The Lamorna Wink (2 page)

Johnny went to polishing the slick card,
la carte glissée.
He liked the sound of it.
La carte glissée
. He stuck it back in the deck, pressed the deck with his thumb, and felt the break. Then he fanned out the cards and looked for the break. There was the slick card. A handy card for different tricks.

Chris looked a lot like his mother. They looked alike, but they weren't alike. His mother had taken off years ago to nowhere. His father was dead.

This is the way life is, thought Johnny, slipping the King of Clubs to the top. Life is violent reversals in a nanosecond.

Turn your head, and you've lost it.

Blink, and it's past you.

Wink, it's gone.

J
ust bring me a pot of poison,” said the elegant man, replacing the Woodbine Tearoom menu carefully between the salt cellar and the sugar bowl.

Johnny's face was straight as he wrote it down. “For one?”

The elegant man nodded. “And a pot of China tea for me. Oh, yes, and be sure to bring a plate of scones.” Melrose checked his watch. “She probably got lost.”

Johnny wrote down
China tea, scones.
“One China tea, one poison, one scones.”

“Might as well make that two cream teas. Since we're in Cornwall, we can't pass that up, can we? And better make sure the pastry plate's always within arm's reach.”

Johnny wrote down the order, nodded. “I'll hold up on the scones; wouldn't want them to get cold. Until your friend gets here, I mean.”

“Uh-huh. The poison's for her.”

“She must be a real treat.”

In the act of polishing up his specs, the elegant man gave him a long look. (A long green look, Johnny would say, if he ever had to describe it. Some eyes he had.)

“Oh, she is.”

The Real Treat came quick through the door of the Woodbine Tearoom with the wind and the rain at her back, pushing, pushing, as if the weather bore her a personal grudge.

The Real Treat removed her cape, shook it to displace the raindrops from her person to someone else, and succeeded, a goodly number of them landing on Melrose Plant's face.

Then the Real Treat sat herself down and waited for Melrose to put the tea in motion.

Melrose was relieved of thinking up conversational gambits because the lad (the quipster) was back, as fast as if he'd arrived by skateboard. Melrose was grateful.

Although he did wonder, Who is this kid? Tallish, dark, quite handsome, mid-teens maybe? Probably had to peel the girls off; they'd stick like limpets. Confident air—that was certain. He wore the white apron without appearing to feel silly. God, most boys his age wouldn't be caught dead waiting tables in a tearoom, much less in an apron.

“Madam?” He gave Agatha a quick survey: bird's-nest gray hair, brown wool suit, ankles like small tree stumps. “The gentleman suggested separate pots, the full cream tea; that's scones and cakes, double cream, and jam.”

Agatha brightened. “Why two pots, Melrose?”

Melrose shrugged, unwilling to solve the little problem.

The boy answered. “He thought you might want a different kind of tea. Instead of black tea, an oolong perhaps?”

This kid, thought Melrose, spends a lot of time in fantasyland. He wished he could accompany him now Agatha was here, but youth has wings and age is shackled. How she had found out he was going to Cornwall, who had spilled the beans, Melrose was still trying to work out. At least, she didn't know his
reason
for coming here.

 

He had seen the property advertised for rental in
Country Life
and had, on the spot, rung the listing agent Aspry and Aspry and made an appointment with a Mrs. Laburnum to see the house in three days. He had booked his first class seat on the Great Western from Paddington/London and felt mightily pleased with himself that he'd acted on impulse for once. “Something I seldom do,” he had said (smugly) to Marshall Trueblood as they sat drinking in Long Piddleton's favorite pub—that is, in Long Piddleton's only pub—the Jack and Hammer.

“You?” Trueblood inhaled his drink and started coughing. When he stopped he said, “That's
always
what you do. You hardly do anything that
isn't
impulsive.”

Melrose sat back, surprised. “Impulsive? Me?”

“Well, for God's sake, it wasn't
I
who suggested going to Venice that time when Viv-Viv had set the wedding date for marrying Dracula.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, that's totally different,
totally.
That's just—you know, like joking around. I'm talking about doing something suddenly, such as packing up and going to Ethiopia. Something one does with hardly a moment's thought.”

“How much thought did you give to telling Vivian that Richard Jury was getting married and she'd better hotfoot it back home? All of ten seconds, if memory serves me.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. That was your story; you invented it.”

“No, I didn't. Well, maybe I did. All right, then. How about the time you—?”

Melrose leaned across the table and clamped his hand around Trueblood's Armani tie and tugged. “Marshall, what's the point of this? What?”

“Nothing. There is no point.”

Melrose flicked the tie back against Trueblood's pale yellow shirt. He looked, as always, sartorially perfect, a rainbow of rosy tints and amber shades.

“Except of course to point out you're totally impetuous. The only reason you think of yourself as one who carefully plans his moves and maps things out beforehand is because you hardly ever do anything anyway—what, what?—there are the times you've helped out Superintendent R.J. Talk about impetuous! Ha ha! Whenever Jury drops the dime you're off like a kid on skates.” Trueblood shot his hand out and made
whoosh
-ing noises. Then he asked, “Where is Jury, anyhow?”

“In Ireland.”

“North? South? Where?”

“Northern Ireland.”

“God, why?”

“He was sent there on a case.”

“Oh, how shabby.”

Melrose frowned, thinking. “What were we talking about? I mean before. . . . Oh, yes. Cornwall.” Melrose took out a small notebook, black and spiral-bound at the top, the kind Jury carried. He leafed up some pages. “Bletchley. It's near Mousehole. Ever hear of it?”

“No. And can't imagine why I'd want to. Nor can I call up a picture of you there, either. You are not at all Cornwallian.”

“How would you know? You've never set foot in that county in your life. How do you know what is and what isn't Cornwallian?”

“Well, for one thing, they're completely unimpulsive. You wouldn't last a week—
Ow!
”

 

Back in the Woodbine Tearoom, Agatha asked, “What's wrong with you, Melrose? You look a sight.”

Whatever that meant. He smiled and stirred his tea, dropping another lump of sugar into it, and thought of the dreadful train ride he'd just taken from London. He had been looking forward to it; he enjoyed the anonymity of a train—no one knowing who you are, where you're going, anything.

Well, he could stuff the anonymity back in his sock drawer. No chance of that.

 

Melrose had not climbed aboard a train in some time. The first thing he asked of the conductor was the location of the dining car. The conductor had said, Oh, no, sir, no dining cars anymore. But someone'll be round in a tic with sandwiches and tea. Thank you, sir.

One illusion shattered. No lolling about over your brandy and coffee and a cigar at a white-clothed table anymore. And the old compartments, where if one was lucky he might be the only passenger or, luckier, would meet a mysterious assortment of others. The outer aisle, where one could lean against the railing and watch the green countryside flash by. Sometimes he thought the only reason trains had been invented was for films.
Murder on the Orient Express.
It would be fabulous to be here in this insular, sinister, almost claustrophobic atmosphere when a murder was committed.

Or just observe those two youngish gentlemen, leaning toward one another, quietly talking. Scheming.
Strangers on a Train.
They could be exchanging murders.

Or that old gray-ringleted lady he had passed, knitting, he would soon see on a stretcher being borne from the train at a stop up the track—

These days he was always waxing nostalgic—old films, old songs, old photographs. In this Hitchcockian reverie he did not see her coming, did not register her presence until he heard, “What on earth are you looking so squinty-eyed for, Melrose?”

He was yanked thus from his reverie with such a vengeance, he dropped his paper and his mouth fell open and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. “Agatha!”

 

If ever there was an antidote to nostalgia, it had just burst through the door of the Woodbine Tearoom.

It put him in mind of another old film he had seen on late-night TV called
The Uninvited,
the “uninvited” being a ghost who hurled back doors, laughed and sang, and presented its unseeable self to the horrified young heroine.

Unfortunately, his ghost was seeable.

For the last thirty-six hours she had accompanied him in his hired car round the bottom of the Cornwall coast. He had kept putting off the estate agent who was to show him the rental property, waiting for Agatha to find some entertainment other than himself that would keep her busy for half a day. He certainly did not want her around when he viewed the house, casting her accursed shadow over it. To say nothing of her endless carping.
You won't want this, Melrose. Look at that thatch; you'll be needing a whole new roof. Whatever would you do with all of this rocky land? No, Melrose, it won't suit.
Et cetera, et cetera.

Fortunately, the young lad's arrival with the tea broke into these morbid reflections. The boy held up one pot, asking “Regular tea?” and Melrose smiled as he tapped his own place mat. The waiter set the other by Agatha's hand. Then he brought the tiered cake plate from the window embrasure and set that on their table also.

Melrose watched him stop at a neighboring table, say something, move to another table and another. The Woodbine was small, but it was crowded. He worked the room slick as any politician.

In a few moments, leaving Agatha to the scones and double cream, he rose and walked over to the cash register where the lad was ringing up bills. (He appeared to be both the serving end and the business end of this place.)

“I beg your pardon.”

The lad smiled broadly. “Tea okay?”

“Fine. I just wondered: Do you have any free time during the day? I'm asking because I need someone to do a bit of work for me. Wouldn't take more than, say, three hours.” He held up a fifty-pound note he'd pulled from his billfold.

“For that I'd take a dive off Beachy Head.”

“It will be neither that heady an experience nor that dangerous. The lady I'm with, and don't look at the table for I fear she reads minds, is also my aunt and sticks to me like Crazy Glue. I need to be rid of her for a few hours, and as you seem extremely resourceful, I thought you—”

“I could take her off your hands.” The boy shrugged, smiled. “I could do. When?”

Melrose handed him the fifty. “Well, say in an hour or so?”

“Done.” Holding up the note, he added, “You trust me with this?”

“Why not? You brought the poison.”

T
he car was a newly minted silver Jaguar with ox-blood-red leather seats. These people probably had to impress their clients with proof of the agency's solvency. Esther Laburnum was the agent for this particular property, named Seabourne.

Melrose had seen the picture in
Country Life
as he was flipping past articles on gardening and on the country's “Living National Treasures,” artisans who continued in outlandishly arcane avocations such as thimble-chasing or making rock gardens for doll houses. Then there was an article on the hunt and its grave importance to the country. The print practically bled entitlement.

The properties shown usually took up a page apiece and as often as not failed to give the asking price; instead, the copy indicated the property's price would be given “upon request.” This bit of showmanship Melrose imagined was from the “if-you-have-to-ask” school. Melrose didn't. He'd torn the page from the magazine and gone to the telephone.

That had been several days ago, and he was pleased with himself for undertaking to see the real thing. He discovered now, as he stood looking at it, that the picture of Seabourne hadn't done it justice.