The Lamorna Wink (38 page)

Despite her relentless silence, Macalvie was getting to her; he could feel it. It was an odd chemistry; he'd felt it before with suspects. It wasn't his experience as a policeman or his cleverness that was getting through. It was something else, some quality in himself that the person under question seemed to think they shared. Macalvie hated the feeling. Not that he empathized, not that he understood. Some killers he did come to understand. Brenda wasn't one of them. It made him uncomfortable to sense she didn't believe this.
That's your problem, boyo.

“Yeah, a real classic,” he went on, “that film. I can see the pedophiles slobbering all the way from Bournemouth to John o'Groat's.”

Her eyes were sparking now, live wires touched to some electrical source. Anger? Good.

“But it didn't start out that way, Brenda.” He got up and walked over to a little window, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, holding back his raincoat. “Before Ramona died you wouldn't in a million years have thought of having a sociopath like Bolt follow those kids to their deaths. I can see it, I can just see it. Noah and Esmé—” He looked round at her, sitting there, not looking at him. The children's names touched off nothing in her—no sympathy, no remorse. At least, these emotions weren't present on her face.

He went on. “You know what I've been wondering? How it is you didn't send the tape to Morris Bletchley. Wasn't that the idea? Make him suffer as much as you had?”

“No.”

Macalvie kept himself from turning round, from registering surprise. He was surprised the film hadn't served the double purpose as instrument of death and sadistic revenge.

“Not knowing is worse. Now, though, I would. I'd like to rub his face in it,” said Brenda. “By taking Ramona into that house, he killed her as surely as if he'd held a gun to her head.”

Fucking melodrama,
thought Macalvie. “Seems to me Mr. Bletchley provided your daughter with safe harbor. Would you rather have had her wandering all over London? You never wanted her to go, and she didn't communicate with you.” That Bletchley could be seen as a savior, Macalvie knew, would fuel her rage.

“Safe harbor? Throwing Ramona into bed with a bloody gay chauffeur who'd got AIDS?” She made a noise in her throat of disgust, dismissal.

Macalvie did turn around then. “Morris Bletchley—” No. Don't defend him anymore, even though God knows the man deserves someone's defending him. “I guess that wasn't very smart of him.”

Her sour laugh was more a snarl.

“He paid a heavy price, Brenda. His grandchildren.”

“No price could have been too heavy.”

She was not crying, but tears were clotting her throat. It was thick with them. Wait. Wait for a moment. Macalvie leaned wearily against the cold wall, as if sick of death. The weariness was not an act. He was drowning in it.

Her only child. He could sympathize with that part of it, certainly. Then it occurred to him, and he was surprised by the conviction. “You didn't see it. The film. You didn't watch it.” Now he was leaning on the table, arms rod-straight. She looked up at him, disclosing nothing. He said, “You weren't there when Simon Bolt shot that film. You didn't see it.” He could have hit her.
You bitch!

And then he realized she'd finally admitted her tie to Simon Bolt. She'd forgotten herself enough to do this, just as he'd forgotten himself enough to want to kill her. “Tell me how he did it.”

She actually shrugged, as if it were really no affair of hers, since she hadn't been there. “He had what I guess you'd say was an assistant. I imagine Simon Bolt had a string of assistants, including Sadie May. They met up with the Bletchley children in the woods just beyond their house, several times. He took pictures, Polaroid shots, which he showed me. Nothing nasty, of course. They might have reported that to the grown-ups back at the house. He merely took pictures of them playing. Told them he was a filmmaker and showed them one. He had this little telly, you know, screen hardly as big as your hand. Anyway, he told them he could do one of them, if they fancied it. He found out a lot about the Bletchleys, about the boat down at the bottom of the stone steps. I expect he just made up a story to get them to go down there, or the girl did. Or the girl led them down there just when the tide was coming in. I don't know. I didn't ask for details.” Her voice took on a colorless, hollow quality, as if she were forever removed from what she was describing.

She was, thought Macalvie. She had arranged this but hadn't had the courage to look at it. That way, perhaps in her own mind, it had happened without her. “He would have given you a tape. A copy. He'd keep a couple for himself.”

“Oh, he did. Said it was for proof. Well, I didn't need proof, did I? They were drowned. Proof enough there. The Bletchleys left Seabourne. End of that marriage for all intents and purposes.”

“Yet Morris Bletchley didn't leave. He stayed. He would have stayed through hell rather than desert his grandchildren. He must have looked at it that way.”

She didn't comment.

“Sada Colthorp put you in touch with Bolt.”

“She told me about him. I'd never have used her as a go-between. She couldn't be trusted. Obviously.”

“Sada came back a couple of weeks ago and tried to blackmail you. She had a copy of that tape, or maybe it was Bolt's copy that she found in the house. Only there was nothing on that tape to link you to the children. You'd been very careful. It was only her word against yours. You thought she'd be believed instead of you?”

“Her word was what she intended to whisper in Morris Bletchley's ear. Along with giving him that tape. Him seeing that tape? Why, he'd have turned heaven and earth upside down to discover who was responsible, and if she told him it was my idea, he'd concentrate on me. He'd have had me investigated in a way police don't have time for—they've got a hundred other people, a hundred other murders to deal with. Morris Bletchley would only have me. Even if he couldn't prove it, even if he couldn't satisfy himself, Moe Bletchley would've hounded me the rest of my life.”

“But Chris Wells?” Macalvie didn't have to frame a question or a conclusion. She had reached that point where it was in for a penny, in for a pound. She was even more tired than he was; she figured she might as well tell the rest of it. Finally, suspects wanted to. They wanted someone else to know either how clever they'd been or how much they'd suffered. Finally, Brenda Friel wanted him to know.

She said, “If Chris were all of a sudden to leave the village at the same time there was a murder in Lamorna Cove, and if it was someone Chris had been known to hate—well, how else could police look at it except the way you did? The minute she set foot back in Bletchley, you'd have arrested her. My word against hers. Right?”

Her smile was like something engraved in acid. He wanted to slap it off her face. He asked, “But why? Why did you want Chris Wells out of the way?

“She knew, didn't she? About the AIDS? She was the only one I told. She was no danger to me until I killed Tom Letts. I had to get her out of the way because she would have sorted it. It wouldn't have taken long for Chris to do that, not her; she's as clever as her nephew.”

“Why did you wait so long to kill Tom Letts? Four years.”

“Why? Because I didn't
know
it was him. I only just discovered it a few weeks ago. Ramona never told me who the da was.”

They sat in silence for a few moments.

Then Macalvie said, “The Bletchleys had children, Chris had Johnny. Not only did she have Johnny, he was always there, in your face, the kind of kid every parent hopes his kid will be like.”

She didn't reply to this, only looked off at the wall as if she could see through it.

For a couple of minutes they sat that way, Macalvie staring at her, she staring off into nothing.

“Where's the fucking tape, Brenda?”

J
ury and Plant were standing on the pavement in front of the Drowned Man when a white Rolls hove into view and continued its glide down Bletchley's main street. The late sun lapped about its bonnet and boot, dazzling pedestrians who, like Plant and Jury, stopped to watch.

“What in hell's that?” asked Jury.

“Moby Dick. What are
they
doing here?”

Jury squinted as the car got closer. “Doesn't look like a whale. I think it's Marshall Trueblood driving.”

“Same thing. Ye gods.”

The car drew abreast of them and the passenger window whispered down. A white silk-sleeved arm was thrust out and a hand waved. The car glided to a stop. “Richard Jury! Oh, what a treat!” called out Diane Demorney. Melrose, the non-treat, got only a perfunctory “Hello.”

Like a cork from a champagne bottle, Marshall Trueblood popped from behind the wheel. Champagne was the color of his Armani suit; his shirt, pocket handkerchief, and tie were all done in watery Monet-garden pastels—pinks, blues, lemons—bringing to mind more a box of saltwater taffy than the gardens at Giverny. Still, he was, as usual, sartorial perfection.

Trueblood could barely contain himself. After opening the passenger-side door he extended a hand toward Diane, who took about the same amount of time as Cleopatra did getting off her barge.

Diane was dressed to match the Rolls: white, slick, and moneyed. But she made tracks from car to curb when it looked as if Trueblood was about to steal all the storytelling thunder. He said, “Wait until you hear about Viv!”

“Marshall!” Diane could really crack the whip when she wanted to. Indeed, this was Diane at her energetic best, talking without a martini to hand, but that lack was about to be filled.

Jury said, “There's a nice little tearoom right behind you on the other side of the street.”

If a look could shrug, hers did. “There's a nice little bar right in front of me on this side.” When it came to bars, Diane was a radar gun; she could pick them out faster than cops could target speeding cars.

As they filed into the Drowned Man, Jury asked, “But what about Vivian? What's going on?”

“Viv-Viv's going to—” Trueblood's answer was cut short by the heel of Diane's shoe grinding down on the instep of his Hugo Boss one.

“Can we get a room here?” asked Diane “Or is there a boardinghouse?”

“You can join Agatha in Lemming Cottage. It's a B and B.”

Diane shuddered.

“Listen,” said Melrose, annoyed. “Is this related to all of that stuff you were gibbering about a couple of nights ago when you woke me up at two A.M.?”

“Never mind,” said Diane, homing to the bar.

When they were seated round a table and had been served by the unenthusiastic and underemployed Pfinn, Melrose said, “You should have taken the train from Paddington station instead of doing all that driving.”

Diane actually stopped the first martini on its way to her blood-red lips. “Taken
what?
” She had never been one to explore alternative modes of travel.

“You made good time if you left Long Pidd this morning.”

“We didn't. We left on Tuesday.”

“Tuesday? But that's three days ago!”

Trueblood smiled stingily at Diane. “Despite the need for haste, Diane insisted on stopping at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons. You know, that restaurant where Raymond Blanc is the chef.”

Jury frowned. “But isn't that place near Oxford? I was on a case once very near it.”

Trueblood pounded his drink on the table. “Here, here! A Scotland Yard man who's a bon vivant. Yes, it is near Oxford.”

“Oxford's north, Diane. Cornwall's south,” said Melrose.

“Don't I know it,” said Trueblood. “We stayed there two nights. Food's a rave, I'll give it that.”

This time it was Jury who pounded his pint on the table, uncharacteristically for him. “So, give. What's this prodigious news you haven't been telling us?”

Plugging a cigarette into her long ebony holder, Diane said, “Our Vivian's going to marry the count.”

“Count Dracula,” offered Trueblood, in case Jury had forgotten.

Which he hadn't. “Oh, for God's sake. That's news? She's been going to marry him for—what? Eight years? Nine?” Complacent now, he drank his beer.

“No, old sweat, you don't understand: Dracula's
here.
The ship's landed, the coffin's ashore, and all over Northants there's a shortage of crosses and garlic.”

“Oh, do bloody
shut
it,” said Diane, who occasionally reverted to her Manchester upbringing. She turned to Jury and Melrose. “He's in Long Pidd. The wedding's in two weeks' time, and she's in the process of sending out invitations. So we've come to collect you,” she said to Melrose. To Jury, she added, “You too, except you're not so easily collected.” She sighed. “You work for a living.” She said this as if it had a strange and alien ring to it. “Naturally, I've been doing what I can, writing warnings into her horoscope. Things like ‘Beware any venture requiring new clothes.' ”

“Oscar Wilde said that,” Melrose informed her.

“Oh, hell, I thought I did. Then ‘You are about to embark on the darkest journey of your life' and ‘You will escalate fatuousness into a fatal fall.' ”

“Sounds good,” said Melrose. “What does it mean?”

“Who cares as long as it sounds good? Anyway, none of this has had any effect, as far as I can tell.” Diane crooked a finger at Pfinn, who paid the table even less attention than Dick Scroggs would have done. Melrose got up and went to the bar, first en-joining Diane to say nothing more until he got back. He didn't want to miss a word.