The Lamorna Wink (27 page)

“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.”

D
aniel 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?”