The Lamorna Wink

by Martha Grimes

  “Because aristocrats have that in common-the aristocracy.”

  “I stopped being one years ago. I’ve forgotten how.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s like riding a bike. You never forget.”

  Melrose sighed. “I would if people let me.”

  “Colthorp collects cars. Vintage autos. That’s why you want to see him.”

  “I do?”

  “Sure. That old Bentley of yours. Isn’t that an antique by now?”

  “It may not be, but I am. Let me get this straight: it’s because I too have an interest in vintage automobiles that I want to see this Lord Mead-what’s his name?”

  “Rodney. Rodney Colthorp.”

  “Right. It’s really his cars I’m interested in, and he’d be damned interested in my Bentley. Do you realize I know absolutely nothing about cars, including mine?” Knowing Macalvie couldn’t care less, Melrose sighed and got out his pen. “So, which part of Surrey?”

  As Macalvie told him, Melrose had the happy thought that if Surrey was not close to Northants, it was certainly close to London and, therefore, to Bethnal Green. He smiled.

  18

  Lord Ardry.” Rodney Colthorp, Lord Mead, put out his hand and looked at Melrose with an enthusiasm that was flattering. He had answered the door himself, which testified to his being long on humility or short of cash. Staff did not include a full-time door opener, or, if it did, Rodney Colthorp had given the man a good deal of elbow room. Ruthven would be scandalized.

  Lord Mead couldn’t resist looking past Melrose at the latter’s Bentley, one of the prewar models, or at least Melrose believed it was. It had been in the family for ages. He wondered if this man was astute enough to tell that Melrose-and his Bentley-were flying false colors. But all Rodney Colthorp said was, “What a beautiful automobile,” as he pulled at his gray mustache, a nervous, contemplative gesture. Then, as if he had forgotten Melrose was there, said, “Oh, sorry to keep you standing on my stoop. Come in, come in.”

  Stoop was not the word Melrose would have chosen to describe the area at the top of the two dozen marble steps he had ascended to reach the door. The house was on a much grander scale than was Ardry End, which it resembled.

  Perhaps more glorious than the house was the expansive garden and lawn at the back, dotted here and there with sculptures, a gazebo, and a folly or two. It stretched as far as the eye could see. It was both windswept and sheltered by internal hedges, with broad brick paths and gate piers. There were bold tall grasses backed by young pines, box hedges, and long vistas that drew the eye to the steeple of a church somewhere. One path between low walls made its convoluted way, vanishing somewhere in the distance.

  “Is that path there for walkers?”

  “No. It’s my butterfly corridor. I’m trying to keep species from disappearing completely and help them migrate. The Adonis blue is one. It’s simply beautiful.”

  Rodney Colthorp said this while they were comfortably seated in one of the several drawing rooms, this one furnished more informally than the larger room they’d passed whose furnishings were dark, heavy, and priceless.

  Melrose drank Lord Mead’s hundred-year-old Scotch and felt expansive.

  Colthorp leaned his head back on his chair and sent both words and pipe smoke toward the ceiling. In a sort of meditation on the merits of aristocracy, he said, “Of course, you know this as well as I… but there are certain rituals, silly as they might seem to others, which should be retained or the whole damned boiling will go down. I know a lot of it seems like claptrap: the hunt, for instance. We do get a lot of these hunt saboteurs knocking about, being damned rude. I don’t ride myself, but I can understand the appeal of it. What I fail to understand is why the great hue and cry of these animal liberationists doesn’t concentrate on the real horrors of experimentation and slaughterhouses. I can only think the-” The cell phone, whose resting place must have slipped Colthorp’s mind, was finally rescued from a spot between cushion and arm of the overstuffed chair. He excused himself and pulled up the wobbly antenna. The call was not to his liking, apparently, for he began it with a huge sigh, followed by a series of grunts, growing more and more impatient over the thirty seconds or so of the caller’s comments. “No. No, Dennis, I’ve told you time and again I do not want to speculate, certainly not in a diamond mine in South Africa.” He shook his head, as if the caller could see how much he didn’t want shares in a diamond mine, and shoved down the antenna, his expression registering extreme impatience.

  Melrose smiled. “Your investment banker?” He wondered what such people did, actually.

  “No. My son. He’s the youngest, he’s twenty-two. He’s always on to me about the market. Day trading, futures, selling short, selling long-I haven’t the least idea what the boy’s talking about. He himself does quite well by it, has done for years. But that doesn’t mean I’d be as lucky. Now. Where did you say you were from?”

  “My home’s in a village near Northampton, but at the moment I’m renting a house in Cornwall. Place called Bletchley.” Melrose waited while the name hit home. It took five seconds. Colthorp stopped in the act of tamping down his pipe.

  “But that’s where Sada-you know about the woman who was murdered near Lamorna Cove?”

  “Yes, yes indeed. Quite a stir that’s causing.”

  “Police from Devon and Cornwall have been around here, and I’ve had to fly to Penzance to identify the body.”

  Melrose feigned surprise. “Police here? Why? Did you know her?”

  “I was married to her.”

  Melrose managed to look appropriately shocked.

  Colthorp went on. “Poor girl. Sada wasn’t a very substantial person. I don’t mean anything was wrong with her mind; rather, she had so little substance. Marrying her was-well, the purest folly. Looking back, and I’ve done a deal of that, I can’t remember why I thought it a good idea at the time.”

  “Who can? Not I, certainly. Hindsight would save us all, wouldn’t it?” Melrose smiled sympathetically and held back from asking questions about Sada. On the contrary, he turned the conversation away from her before Colthorp began to wonder exactly why Melrose was here. “I’d love to see your cars.” Once around the grounds, as it were, Melrose was sure he could find occasion to reintroduce the subject of the dead wife into the conversation. Colthorp certainly seemed willing to talk about her.

  “Yes, of course,” said Colthorp. “That’s what you came for, after all. We’ll go out to the garage. Sorry I rattled on.”

  “Not at all,” Melrose was quick to put in. “How could you not speak of it, after all?”

  Colthorp rose, set down his glass. “A bad business.” He shook his head. “A very bad business. Sada might have been troublesome, but lord knows she didn’t ever deserve this.”

  Troublesome. Melrose made a note of that.

  From the house they walked across the circular drive to a ten-car garage, although garage seemed the wrong word to describe such an elegant building, with its high windows gathering the late-afternoon sun and dashing it across the highly polished bonnets of the cars sitting inside. Melrose knew nothing about automobiles, other than how to drive them. He was, though, fairly certain that the first of them was one of the old Fords, a Model T, its black metal polished to within an inch of its life. This at least he could identify.

  “Ah, yes. The old Tin Lizzie. They drove it to the top of Pike’s Peak, if you can believe it. Those others”-Colthorp’s gesture took in the next two cars-“there you’ve got an Overland Touring Car and a 1912 Cadillac Touring Car. Something, aren’t they?”

  Melrose fussed over them, hardly knowing what the fuss-which consisted of mumbled words of praise, peering inside, and noting the appointments-was about. He commented on the myriad once-felt-to-be “luxuries” of the cars, the turquoise and blue varnishes, the wonderful scent of old cracked leather, the big wheels, the running boards. “Marvelous, marvelous.”

  They moved on to a cherry-red Lamborghini. “That’s Dennis’s. A
nd that one farther along, there”-Dennis’s father pointed out a black Porsche-“it’s the latest model, one of their XK-Eights, quite a fabulous car. Fabulous price, too.”

  Melrose bet he was looking at something in the neighborhood of 75,000 pounds. Fabulous indeed.

  Colthorp went on. “He’s young; he goes for that slick Italian stuff. Myself, I much prefer the more substantial ones, the touring cars, that kind of thing, or that Wolseley farther along.” He nodded toward a dark green car, its body of a graceful roundness that had long since fled the automobile scene. “It was Dennis who put me onto the Cadillac, courtesy of an American friend of his, ’bout-oh, ten or eleven years ago.”

  Melrose calculated: if Dennis was twenty-two today, that would have made him twelve ten years ago. He could not help commenting on this.

  Lord Mead laughed. “Oh, the friend himself wasn’t a child. No, no, he was a grown man. But Dennis knew him, right enough. Dennis always has had a lot of unlikely friends-for a boy, that is. A boy back then, I mean.” Colthorp chewed at the gray mustache and seemed to be ruminating on this point, as if he too were wondering about Dennis’s unlikely friends. But what he said was, “He never could like Sada, though.”

  That didn’t surprise Melrose, not with inheritances and changing of wills in the bargain. He ventured a guess here, trying to keep it as tasteful as possible. “I expect that’s true of most children when a new mother-in-law comes along.”

  “Loss of love and money, you mean? Oh, Dennis is quite sure of my love, and”-here he made a noise both of amusement and dismissal-“he doesn’t care a fig for my money.”

  Melrose thought this rather disingenuous, considering the Lamborghini sitting there. “He has expensive tastes, though.”

  “Mmm? Oh, I didn’t say he hadn’t. It’s his money bought that and the Porsche.” Colthorp chuckled. “For all I know, Dennis has more than I. He invests. Or did I tell you? That’s what the phone call earlier was about. No, Dennis didn’t trust Sada, didn’t trust the old friends out of her past who came here. Sleazy film folk, a few of them. When I met Sada, she was doing the occasional bit part in bad films. Might even have been a pornographic film or two, Dennis found out. One friend was a film producer who came here several times. Funny chap. What was his name? Bolt, I think. Bit of a wide lad, that one. Untrustworthy, bad influence. Good car, though. Dennis tried to buy it. Jaguar-mmm, can’t recall the model. Sporty little car, two-seater, I think.” He meditated on this for a moment and then got back to his ex-wife. “Sada had been down on her luck, as they say, when we met.” He sighed. “She wasn’t all that interested in automobiles, for some reason.”

  Melrose smiled. “Hardly a suitable companion, then.”

  Colthorp laughed. “Time we nipped over to that car of yours for a good look. Hack through the underbrush and lead the way!”

  If there was a way to lead-considering the exquisitely kept lawns and gardens-Melrose led it. He hated the Bentley’s intervening on mention of the “troublesome” Sada. But as Colthorp seemed really to want to talk about her, the subject would come up again.

  When he came abreast of the old Bentley, Lord Mead shook his head as if words couldn’t cover the subject. For once, Melrose was glad that Ruthven (or Momaday, when the spirit moved his grounds-keeper) kept the car polished to mirror brightness.

  Colthorp walked twice around it before settling into staring at the car, tweeded arms folded across his chest. As Melrose had done earlier, Colthorp uttered appreciative words; unlike Melrose, they could be understood. “Where did you ever get it?”

  “My father did, actually. It was the year before he died. He rather liked cars himself.” He remembered it now, the way his father had really been smitten with the car, how he had been like a teenager with his first ride. This was one of Melrose’s few fond memories. “He really did love this one.”

  “And no wonder. Well, if you ever want to sell up, you know who to call.”

  This might have sounded a little vulgar, had Colthorp not been so intensely drawn to the old car.

  Now he rubbed his hands and said, “We’re due for a drink, I’d say.”

  They retraced their steps to the house. Overhead, the whirring buzz of a helicopter stirred the eucalyptus and tall grasses. Colthorp looked up, muttered, “Bloody noisy old thing.”

  Melrose had not thought the house that near to Heathrow.

  Whisky in hand, they settled back into the same seats they had left, and Colthorp picked up the thread of the conversation about Sada. “We separated-oh, five years ago; she managed to go through the money I settled on her and in a year she was back, wanting more. I expect I should have told the police about that, but you know, it slips my mind most of the time. She actually threatened to sell the story to the tabloids. About me and… well, never mind, it’s not all that juicy a story. I must say, it made me queasy in my stomach to think she’d do something like that. Dennis threw her out with a ‘publish-and-be-damned’ attitude. He’s quite forthright, Dennis is.”

  Melrose smiled. “Sounds it. But her trying to blackmail you, that must’ve been extremely painful.”

  “It was, it was,” answered Colthorp, tossing back the rest of his whisky and rising to get another. When he motioned to Melrose’s glass, Melrose raised his and shook his head. “So she was on, you might say, her last legs?”

  Colthorp sat himself, dug into the cushions at his back, and said, “Dennis put a private detective on her.”

  Here was a treat! How he wished the omnipresent yet absent Dennis were with them now.

  “Found out that most of those films were not just bad B films, but bad pornographic B films. Not that that’s something the Dirty Squad might cut you a look for, but she had form on a number of counts. Sada, it’s funny to think, was more impressed by her social standing when we were married than she was by the money. She adored being Lady Mead and being given place to when we entered somebody’s dining room. Funny how the frills and furbelows of aristocratic doings are lusted after by those who want to bring it down. Not that Sada wanted to, oh, no. It fit her to a ‘T’ even if she didn’t fit it. No, Sada’s nose would be much more out of joint than mine if that bill doing away with hereditary peers ever passed.”

  This was interrupted by the cell phone’s brring again, insistent as an insect. Again, Lord Mead scooped it up from underneath the cushions, answered, listened, and sighed. “No. No. I do not want shares in a racehorse. Where he came in at Newmarket Saturday doesn’t interest me in the least… Dennis, for God’s sake, do not keep bothering me with your fly-by-night silver mines and horses and all the rest. Anyway, I’ve company here, good-bye.”

  Colthorp was about to sign off when he brought the phone back to his mouth and said, “And for God’s sakes, get that helicopter out of my butterfly corridor!”

  19

  He had never known the sun to glare in London, but in this early evening it did, as if trying to deliver the knockout punch to the encroaching dusk. Coming out of it and into the museum evoked in Melrose a feeling of being submerged, dark and cool.

  He had been once before to the Museum of Childhood when he’d come months ago to take Bea to dinner. That little restaurant-what was it? Perhaps she’d like to eat there again. Dotrice, that was it, the name of the restaurant. French, very classy, and she’d ordered steak and frites and talked about her “blue period.” Not her feelings but her painting. He had been surprised to discover just how good she was when he’d seen her paintings hanging on a wall of a Mayfair gallery.

  Beatrice Slocum, he was told by a kindly elderly lady in rimless glasses, had gone out to the chemist’s but would be soon back. Melrose had the impression that this woman was someone who would be especially good with children. Indeed, she reminded him of a nurse he’d had as a small child…

  There, he was doing it again, remembering. And he seemed prepared to be reminded of anything by anyone these days. He wondered if this lady truly was like his nurse, Miss Prescott. Nurses to their graves have go
ne… He gave his head a sharp little shake, almost afraid of himself and his penchant for nostalgia. It had to stop.

  Melrose concentrated on the displays. The doll-houses were the first thing one saw upon entering. He’d thought before how charming they were, the bits of furniture reflecting the taste of a particular time, the tiny appointments, the little figures going about their business of housekeeping. The child in the photographs, the Bletchleys’ dead daughter, would have loved this. Quickly he banished that thought from his mind and walked up to the second level.

  Here were the trains and games. Watching the long train move sluggishly around a track was a grave-looking boy of perhaps seven or eight. Melrose almost saw in his back the shape of the boy who’d been here over a year ago when he’d visited it. Nostalgia reinforced by déjà vu, that’s all he needed. He was simply too suggestible.

  But, no, this was a different boy, watching as the train stopped between green fields, one with a cow cropping the grass, the other with a couple of horses, taking their ease at this ambiguous hour.

  The boy exclaimed, “Hey! It’s s’posed t’stop at the station”-(pronounced by him “stye-tion”). “So wot’s wrong wi’ it? I put in twenty p, me. Twenty p oney got it ’alfway round.”

  Perhaps he thought Melrose a member of the museum staff. Or did children merely turn to the nearest grown-up to demand recompense for their losses?

  Melrose said, “Let’s get it going again, then,” as he slotted a twenty-p coin into the slot. The train stuttered to a fresh beginning and started up. They watched it in silence, snaking its way past the little station, past crossings and through tunnels, and finally giving out again beside the field with the one cow.

  “It ain’t supposed t’stop there, mister.” He threw Melrose a baleful glance, as if things had been jolly good before the coming of this adult.