gave a little wave and snapped the wheelchair into a ninety-degree turn.
Rules. Matron lived for them; they were her sound and substance. But it was pretty hard to apply “rules” to the dying, much less enforce them. Heavy with anger and corsets, Matron turned on her heel and marched down the galleried hall.
Damn it all, thought Moe, wish we’d had her at Okinawa. Moe had served three years in the Second World War. In no hurry now, he rolled along on the deep blue and green oriental runner that not too long ago had been trod by Lord Bugger-all and his lady wife. They had sold up because they couldn’t afford their stately home, then called Sheepshanks Hall, any longer. No wonder, when these British aristocrats (whom he disliked without exception) tossed money around like confetti paying for big cars and horses and keeping a staff of fifty. They had been raised not to work but to lounge.
Moe was an American who’d spent the last part of his life in Britain. He’d peeled off all he wanted to in the States (millions) and come to see what was on offer in England (billions).
Moe had built up a fast-food chicken empire “from scratch” (as he was fond of telling people, most of whom didn’t get it, but then most people were pretty witless). He called this popular chain of eateries Chick’nKing. Franchises had sprouted all over England. He had even wanted to plant a few on the North York moors and Dartmoor, but the idea had met with little enthusiasm by the building-permit people and the National Heritage. Moe wasn’t long on aesthetics, except for the design and decor of his Chick’nKings. There he went to town; they were the brightest, boldest things on the horizon, painted in astonishingly brilliant colors. And he had broken the everyone-the-same commandment by having three different designs. It was his building planner-not quite an architect and a kid at heart-who loved to come up with fresh ideas for the shape of a new Chick’nKing. Some were egg-shaped, an enormous marine-blue egg, painted around with bands of Easter-egg designs and standing on its fatter end. There were two dozen of these. Another group was designed to resemble a hen laying, or rather sitting on a nest. Then there was the newest line Moe had christened Chick’nTots, designed expressly for the kiddies. (As if the others weren’t?) These were a huge hit with both children and parents. They were shaped like chicks and painted a buttercup yellow so bright you could see them half a mile away down the A30 to Truro. The Chick’nTots were popular with parents because there were small tables and chairs in a section set apart so the children could eat out from under the parental eye and even order from their own menus; it made no difference whether or not they could read since there were pictures of every dish. The kiddies’ area was tended by a pretty Disney World-ish princess with a pink neon wand. She was there in case the kiddies started throwing food at each other. Peace would be restored immediately; it’s amazing what a princess with a wand can do that mums and dads can’t.
Another big difference between Moe’s eateries and most others was the food. This had been brought about several years back. One of the Chick’nKings had run out of potato chips (tasteless but familiarly tasteless, which made the difference), and an employee named Patsy Rankin had just sliced some potatoes thinly, tossed them in the hot oil, and served up homemade potato chips the like of which had never been seen in any fast-food place. The customers loved them so much, sales of everything had leaped by over ten percent. No one appreciated inventiveness more than Moe Bletchley. Patsy Rankin was immediately transferred to the Birmingham headquarters in charge of food innovation, a position created for her talents alone.
Chick’nKing had cost a fortune to get started but had already tripled that fortune for Moe Bletchley. The difference between his and others’ fast-food emporiums was that the food was better and the buildings so whimsical they simply sucked people in.
Linus Vetch had been admitted six weeks before and was clearly rallying. The unusual thing about Bletchley Hall was that the people who came here, all diagnosed with a terminal illness, did not all leave in a box. Actually, it was part hospice, part nursing home, and not a small part resort. Of course, no one could enjoy this last element if he wasn’t deemed sick-to-dying. But some diagnosed as terminal got considerably better and left under their own head of steam-or perhaps to the disappointed expectations of their relatives, who were then forced to return the elderly family member to his or her own hearth. This made Bletchley Hall a sort of miracle home and, consequently, a highly desirable last stop on the road to wherever. This rallying of seemingly hopeless cases mystified the doctors.
“What the hell’s the big mystery?” said Moe. “It was you fellas misdiagnosed these cases in the first place.”
“Mr. Bletchley,” Dr. Innes had said, “Linus Vetch came in with esophageal cancer. Hardly ever does a patient recover from that particular cancer. Linus Vetch has had radiation, chemo, a bone marrow transplant-”
“So? Maybe the voodoo finally kicked in. It happens.” Moe started humming.
This, of course, infuriated Dr. Innes and no wonder: If a patient had terminal something, he should terminate.
“It makes me wonder,” Moe went on, “why you fellas hate to see somebody get better.”
“That’s absolute nonsense. I-”
Moe waved a thick-veined hand, meaning Shut up, man. “Thing’s this: A fellow is diagnosed with a terminal disease. Then he doesn’t die. Well, one of those premises is wrong. So it must be the first one. Unless of course you think we’ve got another Lourdes here and I’m the Virgin Mary.”
“Funny,” said Dr. Innes. “I never really suspected that.” He flounced off down the hallway in a manner that Moe was surprised hadn’t raised Matron’s suspicions.
Linus Vetch was propped up in his bed, looking wasted-true-but otherwise like a man on the mend. The poor fellow, in his seventies, had been through the hell of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant and still lived to talk about it. That he could talk was surprising, the radiation and chemo probably doing his vocal cords little more good than the cancer that had invaded his esophagus a year ago.
Moe bumped into the lavishly appointed room and up to the bed, where Linus shot his hand up for a high five. They had taken to greeting this way ever since the once-dying man had been able to raise his arm. Moe had to admit it was amazing. He himself had never been sick (with anything other than contrariness) and he knew he had no conception of the physical pain Linus Vetch had been cursed with.
“So what’s up, buddy?” Moe treated all patients-he preferred to call them “guests”-as if they’d just stopped in for a pleasant weekend.
“Better today. Must be your cooking.”
“Brought you tonight’s menu.” Moe believed looking forward to a fine meal could keep you going at least until you got it. Food was surprisingly soporific and comforting, and the meals here were cooked by two first-rate chefs Moe had lured away from two four-star restaurants.
Linus drew himself into more of a sitting posture and fumbled for his glasses. “Where did I put the damned things? Always losing them.”
“Maybe they’re in the drawer.” Moe nodded toward the bedside table. Linus always kept them there and always forgot that he did.
Linus found them and hooked them over his ears, as if for a better view of Morris Bletchley. Then he removed them and looked around the room.
He had the most searching look Moe had ever seen. Eyes that scanned the entire room, floor to ceiling, as if some sort of answer could be found in the William Morris-designed wallpaper, the Art Deco wall sconces, the beautiful wood floors, Kirman carpet, and high windows that looked out over the flower-bound stream.
Still, Moe wished he had the answer, or at least some answer to give Linus.
Linus said, “What put you in that wheelchair?” He was always asking this. It was clear he was glad that Moe, although not dying, hadn’t got off scot free.
But Moe had. He could walk as well as the next man (as long as the next man wasn’t Linus, who couldn’t make it to the toilet without a steadying hand).
Moe slapped the wheelchair’s arm. “Life, Linus. Life put me here.”
When Emily Hayter answered her doorbell the following morning, she looked up at Melrose as if she’d been expecting to see someone else. As she opened the door, her small mouth seemed to form a word or words called back when she saw him. Her figure was hefty with age and too much of her own good baking. Melrose could smell some of it now, the spicy warmth of cloves and nutmeg that hung in the air.
He introduced himself, unnecessarily, for she clearly knew about him; had the disappearance of Chris Wells not superseded him, Melrose would be the most interesting thing in the village. Seabourne had stood untenanted for a number of years (except for the Decorators, who hadn’t lasted long). Curiosity overcame inconvenience. She waved him in with the wooden paddle she was holding-he wondered what it was for-invited him to have a seat and a cup of coffee, and said the apricot bread was just cooling. Had it been timed for someone else’s arrival?
Emily Hayter lived in a little street not much wider than an alleyway behind the village’s main street where the Drowned Man and the Woodbine Tearoom sat. Her cottage was similar to her neighbors’: a mansard roof sloping down to peephole windows and whitewashed clay. It stood in an overgrown garden. Indeed, the garden seemed to have trailed into the front room, for here where Melrose took a seat were weedy potted plants, ivy-bound, and papery, stricken buds and blossoms.
Yet Mrs. Hayter struck Melrose as a woman of industry, so perhaps a lack of time was her problem. Coming in with a tray of coffee, she confirmed this. “There just never seems to be time for things,” she said, as she jammed the plunger down in her French press pot, which seemed to sigh in its downward descent in tune with Mrs. Hayter’s own huge sigh. “You saw the state o’ my garden, and in here too. You can see-” She waved the white napkins she’d brought in around the room as if they were flags of surrender, and poured the coffee. She did this with a grace that spoke of many years of pouring. The bread she now passed to Melrose looked delicious and was undoubtedly the source of the spiced air.
Once they’d settled back, she asked him how he was liking Seabourne. “Very much. It’s a beautiful place. A wonderful setting, too, up there overlooking the sea.” He added this, hoping it would cue her to speak of the children.
“Cold, though. Costs a fortune to heat those rooms.” Her glance swept over him, no doubt estimating the extent of his.
“I don’t mind a nip in the air.” (Oh, yes, he did.) “I’m used to it.” (Oh, no, he wasn’t.)
Emily Hayter struck Melrose as a pump that would require some priming; she hadn’t risen to the prospect overlooking the sea, so perhaps he should lead with more suggestions. “The estate agent tells me the owner lives in the village. In a kind of nursing home and hospice?” He was sure she would be only too ready to talk about the eccentric Morris Bletchley.
“Oh, yes. Mr. Morris started that. Used to be a stately home, and he took it over and calls it Bletchley Hall. I expect it’s quite nice for these unfortunates so near-” She could not summon a cliché to make death more acceptable. “Mr. Morris, yes, he’s a queer duck, that one.”
Melrose waited patiently to be told about Mr. Bletchley’s queer duck-ness while Mrs. Hayter fed herself a morsel of apricot bread and washed it down with coffee.
“See, he owns the Hall so he can do as he wants. I expect it’s generous of him to provide care like that, but as for me, I think you’d have to be a little batty to go live there, don’t you? I mean, does a person want to be reminded of-you know-all the time? Yes, definitely a queer duck is Mr. Morris.”
She did not go on, leaving Melrose to cast about for an opening to the tragedy of the Bletchley children. His eye fell on the rather bad examples of art hanging on her walls and then fixed on a print of a stormy J.M.W. Turner. He smiled, thinking of Bea. Turner was her favorite.
He said, “That’s a very nice Turner, there behind you.”
She looked around, as if it were someone else’s Turner, and said, “Morbid, I’d say. It was Mr. Hayter liked that one. He died not two years ago.” It was as if death came to Mr. Hayter because of the painting.
But Death and Turner did give Melrose an opening. “Wasn’t there an awful tragedy at Seabourne several years ago? Two children drowned, I believe.”
She was only too pleased to discuss it, which she did at length, as it gave her one more opportunity to exonerate herself. Her own account was exactly the same as Macalvie’s. Winding it up, finally, she said, “You see, sometimes they’d go down there to get on Mr. Daniel’s boat. You know, their father’s. That’s what police thought, that they wanted to get to the boat.”
Not bothering to correct her on that score, Melrose said, “But how could Bletchley get a boat in among those rocks?”
Emily Hayter was not at all interested in boatmanship and waved the question away. “Well, he could, is all I know.” She had been interrupted by nonsensical questions and now would get back to her own report. “Something woke me, something like a yell or a cry. I’m up on the top floor, so it’s a distance. And I thought if some noise would reach up there, it must be pretty loud. So I put on my robe and slippers and went downstairs. It was dark and I couldn’t see down to the first floor; anyway, you can imagine I was alarmed. Then I stiffed myself up”-here she sat straighter, stiffing herself-“got a torch, and-” She paused to select another slice of apricot bread.
“You went-”
“Straightaway to the children’s rooms. When I saw they were out of bed, I got a worse fright than I’d got from the noise. I looked all through the house, calling them. Nothing. No one. Did I tell you the Bletchleys went off? Did I mention that?” She clearly disapproved.
“Then, you-”
“Well, I went outside, of course. There wasn’t no one, nor did I hear anything. Only the sound of the sea. I must’ve been out there for a good twenty minutes, looking through the woods, and there was nothing. I didn’t want to stay out, it being the middle of the night. I’ll tell you something, sir.” Her voice dropped to a sibilant whisper. “There’s legends round these parts about that house-”
A legend. Oh, great. He must rush to inform Brian Macalvie. He pasted a smile on his face and hoped she’d get back to reality if he was patient.
“-that it’s built on the graves of a family that was murdered in their sleep.” She leaned across the table, close enough for him to smell her nutmeggy breath. “The place they say is haunted by the ghost of a governess named Marianna.”
There’s always a governess, often named Marianna or some version of the name. Well, he needn’t feel so superior. Who had been mooning about, hoping the imaginary Stella would turn up? He frowned, thinking again of Karen Bletchley’s story: a woman on the other side of the pond.
“The poor girl fell in love with some pirate. He only wanted to rob the place blind, of course. He did and he left and she never saw him again.”
“Ah.” He was not sure what he was ah-ing about. “And where did whoever saw it see this ghost?”
“On the cliff above those rocks.” Ever closer, she leaned toward Melrose, pulling her skirts more tightly down over her knees. “They say she stands there always looking out to sea.”
Ever stood she, prospect impressed. There it was again, the line from Hardy. He felt the same unutterable loneliness wash over him, despite the warm cottage, the pleasant homely woman, the apricot bread…
He roused himself from the cloud that settled over him to hear her say, “… and one of the Decorators-”
There they were again, those marvelous boys, the Decorators! They’d certainly left their imprint on Bletchley.
“He claimed he saw this ghost in the kitchen. But those two were-well, I can’t imagine they were very dependable.”
It was clear what she thought of “those two.” Melrose turned to another subject. “Bletchley certainly has its share of bizarre and unhappy occurrences. This unfortunate woman who seems to have vanished-her nephew waited on me at the Drowned Man.”
She was nodding her head before he’d half finished. “That’ll be Chris Wells you’re talking about. As you say, a strange thing to happen.”
“She owns the Woodbine Tearoom, doesn’t she?”
“Her and Brenda Friel. Good workers, those two, and make no mistake; operating a business like that, that’s hard work for not much return. I help out sometimes with my berry pies. They’re real popular, my pies. If they go away, I go in and help out young John, Chris’s nephew. I’d say a lot of kids could take a page from his book.”
Work was clearly the yardstick Emily Hayter used to take the measure of man. Melrose would rate perhaps half an inch. “The lad is awfully upset.”
“And why not? Chris Wells is like a mother to him. His da died, and his own mother just went off when he was a little thing. Chris was her sister. I was thinking she might have gone to help that good-for-nothing relation of hers lives in Penzance.” She leaned nearer Melrose. “It’s the drink taken over with him. I’ve no patience with that kind of thing.”
“Good lord, Mrs. Hayter, here I’ve been sitting over an hour and forgot why I came! I was wondering if you could spare me just a few hours every week to do some cooking. You’ve the reputation of being an excellent cook.” A little flattery never hurt.
He was right. If she hadn’t before thought of herself as excellent, she did so now. “Well, I did do a bit of everything. How much time were you thinking of?”
“Oh, just once a week.” He’d decided he really didn’t want anyone at all, for he was enjoying knocking about on his own. But he needed some reason to call on her. “I thought perhaps you could cook up a batch of food and freeze it and I could shove it in the oven or whatever when I needed it. You needn’t bother with this week, as I’ll be dining out a lot.”
They agreed on a time, and she took a notebook from behind a pillow on the couch (Melrose marveled at this secreting of the notebook; were a number of villagers after her cooking and charring schedule?) and wrote something down with the pencil attached by a string to the notebook.
“There. I’ve put in seven A.M. the Thursday after next. So that’s sorted!”
Not for Melrose, it wasn’t. “Could you make it a bit later, say, ten?”
“Yes, I expect so.” She gave him a look that suggested she couldn’t imagine what he’d be doing at seven A.M. that her presence would interrupt. Out collecting fossils, perhaps? “If you don’t mind me saying it, sir, it wouldn’t come amiss to have something done with the grounds. They’re looking poorly.”
“Ah. Yes, you’re right. Have you someone in mind?”
“It’s Jason Slatterly used to be gardener, and very good he is.”
“Perhaps it was he who laid a fire for me the first day.”
“I’m sure it was. He does nice little things like that for people.” Here she blushed furiously and tried to cover it up by raising her teacup to hide her face.
Had Mrs. Hayter romantic notions about Mr. Slatterly? This appealed to Melrose, this never-say-die attitude toward romance. And in one who, though not precisely stout, had the solidly packed form of a fireplug, little dimension to waist, hips, and breasts. “Tell me about him.”
“He was gardener for years when the Bletchleys lived there. The Decorators hired him back. But they wanted topiary designs. Mr. Slatterly couldn’t see his way to doing that and argued against it. But those decorators would have their swans, wouldn’t they? That’s why the shrubbery on either side the front door has that ragged look to it. The Decorators messed the place about for nearly a year and then went back to London, where they should have stayed if I’m judge of things. This being Cornwall, we don’t much care for the fancy ways of London.”
Melrose liked the way she made Cornwall sound like the Outer Hebrides. But then, Cornwall did rather think of itself as separate from the rest of England. And “fancy” London was trickling to Cornwall more and more for their second homes, buying up decrepit fishermen’s cottages or great piles of stone set atop craggy cliffs, like Seabourne.
“This Mr. Slatterly, could you speak to him on my behalf?” My God, that was kingly enough.
She would be only too happy to do so.
He rose. “Well, thank you so much, Mrs. Hayter. And I’ll be seeing you then in two weeks?”
“Yes, you will.”
“Fine.” Melrose let his gaze rest on the J.M.W. Turner, the original of which was in the Tate; had he looked at the painting in the Tate five minutes longer, it would have burnt a hole in his retina, the light was so glorious.
Morris Bletchley really interested Melrose.
Anyone who could buy up a stately home (small, but still stately enough), home for generations to viscounts, barons, and baronets, and turn it around into a combination hospice and nursing home was worthy of interest. Especially when the someone was an American who’d made his fortune in fast-food eateries.
On this particular golden September afternoon, Melrose stood gaping at the land beyond the high windows of the old Sheepshanks-now Bletchley-Hall. Formerly the ancestral home of the Viscount Sheepshanks (or so the brochure told him), the grounds were simply magnificent, a blaze of marigolds and purple orchids blanketing much of the ground, but also arranged in knot gardens and parterres. The brochure had been given him by an overbearing, stout woman in a gray bombazine dress who had taken his request to see Mr. Morris Bletchley, as she no doubt took all requests. Her face did not change its expression of being put-upon, as this seemed to be her lot in life. She had gone off to fetch Mr. Bletchley, after directing Melrose to wait in this beautiful room in which he was standing, looking at an ornate fountain in which dolphins frolicked with bronze fish and cherubs; beyond this lay a gentle downward slope of lawn to the dip of a stream that bisected the land. Shallow steps led down to it, drifts of late-season grasses, and clumps of spotted orchids grew along its banks. Dahlias, cyclamen, and purple clematis grew on the downward-sloping lawn. About the grounds were situated white benches on which now sat one youngish woman, no doubt one of the inhabitants of Bletchley Hall, all diagnosed as terminal, a diagnosis Melrose sincerely hoped was not acting itself out as he watched.
Sharing this room with him was an old woman who had probably got here under her own steam, given the silver-headed cane her hand was still closed around, but who was now peacefully sleeping.
The idea behind the hospice movement was that one could die at home, in familiar surroundings. So in this regard it wasn’t a hospice; yet it was a happy combination of both hospice and nursing home-if “happy” was the word. Melrose thought that if one had to die away from one’s own home and kith and kin, one couldn’t do better than Bletchley Hall. Or even given the choice between home and Hall, one might choose Bletchley. This was one of the times when he thanked God he had money. To be old and infirm was bad enough; to be old and infirm and poor was unthinkable. Deathbed scenes (he’d always thought) were grossly exaggerated in their display of filial devotion, the melodrama of relations gathered round the bed, weeping copiously, a battalion of black figures. More likely it was several hundred quid to the mortician and take her away. Or the family would all be out watching a cricket match or tucking into a set tea while Gran or Mum was expiring in an upstairs bedroom. No, the actuality of the moment of death leaned more toward the absence of loved ones than toward their presence.
But at Bletchley Hall, one could be certain of one’s death being well-attended, the sheets white, the pillows plumped. Melrose could hardly wait for Sergeant Wiggins to see it. There was a man who could appreciate upscale care!
The room in which Melrose waited was not especially large, but the ceiling vaulting above his head was resplendent with elaborately carved moldings; the room drank up sunlight as if pitchers of it were spilling across the huge oriental rug that shimmered like silk, and angels could have danced on the sun-beams. The old lady sitting in a big Jacobean chair that dwarfed her was so lit up she might have been called to a higher glory. Melrose hoped she slept. In a place like this, it did not pay to investigate.
The stout woman in gray returned to tell Melrose that Mr. Bletchley was on his way and then crossed the room to raise her voice to the old lady: “Mrs. Fry! Mrs. Fry! Time to wake up!”
Why? wondered Melrose. Surely, Mrs. Fry’s caravan had reached a stage in its slow journey when it wasn’t “time” to do any bloody thing at all. Time for her had gone completely out the window with the withdrawing light. Time was of no consequence.
And why was it necessary to yell at old people as if they were all deaf? A few more Mrs. Fry’s and Melrose was rising to assist when the old lady twitched awake. How could she help but wake with that voice barking in her ear? Now it told her it was “Time for your tea, dear.”
As the stout woman (labeled MATRON, she obviously functioned in some sort of managerial position) helped Mrs. Fry up and out, an elderly man in a wheelchair buzzed in and up to Melrose and held out his hand.
“Morris Bletchley. People call me Moe. You wanted to see me? You wouldn’t happen to have a fag, would you? As long as it’s not that mentholated crap.”
He gave Melrose a once-over, as if evaluating him for good-times possibilities. Melrose wished he’d stuck a flask in his back pocket.
“I do, yes.”
Moe Bletchley turned the chair and started toward the door with a “follow me” wave. As Melrose followed, Bletchley said over his shoulder, “Smoking room’s this way. Got to be careful here. Emphysema, emphysema. Wouldn’t want anyone with lung cancer watching me enjoying myself while I’m on the way to it.” Bletchley laughed, mostly through his nose. “You too.”
Melrose thanked him for that emphysemiac blessing as the two made their way down a long gallery, Melrose walking as fast as he could to keep pace with the wheelchair, which might have run down more of the Bletchley Hall patients than emphysema ever would. The walls of this gallery once were hung with Sheepshank family portraits no doubt carted off by the viscount; Melrose deduced this because the paintings now hanging there, romantic ones of cottages and shepherds, drovers with sheep and sheep-dogs, still lifes of pears and apples, did not fill up the vacated spaces and showed borders of fresher paint. Moe Bletchley whizzed through a shadowed dining room full of tapestry and velvet and a Waterford chandelier glowing as softly as stars on a summer’s night. He snatched a menu from one of the tables. Menus, even! The food here must be as good as the colored brochure pictured it.
On the farther end of the dining room was a set of French doors curtained on the other side with something filmy, which Melrose’s guide flung open, and they entered a room with glass on three sides, which had probably been added to the original structure. It appeared to be an orangery or sunroom. South-facing, the room was still lapping up remnants of the fractured light of the sun.
Morris Bletchley stopped his wheelchair, got out of it, stretched, and took one of the green wicker chairs. Motioning Melrose to sit down in another, he said, “I don’t need that thing”-he nodded toward the wheelchair-“I just think it must be pretty discouraging if you’re chained to a bed to have some old geezer waltz into your room on a pair of good working legs.”
From the sly glance Bletchley slid in his direction, Melrose decided this was only one reason for wheel-chairing it around Bletchley Hall, and that the chair was also there for fun. Melrose smiled. This was not to say that Morris Bletchley was short on compassion or charitable thoughts; after all, he’d started this place, hadn’t he?
And Bletchley was indeed a healthy-looking specimen, remarkably so if he was in his eighties. He was trim, with arms and legs that had not suffered too much bone and muscle loss; the only thing that hinted at old age were the cheeks, which turned cadaverous when he sucked in on the cigarette Melrose had given him and was now lighting. It was damned certain Morris Bletchley’s mind hadn’t suffered any ill effects of aging.
Orangery, solarium, sunroom, whichever it was called, the long glass-enclosed room was filled with green plants-ivy, aspidistra, potted palms-and as the sunlight touched the leaves and vines with a high gloss, waves of green seemed to shimmer on the tiled floor and turn the green-painted wicker furniture greener. At one end of the room sat two old men playing chess. At the other end, Melrose was surprised to see a bank of slot machines.
“So! What can I do for you?”
“I’ve taken Seabourne for a few months. I wanted to meet you.”
“That’d make a change. Ordinarily the last person a tenant wants to meet is his landlord. Although I’m not really running the place anymore. So, is there something wrong? Not enough heat or the pipes clanging? Get in touch with that real estate person if you’ve got problems.”
“No, no. Nothing. The house is wonderful.”
“Good. So what’s the real reason?”
“You mean-”
“That you came here.” Through pursed lips, Moe Bletchley exhaled a thread of smoke.
Melrose smiled. “I met your daughter-in-law. She came to the house.”
A guttural sound, an uh, escaped Moe Bletchley’s throat. “What did she want? Karen?” His expression didn’t change.
“I don’t know, really, unless to revisit her old home.”
Moe uttered another noncommittal sound. “She came without Danny.” It wasn’t a question but a conclusion.
Melrose nodded. “Your son? Yes. She was alone. She told me about the children.” He wanted to add some appropriate word of empathy but couldn’t for the life of him think of one.
Here, Moe looked away and was silent for some moments. It was the stillness of his face in the green silence of the room that suggested to Melrose emotional upheaval.
Finally, the old man-who seemed to have grown visibly older in that silence-asked, “So what did she tell you?”
Melrose gave him as exacting an account as he could. Here was a case where the smallest of details could be important.
But Moe Bletchley looked at him as if Melrose were a news anchor, reporting yet another fatality. “That’s what she told you?”
Melrose frowned. “Yes.”
Again, that guttural uh.
Somehow, the sound was more disturbing-dismissive, perhaps-than words. Melrose took out his cigarette case once again and passed it to Bletchley, whose own cigarette had burnt down to ash in his fingers. Moe looked finally from the length of ash into Melrose’s eyes as if Melrose had worked some trick. Absently, he took another cigarette from the case but didn’t put it in his mouth. He said, “That detective fellow?”
“Commander Macalvie. He would have been a DCI then, probably.”
“Uh-huh. Sharp guy. He didn’t believe her, you know. About the strangers in the wood and the pond. Neither did I.”
Neither, thought Melrose, do I.
Moe Bletchley put the cigarette in his mouth then and took the lighter Melrose still had in hand. The lighter clicked open and snapped shut. “Why are we talking about this? Oh, yes. It apparently is the reason you came. Still, I ask why? Why are you so confounded interested?”
Sitting forward, Melrose said, “Who in God’s name wouldn’t be, Mr. Bletchley? It’s one hell of a story. It’s dreadful. But there’s another reason: there’s been a murder-”
“Over in Lamorna Cove. I know. News gets to me quick, son.” He kept clicking the Zippo’s case. “I know just about everything goes on in this place.”
“Then-”
Moe looked back through narrowed eyes. “No, I don’t know the victim. A woman with a title, they said. So I can’t help out. What I meant was, I know the people in Bletchley pretty well. Been living here for fifteen years. I’m an American, you know. I made a fortune over there with Chick’nKing; then I came over here and made another fortune. People love fast food. With good fast food-well, I figure you’re doing everybody a favor.”
“That’s very interesting, but I don’t see the relevance.”
“I’m just making a point to you: I’m not stupid.”
Raising his eyebrows, Melrose said, “I don’t doubt it for a minute. Did I give you the impression I thought you were?”
Moe looked off toward the elderly pensioners still bent over their chess pieces. “No. But it’s generally the way the world views us.” He nodded toward the old men. “Dithery, forgetful, besides not being good for anything in the world.”
“Mr. Bletchley, I doubt very much anyone in his right mind could look at you that way.”
Moe answered, “Oh, not here, maybe.”
“Not anywhere.” Melrose felt the old man had strong opinions about what had happened that he wasn’t sharing. “You don’t get on with your daughter-in-law, do you?”
Moe raised his arm, hand clasped on the arm of the wicker chair as if he meant to lever himself out of it. But he didn’t. After a moment, he asked, “You married? No, I don’t suppose so, or you’d be down here with the wife and kid. Not many men have the balls to go off on junkets by themselves.”
“No, I’m not married.”
“You’re probably fortunate, then.”
“I take it you don’t think your son is.”
He lowered his hand and picked up his cigarette, another gone to ash. “No, he isn’t.”
Melrose said nothing; he would certainly not tell Moe Bletchley that he found Karen Bletchley charming. But had he, completely? There was that one instance when he felt the silence no longer companionable but hadn’t known why the atmosphere had changed.
“You liked her, I’m sure.”
Melrose nodded.
“People do.”
Melrose considered. Speaking more to himself than his companion, he said, “Why is she here?”
“Good question.” Moe shrugged, turned evasive. “Oh, well, only Chick’nKing gets my unqualified endorsement.”
Melrose smiled. “I’ll have to try it.”
“None around here, I mean close by. Wanted to put one in Mousehole, but the city fathers said no. It’s a cute little place; I can see why they wouldn’t want a fast-food emporium in it. Thing is, people forget the huge revenues the chain generates and also the people it employs. They only think how it’s an eyesore. I think it’s pretty sporty myself. Chicken’s sure friendly-looking enough. Anyway. There’s one just outside of Truro, that’s the closest. I have them make a delivery once a week. People here really look forward to it.”
“I can imagine.” Melrose thought for a moment. “If you know the villagers, you know Chris Wells.”
He nodded. “I do. Johnny-that’s her nephew-has to make the pastry deliveries because Chris has disappeared. So what’s happened? Why all these shenanigans? Why all this misery suddenly?” As he inhaled on his cigarette, he gave Melrose a suspicious look, as if this new arrival might be responsible.
Melrose got up to leave. But then he sat back down. “Mr. Bletchley-”
“Call me Moe, sonny.”
Melrose smiled. He loved that “sonny.” “You’ll think me rude, and you don’t have to answer the question, but-who gets this vast fortune of yours?”
Moe’s expression changed, back to that particular look of misery he’d worn earlier. “That’s okay, I don’t mind answering. Who gets it now is Danny, my son. And of course a lot of bequests to charities and so forth.”
“You said now.”
“That’s right. I had to rewrite my will, of course. Who got it before was the kids.”
“The kids?”
“The kids.”
It was Marshall Trueblood hello!-ing him awake before it was Diane. Having reached blindly for the telephone, Melrose quickly convinced himself that this whole episode was part of his dream and the receiver was being pressed against his ear by invisible hands. He continued to lie in bed, eyes closed, feeling no responsibility at all for his end of this telephone conversation.
“-me that! You’re doing it all wrong, Diane! Give-”
The dream figures appeared to be Diane Demorney and Marshall Trueblood, having some argument over-what? He rolled over and the receiver rolled with him, still held by faerie hands.
“-my hat! Come back with-”
Diane was clear as could be in his dream, wearing those black Raybans and that hat with its floppy brim so big you could see nothing but her mouth and chin.
“When you give me the phone! Then you-”
Screech!
Melrose turned back again. Good lord, that nearly woke him up.
“Melrose! Melrose!” yelled Diane. “We know you’re there, you said hello.”
“Hello,” he said. He heard himself snore, little ladders of breath sucked in, breathed out, snuffles like a pig rooting.
“Listen old sweat, you’ve really got to get back here! Vivian’s-what? Stop it! Stop!”
Here was the smooth-as-glass voice of Diane, as if she hadn’t just let out a screech a moment ago. “Melrose. He’s here! He’s-give that back!” Tussle, rustle.
“Me, again, old bean. Look we don’t want to-”
“Lord Ardry!”
Melrose jolted in his bed. What voice from the past was this? What damned fool dream person? Scroggs, that was who!
“No, she don’t look too good, sir, that’s my-”
Who don’t? Again the pig snuffle-snuffle breath catching at the back of his mouth.
“Good? Would you look good if someone were drinking your blood?”
Trueblood’s voice. Melrose’s dream self frowned mightily. He didn’t like the sound of that, no. His dream self walked away.
A clatter, raised voices in the distance, the telephone receiver audibly wrenched from someone’s grasp, Trueblood’s voice gaining eminence. “It’s Giopinno, old sweat. Count Dracula. He’s here. He’s finally come. We’re all wearing our wooden crosses and garlic!”
Snuffle snuffle, root root.
Melrose turned another page of the Telegraph, looking for the next installment of the neighborly feud over a parrot. It had really escalated while he was away.
Having arrived in Bletchley as safely and soundly as the Great Western Railway could manage; having deposited her luggage (steamer trunks, train cases, hatboxes, and the detritus from the Titanic), and having hooked up with her new friend, Esther Laburnum, Agatha now sat in the Woodbine over tea, asking Melrose if he was, finally, tired of this “absurd foyer” he had made into Cornwall and that arctic-cold, barnlike Seabourne place.
She helped herself to a heart-shaped meringue.
“What about your own ‘foyer’ into Cornwall? This county is surpassed only by Armagh in its lack of reverence for Queen and Country. Armagh, incidentally, is where Jury has made his ‘foyer,’ and I wish he’d come back.”
“What are you doing?” Agatha’s eyes were slits.
“Doing? Helping myself to one of these delicious meringues, that’s what. It’s not the last on the cake plate, not to worry.”
“You know what I mean. You’re mocking me, God knows why!” She was marmalading a scone with Chivers Rough Cut.
“God knows why is correct. I certainly don’t.”
Her eyes were slits. “Anyway, as I said, all Long Piddleton thinks you’re dotty, coming to Cornwall to live in a big empty house, and you should go back.”
“It’s really nice to hear I’m missed.” He knew she’d stomp all over that.
“Missed? I didn’t say they missed you, only that you’re being extremely irresponsible and foolish. Diane thinks”-and here she pulled a page of newspaper from a carryall dotted with mangy-looking cats-“you’re putting yourself in danger. Here.” She thrust it toward him.
“Quoting Diane, are we? Is this the same Diane you called moon head?” Melrose looked at the horoscope column, broadly outlined for him (in case he’d gone blind in Cornwall), and his own birth sign, Capricorn, also outlined and bearing only half a star before it. Diane wrote (if you could call it writing) the horoscope column for the Sidbury paper and of late had been apportioning certain numbers of stars, one through five, to each sign for that particular day. Five stars meant you could walk on water; four, a super day; and so on down the list. To get only half a star signified doom, the absolute worst day imaginable (except of course for the person who didn’t get even a half, but there were none of those, not even Melrose. Yet.).
BE CAREFUL!!! THE JOURNEY YOU HAVE EMBARKED UPON IS
FRAUGHT WITH DANGER. HAVING ALREADY CARRIED OUT
ONE ABSURD PLAN, YOU ARE IN DANGER OF UNDERTAKING
ANOTHER WHICH MIGHT SPELL THE END!
“So you see,” said Agatha.
“See what? You’ve always made fun of Diane’s horoscopes, so why point to this as though it vied with the Book of Revelation?”
“I’ll say only this: Don’t be surprised if Trueblood and the Demorney person turn up on your doorstep.”
This did interest him, for it made him think of last night’s dream. He crushed the paper in his lap. “Why would they do that, for heaven’s sake?”
“Now you’re interested! Well, it will do you no good at all. I’m finished.” She did not mean with her tea, for she turned to where Johnny was serving another table and held up her hand, gently turning it back and forth like a cheery hello from the Queen.
Melrose returned to his paper. “Are you settled in at Lemming Cottage?”
Her look was sharp. “Lemon Cottage, as I’m sure you know.”
“True. I just had a blinding flash of all its guests heading full throttle toward a cliff.”
“Very funny.”
“Just a little foyer into humor.”
“I should think you might take all of what’s happening more seriously.”
Melrose looked around the small room, where every table was occupied. “Take what seriously? Are you taking anything seriously, except that Sweet Lady you’re washing down the scone with?”
What Agatha was shoving into her mouth was a Woodbine special, a wonderful confection of a long thin meringue holding a layer of dense chocolate, itself topped by a layer of chocolate mousse. The crispness of the shell was a counterpoint to the rich layers of chocolate. Melrose looked at the sheet from the Sidbury paper and wondered if he could start a food column.
Agatha pinched up the last morsel of meringue, saying it was quite tasty indeed. “I should like the recipe for this.”
The wish being father to the thought, she set about getting it, hailing the overworked Megs to her side. She told her to see about the recipe for the Sweet Lady, to ask the cook for it.
Megs looked struck dumb as she shifted the small tray she was carrying. “Well, Mum, I can’t say. I can’t say how it’d take her-Brenda, I mean.”
“I know,” said Agatha marshaling a tone one might use when speaking to the mentally challenged. “That’s why I say, ask the cook.”
But the girl was not yet ready to ask, not without giving a bit of the history of recipe requests. “Just last Easter I think it was someone wanted her recipe for Bunnykens-”
A recipe, Melrose reflected, he could easily do without.
“-and when Miss B wouldn’t give it, this person got quite shirty. Not much later, another lady wanted to know how to make the meringues-Miss C’s, that is, as they’re different from Miss B’s-”
Would they wander through the entire alphabet?
“-but she wouldn’t give that out, neither, nor would Miss C.” Megs shifted the tray again. “Then someone wanted-”
Agatha interrupted. “Good grief, girl! Get back to the kitchen! You can never tell when she might change her mind. She’s clearly quixotic.”
The pronunciation of which word Melrose filed away to use later.
“Oh, I can tell.”
At this point, Melrose was about to pull up a chair and have Megs join them.
“I’ve been working here five years and Miss B’s never given out a single recipe. There was even a duke in here once had the beef olives and you wouldn’t believe the fuss he made when she said, and very nicely she said it, she was sorry but she never gave out her recipes. Especially not the meringues. Nor does Miss C.” Megs flushed, realizing that Miss C might never again have a chance to. But she soldiered on. “They make them different, see; they put in secret ingredients. They don’t even know each other’s, so, you see, it’d hardly be like either Miss C or Miss B to give them out. There was one lady-”
Agatha flipped her hand at the girl, off with you, off with you, and Megs scooted away. Agatha returned her attention to the cake plate just as Johnny Wells pushed through the swinging door and met with the waitress going in from the dining room side. He was tying his apron, stopping at a table recently vacated, where he collected the plates and cups and stacked them on a tray. Paler than usual, thus more Byronic and handsomer. Women would kill for that skin, that hair.
Johnny looked over at Melrose and, seeing Agatha returned, actually smiled broadly. He walked over to their table, taking one or two requests from the patrons as he went.
“Hello, John,” said Melrose. “My aunt’s put poor Megs up to trying to get a recipe from the prop-I mean, from Miss B.” Proprietress sounded too much as if there were but one, so Melrose had cut that word short.
Johnny laughed. “Not a prayer, I’m afraid,” he said to Agatha.
To him she said, “Never hurts to try. Dear boy, I’m sorry to hear about your aunt. What are police doing? If anything, that is.”
Melrose’s voice fell on her like a brick wall. “On the contrary, they’re doing quite a lot.” He cast a baleful look around the room that sent the curious back to their tea and Sweet Ladies. “I know for a fact they’re doing everything they can. You met Commander Macalvie; I don’t think he’s ever failed to solve a case.”
Agatha put in some welcome news. “That doesn’t mean the person’s still alive once he’s solved it.” She poked her nose in the teapot.
“Thank you, Agatha, for that cheerful note.”
“Oh, she’ll turn up, never you mind,” said Agatha.
Johnny ignored this banal remark and said to Melrose, “Trouble is, police have enough on their plate to concentrate on a missing person who might not even be missing. There’s the Lamorna Cove business.”
All the patrons were listening now, not even bothering with their tea. Wasn’t this the biggest thing to hit Bletchley since Moe turned their stately home into a hospice?
“But that’s a good reason why they’d pay more attention to your aunt’s disappearance.”
“Well… yes, I see what you mean.” He turned, when another patron called to him, and left.
Melrose thought any bit of knowledge that might uncover the reasons for Chris Wells’s disappearance would be welcome to Johnny, stuck as he must feel in this limbo. That brought to mind the little girl, Cassie, and her mother, Maggie, and how not knowing was virtual hell. But it was Macalvie who had had to endure the real hell. He was the one left with the bad news.
Policemen were always cast as the messengers who bring the bad news. Melrose couldn’t imagine himself being able to fill this role. He wondered how Richard Jury stood it.
He supposed the answer was: Jury didn’t.
That evening, while the sheepdog in the doorway replaced one of the huskies, Melrose found himself sharing the Drowned Man’s saloon bar with two other guests, a woman in a brown suit who sat by the fire, reading as she drank her cocktail, and a man who looked to be in his mid-forties but could well be younger, age altered perhaps by serious drink, such as the one in front of him on the bar: a shot glass of whisky and a pint of beer. The whisky was downed in one blink, a long gulp of the beer in another.
“Evening,” said Melrose, feeling very much a Bletchleyite compared to this inn guest who was passing through, although it wasn’t much of an “onmy-way-to” sort of village. It wasn’t anywhere near a major artery. Since Melrose was ensconced in his own house now, he felt he was not flying under false colors to act as a resident. He added to his greeting-“Are you getting on with the dogs?”-nodding toward the doorway into which all five were now crowded.
The man laughed and said, “Looks like a lineup to me. Are we supposed to identify the guilty one?”
Melrose laughed too. “My name’s Melrose Plant.”
He moved a couple of seats down the bar to hold out his hand.
“Charlie Esterhazey. Glad to meet you.”
“Do you live in Bletchley? I don’t think I’ve seen you about.”
“No. Just visiting a relation. Johnny Wells. I think he works here.”
This, thought Melrose, was the uncle Johnny had mentioned but never referred to again. Alcoholic, maybe, but a very engaging one. “Then you’re related to Chris Wells.”
Charlie turned to his pint of beer, drank what was left of it, and said in a melancholy tone, “No, but I am to Johnny. It’s terrible, what happened. Chris is such a great person.” He drank again. “People are always leaving Johnny stranded. First his father died; then his mother took off; now this. I don’t mean, of course, that Chris did it deliberately.”
Why not?
The question sprang to mind. Always before, it had been asked and answered, as if no one could possibly imagine Chris Wells leaving deliberately. It would have been an awfully hurried departure, a drop-of-the-hat departure… But, why not? Everyone had called it an emergency, not really a “deliberate” leaving; it could only be leaving in answer to some serious occurrence. This notion hadn’t taken root because she hadn’t informed Johnny-and it looked less and less as if she’d left willingly, since she still hadn’t notified Johnny.
He felt he’d been sluggish in coming up with this alternative. And Brian Macalvie? A “sluggish” Commander Macalvie was a contradiction in terms. Yet since Chris Wells’s disappearance had brought back to mind that old horror of Cassie’s death and then the Bletchley children’s, even Macalvie’s usually clear and ordered mind could be clouded by what was on it.
“… a magician, good with cards, scarves, and pulling coins from behind your ear.”
Melrose had only half heard Charlie’s talk. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”
“Johnny. I was talking about his love of magic. He’s pretty good, actually. He’s put on a few shows at Bletchley Hall. The tricks are standard, but he performs with such panache he makes them new.”
Melrose was deep in own thoughts. “Could she have?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“His aunt. Could she have gone off like that deliberately?”
“Well…” Charlie considered. “I know police wondered about an emergency, something that forced her to drop everything and leave.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I mean ‘deliberately,’ as in ‘after deliberation.’ Just suppose she packed up and left without a word to anyone. But I’m talking in circles. That’s what I’m asking you. Could she have done that?”
Charlie shook his head at the same time he made a sign to Mr. Pfinn. He said, “Completely out of the question. She’s the most responsible person I’ve ever known. Dependable, reliable to a fault. So, my answer’s no, she couldn’t have. The only way I can picture her running off like that is if someone called and asked for help. Urgently. Me, for instance.” When Melrose gave him a considering look, Charlie smiled. “No, I didn’t call. I am the first one Johnny thought of, though, I mean as a walking emergency.”
Pfinn came along, reluctant as usual to dispense drink, and gave both of them a steely look as he said, “You havin’ dinner here, you two?”
“We two.” Eyebrows raised, Melrose looked to Charlie. “Mr. Esterhazey?” Charlie nodded, and Melrose said to Pfinn, “Yes, we two are having dinner here.”
With no sign that he welcomed the news, Pfinn made a sound in his throat and walked away to speak to the woman in brown. It would appear that she, too, was to have dinner in the Drowned Man’s dining room.
“Mr. Esterhazey-”
“Please, just Charlie. Why be formal when we’re sitting here getting drunk together?” He looked at the level of beer in Melrose’s glass and said, “Rather, I’m sitting here getting drunk together.” He helped himself to some peanuts in a dish, then tossed back the whisky and followed it with a cool drink of beer. “These things are called boilermakers in the States.”
Melrose smiled. Charlie, alcoholic or not, was extremely beguiling. Perhaps because he was forthright. “Chris Wells has come to your rescue, has she?”
“Oh, yes, more than once. Which makes me think that that night she came to someone else’s.”
“But the someone wasn’t who the someone said, or else something went wrong.”
Charlie was silent for a few moments, drinking and eating peanuts, before he finally asked, “You think she’s dead?”
The strain in his voice made it clear that this was an alternative he didn’t want to consider.
Melrose was saved from replying by Mr. Pfinn, who had come down the bar again to slap menus before them. “Quicker if you order now. Got to take out the dogs.”
“We do?” Melrose looked over his shoulder at the five in the doorway in mock alarm.
“ ’Course not. I mean me.”
“Very well.” Melrose looked briefly at the menu, which was all that was required, given there were only two choices: shepherd’s pie and cod Angelique, whatever that was. “I’ll have the cod, minus the Angelique.”
Charlie said, “I’ll have the same and another whisky, if you don’t mind.”
Pfinn minded. “I’ll bring it to you in the dining room.” A clear bribe, and he took away the shot glass.
The woman in the brown suit drained her cocktail and rose. She was apparently the only other diner. Melrose and Charlie pocketed their cigarettes and followed.
They took a table near the woman but not right next to her. Melrose thought tables in the same area would save Johnny from running all over the room. They said good evening to the woman in brown and she nodded and returned the greeting. She was a good-looking, rather regal woman who had once been beautiful but was now at that age-fifty-five or sixty, perhaps-to be called handsome. She seemed completely composed, not the sort to try and start up a conversation on the basis of a simple greeting.
They shook napkins across their laps as Johnny came in from the kitchen, shouldering a tray holding salads, rolls, a water jug, and the shot glass now filled. He smiled a smile he seemed to have been working on as he passed-taking a moment to set down Charlie’s whisky-and went to the woman by the window.
His smile a little more practiced, he then bestowed it on Melrose and Charlie. “Did you find everything you needed in the house?”
“I did indeed,” said Charlie.
“Thanks for coming. It’s very kind of you,” said Johnny.
“No, no, not at all. I just want to help if I can.”
Johnny nodded and went toward the kitchen.
While they fiddled with their salads, Melrose said, “You told me his mother went off and left him. Why?”
“Because she’s worthless. His father-my brother-wasn’t much better. I don’t know know how those two managed to find each other, but they did. How someone like Johnny could be born of that union, God knows. Really, the whole damned family makes you think you’re living in a medieval court-Henry the Eighth or Elizabeth’s, something like that. The intrigue, the backbiting, the deeds and misdeeds, the plots, the plans-there were no heroes. But then there was Chris. Like Johnny, she must’ve skipped that particular gene pool.”
“Do you know the Bletchleys?”
“People you’re renting from? Not very well. I ran into the wife a couple of times in the Woodbine. Good-looking, I’ll say that for her.” He picked a few sunflower seeds from his salad and added, “Chris couldn’t stand her.”
Melrose looked up. “Really? Why?”
Charlie shrugged. “The soul-searching eyes. Not her own eyes, yours.”
“That’s a new one.”
“Yeah.” Charlie smiled.
For the first time Melrose realized he had the same ingenuous manner as Johnny Wells. “What is it you do in Penzance, Charlie?”
“Magic.” He smiled at Melrose’s questioning look. “I guess that’s where Johnny gets it. I have a little shop, called Now You See It.” He pulled a fresh deck of cards from his pocket. “Here’s a simple one: I shuffle the cards-” which he did. “You pick one-” which Melrose did. “Put it back in the deck.” Melrose did so. Charlie reshuffled. Then he fanned the cards out on the table, picked one, and held it up.
Melrose shook his head. He was sorry it hadn’t worked. “Not that, no.”
Charlie smiled. “I know it isn’t. It’s under your glass. King of Clubs.”
That’s where it was, too. “How in hell did you do that?”
“Sorry.” Charlie shook his head, gathered up the cards, and shoved them back in his pocket. His eyes crinkled at Melrose over the top of his glass.
“Bloody amazing,” said Melrose.
“Uh-huh. The magic shop’s the main job. I also take out boats. You know, tourists who want to see Penzance from away. The climate’s great here and we get a million tourists. I take them out. I’m better with boats than I am with people.”
“Really?” Melrose gave him a long look.
A meeting ordained by the gods was how Melrose pictured the meeting between Sergeant Wiggins and Bletchley Hall. Imbued with the aura of death, death still missed being an actual fact.
Wiggins was talking about these “homes for retired gentlefolk” as they drove toward Bletchley Hall in pale afternoon sunlight. “There’s of course your typical nursing home; it’s small and gloomy and cramped, furnished with iron beds and the yellow light cast by forty-watt bulbs and old magazines. So old you can’t even hold out for the May issue, no, sir, May’s been and gone and if May didn’t revive you, well, June’s gone too.”
The rental car was a cheap model and ground its way up the shallow incline as if it were making for Everest’s peak. It rattled, but no more than did Sergeant Wiggins, who could obviously speak at great length when a topic inspired him. (He must often have been muffled by Jury when they were on a case together.)
“-metal tray with scrambled eggs from a dry mix and weak coffee, a thimble of juice, thin toast-”
“Sounds like the B-and-B circuit, Sergeant Wiggins.”
Wiggins carried on. “Would you even have your own room? Or have to share. Well, I’d hate that, I would. I’d think you could at least expect a little privacy when you’re dying; it’s a safe bet you won’t get any after.”
Melrose wondered what sort of talkathon Wiggins thought he was bound for in the afterlife. If an imaginary nursing home could furnish him with this banquet of topics, what would imagining heaven do for him?
“Sergeant, you’re a master of detail.”
Said Wiggins, “They say the devil’s in them.”
He certainly was in these, thought Melrose.
In the next five minutes, blessedly silent, they rounded the curve that gave them the first glimpse of Bletchley Hall. It was indeed an imposing facade, and Wiggins’s surprise said he appreciated it. It left him-thank God-speechless.
They paused at the stone pillars that flanked the entrance. Ground into stone as if it had grown there was a brass plaque: BLETCHLEY HALL. The long drive-way passed between low honey-colored stone walls over which dripped lush vegetation. Behind the walls were gardens of orchids and beds of bright marigolds. In this temperate climate, even the occasional palm tree seemed at home.
Wiggins pointed one out. Surprised, he said, “Palm trees, Mr. Plant?”
“Well, you know what they call this part of Cornwall: Little Miami.”
“Surely not.”
“Just watch your back and your wallet.”
They stopped on the gravel between the marble steps and the fountain, in which bronze fish, weathered into green, spewed up streams of water and cherubs frolicked, strangling the dolphins they rode. Even the gravel at their feet glittered like crushed diamonds. In the distance was the stream, the orchids, the tall grasses.
“My lord,” said Wiggins in a wondering way, as he shut his car door. “This must cause the earth to keep up.”
“I’m sure. Morris Bletchley has the earth. The unfortunate viscount and his lady didn’t.”
The front door was open; during the day it might always have stood so to suggest either freedom of passage or a four-star hotel. Matron immediately came walking toward them. In her gray dress sprigged with tiny roses she looked like a tea cozy. Plant still didn’t know her name, but as she seemed to enjoy being called “Matron,” that’s how he introduced her.
Wiggins handed her one of his cards and the name seemed to freeze on her lips as she mouthed “New Scotland Yard.” Nervously she ushered them in. Fumbling with her belt, she asked, “What can I do for you?”
“I’d like to have a word with Mr. Bletchley, if you could just fetch him?”
Matron nodded and weaved off as if struggling through deep water, dolphins, perhaps, and cherubs impeding her progress.
Melrose had detected a whiff of something mixed with her toilet water. A bit of gin in the l’heure bleu, perhaps? He wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find Moe Bletchley had designated a cocktail hour in between dominoes and dinner. And why not, for God’s sake? If you’re at death’s door what difference does it make if you go through it half potted? Melrose watched her walk the length of gorgeous Kirman carpet that led down the long gallery, off which were the dining and other communal rooms.
Wiggins was admiring the drawing room in which they waited, with its blue brocades and velvets, dark blue curtains and carpeting, and overhead a chandelier that, touched by the sun, showered confetti light across the rug.
They shared the room with two old women sitting in wing chairs who looked as if they’d just been caught in a spell and commanded neither to speak nor to move. They seemed-well, stuck there.
“Begging your pardon, gentlemen.”
The voice crept up behind them, and they turned to see a tidy-looking, dark-suited man of indeterminate years, who made one think of a funeral director.
“I’m Dr. Jaynes. What is it you wanted?”
“To see Morris Bletchley.”
Wiggins handed Dr. Jaynes another of his cards.
“You’re from Scotland Yard?”
“He is.” Melrose nodded toward Wiggins. “I’m from Northants.”
Dr. Jaynes seemed puzzled by this strange coupling of places. He said to Wiggins, “You’re here in an official capacity?”
My God, thought Melrose, if it was this hard to convince them of what a calling card clearly stated, how would you ever convince them you weren’t dead yet?
“No, sir,” said Wiggins, “I’d merely like to talk to Mr. Bletchley, as we told your matron.”
He still didn’t seem convinced. Life at Bletchley Hall must really ride the rails of ritual if two strangers turning up created such a stir.
Dr. Jaynes seemed at a loss. “Of course, Mr. Bletchley hasn’t the time to see people unless they’ve an appointment.”
Melrose sighed. How was it he had missed the pleasure of Jaynes’s company when he was here before? He told Jaynes he’d already talked to Morris Bletchley.
“I see, I see.” Jaynes was as tentative as one can get and still remain on the scene. “Then I’ll just have a word with Mr.-”
But he could have saved his breath to cool his porridge, for here came Morris Bletchley at full tilt across the doorsill of the blue drawing room. He pulled up and braked. Melrose thought he saw sparks.
“Dr. Jaynes, I’ll see to these gentlemen. Hadn’t you better get back to your patients?”
Dr. Jaynes smiled grimly at Moe Bletchley and departed.
“What’s going on?” Moe Bletchley fiddled with a lever on his wheelchair. “I don’t mean with you two, what’s going on with my brakes? I nearly ran down Mrs. Fry back there.” He chuckled. “Could someone be trying to bump me off?”
Wiggins said, stepping into I’m-on-the-job mode, “I don’t think it would be efficient to use a wheelchair for that, sir.”
Morris Bletchley apparently got a real kick out of this pointing out of the obvious. “And you’re”-he looked at the card Matron must have turned over to him-“Mr. Wiggins, Scotland Yard, that right?”
“Yes, sir. Detective Sergeant Wiggins.”
Melrose knew this slight condescension would end smartly when Wiggins got a deeper whiff of this hospice-nursing-home outfit.
“Well, Sergeant, I reckon I don’t know any more about the Wells woman than I did when I talked to your cohort here.” He leaned his head in Plant’s direction. “Chris Wells helps us out, and she’s damned good at it, too. Drove one or two of the guests to see their families, took ’em to hospital, that sort of thing. So I did have contact with her, but I didn’t know anything about her family or friends. Come on, let’s go in the drawing room-they won’t mind,” he added, with a look at the old ladies.
Who hadn’t, Melrose decided, moved an inch in any direction. Light wavered, shadows shifted in these blue environs, creating an underwater effect much lovelier than that of the Drowned Man. Melrose found it as good as a sedative and wasn’t surprised that the old ladies had fallen asleep. He was having a hard time keeping his eyes open himself.
“Let’s go out to the sunroom; I need a smoke and you can’t do it in here. It would be hard on our emphysema patients.”
“And yourself,” Wiggins said sententiously.
Moe rose from his wheelchair and shoved it out into the hall. “I need to stretch my legs. Come on.”
They sat around the same table. The two old chess players were absent, but an old woman at the other end of the sunroom was feeding coins into a slot machine with her face so close to the display she could have licked it.
“Are your patients here all wealthy?” asked Wiggins.
“No. Why? Are you supposed to be if you’re dying?”
“Oh, no, it’s just that this is clearly an expensive operation.”
“True. But I can afford it. If they were rich, why in hell wouldn’t they just buy what they needed? Someplace in Arizona or the south of France, nurses round the clock, fancy equipment?” He grunted as he lighted his cigarette, then remembered that Melrose smoked. “Sorry. You?” He offered the crumpled pack around.
Melrose shook his head, turning away the cigarettes, not wanting to smoke under Wiggins’s steely stare. As soon as they could get back onto the topics of murder and disappearance instead of emphysema and other illnesses, he would light up himself. It shouldn’t take long. He said, “But the south of France, that’s not really what’s wanted, or not all of what’s wanted, is it?”
Both Moe and Wiggins raised a puzzled eyebrow. Wiggins said, “I’m not sure I follow, sir.”
“If you’re dying, you don’t want to do it alone. If you have no family, or even an indifferent family, and few friends, you’d likely be shuttled off to hospital, cheerless and antiseptic. That’s not a cheering picture, is it?”
“No, it isn’t,” said Moe Bletchley.
As hospitals were high on Wiggins’s list of places where he’d most like to settle down, he ignored the question and took from his inside pocket one of the pictures Macalvie had given him of the dead woman. “Her name is Sada Colthorp. Did you know her?”
Moe frowned as he brought the picture close to his face and then held it arm’s length away. He tried several different positions, as if moving it about would make it speak more tellingly of the woman shown. He shook his head. “Got any other shots of this woman?”
Wiggins pulled out a morgue picture, a full-face shot.
Bletchley put them side by side. “She looks vaguely familiar. What did you say her name was?”
“Sada Colthorp. You might have known her as Sadie May. Her maiden name.”
Frowning, he shook his head. “Nope. Neither name rings a bell with me.”
“She lived in Lamorna Cove as a girl.”
Moe shook his head again. “Still doesn’t ring a bell.”
At just that moment, from the dining room beyond and out onto the sunroom’s tiled floor jolted Morris Bletchley’s wheelchair, occupied by a young man with dark hair, probably in his early thirties. He was holding a big white box on his knees. “Woodbine delivery!” He opened the big box to reveal iced doughnuts and several different kinds of pastry. Melrose’s quick tally showed that there were at least twenty pieces of pastry and a dozen doughnuts.
“What the hell are you doing in my wheelchair, Tom? I keep telling you.” Moe peered into the box, more interested in the éclair he removed from it than the occupancy of his wheelchair. “Damn, these are good!”
“Brenda brought ’em. Did you know she used to live in Fulham? Right next door to Putney.”
“You told me. This is Tom-”
A clatter of coins interrupted Moe Bletchley’s introduction. It came from the direction of the slot machines. The old lady was jumping up and down, at least as well as her stick legs could manage.
Moe Bletchley looked her way. “That damned machine pay off again? Have to fix it.” He grinned and finished his introduction. “This is Tom Letts.”
Tom Letts’s good looks seemed fragile. His skin was pale, like Johnny’s. Unlike Johnny’s it bore the terrible stamp of Kaposi’s sarcoma.
AIDS. Melrose hadn’t even thought of this as one of the several terminal illnesses that would be likely to turn up at Bletchley Hall.
Tom said he was pleased to meet them and looked around, as if one of them, but he wasn’t sure which, had something to say he had waited a long time to hear. He had one of the most ingenuous smiles Melrose had ever seen, and again he was reminded of Johnny Wells. They could have been brothers.
To Wiggins he said, “You here about the murder in Lamorna?”
When Wiggins nodded and smiled, Melrose marveled that the detective sergeant’s response to Tom’s disease was not to cut and run but one of kind regard. Wiggins, who claimed to be sought out by every springtime blade and blossom to test their pollen on, this same Wiggins could sit here and not turn a hair confronted by the ravaged body of a victim of AIDS.
“This woman.” He handed Tom the pictures, though Melrose was pretty sure Wiggins didn’t expect him to recognize her. He really just wanted to include Tom in.
The two old chess players had come in and were seated in their same chairs, chessboard between them. The white box from the Woodbine now caught their attention and they began making their way toward it.
Moe leaned toward Melrose and Wiggins and whispered, “Got to make allowances for these two. Their memories are shot to hell.”
Memories shot to hell proved no obstacle to Sergeant Wiggins.
“These are the Hooper brothers,” said Moe Bletchley. “And that’s Miss Livingston coming along. She’ll make it eventually.”
Leaning on her cane and holding an antique mesh purse, heavy with coins, Miss Livingston made her slow way toward them, a look of grim determination stamped on her acorn face.
The two old gentlemen wasted no time on the strangers; they went immediately for the pastry. Hands started and hovered indecisively over the box.
Said one of the Hoopers, “I’m having my usual, a… a…”
“Doughnut,” said Moe, almost absently, as if he was used to supplying the Hooper brother with information.
“Right!” Hooper’s hand snapped down and plucked up one with chocolate icing.
“So am I!” exclaimed his brother. “I’m having a”-he looked at what his brother had taken-“I’m having one of those… one of those…”
Miss Livingston had reached them by now. “Doughnut, you goddamned fool!” she yelled. “Here get your paws off.” And she parted them like Moses did the Red Sea. “I want one o’ them puffy things.” She reached nimbly into the box for a cream puff. “Hello, cutie!” she said to Melrose.
He lavished a smile upon her, rose, and pulled a chair around. Gray-haired Miss Livingston put Melrose in mind of a small bird of prey, with her little beaky nose, darting eyes, and fingers tough as pincers.
One of the Hoopers watched the chair being pulled around and then followed suit, dragging over a bentwood chair from against the wall. His brother did the same, and now all seven of them were gathered around the table, the new people turning owlish eyes on the four who had been there.
The other Hooper asked gruffly, “Why’d you want to see us, Colonel?”
“I think the cryptogram’s been broken,” said Moe, eyeing a cream cake.
The Hoopers looked at one another. “It has?”
“Both of you. You’d best go to Plan A before they come.”
The Hoopers stood up abruptly, one upsetting his chair. He picked it up, set it down with a thundering crack, and the two went back to their chess game, but not before Melrose heard one of them ask the other what Plan A was and saw the other shake his head, he didn’t remember.
“Cryptogram?” asked Melrose.
Moe shrugged. “Hell if I know. They’re always rattling on about secret codes and being spies. Of course, they’ll forget it before they’re through the dining room, so it does no harm.”
Tom said, “Still, it’s like one thing they half remember with any consistency.” He laughed.
“It’s retrograde amnesia, something like that,” said Moe. “It’s not being able to remember something you heard not more than two minutes ago. They’ve both got Alzheimer’s, but whether that’s causing it, the doc doesn’t know. Not surprising.”
Not caring a fig for the Hoopers’ condition, little Miss Livingston’s strong fingers clamped Melrose’s forearm. “Let’s you and me go for a walk out there around the grounds. There’s some spots only I know about, dearie. They’d never find us. Besides”-here she shook her beaded bag and set the coins jingling-“I’m rich”
Not at all tempted by this invitation, nevertheless Melrose gave her a darling smile and made a quick movement to free himself from her grip.
Probably used to Miss Livingston’s little ways, Moe Bletchley ignored her and said, “Tom here’s been my chauffeur for years in London. He’s such a good wheel man, there’ve been times I wished I could stick up a bank or a jeweler’s, just so’s I could zip out to the car with the swag, have Tom gun ’er up, and tear off on a chase.”
Moe said this with such obvious affection that Melrose could guess how an AIDS case had come to Bletchley Hall.
“How long have you been here, sir?” Wiggins asked Tom without (Melrose noted) shrinking back at all.
“Six months. But this is only since I got really bad.” He gestured toward his face and yet managed a smile. After all, he’d been lucky to get into Bletchley Hall; so few were able to.
“How many patients do you have staying here?” asked Wiggins.
“Twelve. Twelve’s the capacity; there’re twelve bedrooms besides the four for Matron, a nurse who’s here full time, Jaynes, and me. The rest of the staff’s not live-in. We have doctors, of course. One lives in St. Buryan. Another lives near Penzance.” Moe Bletchley suggested Wiggins might like a tour of the place and Wiggins accepted with alacrity. Tom wheeled out with them.
Melrose excused himself from the tour, spent some five minutes disengaging himself from Miss Livingston and her pincerlike fingers and walked back inside.
He walked through the voluptuous green dining room: That crystal! That silver! He liked the idea that all this finery was laid on in case there was even one guest who could make it downstairs for dinner. Perhaps there was more hope of recovery in setting a good table than in administering a newly discovered drug.
He stopped before one table to look at the delicate arrangement of mauve orchids and cyclamen; touched the thin crystal of a wineglass, so delicate that a glassblower’s breath might have sighed it into existence; lifted a knife as heavy as a vault or as weighty as memory.
For that’s how he felt; memory really could weigh one down. Perhaps that’s what had happened to the Hooper brothers. They’d had to remember, at last, too much, and decided nothing was preferable. Melrose walked on.
There was another drawing room across from the blue room, still occupied by the two old ladies, who seemed not to have moved a muscle. Should he call for help? No, the breath of one lifted the frill of the lace collar on her jabot. She at least was still breathing, which meant the other probably was also.
The drawing room across from the blue room that he now entered was somewhat narrower, longer, and done in the burgundy red of an old Bordeaux. This room was darker and-if it could be so described-deeper, as if it had been steeped in wine. The colors at Bletchley Hall, Melrose noticed, were exceptionally strong-none of your weak-kneed off-whites, ecrus, or pastels but colors that seemed to demand that one just hold on.
The red room didn’t get much natural light, facing north as it did; it depended on lamps being lit and the logs burning in the fireplace, as a fire burned now. Because of this play of light and dark, Melrose hadn’t immediately seen Tom, who sat by the hearth. His eyes were closed or almost closed, and he hadn’t noticed Melrose come in either.
Melrose hung back, not wanting to disturb his doze.
He turned and was about to leave when Tom said, “Hello. Come on in.” He was still in Moe Bletchley’s wheelchair. Melrose walked to a wing chair in front of the fire.
Tom was holding a small sherry glass in his hand, which he raised. “Want some?”
“I do, yes. Just point me to it.”
“Over there.” Tom indicated a table beside a window hung in a sea of dark-red curtains. Melrose found the sherry decanter in among other decanters-cut glass, probably Waterford, that shade called “Waterford blue,” a unique assimilation of blue and gray. This table was stocked with the best and most expensive whiskies, gins, and vodkas. “I’m amazed,” he said, coming back with his sherry glass, Lalique, he thought, remembering Marshall Trueblood’s lessons. The glass was shaped like a tulip just beginning to open.
“What’s more amazing is how seldom we use it-the drink. It must be the idea that what’s so readily available loses a lot of its power to tempt you. You’d think all of us would be driven to drink, wouldn’t you?”
Melrose smiled. “Maybe. Listen: Why do you like that wheelchair so much?”
Tom smiled too. “Because it’s fancy, it’s fun, and it gets his goat. You’re living in Seabourne, aren’t you.”
“I am, yes. At least for a little while.”
“It’s haunted.”
Melrose laughed. “You’re not the first person to tell me that.”
“It is.”
“Come on, Tom. To tell the truth, the place does give me the feeling of-um, a movie set. It really does. One expects to see spectral shapes forming at the top of the stairs. Anyway, I take it you’ve been in it?”
“I’ve stayed there.”
“You’ve known Morris Bletchley for some time?”
“Like he said, I was his chauffeur for years. Mostly in London. He had a terraced house in Putney, maybe still does, though he never leaves here much, now.” He turned his head to look out of the tall window and smiled as if the memory made him happy. “That was just like him, living in Putney instead of Belgravia or some swank house in W-One. It was a small house, too, the Putney house. There was just me, a cook who came in daily, and an au pair for the kids, who used to come and see him a lot. They really loved him.”
“His grandchildren?”
Tom nodded. “Noah and Esmé. Nice kids. I used to drive them places: the zoo, films, Chick’nKings.” He flashed Melrose a smile. “Of course.”
“I understand they drowned; it was a strange accident.”
“It was strange, all right. It was strange,” he repeated. Silence. Then he asked, “Want some more sherry?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
Tom might have liked the wheelchair for reasons other than “fun.” He rose slowly and, it appeared, painfully. It was a pain that hadn’t seemed to bother him in the sunroom or hadn’t registered, if it did. He continued talking as he poured and stoppered up the decanter. “Mr. B was in London, in the Putney house. After he got the call he came to my room to tell me to warm up the car, that he wanted me to drive him to London airport.” Tom was standing in front of Melrose, handing him the refilled glass. “I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen Mr. B look like that; sunk, he looked, as if he himself had drowned. I drove him to the airport; he keeps a Lear jet there, but he hardly ever uses it, only when he has to go to the Highlands or Paris or someplace. He really keeps it for his executives and employees. One of his girls who worked at the Watney C-K, her father had a heart attack, and Mr. B got her to the airport and she was home in Edinburgh in an hour. He doesn’t like the plane; he doesn’t like ostentation; he’s a plain man.”
Melrose laughed. “There, I disagree; he’s much too complicated to be plain. Though I do admit he works at it.”
Tom nodded and turned the tulip-shaped glass in his fingers. “Well, not plain, maybe, but generous. After a few years of this”-his hand swept over his body-“when I got too sick to do anything, he brought me here. Most of the people here are ones he knew before. The Hoopers owned a bookstore in South Ken he was always going to. Miss Livingston was once his son’s public school teacher.”
Afraid he’d gotten Tom off the subject of the grandchildren, Melrose said, “And what happened that night he flew down here?”
“Of course, by the time he got to the house, it’d all been done; I mean, police had come, and the ambulance had taken the bodies away. The cop in charge, at least I guessed he was in charge, talked to Mr. B for a long time. Then they all left.
“He told me it felt like the aftermath of battle, when you can’t do anything but look at the bloody battlefield. His son’s wife had gotten there first-I mean, after the cook, Mrs. Hayter. Daniel, his son, arrived later; they’d had a hard time locating him, so it was awhile after his wife got there. So Mr. Bletchley, he had to get information from his daughter-in-law. Karen, her name is. And that really frustrated him.”
“Why’s that?”
“Why? Because he doesn’t like her. He always said she married Daniel for money. I guess it wouldn’t be the first time. He was in a rage with both of them because they hadn’t been home when the kids got out of bed. I imagine Mrs. Hayter came in for some sharp words, too.” Tom sighed. “It was too painful for him to live in the house after Noah and Esmé died. But at the same time, he couldn’t stand to leave the village. It’s the reason he bought this place. He didn’t know exactly what he was going to do with it until he got the hospice idea-taking in only people who’ve been diagnosed as terminal. Strange thing for him to do, isn’t it?”
“Not if you want the illusion that you’re controlling death.” He’d said something like that to Karen Bletchley.
Tom moved the wheelchair closer to Melrose’s wing chair. He leaned forward, in the manner of someone with important things to impart who doesn’t want others to hear him. “It’s funny you’d put it that way, because not everyone leaves here in a coffin. Some of us actually get better. It hasn’t happened too often, but it has happened several times. Cancer of the esophagus, you can hardly ever win out over that. But a woman who had it went into remission and still keeps in touch. Then there’s Linus Vetch, who should have been dead a year ago. He’s still with us. There’ve been others-well, all of us are terminal; what a hell of a word-so when something like that happens it’s like a bloody miracle. Don’t think I’m talking about false hope. For me, it really would have to be a miracle.
“I don’t think the comfort of this place comes from not having to die alone. I think it’s because if you have to die, you want it to be in a place like this or someplace like a battlefield, where death’s a fact, not a fantasy. Outside of places like this and beyond wars and battlefields, death is more of a fantasy. People don’t really believe it; they deny it at every turn.”
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” said Melrose.
“What do you mean?”
“Tolstoy’s story. Ivan Ilyich is ill for a long time; he knows he’s dying. But the doctors, his wife, and his children keep denying it.”
Tom said, “That’s what happens, isn’t it? Here’s the most terrifying experience you will ever have and you want to share how you feel and make others understand. But people won’t let you. ‘Oh, stop talking like that; don’t be morbid.’ Or ‘You’ll see; you’ll be up and around in no time.’ ” He stopped. Then he said, “A lot of people have ended their days here in a way they could never have hoped for without Bletchley Hall. Every once in a while children or parents come to visit. Not often. Not mine.”
There was a silence while they grasped their sherry glasses. Melrose didn’t know what to say that didn’t sound banal.
Tom went on. “Except for my sister, Honey. She’s only sixteen and just three months ago got her driving license-as she says, ‘to kill.’ The first drive she took was to come here from Dartmouth. That’s a long way. I assumed Dad would give her a hard time about visiting, but he doesn’t. I think maybe he and Mum are secretly glad Honey’s got the guts to do it. And she keeps me from really hating them; she keeps reminding me that this is how they are. They don’t know any other way to be. Honey. She’s only sixteen and yet she knows that. It’s something we don’t realize about people. We do what we do because we don’t know any other way to be.
“She takes me for rides. Sometimes Mr. B goes with us. And a few times we’ve gone to Seabourne. You know what we do? We look for clues.” Tom smiled. “He says something will turn up, that if we don’t find it, somebody will.”
Looking at Melrose, Tom added, “Maybe you’re the somebody.”
An inductionist who never got around to tallying bits of string or footprints in zinnia beds, Sergeant Wiggins had never subscribed to T. S. Eliot’s dictum about the rose and the typewriter, that if you could think of them in the same breath you might have the makings of a poet. Wiggins, who clearly hadn’t the makings, could still think of the rose and the typewriter together. Contraries didn’t bother him at all, nor did obverses, inverses, and converses. In Eliot’s book, the rose and the typewriter were headed for a third encompassing emblem. But Wiggins’s mind did not give birth; the rose and the typewriter remained discrete elements. They did not produce an objective correlative until a Macalvie or a Jury or (he gave himself credit for at least this much) a Plant. Jury would look at the typewriter and the rose and go Aha! Macalvie and Jury were intuitionists.
But Macalvie (who was to meet them in Lamorna, toward which they were now hurtling on a narrow coastal road) also wanted to know everything-every rose petal, every bent blade of grass, the precise length of every bit of string; he was famous for this attention to detail. It wasn’t easy to work with Macalvie if you believed (as most men surely do) that some little things are eminently forgettable.
Wiggins didn’t believe in forgetting. To him, everything was memorable. His mind operated like the four-race accumulator; you left the bet on the table and, through the next three races, “accumulated” winnings.
Right now, he was informing Melrose (who was doing the driving) that Kaposi’s sarcoma wasn’t a kind of cancer as originally supposed. “It’s caused by a herpes virus, HHV8, it’s called. Though I doubt,” he added, sympathetically, “it makes any difference to poor Tom Letts.”
Melrose marveled: Here was Wiggins, who often talked as if a walk through a field of dandelions could do him in, yet who could shake Tom’s hand, sit beside him, breathe a common air-all without blinking an eye.
Wiggins went on, reporting in staggering detail the status of each guest at Bletchley Hall. He had met them all, talked to them all, listened to them all; this was Wiggins’s great talent, even if he did not know what he was listening for (which was Jury’s job, Macalvie’s job).
There was Mr. Clancy with inoperable pancreatic cancer; Mrs. Noonan, who had come to Bletchley after a bone marrow transplant had failed (“Imagine going through all of that! You know how painful a transplant is”); Miss Timons-Browne, who had been a piano teacher before rheumatoid arthritis had taken away her livelihood; Mr. Bleaney-
“That’s a poem by Philip Larkin,” put in Melrose, to show he was interested in the fates of these poor people. He recited:
“This was Mr. Bleaney’s room; he stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.”
“Ah, that’s as may be, Mr. Plant, but I doubt your Mr. Bleaney suffered from pancreatic cancer.”
“He’s Philip Larkin’s Mr. Bleaney, and he suffered as much as anyone-well, go on.” He tried to concentrate on the waves (out there) crashing against the shoreline (in here), and it would have been a pleasant-enough drive had the road not been potholed and had he not had the incarnation of Hippocrates or Sir Richard Burton sitting beside him. Every detail of every illness and, thrown in for good measure, a complete picture of every thankless, graceless relation.
“Poor Mrs. Atkins, she’s the one suffered three strokes and no one can see how she’s holding on, and you’d think her daughter-in-law could do more by way of bringing the grandchildren-”
Et cetera, thought Melrose. Was Wiggins through? Had he run down the entire roster of twelve patients? Take away the three met in the sunroom-no, four, including Tom-that left eight; take away Bleaney, Timons-Browne, Clancy, Noonan, Atkins, Fry. Still two to go.
The Hoopers’ long battle with Alzheimer’s brought them into Lamorna and Melrose pulled up, spitting dirt and gravel, in front of the Wink.
“Bit tired-looking, in’it?” said Wiggins, slamming shut the car door. His tone hinted at the superciliousness one might expect from a Londoner-in this case Wiggins, who ordinarily hadn’t a shred of the city snob about him. But then he was ordinarily with Richard Jury, who was the least supercilious human being Melrose had ever known. Oh, that he were here!
Although the layout and the shape of the Wink were completely different from his pub in Long Piddleton, it reminded Melrose nonetheless of the Jack and Hammer. Perhaps it was the nucleus of regulars seated at a round table, three men and two women, the same as had been there three nights before, and he toyed with the notion that they were the actual models for several Dorian Gray-like portraits of the habitués (Melrose being habitué number one) of the Jack and Hammer. That old one with the pinched cigarette and the pocked face, surely that would be no other than the true soul of Marshall Trueblood; the woman with the long sad face wearing a dusty brown jumper, Vivian Rivington to a T; the other woman, stout and squat with shreds of gray hair boiling about her forehead-well, actually, she wasn’t the inward self of Agatha, she was the outward incarnation.
Yes, as he and Wiggins stood at the bar waiting for their drinks, he thoroughly enjoyed his little scifi fantasy, his little ghostly dimension, and was also quite sure that everyone in here was delighted that he had something wonderful to chew over, something to get his teeth in. Murder! No longer would they have to pretend Lamorna was a village to excite the admiration of tourists. Now, it really was! The clay pipe, the black patch, the wooden leg, the rheumy eye, the oil lantern-these were now things to be reckoned with.
“I don’t know what I want,” said Wiggins, in a pedestrian way that jerked Melrose back from pirates’ gold and Jamaica Inn.
“What do you mean? It’s just another pub. Get what you usually do: horn of toad, eye of frog, whatever. Have a beer.”
Wiggins just gave him a look. Have a beer was not one of the Wiggins fallbacks in emergencies. He sighed. “A lemonade, maybe.” He was already getting out a small tubular glass bottle.
Bromo Seltzer. It was by now one of Wiggins’s staples. Melrose wondered how much of the damned stuff he’d consumed since that trip to Baltimore. Wiggins only remembered the city as the home of Bromo Seltzer. He’d taken a snapshot of the tall building with the logo.
“Finally got here,” said a voice at their backs. It was, of course, Brian Macalvie, for whom one can never arrive too early. He was always in a hurry, another reason for the coat’s staying on. He gave Wiggins’s shoulder an enthusiastic thump; he’d already seen him at police headquarters in Camborne.
The finally-got-here part of the greeting had been directed, apparently, at Melrose Plant, who-Melrose would like to remind him-was not on the payroll of either the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary or New Scotland Yard.
Macalvie looked at the options and said, “I don’t know what to have.”
“Is this the biggest decision you two have had to make today?” said Melrose. “Have what I’m having.” Melrose put down some coins that clinked together. “Or what he’s having. Whatever, with Bromo Seltzer.”
Macalvie ordered a Guinness, got it, and the three went to the same table that Melrose and Macalvie had shared before.
“Between me and my men and the local police, we’ve talked to everyone in this place”-he waved an arm to take in the Wink-“and found out sod-all, except a few who remembered Sadie May but don’t remember anything more about her.” Macalvie shook his head. “Can’t be coincidence. Two little kids die in peculiar circumstances; a woman disappears; another woman is murdered; the mother of the little kids turns up now after not having been back here for four years-” He shook his head again, lighted another cigarette, and said, “Daniel Bletchley…” His voice trailed off with the smoke from his cigarette.
“He’s still not given you the name of the woman?” said Wiggins.
“Zip,” said Macalvie.
Wiggins said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “Bletchley could have left and then come back, but what about this housekeeper? Wouldn’t he have been concerned that she would see him?”
“No reason to be. It is his house, after all,” Melrose said. “Maybe it’s simply because the idea is so repugnant. I just can’t believe it: a parent doing this to his own children.”
“Tell that to Medea,” said Macalvie.
Melrose looked around the pub, at the smoke that lifted up to the ceiling like cirrus clouds. “Morris Bletchley says you didn’t believe Karen’s story, the one she told about people in the woods.”
Macalvie brought out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. “He’s right, I didn’t.”
“Neither do I. Seabourne is well stocked with wine and Henry James. Karen Bletchley’s story sounds suspiciously like The Turn of the Screw: two children, Miles and Flora; the woman across the pond as the governess; the strange man who talked to them, Peter Quint; there’s even the unimaginative and literal housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. I’d say Mrs. Hayter is the embodiment of that character.”
Macalvie was thoughtful. “That’s interesting.” He was silent, drinking his beer. “Anyway, she could’ve concocted the story to get herself out of the frame.”
“Or to direct your attention away from her husband?” suggested Melrose.
“If she thought there was any possibility that Daniel Bletchley had something to do with her kiddies’ death?” Wiggins suggested.
Melrose shook his head. “She wants the money. If the children predecease Daniel, he gets the whole Click’nKing fortune. But if he’s convicted of their murder, all that money goes elsewhere, not to the wife. Karen certainly couldn’t look forward to Morris Bletchley’s handing it over to her. He doesn’t like her; he doesn’t trust her. It’s the reason he made the fortune over to the children-with, I’m sure, adequate provision for a trust-to keep Karen from getting her fair white hands on it.”
They were silent for a moment.
“And Chris Wells?” said Melrose. “You think she’s dead, don’t you? Isn’t it the rule that every hour she goes missing points in that direction?”
“It points to her being missing one more hour.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m not trying to be,” said Macalvie. “I go on the assumption there are no rules.”
Someone had slotted money into the jukebox. “When You and I Were Young, Maggie” is what came up. At the first baleful words of this old song, Melrose looked anxiously at Macalvie, but Macalvie was looking at nothing, the pint he had lifted frozen in air as if he were toasting the three of them. He put the glass down, rose and went over to the jukebox, and with the line The sunshine has gone from the hill, Maggie, he yanked the plug from the socket. To the protestations of the few who had been listening and now even the ones that hadn’t, he walked to the table where sat the man who had played the three songs and slapped a ten-pound note on the table. The customers there looked up, surprised.
Years ago, in an old pub on Dartmoor, Macalvie had put his foot through the jukebox.
He was improving.
In the kitchen of the Woodbine Tearoom, Johnny sat at the small desk Brenda used for doing her accounts. He was shuffling his deck of cards, fanning them out, scooping them up, and reshuffling. The only thing that could keep his mind off Chris was going through his repertoire of tricks.
Brenda was taking cookie sheets out of the oven. Like Chris, she did most of her baking at night. “I know it’s hard, sweetheart, and gets harder to believe she’ll be back, but she will, I know it. I know she will.”
He hadn’t been able to keep the anxiety out of his face. He’d never make much of a hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye fellow. “No, you don’t. You’re just trying to make me feel better.” When she turned from the oven to protest, he smiled and held up his hand. “It’s okay, Brenda; it’s okay.” He went back to laying out cards and she went back to the gingerbread men she was decorating with currants.
“Pick one.” Johnny held out the fan of cards.
Brenda ran the back of a floured hand over her temple to get the hair out of her eyes. “Is this that old trick? Haven’t I seen you do this a thousand times?”
“At least.” She took a card; she put it back. He shuffled, picked out her card.
“Surprise, surprise,” she said, pressing a currant into dough.
“You needn’t dismiss this trick, especially since you still don’t know how I do it.” He put the cards aside and looked at the things that covered the desk, the big checkbook, the envelopes, and on its top surface the pictures, the snapshots of Brenda’s dead daughter. He lowered his eyes; the daughter only made him think of Chris. How could she have disappeared so effectively when she’d done it so hurriedly, without time to really think? He asked Brenda.
She stopped and picked up her mug of coffee. “Maybe it’s not being able to see the forest for the trees, love.” She looked over at him. “Maybe it’s something really simple. What happened, I mean.”
“Come on, Brenda, police aren’t stupid. The one who’s in charge is a commander. That’s one of the highest-ranking officers in the whole Devon and Cornwall force.”
She sighed what sounded like a long and pent-up sigh. “I expect you’re right.”
Johnny went back to looking at the snapshots of Ramona. They showed her at different ages over the years, as if she had magically been whisked from childhood to adolescence. A toddler, a schoolgirl, a teenager. Chris had told him Brenda rarely talked about Ramona; the sadness was too overwhelming.
He could remember Ramona, beautiful as a young girl, who in the last months of her life had all but faded away, as if she were vanishing right before everyone’s eyes, like the beautiful woman in a magician’s act disappearing into the locked trunk, empty when it was open. Now you see her, now you don’t. He crossed his arms and lowered his chin to rest on them, his eyes still on the pictures. “She was really pretty, Ramona was.” His own voice startled him slightly, for he had not meant to say it aloud, reminding Brenda of her daughter.
As if-you arse-the poor woman could ever forget. He felt the weight of her silence. Then she came to stand behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. “She was, wasn’t she?”
Johnny heard such woe in her voice, he thought he might cry himself. Instead he reached his own hand around and covered hers. He thought he almost knew how she must feel. It probably wasn’t possible to really know unless you had children and had lost them. It made him think of those poor little Bletchley kids. God. It hardly bore thinking about.
Brenda said, “Remember she used to baby-sit for you when you were eight or nine?”
“Too old to need a sitter, that’s sure.”
“Oh, go on. You would have thought the same thing when you were two.”
“I did. I was.” What Johnny remembered about Ramona was how much of a golden girl she had seemed to him. Her hair was flaxen, her skin with a sheen like sunlight. She had had bright amber eyes and her mouth was naturally pink. She never needed anything to enhance those colors. She’d gone off to some public school and then to London. When she’d come back, how pale she’d looked. As time went on her eyes looked hardly darker than water, her lips silvery. Some kind of leukemia that leaches color from you. The swinging door over there made a space she had walked through; the pavement outside sent up echoes of her footfall; the window reflected her image.
Brenda’s hand still rested on his shoulder, though his own hand had slid away, for he thought of it as cold comfort for her. He tried to imagine what the world after Ramona must be like for Brenda. Here was this space, this chair, Ramona had inhabited. Ramona had filled this room, now empty. How could Brenda stand it, the lack of her? The unfilled space, the silent pavement, the unreflecting window, the empty door? He put his head in his hands and thought of the lack of Chris, and the Gilbert and Sullivan tune went through his mind:
If anyone anything lacks,
He’ll find it all ready in stacks-
He got up; he had to go; he told Brenda he’d see her tomorrow and avoided looking into her eyes.
She called something after him, probably just Good night, sweetheart.
Passing the chestnut tree, Johnny stumbled over the big root he’d managed to avoid tripping over for years and went tumbling down, not hard, just in a stupid praftall. Embarrassing had anyone been around to see. He fell on his face and just lay there for a while.
Finally, he turned over, brushing earth and grit from his face to look at the dead white moon casting its beautiful, useless light across the pavement.
After a bit, he got up, swept some dirt from his jeans, and trudged on home.
PC Evans, when he’d received the call at midnight, decided that the presence of the Devon and Cornwall higher-ups had its sunny side. Let them handle it had been his second thought; his first had been blind disbelief.
He’d been pulling up his trousers when Mrs. E had half woken and mumbled a question as to where he was going. He’d answered by saying it was just a bloody cat up a tree. God knows he didn’t want to say “murder” and have her sit bolt upright in her cloth curlers and start firing questions at him. He tugged on his blue jacket, shoved some hard candy into his pocket-root beer barrels, his favorite-and went out, climbed on his bike, and wheeled along at a good clip to the Drowned Man.
Getting that old bugger Pfinn out of bed by pounding on the front door of the pub had been a bonus. Making him trudge up the dark steps to yell awake that detective from New Scotland Yard had been bonus number two. Yes, this was when he felt like a copper.
Feeling he was in charge of the mills of the gods, PC Evans sucked on a root beer barrel as he brought his palm down on the bell just to let everybody know he was down here waiting as the body grew colder by the minute. Evans had passed through his initial fright at the notion of having to take responsibility himself for the body at Bletchley Hall and was delighted he could pound on doors and ring bells and hurry people along who themselves would have to be the responsible parties.
Therefore it came as a sharp disappointment to him to discover, when he finally got up to the Hall, six police cars already there, blue lights turning. Also to find that scattered around the grounds, electric torches beaming light up and down, were at least a dozen policeman from Camborne headquarters. PC Evans recognized none of them. How had they got there so quickly?
The bullet had torn through the back of the wheelchair with enough momentum to make an entrance wound the size of a lemon and an exit wound in the front just below the rib cage the size of one of Evans’s root beer barrels before embedding itself in a panel of dark red textured wallpaper on the far wall, next to the door in which Matron stood, swaying a little.
Brian Macalvie, for once, was speechless, not because of focusing all of his attention on the crime scene, but speechless with disbelief. He was not shocked that someone had murdered a man, only that someone had murdered this man.
Detective Sergeant Wiggins was white-faced, his mouth agape. He was the first to speak, however. “Why? The poor devil-I just saw him this afternoon. So did Mr. Plant. Should I call him?”
Macalvie nodded. He turned to the stout woman in a flannel bathrobe who had called PC Evans. A long braid hung over her shoulder and she was hugging herself.
Constable Evans watched the police photographer set off flash after flash, making it look like a film shoot. Now, happy to take up his policeman’s duties if it meant merely telling Divisional Commander Macalvie who’s who and what’s what, he motioned toward the elderly man whose face looked hot and tight as a blister and said, “This is the man you want to talk to, sir. Mr. Morris Bletchley.”
Macalvie nodded. “We’ve met. In a minute.” In this minute, he was hunkered down before the wheelchair.
His diminished duties having been even more diminished, PC Evans thought, Arrogant bastard, and dropped his hand.
Macalvie peered up into the downturned face, the head that had dropped forward as if the dead man were sleeping. He then rose and walked around behind the wheelchair and looked at the splintered band of wood, one of several across the back of the chair.
Wiggins was back from making the call to Seabourne and said Mr. Plant would be right over. Ten minutes, tops.
Macalvie asked, then, “Who was he, Mr. Bletchley?”
“Tom Letts.”
Macalvie nodded. “Sergeant Wiggins, come here.”
Not “Constable Evans, come ’ere,” oh, no, just that emaciated boyo from Scotland Yard, come ’ere. Even though I’m the police presence in the village. No, no deference shown. Bastards! Evans stood straighter, just to let everyone know he wasn’t affected at all by being ignored.
A car pulled up outside, a door slammed shut, and the medical examiner from Penzance came in. “What’ve we got?” He looked neither to right nor left but headed toward the dead man and set about his preliminary examination.
Again, there was the sound of tires on gravel, a car coming to a halt, and running feet, and Melrose Plant stood in the doorway of the red drawing room, his coat over his bathrobe, feet still in leather bedroom slippers.
“Ah, no.” Plant turned away.
Thus far she had said nothing, but for some reason, perhaps because it was such a sad little understatement, Matron began to sob. Another woman, smaller and older, patted her shoulder and started crying herself. Morris Bletchley said something to the small old woman about bringing in coffee for everybody.
Melrose Plant looked around this room where he and Tom had been talking seven or eight hours ago. This poor boy, he thought, was talking about the miracles that had occurred at Bletchley Hall. Melrose had been astonished that Tom had actually looked happy. Maybe that was enough of a miracle right there.
Melrose looked across at Macalvie, who looked back. Melrose shook his head.
Macalvie asked how many cases they had here at the Hall at present and was told there were a dozen. “That’s all we can accommodate,” said Matron.
“Are they bedridden? That is, could any of them have been out of bed, moving about?”
Morris Bletchley said, “Several could have. I mean, we have some that are ambulatory, of course.”
“Then I want Detective Sergeant Wiggins to go room to room; I certainly imagine everyone’s awake at this point with a dozen police tearing up the flower beds. You don’t have to worry about his upsetting anyone unnecessarily. If you’d just show him where, Mr. Bletchley?”
Moe Bletchley nodded and left with Wiggins and Matron. Macalvie dispatched PC Evans to the grounds.
“What’s hard to understand,” said Dr. Hoskins, putting away his instruments of life and death and getting up so the ambulance attendants could move the body to a stretcher, “is why anyone would shoot to kill a man who was in the final stages of AIDS. Poor chap was going to die soon anyway; why would anyone try to kill him?”
Melrose said, his voice thick, “I don’t think anyone did.”
Both Hoskins and Macalvie turned to look at Melrose.
“It wasn’t supposed to be Tom. He wasn’t the intended victim. It was Morris Bletchley.”
Dr. Hoskins shut his bag briskly. He was a man who dealt with the body in situ, not the body out of it.
Macalvie nodded. “When can you-”
“Tomorrow morning. Early. I’ll talk to you then.” Dr. Hoskins bowed slightly to Melrose and left.
Macalvie looked at Melrose, waiting.
“It’s the wheelchair. It’s Morris Bletchley’s.”
“Bletchley? He doesn’t need a wheelchair.”
“No. But he uses it, he says, so as not to present a picture of too-perfect health to these terminally ill patients.”
A voice behind them said, “He’s right.” Morris Bletchley took a step forward, as if they all stood for inspection. “The bullet was meant for me. No end of suspects for that. Probably keep you busy for years, Commander Macalvie.”
Macalvie stared at him. “Not this time, Mr. Bletchley.”
They were sitting now, but not comfortably. Macalvie and Melrose were on one of the dark red velvet settees, Moe Bletchley on the other. PC Evans was still on the grounds, helping with the search for forensic evidence.
“Everybody’s seen me in that wheelchair; they know it’s mine.”
“Including visitors?”
Moe shrugged. “What visitors had you in mind?”
With a thin smile, Macalvie answered. “What visitors have you in mind?”
“No one. Few people come here, Superintendent; terminal illness isn’t very tempting.”
“Nursing homes aren’t popular with family and friends either, even if the illness isn’t terminal.”
“No,” said Moe Bletchley, looking sad.
No sadder than Melrose felt. What they were talking about, the failure of people to come to cheer you just when you were really sinking, made him think of Tom and Tom’s parents. On the other hand, there was his sister, Honey, a young lady Melrose would like to meet. Probably would, too, at the funeral.
“Late at night, though, Mr. Bletchley, would someone expect to see you sitting up?”
“Why not? I never go to bed before midnight anyway. I’ve been known to sit in just about any room at night, reading or just thinking. So, yes, there’s a high probability of finding me sitting alone at night.”
Macalvie nodded. “Okay. Anyone in particular you can think of who’d want you dead?”
Bletchley was silent for a few moments, then shook his head.
“Why not?”
“What?”
“Why can’t you think of anyone, since you’re convinced the bullet was meant for you?”
Morris Bletchley looked straight at Macalvie but offered nothing.
Macalvie’s gaze was blue and unblinking. His hands, stuffed in the pockets of his coat, seemed to be pulling him forward on the settee. “Come on, Mr. Bletchley, you’re a billionaire. Are you telling me you can’t think of anyone in your will who might be eager for a hunk of your money?”
Bleakly, Moe smiled. “A number of them. But I don’t see the Sailors’ Home killing me for it.”
“Who has the most to gain?”
“My son, Dan, naturally. Now that the grandchildren are gone.”
“And your daughter-in-law.”
Moe Bletchley said nothing.
“As I recall, you’re no big fan of Karen Bletchley.”
“That’s right. Nor is she fond of me. I don’t think that means we’d shoot one another.”
“Oh, you might not shoot her. Why don’t you like her?”
Moe shrugged, as if it should be obvious. “I think I told you that night. She married Dan for his money. I know it.”
“How?”
“Commander Macalvie, if there’s one thing I can sniff out at a thousand feet it’s someone who’s in love with money. She was here, incidentally.”
“When was that?”
“Three days ago. She stopped by to see me.”
“Is this something she often does?”
“No, never. It’s the first time I’ve seen her in over a year, but that was in London. She doesn’t come back to Bletchley. I’ve seen Dan a number of times, but without Karen. That’s why I was surprised.”
“What was her reason?”
Moe looked over to the window through which the shot had come, but Melrose thought he was merely looking at blankness-the black sky, the blacker trees. “She said she wanted to see Seabourne again. She said she was trying”-he rubbed his eyes as if to bring something into inner focus-“to come to terms with Noah’s and Esme’s deaths. Well, I don’t have to remind you-”
“No, you don’t. But why now? Especially since the house is leased to a stranger. Didn’t she know it was taken by Mr. Plant, here?”
“Yes. She’d been to see the agent, Esther Laburnum, who handles the property for me.”
Macalvie leaned forward. “Mr. Bletchley, doesn’t it seem strange to you that she’d show up, first time in four years, just when all these other things are happening?”
Moe looked off toward the black glass of the high windows again. “Yes, I guess it does.”
After a few seconds of silence, during which nothing could be heard but the ticking of the longcase clock, Macalvie asked, “Who else might wish you harm? Given the way you’ve built up a business empire, there must be some toes you’ve stepped on; you must have made some enemies.”
“Sure. But not the shoot-’em-up kind.”
“Then what have you got that I don’t know about that someone either wants or wants to get rid of?”
Moe frowned. “What’s that conundrum mean, exactly?”
“That you have something you don’t know you have or, more likely, know something that you don’t know might be lethal. To someone else. A secret shared with you that you might even have forgotten. That’s merely an example. In other words, someone who thinks you’re a danger to him.”
“That’s just-too unlikely, Commander Macalvie.”
Macalvie sat back then and studied Morris Bletchley.
Macalvie, thought Melrose, didn’t want to remind him that leading two little children down a stone stairway to frigid water was even more unlikely.
I can’t eat strawberries, can’t touch ’em, me,” Sergeant Wiggins was saying, by way of sympathizing with Mrs. Crudup. “Minute I get a taste of one, like in some pud or trifle, I’m off.” Wiggins was sluicing the palm of one hand off the other to show how quickly “off” a strawberry could send him.
Old Mrs. Crudup looked tissue thin, someone whose every breath seemed proof that the air was unbreatheable, as if she might have been living at an extraordinarily high altitude and been brought down from it in a bubble. She was gossamer, as sheer as the gauze-like curtains at the window.
But she was not, apparently, so ephemeral that she couldn’t dip into the public complaint bucket and give as good as she got. “I know, I know, don’t tell me.” Her reedy voice wavered. “Strawberries is what’s caused all this, and that’s a fact. Sick as a dog, I am, sick as a dog. Could die before the night’s out.”
“Don’t say that, Mrs. Crudup. I can sympathize, I can sympathize.”
Apparently, thought Melrose, Wiggins had quickly picked up Mrs. Crudup’s habit of saying things twice. Melrose also noted that Mrs. Crudup was one of those patients whom Wiggins had been told he need not question. She was hooked up to enough IVs and machinery to furnish Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.
At Macalvie’s request, Melrose had gone to find out if Wiggins had discovered anything. Yes, he had apparently discovered that he, Wiggins, and the ghostly Mrs. Crudup both had a strawberry allergy.
But Mrs. Crudup, as Melrose learned from lounging in the doorway, suffered not from just an allergy but from a whole strawberry conspiracy.
“They disguise ’em in chocolate. They think I don’t know! Take ’em away, Mr. Wiggins! Take ’em away!”
Wiggins had the plate in hand. “Certainly I will. And I’ll just see Mr. Bletchley about stopping people bringing them round.”
Melrose interrupted. “Sergeant Wiggins?” Wiggins turned. “Commander Macalvie needs you.”
Wiggins bade adieu to Mrs. Crudup, who exacted a promise from him that he’d come back as soon as he’d dealt with the ones who were trying to kill her.
There had been three or four of the ambulatory old people standing in their own doorways when Melrose passed by. It was Mr. Clancy who had directed Melrose to Mrs. Crudup’s room.
Now, on the way back, there were several more. There was the piano teacher, Miss Timons-Browne, Mr. Bleaney, and Miss Livingston, who caught Wiggins’s sleeve in her small talons and rattled on about the murder of poor Tom.
Wiggins managed to disengage himself, but all down the hall voices called to him and seemed to want to haul him this way and that. Mr. Bleaney and Mrs. Noonan (also on the not-to-question list) were two of the most vocal. How in God’s name had he managed to visit, must less question, all of these people? Yet he waved to them or said hello, hello, as if he’d known them forever.
As he walked he was thumbing back the pages of his small notebook. “You remember the Hoopers?”
“Who could forget them? Oh, excuse me, they could forget them.”
“They saw something.”
Melrose stopped, turned. “What?”
“Someone or something, right round the corner.”
“Corner?”
“They were in the conservatory, playing chess.”
“At midnight? Good grief, are people permitted to wander around here at all hours?”
“Well, knowing how much Mr. Bletchley believes in his patients’ freedom, that doesn’t surprise me, sir.”
Melrose supposed not. He started walking again. “Someone or something. That just about suits them, given their memories.”
Macalvie sat on the same dark red settee, but across from him this time were the Hoopers. All three of them sat leaning forward, as if they were about to try out one-armed wrestling.
“Okay,” said Macalvie. “Exactly what did you see?”
The Hoopers leaned even closer to Macalvie, looking puzzled. “And you might be-?”
“Macalvie, Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.”
They all had, of course, been introduced, or at least the Hoopers had introduced each other. But that was all of fifteen seconds ago.
“A policeman?” said one of them, his squiggly eyebrows dancing.
Melrose expected Macalvie might be about to reach across the seductively reachable distance and knock their heads together. On the Hoopers’ part-well, they appeared to be waiting for Macalvie to go on.
So he did. “You told Sergeant Wiggins, there, you saw someone or something at the time we judge the shot was fired.”
The Hoopers sat; the clock ticked.
Then one said, of a sudden, “It was…”
The other snapped his fingers. “Yes, it was a…”
They looked at one another, urging one another forward. “It was a…”
Macalvie shut his eyes, tightly. When he opened them he turned to Wiggins. “Is it hoping for too much that you-?”
Wiggins, whose brow was furrowed as if in sympathy with the Hoopers’ brows, blinked. “Oh. Oh, of course. Sorry, sir.” And he started thumbing through his notebook, turning page after page after page.
Melrose wondered what in hell he could have in it. How many people up there in their bedrooms had he interviewed and for how long?
“Here it is.” Wiggins read. “Hoopers: ‘We were just in the middle of our game, I mean, nobody knows just what the middle is, anyway it was just on midnight, for a moment later the clock chimed. We looked out-we saw this person, well, more a shape it was, going past the window.’ ”
“And?” asked Macalvie.
“I’m afraid that’s all I’ve written down, sir.”
Macalvie looked at the Hoopers. “You saw this shape. Can you be a bit more precise there?”
“It was a…”
“He could’ve been-kind of small.”
“Or she, she could’ve been-well, small.”
Just at that moment one of the uniformed police outside raised the window around the corner from the one the shot had been fired through and called to Macalvie, asking if this was what he meant.
“Yeah. That’s what.”
“Just when the conversation was getting interesting.” Melrose walked over to the window.
Finally, the Hoopers were excused. The little woman who’d been sent to get the coffee came in with a tray of cups and saucers and biscuits. Matron followed her with an enormous coffeepot. Having observed the party atmosphere, Mr. Bleaney, Mr. Clancy, and Miss Livingston crowded in after them.
What Melrose liked about these people was their sporting nature, their smiling in the face of such adversity, and it set him to wondering about the chemistry among people for whom death was right around the corner. To use Tom’s metaphor, it must have been like this in war, at least it always was in war’s representations. As if at the front, he and Wiggins were passing amid battle-ravaged troops taking strength from one another. You depended, he thought, upon another man’s spirit to pull you through. And it was all overseen-the battle plan, the deployment of troops, and, at the end, the demobbing, the mustering-out, all of the cliché-ridden, unashamed, canting patriotism-by Morris Bletchley.
I heard what happened; I guess everyone has. It’s terrible. It’s worse than terrible if Tom got shot-by mistake. He was going to die anyway, and soon; that’s what people are saying. As if that made it all right. As far as I’m concerned, it makes it worse. It makes it ten times worse. Even the little he had to live, that’s gone now.”
Johnny stood in the open doorway of Seabourne and said this to Melrose before he’d even stepped inside. He stood turning his cabby’s cap in his hands and his eyes glazed with tears that didn’t spill.
“Come on in, Johnny. You’re right. It does make it worse. Come on back to the kitchen; I just made some coffee.” It was late morning and Melrose had just arisen, having had no sleep to speak of the night before.
Johnny followed him, talking about Tom all the while, talking nervously as if his license to talk might be revoked at any moment, so he’d better get it out fast. “I always talked to him when we went to the Hall. He was so-calming, somehow. You probably never noticed but I’m kind of tight-wound-”
Melrose smiled and nodded.
“-and it was actually relaxing to be around Tom.
It seems strange it should be, with his problems. You’d think he’d be bitter, getting AIDS when he wasn’t even gay, but he wasn’t bitter, not at all-”
“Tom wasn’t gay? But-”
Johnny was shaking his head. “He told me when we were talking about the chances of getting Alzheimer’s or esophageal cancer, you know, the various things the people at the Hall have. We started discussing AIDS and he said the chance of getting it with only one-uh-you know, contact-ranged anywhere from one in a thousand to three in a hundred. This relationship he had happened a long time ago and was very short-lived. Anyway-” Johnny shrugged. “But maybe a crisis is what shows you what you’re made of.” He finished this looking at the cup of coffee Melrose had placed before him, looking as if what he himself was made of must not be much.
“Tom’s crisis was in the past, Johnny; it was horribly painful but he’d lived with it for a long time. It was old. Yours is new.”
Johnny was quiet for a moment and then said, “Police think Chris shot this Sada Colthorp and then took off, don’t they?”
“No, that certainly hasn’t been my impression. Commander Macalvie hasn’t come to any conclusions about that murder.”
“Chris didn’t like her, though. I think they had a couple of fights.”
“A long way from fighting to murder, Johnny.”
Johnny shook the hair fallen across his forehead out of his face. “What in bloody hell is going on around here? Why would anyone want to kill Mr. Bletchley? He’s done nothing but good for this village.”
“That’s what I understand.”
He shoved his cup aside, slapped on his cap, adjusted it, and said, “I’m on call. I’ve got a ride to pick up and take to Mousehole. Thanks for the coffee.”
“Is your uncle still stopping with you?”
“Charlie? He went back to Penzance yesterday morning.”
“I had dinner with him night before last under Mr. Pfinn’s watchful eye. I thought him quite a good fellow.”
“He told me. He thought you were, too. ’Bye.”
The bell rang again and Melrose started to rise from the comfort of the fireplace and the book he was reading. He hesitated, thinking it might be Agatha already or, worse (since Agatha might have needed a ride), Agatha and her bosom buddy, Esther Laburnum.
He tiptoed. How ridiculous, he told himself, and straightened up as he walked the last twenty feet. Still, once there, he did not open the door immediately. Instead he took a furtive glance through one of the leaded-glass panels on both sides of the door to see a man standing there, a stranger in a lightweight wool suit. Good wool, too. At least the back was a stranger’s. He was quite tall and seemed to stand at ease, not with the stiff uncertainty some backs can muster if they’re on unfamiliar ground.
Then, disgusted with himself for keeping the poor fellow waiting, he yanked the door open.
The man turned. “Mr. Plant? Or Lord Ardry? Mrs. Laburnum didn’t seem sure what to call you.” He smiled. “I’m Daniel Bletchley.”
The serviceable stereotypes of composers Melrose had trusted and trotted through his mind-effete, absent-eyed, cloud-ridden-would have to go. The man’s sheer physical presence erased the stereotype. He was tall, though no taller than Melrose; yet he was more densely packed. He was not conventionally handsome, but then he didn’t need to be. His sexuality was something like Richard Jury’s only more so. (A lot of women would have been surprised that there was a “more so.”) Nothing in the expression of his unconventionally handsome face seemed held back, restrained, or secret.
This went through Melrose’s mind in the moment it took him to say, “Come in.”
Daniel Bletchley was happy to come in and stood in the foyer, shaking hands. His eyes, though, Melrose noticed, seemed to be following the sweep of the graceful staircase that he had once climbed so often to the upstairs rooms with which he was so familiar.
“You’re the musician,” said Melrose.
Dan turned his eyes from the staircase and laughed. “I don’t know if I’m the musician, but, yes, I’m one of them.” His expression and his tone grew more sober. “When I heard about what happened, I thought Dad could use some help. Tom.” Dan shook his head. “He was with Dad for a long time. A long time.” He brought this out on an expiration of breath, as if Time had been profligate with Tom Letts’s life, as if Tom should have been able to count on it for more. Then he added, “I hope I’m not bothering you.”
“You’re not bothering me in the least. My aunt is coming for tea at five, and you’ll want to be gone before that event horizon. But as for now, join me in the library. I’ve got a fire and whisky going.”
“Sounds great.” As Melrose led the way, a way with which Dan Bletchley was thoroughly-and sadly-familiar, Dan said, “ ‘Event horizon’? Sounds ominous.”
“It is. It’s my aunt, who, knowing I wanted to get away from Long Piddleton-my village in Northants, that is-and all things Piddletonian, just for a change, a damned change, followed me and has taken up residence at that B-and-B in the village.”
Daniel laughed. “Not to worry; she won’t last. No one can stand that place for more than a night or two.”
“Wrong. Wrong on that score. She’s been there for over a week.”
Melrose might not have recognized Daniel Bletchley with only the snapshots to go by. Sitting now in the wing chair beside them, and with a drink in his hand, he still might have escaped recognition. He was a man who was very alive, an aliveness not captured by a camera’s lens; He was apparently one of those people subdued by them; cameras didn’t “catch” him. Certainly, he was one who wasn’t tempted by them, for he was always looking away, or down, or in shadow. Melrose might have wondered if the two men were the same person.
They were. From the way Daniel picked up the photograph of the children and looked at it, carefully set it back, and looked in his whisky glass, there could be no mistaking who he was.
“Dad said you were a lot of help. He said you were at the Hall last night. With that detective.”
“Commander Macalvie.”
“Yes. I know him from… does he have any idea what’s going on?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not yet.”
“Dad sometimes gives the impression of being-uh, demanding and impervious to people’s feelings.”
“I’ve seen no sign of that, none.”
Dan smiled, if a little uncertainly. “He’s very tough in business. Sometimes he appears to be steamrolling right over people… I’m trying to explain it to myself. Police seem to think whoever it was was trying to kill him and not Tom. I know Dad can be headstrong, arbitrary, intractable, but-” He shrugged.
“If those qualities earn you a bullet in the back, I have a relation who’d be riddled.”
Dan laughed. “Yes. You’re probably right.”
Melrose thought for a moment. “Could it be some old grudge? Some old damage your father caused?”
Dan was thoughtful, head down, the whisky glass, empty, swinging from the tips of his fingers. Melrose got up and took the glass from his hands. Dan thanked him absently. He put his elbows on his knees, made a bridge of his now empty fingers, and rested his mouth against them. He stared at the fire.
Except for the occasional spark and split of wood and the click of glass against bottle, the room was perfectly still. Beyond the window, the quiet day. He could easily check Karen Bletchley’s account of what happened with that of her husband.
“Daniel,” Melrose said without thinking; he was not usually free with first names on short acquaintance. “If you don’t mind my calling you that?”
Of course he didn’t mind. The long fingers, the pianist’s fingers, waved this away and took the whisky. “Go on.”
“I met your wife. I met Karen.” He felt uncomfortable, as if he were telling a secret. Or would have done, had it not been for what he suspected was an artful story of hers.
Daniel was surprised. “Really? Where did you meet?”
She hadn’t mentioned it. Why? “She came here, actually. It was only a few days ago.”
Daniel set his drink on the table and again leaned forward, mouth against entwined fingers. Full attention.
“She wanted-she said-to see the house again. I imagine tragedy-well, pulls one back. Look, I’m terribly, terribly sorry about your children, what happened to them. It was-” He searched for words. “I have none of my own.” Suddenly, Melrose felt the lack and was ashamed of it, as if he’d been considered for parenthood and been found wanting. Ridiculous, but there it was.
Dan said nothing, but his eyes, scarcely visible over his fingertips, were wet. It would take very little, thought Melrose, to bring this man’s feelings to the surface. “She told me-” He tried to sort out what Karen had told Macalvie four years ago and had since told him. Then he went on to report what Mrs. Hayter had told him and, before that, Macalvie. And the rest of it. “The thing is this: Commander Macalvie has never let this case, what happened to your children, go. He’s never closed it. Now he wonders if the strange things that have been happening are related to what happened back then. That’s the reason I bring it up.” He felt fuddled. “I’m probably overstepping my bounds; Macalvie will talk to you about all of this. I certainly don’t want to bring up something that you must find painful.”
“No. I don’t mind. I don’t want not to talk about it. It makes me ill not to be able to talk about it. So, please, go on.”
“Well.” Now Melrose sat forward too, hands circling his glass. “Your wife went over that terrible night. She told me that earlier the children had come upon some people in the woods, more than once, a man and a woman. At first your wife thought nothing of it when they talked about it, but after a while she got to thinking it was peculiar. She didn’t know who the man was or who the woman was. That is, she didn’t actually see them. But… what do you make of all this?”
“I didn’t know what to make of it. Mr. Macalvie asked the same questions.”
“Did you think she was-they were real?”
“You mean did the kids make them up?”
“Not exactly. I wondered if-” What in hell was he doing? He knew nothing about Bletchley’s present relationship with his wife. Why should he be putting himself in a policeman’s place, in Macalvie’s place, raising issues like this? “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing for you to be sorry about. Through no fault of your own you’ve got involved with my family. I’ve no idea what Karen told you. Since Noah and Esmé died, we haven’t talked much.” He turned his face toward the high window that faced the cliff and the bay. “I’m not sure we did before.” He rested his head against the tall back of the chair and closed his eyes in the manner of a man who is tired to death. Life, however, would never let Daniel Bletchley go, merely at his bidding. “Sometimes I catch my own thoughts and wonder, How can I think of anything at all except what happened to those little children? Have you ever had something happen in your life, some event that washes over everything else and flattens it?”
Melrose couldn’t answer. It was as if something were stuck in his throat.
There was a silence. Into it, Daniel said suddenly, “Chris Wells has disappeared.”
Melrose was surprised by the seeming irrelevance of the remark. “You knew her.”
“Yes. I knew her well.” He took a long drink of his whisky.
“There was a woman murdered in Lamorna Cove. Your father told you about this?” When Daniel nodded, Melrose went on. “She once worked at the Woodbine.”
“I think I remember her slightly.” He leaned forward, rolling the glass between his hands. “But I didn’t know this woman and Chris had had a falling out.”
“I think it was over Johnny.”
“Johnny? But, dear God, if it was four years ago, the boy couldn’t have been more than-what?-thirteen?”
“He’s probably always seemed older than he is. And he’s a very handsome lad, very appealing to women, I’d think.”
Daniel shook his head. “And now because this woman was murdered and Chris has disappeared, it’s post hoc, ergo propter hoc, is that it? Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.” He shook his head again, unable to come up with a word that would convey his disdain for such an idea. “Chris could never, never do that.”
Dan Bletchley had known her well, clearly. “Not even to protect Johnny?”
Dan looked at him with a surprised quickness. “Protect Johnny? From what?”
“Sorry. I’m just playing devil’s advocate. I had no reason for saying that. I don’t know her, of course; I’ve never met her. But I’ve certainly got the impression she loves him a lot, and for his part-well, his feelings for her seem to stop just one step short of worship.”
“Yes. She certainly does love him. Still.” He ran his hand through his straight light-brown hair, which had a way of standing up in ridges when he did this. And this gesture too made him look young, like the boy he must have been. That was one more thing about him, a boyishness that would have appealed to women. His sexuality would simply bowl women over. He had a force and a heat about him a woman would feel like the siroccos that blow across the dunes.
“Let’s have another,” said Melrose, heading for the drinks table again. When he was back in his seat, he turned the talk to something less volatile, telling Daniel how the house had affected him the first time he’d seen it.
Dan laughed. “The Uninvited. I thought I was the only one who remembered that film. It must have been a rerun on the telly. I have to confess one thing: I loved that background music.”
Melrose waved his glass and hummed the tune. Was he drunk?
Dan drained his glass, stood up, and said, “Come on. And bring the decanter.”
“Where?”
Dan was already out of the room. “Upstairs,” he called back over his shoulder. “The piano’s still there, isn’t it?”
Following him up the stairs, Melrose said, “I was trying to play it.”
Dan stood looking around the nearly empty room as if long absence might have altered things irrevocably. “How I missed this room. I could stand where you are now for what seemed like the entire day watching the water, getting the rhythm of it, thinking music. God, what a cliché.” He set his glass on the corner of the piano and sat down on the bench.
Melrose recalled how Daniel’s gaze had traveled the length of the rosewood banister the moment he’d set foot in the house. He was speaking the truth when Dan had said he’d come to console his father, but Melrose wondered if this house and this room hadn’t been part of what pulled him back. As there must be for Daniel Bletchley many rooms and countless pianos, Melrose wondered about his attachment to this one. Or, rather, if the attachment were so strong, could anything have driven him away?
The music happened so suddenly and with such force that Melrose had to take a step backward. Waterfalls of music, cascading notes, a whole rich canvas of that song Melrose had tried to pick out with a finger. He stood looking out the window as if the music might be rushing against the rocks, shaking the waves in some violent rapprochement with the elements.
And the thing about it was, the original composition, though vastly appealing, was not great music, not complex, not textured, but a sentimental song with rather predictable crescendos and diminuendos. Yet this was such felt music. The sheer volume made it seem as if all of the air had been drained from the room and gone to swell the music. Were he truthful, he thought, there were only two responses to such a sound: to faint or to weep. He was not truthful and did neither.
“ ‘Stella by Starlight,’ ” said Daniel. “Do you know what I did? I was eleven or twelve when I heard it. I wrote to the composer and told him how much I liked it. He sent me his original score. I never got over that.” He shook his head as he fingered the opening bars again.
“But that’s wonderful. You must have been very persuasive as a lad. Not to say very talented. Play something of yours.”
“Of mine? I just did.”
“I thought you said-”
Daniel smiled. “Sorry. I’m being enigmatic.” He sighed, thought for a moment, and began to play an étude.
Melrose thought it was technically very fine, yet it didn’t have the weight of the Stella he’d just played. Although “Stella by Starlight” was, no matter how beguiling the melody, sentimental stuff, whatever it lacked in complexity was more than made up for by the complex emotions of the man who played it.
Lost in these reflections and the water below, Melrose jumped when he heard the door knocker.
Dan stopped playing. “Your aunt?”
Melrose looked at his watch and answered, ruefully, “My aunt.”
Talk about the Uninvited.
Before she was even over the doorsill, Agatha was running on about the shooting at the Hall. “It’s not hard to see it, I’ve done a little-how d’you do?” she said, acknowledging Daniel Bletchley’s presence, before herding herself into the living room on the right, talking a mile a minute as she went through, unaware that Melrose wasn’t with her. Talk talk talk.
“Listen, thanks for the drinks,” said Daniel.
“Thanks, dear heavens, for the music!”
“My pleasure.” Daniel went out the door and turned. “You’ll come to the funeral?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Ah. Good. You’re really a part of all this. You knew him. Anyway, please come.” With that, he trudged across the gravel to his car.
Agatha was at the window, watching Daniel Bletchley drive away. “Who is that man?”
“Daniel Bletchley. You just met him, remember?”
“That’s the name of the person who runs that depressing home.”
“He’s Morris Bletchley’s son.”
Agatha hugged herself and made a shuddery sound. “It’s freezing in here. You could at least have laid a fire. You knew I was coming for tea.”
“True. We’re not having it in here. Come along.”
Complaining all the way across the foyer and down the short hall-about the temperature, the size of the place, the velvet hangings in the dining room she passed, the drafts, the prospect she glimpsed through a round window facing the bay, the bay itself, the coast of England, all of England, and the world-she finally came to rest on the small sofa by the fire. The air through which she’d passed hummed and vibrated with the tinny sound of a plucked banjo string.
Melrose said, “I’m surprised you didn’t recognize Bletchley. He’s a pianist. He played that white piano in Betty’s or Binkey’s or whatever that tearoom was called.”
“What are you talking about?”
It was as good a story as any. “Harrogate, dear aunt. Don’t you recall staying at the Old Swan with your friend Theodore?”
“You mean Teddy.”
“Well, she looked like a Theodore.” Sighing with genuine pleasure, Melrose recalled that wonderful twenty minutes of conversation when he had set himself the challenge of not speaking a word, yet all the while giving the impression of a man with brilliant conversation. Wasn’t it amazing how blind people could be to the world outside of their own egos?
“You mean that man was the afternoon-tea-hour pianist at Betty’s?”
Betty’s was a Harrogate landmark. Agatha was impressed; she always was by the wrong things.
“Yes. I was trying to talk him into playing in the Woodbine. Well, excuse me while I put the kettle on.” Melrose turned to go.
“You mean the tea’s not ready?” Her sigh was pained. “Oh, honestly, men!”
She seemed to have forgotten that oh-honestly-men had been producing her tea daily at Ardry End without fail or error. He put the kettle on the hob and was back in the library quick as one of young Johnny’s card tricks.
“I was telling you about my own little investigation. We cannot leave it to doltish police such as that Constable Evans!”
“There are some distinctly un-doltish police on the job. Mr. Macalvie, mainly.”
She straightened the ruffle of her fussy flowered blouse. “Of course, they’re all barking up the wrong tree.”
“Which tree is that?”
Ignoring the tree, she leaned forward and whispered-who ever she thought might be overhearing, Melrose didn’t know-“What we need to search for is your local homophobic, and I think I’ve got him!”
The kettle screamed.
No wonder.
Melrose was out and back barely in time for the tea to steep. This announcement of his aunt’s might prove to be entertaining. He told her that her homophobia was misplaced, since the killer hadn’t even intended to kill Tom Letts. “It was Morris Bletchley he or she was after.”
“That’s patently absurd. That’s the trouble with you so-called intellectuals, you can’t see what’s right under your noses. What I heard was”-again she leaned toward him and said in a whispery hiss-“he has AIDS-full blown AIDS! Can’t have that in a village. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that Pfinn person shot him. If ever there was a homophobic, it’s that man!”
Melrose had a hard time of it not to pour scalding tea down her neck. He was never a proselytizer of gay rights or anything else; he didn’t care much one way or the other. But for Tom, yes, he would proselytize. “Your bigoted nature-”
“What?” Sheer amazement sat on her features at the realization that Melrose was overtly criticizing her.
“-precludes any possibility of your seeing a person’s true worth. All you’re doing is projecting your own fears on another person or situation. That’s what homophobia is, isn’t it? Projecting one’s own fear of partaking of other men’s needs and desires? That’s what phobia in general is, a fear of being the Other. Anyway, you didn’t know Tom Letts. I did, and I liked him very much.”
Agatha looked all around, as if the dread virus might have infiltrated Seabourne. The look made Melrose laugh; it was so much the look that would be called forth by the doors crashing open upon them. The Uninvited!
“I don’t see it’s anything to laugh about.”
Too bad. “As for your chosen homophobic-Mr. Pfinn, is it?-I don’t know how you come to that remarkable conclusion, since Mr. Pfinn engages in conversation only to be contradictory. He stays away from words.”
“Well, he didn’t with Esther and me. Of course, people do tend to confide in me, you’ve noticed.”
Melrose felt his eyes open as wide as any cartoon character. As did Mr. Pfinn, Melrose stayed away from words.
Agatha leaned forward, balancing a biscuit on her knee. “The man absolutely loathes homosexuals!”
“Mr. Pfinn loathes everyone. Loathing is not a criterion by which to judge Mr. Pfinn.”
Pfinn was living up to Melrose’s assessment of him (splenetic, peevish, and unaccommodating) that night in the Drowned Man by refusing to allow Brian Macalvie another drink in the saloon bar.
“Just you order another at dinner,” commanded Pfinn. “But get your skates on. Can’t keep the cook around all night, can I?”
Dinnertime thus determined, they had gone into the dining room, where Melrose was now picking another bone out of his turbot. This had been served by a humorless middle-aged lady he had never seen before. Johnny was not around. “You say the same gun killed both of them?”
“Yeah, but we already knew that. Smith and Wesson twenty-two.” Macalvie had stopped eating five minutes before and was smoking a cigarette, having considerately asked Melrose’s permission.
“We didn’t know anything. You apparently did.”
“Did you really think there were two shooters involved?”
“I-”
“There are too many similarities between the shootings to believe that.” Macalvie pierced a piece of aubergine and held it on the tine of his fork as if it were a little green world he needed to decipher. He gave his fish a poke, put his fork down again, and looked around for the waitress. “We’re the only ones in here, for God’s sakes, so why can’t we get service? I want another beer. Has it occurred to you, Plant, that everything significant in the background of these two cases-three if we count the little kids-happened four years ago, give a month, take a month? Listen: Sada Colthorp turns up here four years ago; the kids died September four years ago; Ramona Friel died in January four years ago.”
Melrose drank his wine, a Meursault at some outlandish price, but he felt he deserved it. Why, he wasn’t sure. “That bothers you?”
Macalvie’s head turned from the dining room search and cut Melrose a glance. “Doesn’t it disturb you? You don’t think it’s coincidence, do you?”
Actually, Melrose hadn’t worked out that there was a list of events to consider. He watched the waitress trudge grimly toward their table, thinking not about Macalvie’s list but about where Johnny was.
Macalvie told the woman what he wanted and she trudged grimly off again. “The night the little kids died, the housekeeper thought she heard a car, woke up, but went back to sleep again. Why did she do that?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“You’re an elderly woman of a nervous disposition, alone with two little kids in an isolated house-”
“Turn of the Screw, as I said.”
“Uh-huh. A car drives up or drives off. Wouldn’t this keep you from going back to sleep? It would me, and I’ve got a gun. I’d be pumping adrenaline-unless, of course, the sound was familiar.”
“You mean one of the family cars?”
“There were three: Daniel’s sporty Jaguar, Karen’s BMW, Morris Bletchley’s Volvo.”
Melrose recalled his visit to Rodney Colthorp. “Or Simon Bolt’s. If she heard a familiar car, it didn’t have to be Dan Bletchley’s. Bolt had the same make; Dennis Colthorp tried to buy it, remember? The car would have to have been leaving, not arriving, because Mrs. Hayter went to investigate.”
“Right. That’s possible. Too bad Bolt’s not around to question. He died three years ago.” Macalvie paused. “So Daniel and Karen were out on the razz. Don’t give me that alibi look. Daniel’s fell apart pretty quickly. Karen’s lacks the essential watertightness we cops hate; her dinner companions said they actually hadn’t seen her every minute as they went on to a concert after dinner. Tickets were hard to get, so they had to sit apart. I only got this from them, mind you, when I questioned them again.”
“So they didn’t really know where she was for some time.”
“An hour and twenty minutes. They were vague. I went back and checked up on that particular event.”
“What you’re saying is that one of the Bletchleys came back?” Melrose’s scalp prickled.
Macalvie shrugged. “Not necessarily. I don’t know. Even so, it doesn’t mean one of them was responsible for the kids’ deaths.”
“And Mrs. Hayter only now mentions the car?”
Macalvie nodded. “She said, ‘It could never be Mr. Bletchley, as he was in Penzance with his business friend.’ ”
“How could she leave this out before?”
“People are funny about what they see and hear. If you ask a witness to describe a man, he might say, ‘He looked a lot like that gentleman over there, green eyes, dark blond hair, tall, classic looks, yes, like Melrose Plant. Wore those little gold-rimmed glasses, just like ’im.’ Given the possibility you, Plant, could actually have been there, then why not hit on the obvious? It wasn’t a man who looked like you, it was you.”
Melrose said nothing; he was trying to think up reasons why it couldn’t possibly have been Dan Bletchley. He didn’t somehow think Macalvie would go for the nice-guy defense. He pushed his plate aside and took out his Zippo and cigarettes and listened.
“They must’ve been careful. I had someone on Dan Bletchley’s tail for two months.” He nodded at Melrose’s look of surprise. “All we got was dinner with his wife once a week at the Ivy, then concerts, the theater. It must have been someone living near enough that he could see her and get back in an evening.”
“How about here in Bletchley? That’s near enough.” He lit a cigarette, rasping the flint. “Chris Wells.”
Rarely had he ever surprised Macalvie, but her name in this context certainly did. “Chris Wells? What makes you think that?”
“I’m inferring it from the way he talked about her. She was no passing acquaintance.”
Macalvie had forgotten his cigar. The coal end was dimming. “And she’s disappeared. Jesus.” He took the cigar from his mouth. “Another woman. Chris Wells. I knew it’d be something simple.”
“If you call that simple,” said Melrose, ruefully.
Johnny had stayed in all day and was staying in all night, too. Rarely did he call any of his various jobs to say he wasn’t coming in, but after last night, and falling over that stupid tree root, and the awful way he felt, he’d decided to stay in.
He was dividing his time between housecleaning and practicing magic. Up to then, he hadn’t done anything, hadn’t touched anything, as if, by some alchemical process, leaving things exactly the same meant she would come back, she would magically appear.
It had by now been nearly two weeks. Twelve days. It seemed months, years, since he had last seen his aunt. He dried the last plate and stacked it, snapped the dish towel, and flung it over his shoulder.
Johnny picked up his book, named Sorcerer’s Apprentice, in which the “Sorcerer” led the reader apprentice through the tricks. He disliked the comic-book illustrations, but the actual text was all right. He leaned against the kitchen counter and continued reading what he’d interrupted to sweep the floor. He looked at the big table where Chris’s baked goods still lay on cookie sheets, the meringues and the ginger cookies, and told himself to put the meringues in plastic bags. Most of the cookies he’d already eaten. He wasn’t all that fond of meringues, although Chris’s were better than Brenda’s. Brenda liked things really sweet.
He looked back at the book and read the instructions for this particular trick.
You will need: (1) three ashtrays, glass or metal, 3-4 inches diameter; and (2) three small objects-safety pin, button, penny.
They hadn’t any ashtrays since neither of them smoked. At least, Chris was supposed to have stopped. Charlie might have brought one of his tin ones; he’d started carrying them around because ashtrays weren’t such a familiar sight anymore. But Johnny didn’t see any.
It had been nice having Charlie around, if only for twenty-four hours. He rarely visited.
He looked at the dessert plates he’d washed. Too big to stand in for ashtrays. He read on to see what the Apprentice (meaning himself) was supposed to do with them. Just put one of the small objects on top of each one. He looked around the kitchen and saw the lid from an empty jar, yes, that would work, except he had to have three of them. Then his eye fell on the meringues. He walked over to the table. Three, maybe four inches. Perfect. The center was depressed so he could put the “small objects” in them. He stacked up five-in case they broke easily-and took a big napkin from a drawer in the table, where he also saw a small picture hanger that would do as a “small object.”
This loot he carried into the living room and put down on the card table. Its smooth green baize made it an excellent surface. Then, with one of the meringues to munch, he went to a small sideboard and opened a drawer where Chris kept odds and ends-the “junk drawer” she called it-into which she tossed things she couldn’t think what to do with.
He found several safety pins and chose the smallest. An amber plastic tube of white pills rolled to the front of the drawer. The pills were just the size of small buttons. But what were they? Medicine for what? He could make nothing of the name. He took a bite of the meringue and let it melt in his mouth, turned the tube to read the date. That wouldn’t tell him anything. Chris wasn’t a pill popper; he hoped she wasn’t sick and he didn’t know it. He took one of the pills to use in place of the button.
He went back to the card table, where he polished off the meringue and wished he had some strawberries and some of that wonderful custard, sabayon. Chris made it for dessert sometimes, piling strawberries on a meringue and pouring the custard over it. You could get drunk off that custard, there was so much Madeira wine in it.
Telling himself to stop thinking about Chris, to concentrate on the book and the trick, he aligned the ashtray meringues as instructed and laid out the napkin. He read:
Stack ashtrays, cover with the handkerchief.
Johnny stacked the three meringues and dropped the napkin over them. This was going to be one of the Sorcerer’s no-brainers, he thought. He picked up the last meringue-since he wouldn’t need it for reinforcements-and bit into it while he read:
It is important that the viewer(s) believe that the button, coin, or pin will reappear if they have faith that this is the case.
Johnny’s head snapped up. He stared at the wall opposite. Wait, he thought, and shook his head. Just wait, now. It was as if to proceed, as if to take one small step, would have him rushing like an avalanche toward an answer he couldn’t believe.
Fragments of remembered conversations jostled for his attention. She would never go off without telling me… This time she did.
Johnny knew he was right even while more and more adrenaline was pumping through his body.
This time she did.
No, she didn’t!
He was out the door in a flash and, virus excuse forgotten, went running toward the Woodbine. He stopped abruptly where the roots overlapped the pavement and thought, No. Not the way to do it.
He looked across at the Drowned Man and darted across the street and in through the door, again un-caring of the virus that was accounting for his day off from serving dinner.
Mr. Pfinn, however, hadn’t forgotten. He came into the bar from the dining room carrying dirty linen. “Well, Johnny? Ya better now t’meal’s done and I had t’get Ursula in?”
Johnny didn’t waste time making excuses or acknowledging the sanctimonious tone. “Is Mr. Plant here by any chance for dinner?”
“He were. Gone, now, him and that other’n, too.”
“Which other-you mean the detective? Mr. Macalvie?”
Mr. Pfinn, happy to add to Johnny’s anxiety, merely said, “Mebbe. Whoever.”
Johnny looked wildly around the room as if something might yet remain of the two men, some fragment he could address. But the only things here to commune with were Pfinn and the dogs in the doorway.
“Where’d they go? Do you know where they went?”
Mr. Pfinn’s white eyelashes blinked several times. “No cain tell that. Listen, boy, I’d ought t’fire ya, I ought.”
“Stuff it, Mr. Pfinn, and you can stuff your job too.”
He was fast on the point of tears; then he was at the doorway, jumping over the dogs, and out the front door, where he ran straight into Megs, who served along with him at the Woodbine.
Not that it mattered, but now Brenda would know his reason for not coming in was bogus. He decided to make it three out of three and walked as quickly as he could to the Cornwall Cabs office.
“Feeling better, love?” asked Shirley, who, not waiting for an answer, continued with, “Look kinda peaked to me. You sure you should be out of bed?”
For the first time that evening, Johnny smiled. “I’m better. But I want to ask a big favor. Can I have a car for a couple of hours?”
“You certainly could, love, except one’s in the shop and the other two’re both out on calls. Is something wrong?”
“No, no. I just have a little business that I need a ride for.”
“Sorry. One of them’s gone to Mousehole and one to St. Buryan. Bit of a distance. But you can wait if you like.”
Johnny was biting a thumbnail. He shook his head. “Listen, could I just make a phone call?”
“Sure, love.” Shirley shoved the black telephone toward him.
He punched in the number and listened to the bleak brr-brrs sounding in Seabourne. He let it ring a dozen times before he turned off the transmit and handed the phone back to Shirley.
“No joy there either?”
“No joy, right.”
“Shouldn’t be long before one of them gets back-speak of the devil, here comes Trev. You can take that one.”
Johnny tossed her a “thanks” over his shoulder as he ran out the door.
Melrose was sitting in his favorite chair, looking at the fire and entertaining himself with thoughts of a séance. Surely, there had been a seance in The Unin vited; in films like that there was always a seance. He wondered if real séances (or was that an oxymoron?) were like those portrayed in films: the medium’s voice turning deep and guttural, uttering the oracular words of one centuries dead; the candle flame flickering and dying; that clammy hand holding yours later discovered to be wearing a glove…
Melrose shuddered slightly. He was wracking his brain, or, rather un-wracking it, downloading his thoughts about the murder of Tom Letts and Daniel Bletchley’s visit into his glass of whisky.
The doorbell rang.
Again? Who the devil-?
He sighed, got up from his chair, and carried his drink with him. He got to the door, glad that at least it wouldn’t be Agatha, since it already had been, and, yanking it open, hoping it would be Stella making a magical appearance.
It was Richard Jury. Just standing there.
Melrose gaped. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. He’d like to appear to be just standing there too, with a drink in his hand and Jury’s cool. Instead, he knew he must look like a fish. Mouth open, closed, open, closed.
He found his voice, finally. “Is Ireland over?”
“It’s still there. It didn’t much want me around. I don’t take it personally. But I do take it personally that I’m standing out here on your stoop when I’d much rather be inside, sitting down, with one of whatever you’re drinking.” Jury smiled.
It was one of those smiles that didn’t end with the mouth. It seemed to radiate everywhere, as if his whole person were pitching in to help that smile along.
“Oh! Sorry.” Melrose threw the door wide.
Jury shrugged out of his coat and looked for an available coat rack or surface. Melrose took it and tossed it over the staircase banister. “Come on into the library. There’s a fire.”
Jury settled into the chair Daniel Bletchley had occupied earlier. With a strong sense of déjà vu, Melrose handed him a drink. It was true; Dan Bletchley did have something in him that reminded Melrose of Richard Jury. No wonder he and Daniel had hit it off.
“This fellow who was murdered last night, Tom Letts, over at the nursing home in Bletchley.”
Melrose felt Jury hadn’t dropped a beat since the last time they’d seen each other. It was as if they’d been discussing this case all along. “But how do you know about him?”
“Because I’ve been three hours in Exeter talking to Brian Macalvie. Why was I in Exeter? Because the ferry from Cork goes into Wales. Why was I in Cork instead of Belfast? Because I had to go to Dublin at the last moment. Why was I in-”
“Look, I’ll leave, if you think the conversation would go better without me.”
Jury laughed. “Sorry. I was just saving you the trouble of asking a lot of inane questions.”
“Inane? Thanks. So Brian Macalvie filled you in.”
“At length. He seems to have taken this case pretty much to heart. But I don’t know why that should surprise me. He usually does take cases to heart.”
“Remember Dartmoor? That pub named Help the Poor Struggler? He put his foot through the jukebox when someone played a song-what was that song?”
“Molly something.” And Jury started to sing: “Oh, mahn dear, did’ja niver hear, o’ pretty Molly da da da.”
“Brannigan! That’s it, that’s it!” Then Melrose sang: “She’s gone away and-and-what?”
“And left, me, and-”
Then they sang together or, rather, apart:
“And left me, and I’ll niver be a mahn again!”
They laughed, but then Jury said, “Christ, why does love have to be so sad?” He rolled the cool glass across his forehead. “I’m lightheaded; I haven’t had any sleep in a couple of days.”
“You can sleep here, of course.”
“Thanks. That pub in the village didn’t much tempt me.”
“The Drowned Man. Sergeant Wiggins is staying there.”
Jury smiled. “When this case is closed, or even if it’s not, may I have him back?”
“Don’t blame me. It’s foot-through-the-jukebox Macalvie who insisted on getting him down from London.”
“He’s always liked having Wiggins about. Funny.” Jury looked around the softly lighted room. “Nice room, this. Nice house.”
“I’ve got it for three months. Look, since you’re here, give some thought to this business, will you? The only thing I have in common with Hamlet is that I’ve been thinking ‘too much on the event.’ ”
“I don’t believe it’s thinking too much; that’s just a symptom. What’s causing it? I know what’s causing it for Macalvie: the murder of those two kids. For four years, he’s been a little obsessed. Really, it reminds me of the whole Molly Brannigan thing. Molly Singer, I mean.”
But Melrose remembered that it hadn’t been Macalvie alone who’d been interested in Molly.
Jury had been looking over the silver-framed snapshots and now picked one up. “These are the children? What a tragedy. And what a puzzle. If Macalvie hasn’t solved it, who could? He can cut away everything extraneous to a situation. He’s like a laser.” Jury drank the last of his whisky. “I can’t do that. I get too muddied up by stuff. Anyway, he’s sent you a message.”
Melrose did not tell him that Macalvie could get muddied up and overinvolved himself.
Jury reached into the pocket of his shirt, under a heavy Aran sweater, and pulled out a folded paper. He spread this on the coffee table between them and smoothed it out. “It’s about Morris Bletchley and Tom Letts.” It was a diagram of the red drawing room. “Does this look accurate to you?”
Melrose put on his glasses. “Yes, absolutely.”
“What Macalvie says is that if he wanted a cleaner view of the target, he’d have picked windows two or three”-Jury pointed-“and not window number one.” Jury tapped the representation of the window through which the bullet had been fired. “There’s a lot of thick shrubbery around windows two and three; besides that, the ground is lower on that side. It’s possible for nearly anyone to see through one of those windows, but you’d have to be taller than we are to shoot through them.”
Melrose frowned. “So the shooter picked that window.” Melrose indicated the same window Jury had. “Window number one.”
“Right. But Macalvie’s point is this: How would you know this unless you reconnoitered? You can’t tell the ground’s lower unless you actually stand there, and if you do look through the other windows on this side, either one of them-”
Melrose finished the sentence for him. “You’d see who was in the wheelchair.” He stared at the diagram. “Tom Letts really was the target.”
“Looks that way,” said Jury.
On a heavy Empire table between the two chairs sat a Murano ashtray of deep blue and green, colors that shifted with the shifting firelight. In the bowl were small polished stones that Jury had used to mark the tragic events that had taken place in Bletchley and Lamorna. At the moment there were four stones forming the beginnings of a circle: the deaths of the two Bletchley children, the death of Ramona Friel, the murders of Sada Colthorp and Tom Letts.
“Sada Colthorp.” Jury started to say something, then paused, searching his pocket for some item.
Melrose said, “Ah, Sadie May, right. Both the ex-Mrs. Rodney Colthorp and Vicountess Mead. Vicountess Mead, redoutable star of blue movies. Funny old world. This Bolt fellow, producer of said films, turned up at the manor when she was still married to Colthorp. Dennis, the viscount’s son, threw him out. Not until after he’d valued Bolt’s Jaguar.”
“Macalvie told me about Simon Bolt.”
“In her younger days, Sada worked at the Woodbine, that’s the local tearoom owned by Chris Wells and Brenda Friel. They’re partners. Sada Colthorp reappeared four years ago in Bletchley for a visit.”
Jury had found the item, a brown envelope, and sat tapping it against his thumb, thinking.
Melrose wished he’d stop thinking and let him see whatever it was.
“There it is again.” Jury leaned forward to look at the table, at the little semicircle of stones he’d made.
“There what is again? And what’s in that envelope, the winning lottery ticket?”
“Four years ago. When, four years ago?”
“I’m not sure. Brenda Friel could tell you. She was the one who identified her. The people in Lamorna didn’t recognize the police photo.”
“Perhaps her appearance had altered, having lived the life of a viscountess for all those years.” Jury put another little stone near the one representing the deaths of the children.
“Some of those years, you mean. She was Viscountess Mead for less than two. Rodney Colthorp was clearly embarrassed about having married her. I put it down to the usual midlife crisis.”
Jury had opened the packet and drawn a photo out-two photos, one being the familiar scene-of-crime picture of Sada Colthorp. He handed them to Melrose.
“I see what you mean.” One photo was of Sada, or Sadie back then, during her years in Lamorna and Bletchley. The young woman in this earlier photo had quite pale hair, as opposed to the hard yellow of the more recent photo, the crime scene photo of her dead on the public footpath. The eyes were quite different too, but that would be owing to the generous application of cosmetics: eyeliner, shadow, mascara. But the most telling difference was that the rather plump face of the earlier photo had changed to one gaunt and angular, though not unattractive. The changes seemed to have been caused by something other than time.
“They look different, don’t they? If you know it’s the same person, you can see the resemblance even with the change of hairstyle and color, even with the meltdown from drugs. Clubs and Vice picked her up a couple of times in Shepherd Market for soliciting. Then again she was picked up in Soho for dealing drugs, charge later dropped.”
Melrose was shocked, not by Sada’s habits but by Jury’s knowing them. He’d been on this case for less than eight hours and he seemed to know more than Melrose himself. And now he was reading Melrose’s mind.
“Macalvie only just got this report, which is why you haven’t heard about it.”
Melrose decided to carp at police reporting. “It took all of this time? It took a week for police to send this?”
Jury nodded. “Sometimes it happens. Bureaucratic slowdown or maybe it was hard to get stuff on her. Who knows? Anyway, Sada had a big drug habit she couldn’t support on her negligible salary as hostess in a club in Shepherd’s Bush, so she had to supplement it, and prostitution and dealing were the most profitable means. Her habit meant big money. My guess is that was what she was here for. Just a guess, mind.”
“Blackmail?”
“That, or to sell something.”
“Same thing, isn’t it?” Melrose got up and took their glasses to the dry sink. “The only person I know of around here with what you call ‘big money’ is Morris Bletchley.”
“What about Daniel Bletchley, his son? Or his daughter-in-law-who would have access to it, even if she didn’t have a fortune of her own?”
Karen. Melrose thought about this. “She was here in the area at the time of the shooting. She came to see me. Or see the house.”
“Did she come back to Bletchley often? It must be painful.”
“Often? Oh, no. This was the first time in-”
Jury smiled. “Four years.”
“True.” Melrose took another look at the stone circle. There was something he was overlooking.
“Why Lamorna?”
“What?” asked Melrose absently.
“Why was she found in Lamorna?”
Melrose shrugged. “You’ve got me.” He said this a trifle testily, since it probably hadn’t got Jury.
“There’s a pub there?”
“The Lamorna Wink is what it’s called.”
“Come on.” Jury got up quickly.
“Damn it! People are always going somewhere and wanting me to go with ’em.” But he was not displeased. “To Lamorna? At this hour?”
“ ‘This hour’ is only nine-fifty. Come on.”
“Can’t we solve the damned puzzle sitting here? Must we take steps?”
“Well, I don’t have your little gray cells; all I can do is plod plod plod plod plod.” Jury reached down and pulled Melrose from the sofa.
“You sound like Lear. I wonder how it would have sat with the audience if Cordelia’s death had him saying, ‘And she will come again, plod plod plod plod plod’ instead of ‘Never never never never never’?”
Johnny brought the cab to a stop, saw several lights in the downstairs windows, and Melrose Plant’s car. He ran up the steps and banged the brass knocker as hard as he could and waited. In another thirty seconds, he banged it again. And waited again. If his car is here…?
Johnny found a pack of Trevor’s cigarettes in the glove compartment and sat in the cab and smoked, something he very rarely did. Smoking helped to calm him, made his head clearer. He could understand why it was such a hard habit to kick.
By a little after ten o’clock he’d stubbed out three cigarettes. He slid down in the front seat and tried to think, tried to work it out. But it was like hitting a brick wall.
The trouble was, he was afraid. He was afraid to try anything alone. Backup, that’s what police called it. He needed backup. He thought about Charlie, but Charlie was in Penzance.
For a few more minutes he sat in the cab before he gave up on Plant’s coming home. He was probably somewhere with that policeman, Commander Macalvie.
One more cigarette and then he started the car, let out the clutch, backed up, and, venting some of his frustration and fear, jammed his foot on the gas and nearly ricocheted down the drive.
Why were the cops always somewhere else when you needed them?
You’ll find them a close-mouthed crew,” said Melrose, crawling out of Jury’s hired Honda. “If you’re thinking of questioning them, that is.”
There was a sea fret covering the path, encasing their lower legs in mist so that they appeared to be walking footless to the door of the Lamorna Wink.
Melrose continued. “Macalvie says it’s blood out of stones.” He sighed. “I wish they had a takeaway window.”
It looked to Melrose, once they were inside, as if these were exactly the same people he and Macalvie had encountered. And why not? Where else was there to go? They pulled up to the bar and sat down between an old man in an oilskin and a heavy woman drinking pale beer. Sediment at the bottom of her glass suggested it was one of the local brews.
Perhaps it wasn’t fat that had her bulging over into Melrose’s allotted space; it might have been the layers of clothes she wore. Beneath a mustard-colored sweater was a plaid woolen shirt, its arms rolled up to show a grimy biscuit-colored flannel that might have been underclothing, but Melrose doubted it, for he saw something lumpy jut above the elbow, suggesting yet another garment beneath it.
Melrose was deciding on what conversational approach to take-she hadn’t turned to give him so much as a glance-and found he was listening to the old man on Jury’s left, apparently in fulsome answer to some question of Jury’s, mapping out the watery course through Mounts Bay into the Atlantic that he apparently had once traveled as a fisherman.
Or a smuggler, thought Melrose, though it was more likely that role would have fallen to his grand-father. Now, upon seeing the woman’s glass was empty, he asked the barmaid to refill it and to bring him an Old Peculiar. This done, he turned to his drinking companion, asking, “Are you a resident of Lamorna or just visiting?” This he decided was not the most brilliant conversational gambit.
The woman, whom the barkeeper had called something that sounded like “pig trot,” obviously agreed with him as to the appropriateness of his question. “Me? No. I just got off one of them Princess cruise ships, me. Docked out there, it is.” She had turned to him a face that obviously did not know on which side its bread was buttered.
Melrose pushed forward. “I’m Melrose Plant. Glad to meet you.” He thrust out his hand, but she ignored it.
“Peg Trott, that’s me in a nutshell.”
“Have you lived here long?” Another boffo question.
“Aye.” She pulled a vile-looking cigarette from a pack on the bar. It was a brand Melrose hadn’t seen before and enough to induce anyone to quit smoking.
Melrose hastened to light it. “Lamorna’s quite charming.”
Peg Trott shrugged and inspected the coal end to see if he knew how to do it. Satisfied, she put the cigarette back in her mouth.
“You must be pretty excited about what happened here last week. The shooting, I mean.”
“Aye.”
Apparently, the aforementioned nutshell was to be taken literally. There was no more here for him than her name. Except her glass, empty once more. She picked it up and looked at it as if appraising the glassblower’s skill.
Melrose gestured once more to the woman behind the bar, who then came to fill the glass. Having no luck himself on the conversational front, Melrose turned to his right, where the old man in the oilskin was still going on in answer to Jury’s single question. And Jury wasn’t even buying beers. Someone out there yelled, “Shut it, Jimmy!” the dictate lost in the Greek chorus of conversational waves.
While Melrose was girding up for another go at Peg Trott, he felt a hand on his shoulder, glanced in the mirror, and saw an artist named Mark Weist, one of several that lived here, looking less handsome than Weist was sure he was.
“Getting any further along with your investigation?” He laughed at this, seeming to think the question was droll.
“I’m not, but he is.” Melrose nodded toward Jury, who turned and was introduced to the painter.
“New Scotland Yard!” crowed Weist. “Bringing out the big guns, are we?”
Jury smiled patiently. “You’ve already met the big gun. Commander Macalvie.”
“Ah, yes. Smart chap.” It was all so unbearably condescending. “As I told him-Commander Macalvie-we didn’t know the woman.”
Melrose marveled at Weist’s range of the banal. He also seemed adept at making himself spokesman for Lamorna.
“Some-a’ us did.” It was Peg Trott speaking. “Nasty bairn, nasty woman, ah don’t wonder.”
“How so?” asked Jury.
“Bairn use to show herself in public.”
Thinking of the Cripps kiddies, Melrose thought, Don’t they all?
“Ya know what ah mean? You, Tim.” She was leaning across Melrose to speak to the wiry little man beside Jury.
“Oversexed, she were,” said Tim.
“Whatever,” said Peg. “Found out t’ings, people’s private business, then used it against them.”
“Blackmail, you mean?” said Jury.
“Call it what ya will. One poor soul name of McPhee-dead now, McPhee-she found out he was up at Dartmoor for fifteen years, put there fer takin’ a breadknife t’ his wife. Sadie tells it all over. So ah dunno did she try to blackmail him or not. He must not of paid; he hung hisself.” She fell silent, holding up her empty glass yet again.
If a few drinks were all it took to get her going, Melrose was willing to buy her the pub. The barmaid was right near them, listening. Indeed, a little crowd must have picked up on the ghoulish story and a half dozen had come to join them. The people within earshot were listening hard. A youngish couple, very London-looking, standing talking farther along the bar, became interested in this small drinking circle and came to join them. The woman had a spun-glass beauty, complexion fine to the point of transparence, eyes pewter-gray and clear as seawater, hair a limpid sort of white gold. She was wearing white silk. The man, equally good-looking, was dressed in tweeds and a black silk turtleneck shirt.
It was hard to tell who lived in Lamorna and who didn’t. Melrose imagined it attracted people of high sophistication, the sort Mark Weist thought he was numbered among.
Peg Trott picked up her narrative. “When Sadie were only ten she were makin’ indecent advances to men, puttin’ her hand in their pants pockets, feelin’ ’em up-you know what’s what, you bein’ a copper. She’d go creepin’ up to windows after dark an’ watch. Out at all hours, Sadie was. Turrible. Her mum was never no better’n she should be. Mum left, no one knew where to, and Sadie stayed on with her da. Raised a few eyebrows, know what I mean?”
Although she was addressing her remarks to the ingratiating Jury (even though it was the uningratiating Plant who was paying for her drinks), the clutch of people gathered round all nodded sagely.
Peg drank off her urine-colored beer and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Then she gets t’be fourteen, fifteen, and t’trouble really starts.”
Weist, who felt he was being crowded out by recent comers, said, “The Lolita of Lamorna!” When Peg ignored this explication of her story, he said, “Lolita, Nabokov’s Lolita.”
She glared at him. “I know who bleedin’ Lolita is.” She waited for Melrose to light her fresh cigarette and plowed on. “There come a man t’Lamorna, a London man name of Simon Bolt. Well, if our Sadie was bad news, this Bolt fella, he was worse. Ain’t surprising them two found each other real quick. He said he was a ‘fil-um producer.’ ” Here she drew squiggles in air to show her suspicion of Bolt.
The woman in white silk raised her satiny eyebrows and asked, “Pornography?”
Abruptly, Peg Trott nodded. “An’ worse.” She seemed a trifle annoyed that some good-looking city woman was getting a march on her story. “There’s some said devil chased ’em across Bodmin Moor.”
Some always do say the devil in these parts, thought Melrose.
“That’s hardly surprising in good old haunted Cornwall,” said Weist, not one to get out while the getting’s good. He tamped tobacco down in his briar pipe.
“Tim here-”
Tim nodded eagerly, though he didn’t know how he would feature in this tale. “Tim said he seen the piskies over in the bluebell woods, and Lydi Ruche-over there”-she pointed to a table where sat three men and one rather hard-looking dark-haired woman-“says she be drivin’ by the Merry Maidens an’ seen this specter-this specter.” Peg enunciated clearly here, seeming to like the sound of the word.
“The Merry Maidens, that’s the stone circle,” said Weist, offering an explanation no one had asked for.
Muscling Weist out with her voice, which she raised a decibel or two, Peg Trott went on. “Anyway, that ain’t my point. This Bolt fella made fil-ums, like I said. He was livin’ in the old Leary house that sits atop that cliff out there, and we heard from a woman used to char for him there was a room he kept just for runnin’ these fil-ums. Oh, she never fooled with ’em; she was takin’ her chances just to go in the room. But she said there was a projector and a stack of these tapes beside it.
“Simon Bolt and Sadie May-those two just had t’git together. Simon liked ’em young, is what people said, the younger the better. Sadie’d say t’me, ‘I’m goin’ t’be in the pictures, me. I’m goin’ to be a star.’ ”
“He was shooting pornographic films, is that it?” Peg Trott nodded. “Worse’n that. T’was bairns. T’was Sadie helped ’em find the poor tikes.” Peg shook her head. “Why’d anyone want t’see kiddies die?”
Melrose frowned. “Die?”
“Well, that’s what I heard.”
In the awful silence that befell them, they all stared at Peg Trott.
“Snuff films,” said the man in the black turtleneck.
The idea was so repugnant that several of them turned away just on hearing it. Yet the subject was too seductive to make them leave the little circle at the bar, and they turned back again.
“How is it that the Devon and Cornwall police didn’t know this?” asked Jury.
Peg shrugged. “Prob’ly did and couldna catch him at it, like.” She accepted a light from Melrose. “He was in London lots when he warn’t livin’ up atop ’ere.”
Jury frowned. “Atop where, Peg?”
With her glass, she pointed off in some northerly direction and upwards toward the moon. “There’s a road I kin show ya.”
“We’d appreciate it.” Jury tossed money on the bar and rose.
They did as Peg Trott directed-parked the car on the paved area and walked the rest of the way, about an eighth of a mile-on the public footpath.
The house had a beautiful prospect, finer than the view from Seabourne. It was a stark building unrelieved by any sort of architectural embellishment that might have softened its facade. There was at least none that Plant and Jury could see by the light of their torches. Jury kept a spare in the car, which he had given to Melrose.
He also kept a small box of lock-picking equipment. “Remind me to get a warrant next time I’m in Exeter.” The lock was old and easy. “I could’ve done it with my finger,” Jury said, as he pushed the door open.
The inside was bleaker than the outside. In the room facing seaward, there were a sofa and two overstuffed and ugly chairs. There was a small fireplace with a tiled surround and ugly Art Deco wall sconces.
They roamed from room to room, upstairs and down, then farther down into a basement that seemed to be doing service as a wine cellar.
“Good stuff,” said Melrose, blowing dust from a bottle of Meursault, a Premier Cru (straight from the abbé, doubtless. Or was he mixing it up with Lindisfarne?) “God, what a waste. Isn’t anyone going to collect this wine?”
Jury was adding a skin of light to the walls as he shone his torch carefully round. But he saw nothing that might have served as a hiding place for the videos he was sure must be here and said so.
“Why do you think they’d be here instead of in London? According to Peg Trott he spent most of his time in London.”
“I don’t think ‘instead’; rather, I think ‘in addition to’; he would have at least a small collection here.”
Melrose was studying a simple appellation of Puligny when Jury started up the cellar stairs and asked, “You going to have a wine tasting or are you coming along?”
Regretfully, Melrose returned the bottle to its shelf.
Upstairs, Jury made another torch circuit of the room. Melrose said, “We’ve already done that. What do you expect to find?” He switched off his torch and sat down on one of the chairs and lit a cigarette.
“I don’t know. I’m working on the assumption that this house might have been the meeting place chosen.”
“Meeting place?”
“She obviously had a meeting arranged; I doubt she just ran into her killer on the public footpath.”
“They could have arranged to meet at the point where her body was found.”
“Yes, they could’ve. It’s just that it’s difficult to know a point in advance, unless there’s a very clear marker. Sada Colthorp might have chosen to meet here because she was familiar with the house and because the house was out of the way; no one would see them.” Jury switched the light off and sat down too, on a sofa across from the chair.
It was the darkest dark Melrose had ever experienced. He could barely distinguish Jury’s outline.
“I imagine they left the house to walk along the public footpath. Whose idea was that? The killer’s, most likely. He-or she-wouldn’t have wanted the body found too close to the house, so he put some distance between the house and the spot where he killed her.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why not have the body found in the house?”
“Because it would raise the possibility of a connection between Bolt and the Bletchley children’s deaths.”
“You think that’s what happened?”
“I do. Lured by God only knows what reward or reason, they stumbled down those stone steps while Simon Bolt recorded it on film. He watched them drown.”
“How could a man do that?”
“Because there’s a market for it. A big one.”
Melrose switched his torch on and off, on and off. “One thing I fail to understand is why a man would trust a young girl with knowing what he was up to, the way he did with young Sadie.”
“Ever read Lolita?”
“Yes, both Peg Trott and I are familiar with Lolita.”
“It’s not a question of trust, anyway. People in Bolt’s line of work probably don’t trust anybody.” Jury flicked his own flashlight on, then off, and asked, “Did you ever take food and stuff up to a tree house at night and a torch to read by?”
Melrose’s cigarette glowed in the pitch blackness. “No, I can’t remember ever having a tree house. Did you?”
“No. I guess some kids must have. You hear about that sort of childhood. Idyllic.” He swept the torch in Melrose’s direction.
Melrose ducked, but not soon enough. “I suppose no one ever did. An idyllic childhood is probably illusion.” He aimed his torchlight at the sofa and Jury moved quickly out of its way.
“Maybe,” said Melrose. Then, “It’s hard being an only child. You were one. It’s as if there’s something missing, like a hole in the world that someone fell through. Of course, my childhood wasn’t as obviously bad as yours was. A person can empathize with yours, but probably not with mine.”
“You mean yours was only superficially better? Yet you had your mother, your father.”
Melrose was quiet, flicking the torch on and off, aimed at the floor. “My mother, yes; my father…” He changed the subject. “You know there’s something I’ve always wondered about.” Lights out, cigarette snuffed, they were plunged into darkness again. “You and Vivian.”
There was an engulfing stillness. No one moved. Until Melrose flashed the light on Jury.
“Cheat! You knew that question would distract me!”
“Oh, come on, sport.” Melrose laughed. “So, there’s something in it, eh? You and Vivian?”
“That Christmas dinner years ago. Remember?”
“Yes.” Melrose wanted another cigarette, but it would give his position away.
“I walked Vivian home and we had a drink and a talk. You see, what I couldn’t understand was this business of her marrying Simon Matchett. He wasn’t at all her type. It was pretty clear that she wasn’t in love with Matchett from the passionless way she talked about him. You know Vivian. Though at times she can be very straightforward, when it comes to her feelings she’s-well, indirect. So in the course of our talking about various people, I inferred that Vivian loved somebody, but who was the somebody?” Jury flashed his torch and caught Melrose full in the face.
“Hey! Not in the middle of something important.”
“That’s what you just did to me, isn’t it?”
They sat in darkness again.
“You want a cigarette?” asked Melrose.
“No. You know I haven’t smoked for over a year.”
“Okay, then we’ve got to have a time-out while I light one. Because obviously you’d see the match flare.”
“I can also see the coal end as you smoke it, so what’s the big deal? I could get you anytime you inhale.” Jury leaned his head against the back of the sofa. “Simon Bolt,” he said, exploring the name.
“Yes. Simon Bolt was taking a hell of a chance,” Melrose said, “appearing at Seabourne, even if it was at night. He could so easily have been seen.”
“If the Bletchleys had been there, but they were out. The only possible witness would be the aging housekeeper. Didn’t you say her room was on the other side of the house?”
“How would Bolt have known that?” asked Melrose.
“From the person who put Simon Bolt onto the kids in the first place.”
“You mean Sada Colthorp.”
“No. Sada was probably the middleman, is my guess. Whoever wanted these kids killed and thought of this way of doing it knows the habits of people in Bletchley. Possibly Bolt and Colthorp were the people in the woods. At any rate, the kids saw somebody.”
“Correction: Their mother said they saw somebody.”
Jury said, “You think her story was fabricated.”
“I think Henry James wrote it.”
There was a long silence.
“You sure you don’t want a cigarette?”
“What? Jesus, some friend you are, encouraging me to go back to that foul habit.”
“Oh, don’t sound so much like a missionary selling Christianity to the natives. I just thought if we both had one we’d be at the same disadvantage.”
“Ye gods! I’m supposed to smoke just so you can shine that bloody light in my face?”
“Go on with what you were saying about Vivian, about her being-Good lord!” Melrose dropped his torch but quickly recovered it. “Vivian! I forgot to tell you. Vivian claims she’s going to marry Giopinno in a few weeks.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You’re just trying to catch me off guard.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. I’ve completely forgotten about the torch.”
Jury moved on the sofa, sitting forward. “Are you telling me she’s really going to marry this creep?”
Melrose shook his head. “Who knows? With that weird relationship, anything could happen. Maybe Viv’s going to ditch him.”
“Ditch him? How can you ditch anyone after all these years? Kill him, maybe, but ditch him, no.”
“Well, anyway.” Melrose’s torch went on suddenly.
Jury switched his own on. “Oh, for God’s sake, you can’t put the torch somewhere else on the sofa. How childish!”
Melrose sniggered.
“What in the bloody hell is going on?”
As if choreographed, both torches swung toward the living room door and caught Brian Macalvie in twin circles of light.
“This is how you carry out an assignment?”
“You didn’t give me one,” said Jury.
“How’d you know we were here?”
“I was in the Wink at closing time. Old dame in there told me you’d come up here. She didn’t want to tell me how to find you.”
“So you broke her jaw.”
“Obviously, I got the information, but you don’t need to know my methods. And I sure as hell don’t want to know yours. Get that damned light out of my face. Come on, let’s get our cars.”
The night deepened around them as they stood between Macalvie’s Ford and Jury’s Honda, dark green, dark blue, both cars looking black in the un-lighted clearing.
They were talking about Simon Bolt.
“Simon Bolt? We tried to nail him for possessing and distributing pornography. When I say we I mean Vice. I wasn’t on the case myself. He took photos, films too, I heard. But snuff flicks of kids? Christ, no, I heard nothing of that; they must not have found anything like that or I’d’ve heard.” Macalvie turned in a half circle, mouthing epithets.
It did not sound at all like a wounded ego; the self-abrading tone sounded more like dereliction of duty.
“You weren’t on that case years ago. How could you possibly have connected it with this one?”
“You got it out of a witness, Jury. I should’ve too.”
“Macalvie, it was dumb luck. I happened to ask a question that provoked Peg Trott to give up the information.”
Melrose said, “Let’s go back to Seabourne. We can at least have a fire and a drink. I can even do us an early breakfast.”
Climbing behind the Honda’s wheel, Jury said, “Just not soft-boiled eggs and soldiers. I refuse to eat toast cut into soldiers.”
Melrose eased into the passenger seat. “It was the bright spot in a ruined childhood. Soldiers.”
“How heartrending.” Jury gunned the engine and they sped away, as much as one could speed down such a narrow and rutted road, eating Macalvie’s dust.
Johnny parked the cab in front of his house and wondered if he was letting his imagination, overworked in the best of circumstances, run away with him. There might be another explanation.
Might be, but he doubted it, because what he believed had happened explained too much for him to be wrong. But it didn’t explain everything. It didn’t explain why.
He got out of the car, didn’t bother locking it-which was part of the point, wasn’t it? Who bothered locking up cars and houses around here-and walked the short distance to the Woodbine. Brenda was always up, usually baking till all hours, which had been a real comfort to him these days, in case he couldn’t sleep and wanted to talk.
The bell made its discordant little clatter when he opened the door to the tearoom, a room that always gave the impression of warmth, even in the dead of night with the heat turned down.
From the kitchen came the sounds and smells of baking. The rattle and click of pans, the swish of the big beater, the whir of the blender-it always sounded as if Brenda had an army of undercooks and sous chefs back there. He smelled ginger.
He could understand why customers came here, morning and afternoon, to be lulled into a sense of well-being, an illusion of ease, even if that was far away. He could see by moonlight or memory the heather design on the polished cotton curtains, the faded roses on the chair cushions, the burned wood and the bay windows’ mullioned panes through which the moonlight spilled silver. Everything in the place-the faded roses, the smell of ginger-blended like spices and milk and honey into a satiny dough of contentment. It was all overwhelmingly sensuous.
Like sex, Johnny thought.
He stood in the open door to the kitchen.
Brenda was pulling a cookie sheet full of gingerbread men from the oven and when she stood and turned, she smiled. “Sweetheart! Couldn’t you sleep?”
“No. Where is she, Brenda?”
Wiggins’s bleary-eyed greeting at the door of his room in the Drowned Man was only marginally more welcoming than Mr. Pfinn’s had been. At least Wiggins was aware that a police investigation knew neither time nor tide. Mr. Pfinn, on the other hand, didn’t care if the three of them were pod people come to borrow his body. He needed his sleep, he said.
But Wiggins’s mood improved immensely when he saw Richard Jury was one of the three. He was all ready to have a long talk about Jury’s travels, while standing at the door in his pajamas.
“Ireland, nil; Scotland Yard, one,” said Macalvie, cutting into this reunion. “Get dressed.”
They were now in Seabourne. Melrose and Wiggins repaired to the kitchen to prepare some sort of meal; Jury and Macalvie stayed in the library.
“What are these stones? Avebury? Stonehenge? The Merry Maidens?” Macalvie inspected Jury’s little stone circle, or semicircle.
“Very funny. I was trying to get the sequence of what’s happened to whom in the last four years. In most cases, death has happened. I was trying to get straight in my mind the events of four years ago. Then the events of today-that is, recently.”
Jury picked up another stone. “We can now add Simon Bolt to the four-year-old section of the circle, setting him beside Sada Calthorp, who came back four years ago and who’d kept in touch with Bolt-well, she must’ve done, since she was in his films.”
Macalvie said, “And, according to Rodney Colthorp, Bolt visited the manor. Yes, they kept in touch.”
Jury set the two stones side by side.
“So what have you got here?”
“Beginning with the Bletchley children, with Simon Bolt and most likely Sada Colthorp involved in that, then the death of Brenda Friel’s girl, Ramona; that’s the four-year-old part. More recently, the disappearance of Chris Wells, the death of Sada Colthorp, and the death of Tom Letts.”
Macalvie slid a stick of chewing gum into his mouth and was silent, looking at the stone diagram. He hadn’t sat down, and he hadn’t taken off his coat.
“Why don’t you take your coat off?” Jury didn’t expect him to; he just couldn’t resist mentioning the coat.
Instead of taking it off, Macalvie shoved the sides back and put his hands in his trouser pockets. He chewed the gum, thinking. “Bastard was making snuff films.”
“That tape’s somewhere in or around that house.”
Macalvie was still gazing at the stone circle. “It’s with whoever murdered Sada Colthorp. I found part of it.”
Jury gave him an inquiring look. “Where?”
“Just a fragment of the black casing. It was lying near her body. At least, I expect it’s a safe assumption. The piece was definitely part of a videotape casing. Of course, that’s not the only copy. Four years ago, whoever got Bolt to do this, that person would have the original. Then of course Bolt would’ve kept a copy, at the same time claiming there wasn’t one. I’d say there are at least three copies. We went over his house with tweezers. Sada Colthorp had another copy. Or the same one Bolt had stashed; maybe she knew where it was. How else was she going to blackmail the person who wanted those little kids dead if she couldn’t produce a copy?”
“The film wouldn’t prove who this person was.”
“No,” said Macalvie. “But it certainly shows how it was done.” Macalvie walked over to the fireplace and leaned his forearm across its green marble mantel. “Bad enough the little kids died, but that way?”
Macalvie was always intense, thought Jury, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen him this emotionally involved. Not since the serial killings of children on Dartmoor and in Lyme Regis. Jury waited for him to go on.
He did. “I’d say Colthorp knew the motive, but even if she didn’t, whoever wanted that film made would not want a fresh investigation into the Bletchley business. Anyway, the film is the best theory we have; it’s a working hypothesis that explains a hell of a lot.”
Plant and Wiggins came through the door, bearing coffee, fresh bread, and cheese and cold ham. “Couldn’t find any eggs, so I didn’t make toast,” said Melrose, setting down the tray. Wiggins put down the coffeepot.
Jury set about making a sandwich. “Wouldn’t have any pickled onions around, would you?”
No.
Wiggins was turning over the coat he’d draped across the back of a chair and drawing something from an inside pocket that looked much like a soft leather jewelry case, the sort that folds and ties. He untied it, revealing several zippered compartments. From one of these he took a dung-colored pill and from another a couple of large white tablets. The tablets he dropped into a glass of water and watched it fizz with almost religious application.
So did the other three, chewing and watching the fizz until a fine scum of white powder showed on top.
Apparently waiting to catch it at the height of the fizz, Wiggins drank it down, leaving a little in the bottom to swallow with the brown pill. Jury wondered about the pill; it seemed new to the Wiggins pharmacopoeia. But he refused to ask what it was. He did not want to know about any new ailment or allergy.
“Chris Wells,” said Macalvie, holding his mug of coffee between both hands to warm them. “Look in your notes and tell me what you’ve got about Chris Wells,” he said to Wiggins.
Wiggins thumbed through the notebook; it looked as if he’d written absolute reams of notes (which was why Macalvie had wanted to stop at the Drowned Man and drag him out of bed). He mouthed a few words to himself, then read: “According to young Johnny, his Aunt Chris took over the care of him when he was seven. He thinks his mother was going to the States, but he doesn’t know. The maiden name was Wells, the father’s name Esterhazey, but Johnny changed his to Wells, same name as his aunt. The mother just took off and that’s the last he heard of her.”
Macalvie uttered a low imprecation, and Wiggins looked up. “Sir?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“Chris is Johnny’s only family, except for the uncle who lives in Penzance, Charlie Esterhazey. Unmarried, keeps a magic shop. You know,” Wiggins said to Jury, “sort of place that sells trick decks of cards and magic metal rings that look like they couldn’t fit together but do.” Wiggins stopped reading, seemed to be pondering.
“Don’t worry, Wiggins. We’re coppers. We’ll make him tell us.”
Wiggins shot Jury a grazing look and went on. “Getting down to the night in question, when young Johnny got in touch with police. Chris Wells disappeared sometime between eleven A.M., which is when she left the Woodbine and is the last time anyone saw her in Bletchley, and nine P.M., when John Wells actively started looking for her.”
“It could have been later,” said Jury. “I mean, she could have been in Bletchley, only Johnny didn’t see her.”
“Just wait a minute,” said Wiggins. “The cookies she was baking could have been done some time earlier. But meringues-well, that’s a different story. They were still in the oven. That’s what you do with them, you know. You leave them in to cool. Very slow cooling period. The oven was still slightly warm. Since it takes an hour to bake them at four hundred degrees, that would mean they went into the oven about seven-thirty. There are two different kinds of meringues served in the Woodbine, quite tasty too.”
“Thank you, Wiggins,” said Jury. “We’d like the recipes when we finish this case. If we do.”
Macalvie said, “Sada Colthorp, Wiggins.”
Wiggins read: “Murdered the night of September twelfth, ME says between seven P.M. and eleven P.M.”
“In other words, murdered during the time Chris Wells did her vanishing act,” said Melrose.
Macalvie had moved away from the fireplace and sat down on a narrow, uncomfortable-looking side chair. “The connection between Chris Wells and Sada Colthorp?”
Wiggins moved forward a few pages. “The person who knew about that was Brenda Friel. She said Sada was trying to get her hands on young Johnny, who’d have been no more than thirteen at the time. Apparently, Sada and Chris really had it out.”
Melrose said, “Johnny Wells looks older than he is, probably did when he was thirteen, too.”
Macalvie asked, “How did Brenda know this?”
“Chris Wells told her,” said Wiggins.
“Still, trying to seduce a kid is hardly a motive for murder, is it?” said Jury.
Wiggins said, “People don’t often behave as you’d expect them to, sir,” said Wiggins sententiously. Looking at his notes, he added, “And Brenda Friel told me Chris Wells threatened Sada Colthorp, said if she ever showed her face in the village again, she’d wish she hadn’t.”
“Chris Wells,” said Jury, “appears to be the chief suspect, doesn’t she, by virtue of her sudden disappearance just at the time the Colthorp woman was murdered?”
“Hold on a minute, Richard. She doesn’t sound at all like a person who runs away. She’s too responsible.” Melrose cited her work at the Hall, her care for her nephew. “Not only that, you’d surely have to be looking for two killers, not just one. I see no reason on earth you could say she was the one who planned the Bletchley children’s deaths or murdered Tom Letts.”
“But you don’t know her,” said Jury. “You’ve never met her.”
“No, you’re right. I’ve never met her.”
Macalvie broke the silence. “There’s another way to look at this woman’s suddenly taking off.” He turned from the window. “Maybe it was made to look that way. Maybe it was staged.”
Wiggins raised his head from the little stone circle and gave Macalvie a questioning look.
“To make it look like Chris Wells murdered Sada Colthorp.”
“Then where-” Melrose began. He didn’t finish the question. He thought it was almost too much to bear. And made worse because he hadn’t been given it to bear: the children, Tom Letts, the sadness of Daniel Bletchley and his father, and Chris Wells. He was a stranger to it all; he had no business feeling desolate; the actors in this tragedy, they were none of his business. And it wasn’t his tragedy. “You think she’s dead, don’t you?”
Wiggins had put his small notebook back in his pocket and was bending over Jury’s improvised calendar of events, his small circle of stones. “Sir, go over this again, for me.”
Jury rose and walked over to stand beside him, pointing clockwise around the stones. “These first two here: the Bletchley children died on the rocks; next, we’ve got Sada Colthorp and Simon Bolt, most probably arranging the death of the children. But to keep the sequence right, Bolt and Colthorp should be up here.” Jury moved the two stones to first place. “Next, Brenda Friel’s daughter, Ramona, dies. Moving four years ahead, Sada Colthorp is murdered; Chris Wells disappears; Tom Letts is murdered.” He looked at Wiggins, who had retrieved his notebook from an inside pocket. “Okay?” Jury turned away.
Wiggins shook his head. “No, that’s not right.”
Jury turned back.
Wiggins was reading from his notes and putting another stone down.
“What’s that for?”
“You’re forgetting the baby, the unborn baby.” He had put the second stone beside Ramona’s. “It’s actually two people who died here. And you’ve got the order wrong.” Wiggins moved the Friel stones up to first place. “The Bletchley kids died after these two, not before.”
Both Macalvie and Melrose had joined Jury at the table, and all three were looking at Wiggins’s new arrangement of the stones.
Macalvie turned to stare through the window, looking out through the black glass as if he should be able to see through the dark. “Jesus,” he said, and turned back again. “Jesus, how could I have missed-”
“How could we have missed it, Macalvie?”
Wiggins hadn’t, and he was wreathed in smiles. “It’s easy to overlook, sir. They all died in the same year, but Ramona Friel and her baby, they died early, in January. The Bletchley children’s deaths, that came months later, round about now, in September.”
Macalvie appeared to be looking around the room for something to throw. He picked up the blue Murano ashtray holding the other stones and stared down at them. Then, almost delicately, he returned the bowl to the table.
“Am I just slow here?” said Melrose, irritated that he hadn’t thought of whatever they’d thought of.
Where is who, sweetheart? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Brenda wiped her forearm across her temple, shoving back strands of hair.
“Chris didn’t leave suddenly. And I was right. She would never have left that way.”
Brenda looked up from the cookie sheets, annoyed with this nonsense. She stubbed out the cigarette she’d smoked down to the butt end. “Of course she did. What are you saying?”
He shook his head. “You went to the house and made it look not only as if she’d gone but as if she’d run. A few hours ago I ate a couple of those meringues she supposedly left in the middle of baking. They weren’t hers; they were yours.” He pulled over the stool at the end of the pastry table. “Meringues, yours and hers. That’s always been a kind of good-natured competition. It doesn’t look good-natured now, though.”
Brenda stood looking at him as he sat down on the high stool. She didn’t answer.
“I asked myself: Why would Brenda want to make it look as if Chris had run out?”
“This is so silly, darling.” Brenda sighed. “And what did you answer yourself?”
“I couldn’t. Not until I remembered the police were asking about Sada Colthorp. According to you, she and Chris had some kind of falling out four years ago. And you, you made it look worse by bringing it up with that detective and then refusing to talk about it. So what police are supposed to think is Chris kills her in a rage. Chris goes to Lamorna and shoots her. With this?” Johnny had pulled Charlie’s small gun from his pocket. It lay cold on his palm.
Brenda looked at the gun for a long moment, then up at Johnny for yet a longer one. Then she pulled open the knife drawer behind her. “No.” The gun came out of the drawer as if she were the one used to pulling silk scarves from sleeves and doves out of the air. “With this.”
The gun was twice as big, twice as black, twice as evil looking as the one Johnny held. He had never shot a gun in his life; he had never even handled a gun until tonight. But he was as deft with his fingers as a sharpshooter was, and he had the gun from the palm of his hand and between his thumb and forefinger in less than the blink of an eye.
“If you shoot that,” she said, “you’d probably hit me, but you would miss any vital spot. You’re not used to guns.”
“But you are.”
“If I fire this, Johnny, it would kill you.”
Looking at the barrel of that gun seemed to wake him out of a trance, as if up to that point this had all been a fantasy. His hand felt numb; he laid the small gun on the butcher block.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” That she must be was a fact that outweighed even the danger of the gun pointed at him.
“Chris?” Brenda snorted. “Of course not. She did go away. To Newcastle.”
The relief of what he felt as an almost comic turn in all of this made him laugh. “Newcastle? She doesn’t know anybody in Newcastle.”
“Really, sweetheart, you can be so arrogant. You think Chris had no life apart from you? Children, children.” It was an admonishment, her tone merely exasperated, as if they might have been chatting about the rearing of them. “They think they know everything about their parents. And their aunts.” Her smile was almost indulgent. “She has an old friend up there who needed someone right away to take care of her because her home help died suddenly. It was for two weeks, until this woman could go into one of those homes they advertise for ‘retired gentlefolk. ’ That always amuses me, that phrase; doesn’t it you? But you’re right. I did want to make it look as if Chris had run off and there wasn’t much time to improvise because Sadie May-the Viscountess, I should say-was in Lamorna.”
Johnny looked down at his empty hands. It didn’t come clearer; it just got deeper. Like a ladder to the sea you go down and down. Like the stone stairs in the rocks where the little Bletchley kids had wound up. Then he raised his head. “You killed Sada Colthorp.”
Brenda said nothing.
“Why?”
She still said nothing.
“And if Chris left right then, it would look like she did it. That was the idea, wasn’t it? But if you’re telling the truth, she’ll be back. What then?”
“Newcastle police will pick her up. When I finally tell them where she is. She could call at any time.” With her free hand, Brenda reached for the pack of cigarettes, found it empty, balled it up, and swore softly.
Got to get out of here, thought Johnny. Get out of this kitchen. Get back to where I’d have, if not a sporting chance, maybe a fighting one. Just knowing that Chris was alive had cleared his mind utterly, even of fear. He could think now. “If I worked it out about those meringues, I’m sure somebody else could too.”
“That was very clever of you, sweetheart. I knew you were smart, but not that smart. I honestly don’t see how anyone else would, but”-she moved in a sideways walk, over to a coat rack, and unhooked her coat-“I’ll just get rid of what’s left. Get up.” She struggled into the coat. “Come on. And remember something. I will shoot you if you try to run. So walk beside me when we get outside.”
The sporting chance was now on offer. At least, in his own living room, he might be able to find a way out of this. Johnny turned slowly, as if reluctantly, and waited while she turned out the lights. Then he moved toward the swinging door, wondering if he could slam it back in her face when she followed behind him, knowing he couldn’t. She would shoot him. The total folly of so doing did not occur to her; how would she ever explain that to police? It hadn’t occurred to her because her thoughts were pointed like an arrow to one thing and one thing only, and he still didn’t know what it was. He had no doubt of that at all. He walked through the tearoom where the moonlight still flooded the window embrasure as if nothing had happened. It was almost consoling to think that rooms you walk through still hold fast to their identity.
“If you did anything to Chris, I’ll kill you Brenda. I will. She’s all I have.” He opened the door. The bell sounded its tiny discordant chorus of welcome.
“Like Ramona,” said Brenda, “was all I had.”
It was after midnight by now, and Macalvie decided there wasn’t a hell of a lot they could do until they had some hard evidence. “What,” asked Macalvie, “did she have against the Bletchleys?” No matter what their theories, they had nothing to link her to the murder of Sada Colthorp or to Simon Bolt’s film.
As Macalvie and Wiggins were leaving, Melrose beat a little tattoo on Wiggins’s shoulder, saying, “Well done, Sergeant. Well done. We none of us saw it except for you.”
Wiggins tried to be casual about it; he held up his notebook and said, “It’s just good note-taking, Mr. Plant. The Bletchley kids’ death-well, that was so dramatic it’s easy enough to forget poor Ramona Friel.” He added generously, thereby deprecating his own role in any solution, “And we don’t really know, do we? We’ve still got Tom Letts’s murder to deal with. Assuming, of course, that Mr. Macalvie is right and it’s not Morris Bletchley we should be thinking about. That’s just theory, too.”
Jury stood there, listening to Wiggins. He smiled. It was probably the most the sergeant had ever said about a case without a meditation on his or someone’s illness. It was certainly the first time Wiggins had ever called into question a theory of Macalvie’s.
They said good night.
Back in the library with whisky in hand, Melrose said, “Noah and Esme, poor benighted kiddies. You wouldn’t think a mother, any mother, could be part of such an arrangement.”
Jury raised his glass and watched the dying fire through a half inch of whisky that turned the hearth into a liquid amber sea. “Daniel Bletchley. What if it wasn’t Chris Wells but Ramona Friel he was having an affair with?”
“It was Chris Wells. Anyway, the night his children died-that couldn’t have been Ramona Friel. Poor girl was dead.”
Jury lowered his glass. “What I meant was earlier. If he’d had an affair with Ramona Friel and the child was his and she died of complications in childbirth, I would imagine a mother would lust for revenge.”
Melrose frowned. “What complications?”
Jury looked at him.
“Leukemia isn’t a complication of childbirth. I have no idea how pregnancy could affect such a disease.”
“It wouldn’t, as far as I know. But it might have made no difference to her mother. She died, and so did the baby. Brenda Friel would make that add up to murder,” said Jury.
“Then why in hell not grab a gun and kill Dan Bletchley if she thought he was the father? No, you’re wrong. Bletchley isn’t, I think, a profligate man. It would take a most unusual woman-woman, not a twenty-odd-year-old child-to move Daniel Bletchley.”
“Perhaps. You’ve met him, I haven’t. I feel sorry for that boy, Johnny. How old is he? Sixteen? Seventeen?”
“Seventeen. He’s a magician. Amateur, but pretty good, I think.”
“No kidding?”
Plant nodded. “He loves gambling. Not that he can get into it much in Bletchley. But you know what he wants to do? Go to Las Vegas. That’s what he wants. I guess for somebody like that, Las Vegas is the Promised Land. He wants to go to the Mirage and see Siegfried and Roy.”
“Don’t think I know the lads.”
“No. Well, you don’t know much about the States.”
“Does not knowing Siegfried and Roy constitute not knowing much about the States?”
“Everybody knows them. They’re the magicians with the white tigers. They can make an elephant disappear. They can make anything disappear.” Melrose looked up at the ceiling. “Except Agatha.”
“An elephant? Jesus. How do they do that?”
“Well, they don’t, do they? Charlie told me you obviously begin with the premise that they don’t do it. If you accept that premise-and it’s amazing how often people really don’t-you go on with that in mind. It’s mirrors, or something. I didn’t really understand-” Melrose stopped abruptly, thinking.
“What’s wrong?”
“Why didn’t we do that with Johnny?”
“What?”
“Accept the premise that his aunt wouldn’t go off without word to him? And if we accept it-well, it means she did leave word-a note-or she told somebody else.”
Jury sat up. “The disappearance was all staging.” He shut his eyes and leaned his head back. “Siegfried and Roy.” He sighed. “We could use a little magic.”
He wished he’d got some exploding cigarettes from Charlie. But with his luck one would go off in Brenda’s face and she’d shoot him.
A cigarette was what she wanted, and he found a pack in the pocket of Chris’s blue wraparound apron, the gardening one. Chris wasn’t supposed to be smoking, but the apron pocket was safe enough. He never did any gardening. “A putter about” was the way Chris referred to digging on her hands and knees.
She had stood in the kitchen with the gun in her hand, watching him crush all the meringues and toss the crumbs in the sink and wash them down the drain.
Now they were seated in the living room. Instead of the green baize-covered table for performing card tricks, he’d chosen the trunk in the alcove, with Brenda across the room in Chris’s favorite overstuffed chair. Johnny motioned toward the gun Brenda had placed on the gateleg table by the chair and which, he knew, she could retrieve in far less time than it would take him to lunge for it. “What’re you going to do?” he asked.
She did not so much exhale smoke as let it slowly escape through her slightly open mouth. It made Johnny think of ectoplasm. “I don’t know, do I, sweetheart? I may have to leave Bletchley, and that might mean taking you with me.”
He tried to hide his anxiety and was grateful for the time he’d spent in perfecting a poker face and the attention he’d paid to body language, his own and that of others. His own he had under control. And he had trained himself to notice the tiny “tells” that give people away. Others didn’t have themselves under control unless they were also in the business of not-giving-away-police, for instance. That detective, Macalvie, would have made a good magician.
“What are you thinking about?” Brenda frowned.
He didn’t answer immediately. Silence, Johnny had found, could be a formidable weapon. After a few more beats of it he said, simply, “Nothing.”
She smoked and watched him. “You’ve very cool, sweetheart. You know that, I guess. Quite amazing for someone your age. Quite stunning.”
He didn’t comment. She wanted him to ask questions. He could tell that in order for her to maintain her belief in her control over this little tableau, she needed him to appear the one without the answers. Thus, if he did ask a question, it would be innocuous. He would not ask her again about Chris. Whatever had happened to Chris, that was Brenda’s ace in the hole with him. It could be dangerous to thwart her, but he had to try every trick in the book to get himself out of this. He picked up the deck of cards he’d left on the table hours ago-a lifetime ago, a childhood ago. He held the deck up. “Mind?”
“Yes.” She picked up the gun.
He set the cards down. “Why?”
“Because you want to. I don’t trust you, sweetheart. You’re up to something.” Her smile seemed to snag on an unhappy memory.
Briefly, he laughed. “A pack of cards wouldn’t stop a gun.”
Surprisingly, she found that amusing and laughed, too.
Johnny wondered what she really thought of him right now. He knew how much she had always liked him, and he felt sad. Even now, and her over there with a gun she just might use, even now it saddened him. But this feeling he could box off until it was safe. That she did like him so much was in his favor because it left her more vulnerable.
She said, “Oh, go ahead,” and sighed as if he were an obstreperous child. “Show us a trick, why don’t you?”
He took up the deck, feeling for the slick card, shuffled it, fanned the cards out in a half-moon, swept them up again, shuffled again. None of that made the slightest bit of difference to a trick, but it gave him a few seconds to think. That was what he needed, time to think while appearing to be concentrating on the cards. He could do one slick card trick after another without thinking about the tricks themselves. He saw the pack of cigarettes she’d put down on the coffee table and looked around the room and spotted an ashtray he’d missed earlier. He said, “Mind if I get a cigarette?”
“I’ll get it.”
“And that ashtray over there?”
Holding the gun, she brought the ashtray and picked the cigarettes up with the same hand. The gun never faltered. “Just when did you start smoking?”
His answer was a smile. “Thanks.” Her eyes were on his movements as he took out a cigarette. “Match? Or there’s a lighter in that desk drawer. Charlie left it.”
Her smile was rueful. “Now why would you want me to go and get the lighter when there’s a book of matches right inside this.” She turned over the pack of cigarettes to show the matches nestled inside the cellophane.
It was a wonderful fact of human behavior and the mainstay of magic: distraction. Make them look at what is completely irrelevant and they’ll miss what’s right under their noses. It worked every time. Brenda thought she was being so careful-the cigarettes, the ashtray, the drawer, the “don’t-moves”-but she was missing the whole thing.
Johnny lit a cigarette, pulled the astray closer. It was quite heavy, he knew. “While you’re here, pick a card.” He held out the cards, the slick card as usual in the middle. He didn’t think she’d reach for one, not that it mattered, but she did. Then withdrew her hand before she’d taken one.
“I don’t think so.” She backed away and found the chair she’d been sitting in.
He squared the deck, tapped it a couple of times, and fanned out the cards again. His movements were so smooth you could have skated on them. That, of course, was what did it. The card, except to be turned over, had never really moved. It was dexterity, all dexterity.
Brenda had lighted one cigarette from another and stubbed out the first. “I’ve seen you do that a dozen times and still don’t see how.”
With the cards he took a few steps toward her. She snatched up the gun. “Uh-uh. Stay back. I told you. I don’t trust you.”
Back was where he wanted to be, which is why he’d moved forward. “Okay, something more elaborate. But I’ll have to get the props out of a drawer in that sideboard.” He started toward it.
“Johnny. I’m not stupid.” The gun gestured him back.
He stepped back into the alcove, this time a bit farther to the right. “Another card trick then. But I don’t know if you can see this from that distance.”
“I’ve got good eyes.”
“Watch.”
Sleep, he knew, would elude him, so he sat in the library and read one of Polly Praed’s thrillers. He didn’t like it at all but felt compelled to read a book written by a friend. The trouble was, Polly had published so many of them he could spend all his reading life trying to beat the detective to the denouement, which he never did, because he couldn’t sort out the puzzle, much less the solution. The one now in his hands had a plot that had lost him somewhere in a Wales wilderness, the mise-en-sce‘ne (one of Polly’s favorite phrases) having shifted from Aruba to Wales. Melrose imagined the only thing that could move one from Aruba to Swansea would be a gun at one’s back, as was the case here. He hoped the hero would be riddled, he was so boring. The hero should have sent him straightaway into the arms of Morpheus. But the hero didn’t, nor did the chase scene. Melrose set it aside and picked up his drink, hoping brandy and soda would have a more salubrious effect. It didn’t either.
So Melrose left the little library and climbed the stairs to the music room, where he could plunge himself into sadness, the sadness that had overcome him last night and whose source seemed to be the history of this house.
It was not difficult to plunge, given the black sky beyond the long windows and the implacable, repetitious drone of the waves. He thought of Daniel Bletchley’s wonderful, unself-conscious playing and how it had filled the room. His mind on this music, he was looking down, expecting, surely, Nature would indulge him and let the wind whip up a storm of water…
Something moved down there.
Because of the angle of the windows, part of the path was cut from his view. But someone, he was certain, was standing or walking down below.
When the figure came into partial view, he assumed it must be Karen Bletchley. It was a woman, but the hair was not light, not Karen’s; it was dark, the color of mahogany. And suddenly, she looked straight up and straight at him. It was the middle of the night, but the moon glowed like white fire.
The glass dropped from his hand, splashing brandy down the leg of the immaculate flannel and drowning the top of his shoe.
He would have known her anywhere.
Stella.