The Blue Last

down into the kitchen. Nothing interesting here, so he went through to the living room. It was warm and with the signature English cottage ambiance of cretonne, exposed timbers, cuteness and cat. Snowball sat and stared at Melrose. He wondered why he had this effect on animals; they found him as entrancing as a box parterre. They stared; they washed.

He looked at the pictures on a round table by the window (cutely curtained in a print of flowers and butterflies). There were a number of framed photographs, mostly of the snapshot-by-the-sea variety, showing a younger Kitty Riordin with a younger Maisie Tynedale. At least the child looked like Maisie, here probably ten or twelve. There was also one of (presumably) Maisie as a baby. On the corner of the silver frame dangled a silver bracelet with an engraved heart: M. The bracelet adorned her tiny wrist in the photograph and, looking closely at the hand which lay against Kitty’s breast, he could make out the flaw in the tiny fingers, which would have been, he guessed, prior to the accident during the bombings. He was surprised, though, that the Tynedale fortune hadn’t been able to secure a surgeon to put the flawed little hand to rights.

He walked up tres cute narrow stairs into a bedroom the same size as the room beneath it. Bathroom over the kitchen. Definitely a house for one person, but that said, it seemed comfortable and with the fringe benefit of meals taken at the Lodge.

Snowball had followed him into the room and regarded him with an expression usually reserved for bus conductors. Melrose told the cat to go away, an order which would have gone down equally well with a bus conductor.

Melrose wondered if Kitty Riordin would bother hiding incriminating evidence. Or was she confident that so much time had passed, no one would be searching her premises? There was a desk with pigeonholes and writing implements against the front wall between the two windows. The top held shelves for books behind two glass doors. He stood and looked, believing this to be better police procedure than immediately knocking about the room and busying his fingers with poking things about. Having looked without success, he busied his fingers poking through the cubbyholes and little drawers. Nothing. He looked through her bureau drawers. Very neat, nothing there either.

The cat, who had been creeping about and sniffing as if he had never been in the room before, made a bound to the bed where Melrose was now sitting and another bound to the night table, knocking over a picture. Finding nothing further to maul and hit, Snowball gave up trying to find anything remotely interesting and padded downstairs. Good riddance.

Melrose picked up the picture of Kitty and another baby and the little bracelet that had dangled (as had the one downstairs) on one corner of the frame. On this one the heart was engraved with the letter E. Melrose sat with this little bracelet and looked to the window where a narrow branch of the tulip tree tapped in the wind. There was nothing surprising in Kitty Riordin’s keeping this memento of babyhood, certainly not the bracelet worn by her own baby, Erin, and not Maisie’s either, although she could have handed it over to Maisie herself or even Oliver. But that was splitting hairs. Only…

… assuming the child brought back from the walk that night was actually Maisie, how had Kitty come by Erin’s bracelet? Could she have found it in the course of frantically sifting through the rubble of the Blue Last? Surely not. He held it up, swinging it on his finger. It struck him as bloody unlikely but he would have to allow it was possible. The question then was, why? Why would she search for it? Other than as a memento, what purpose would it serve? The bracelet downstairs with the M would indicate the baby was Maisie-not prove it, since anyone can switch a bracelet from one little wrist to another.

He went back to looking at the photograph. The baby had both of its hands on Kitty’s forearm. He could see the fingers separately and clearly. In some way the picture made Melrose think of Masaccio’s Madonna and Child in the Uffizi. He recalled that the hands of the baby Jesus curled on his mother’s arm, just as Erin’s did here. The plump little hands were perfect and unmarked. This was taken before that awful night, the final night of the Blue Last, when little Maisie’s arm and hand were hit by flying rubble.

Or was it Erin’s?

Melrose kept looking from the photograph to the bracelet to the tapping branch of the tulip tree outside. It was almost enough to make him believe that Kitty Riordin knew the pub would be bombed. But not even Kitty Riordin could control the skies.

He hoped.

Forty-five

Gloomy thoughts. But it wouldn’t be the first time a mother had done something like that.

And it had been, after all, for Erin’s own good.

Melrose was in his room at Boring’s trying to decide what to change into for dinnr. For God’s sake, he told himself (snippily), you have only six articles to choose from-two jackets, a black cashmere and a greenish wool-silk; two pairs of trousers, one of those being the new black jeans he had bought at the Army-Navy Store for gardening and the other a black wool; two shirts, one white, one a black turtleneck. Still he felt all the indecision of a teenager trying to decide what to wear to the dance.

He looked his wardrobe over. Black. Now that was an interesting idea. What, he wondered, would be the effect if he pulled on the black jeans-

(He did.)

Pulled down the black turtleneck.

(He did.)

Then yanking it from its hanger, pulled on the black cashmere jacket.

He did this too, then stepped back from the long mirror, whipped out a comb and snapped it through his gold- licked hair, cool as John Travolta. He caught the whole effect and smiled. He made a gun of his thumb and index finger, pow.

Back at you.

In the Members’ Room, Melrose waved hello to Major Champs and Colonel Neame, but sat down on the other side of the room, after procuring for himself a newspaper from the rack near the desk, one of the twenty or so different papers Boring’s supplied. Melrose could understand keeping Le Monde on the rack, but did anyone in here speak Arabic? Swahili? Cigarette in his mouth, he flicked his Zippo and lowered his face to bathe in shadows and fire. Unfortunately, there was no way to see just what the effect was, but he thought it fitted his black-clothed persona.

“Cool.”

Quickly, he turned, nearly dropping the lighter. “Polly!”

Polly Praed smiled as Melrose jumped up, mouth unhinged. He’d caught the cigarette as it fell.

Polly ran her eyes from his head to his toes and then back up again. “Way cool.” She plopped down in a leather chair, companion to his own. She said, “I may have to revise my opinion.”

“What the devil are you doing here in Boring’s?”

“Oh, don’t be such a stick, Melrose. These places let anybody in nowadays. Light?”

He lit the cigarette she was waggling in her mouth. She hadn’t changed a jot in these last couple of years. She still had the only amethyst eyes in the world, excepting Elizabeth Taylor’s.

“But how did you know I’d be here? Sit down, sit down.”

Polly sat in the wide leather chair opposite him and placed a brown paper parcel she’d been carrying between herself and the arm.

“Did you come here to see me or what?”

“To see my editor.”

Melrose looked around the room. “He’s here?”

“No-o. I mean I came to London to see him.”

“How did you know I’d be here?”