The Lamorna Wink (26 page)

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.”

T
hey 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 . . .”