The Lamorna Wink

by Martha Grimes

  “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.

  35

  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 arou
nd 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.

  36

  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.”

  37

  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.”