“Okay, Gilly. Go ahead.”
They might have been playing at statues till then, for everyone seemed to want to move arms and shake out legs as if numbed. Gilly started moving around the body with her camera.
“When she’s through, it’s all yours, Doc,” Macalvie said. “Then yours, Fleming.” He gave the forensics man a punch on the arm. “I’m sure you’ll turn up something.”
“Maybe, guv,” said Fleming. “But not whatever it was you stuck in that Baggie.”
Macalvie could inspire terror in incompetents (of which Devon and Cornwall police had more than their share, he was fond of pointing out). Fleming wasn’t one of them. Neither was Gilly Thwaite, though he could still have her wishing sometimes that she’d never joined the force. The good ones, the crack technicians, Macalvie kept by him. He smiled ruefully at Fleming and handed over the Baggie. “Sorry,” he said.
He watched Gilly as she moved in for the close-up shots. He wished the victim could tell him something with a look. But the faces of the dead wear no expression, no matter whether they’re looking down the barrel of a gun or at a charging bull. Except in the case of a spasm, which freezes the victim in instant rigor mortis, the expression on the face gives nothing away.
Death is the great expression leveler.
8
Melrose was coming to the bottom of his third Old Peculiar while sitting at the bar of the Drowned Man. There had been a very brief debate with Mr. Pfinn as to whether he had any more, an argument hardly supported by the fact he had half a case of the stuff on a shelf beneath the bar. He hated this whole business and what it was doing to this seventeen-year-old kid, whose entire family consisted only of an afterthought of an uncle in Penzance and this dearly loved aunt, Chris. And now she was gone.
How had he gotten embroiled in this boy’s life, a boy he had known for only a day?
As if time mattered. Melrose had always believed you could meet and fall in love with a woman in the time it took to put out your hand and say hello.
It disturbed him that he could reach that point immediately where Johnny had landed: abandoned and betrayed. Not that his aunt had abandoned the lad, of course not. No more had his own mother abandoned Melrose; of course she hadn’t. Nor his father. But Melrose still loathed public schools and the British penchant for sending children away to them.
There was Harrow. What he remembered most about Harrow was the midnight vigil. He could never get to sleep before then. He’d lie in a narrow bed, crying soundlessly. He hadn’t dared make any noise or he’d wake up his roommate-what had been his name? He could not understand this reaction to public school-or, rather, to leaving home. About as independent as a baby penguin, he’d been.
Harrow wasn’t the first time, either. Before that, when he was eight, there’d been a boarding school in France. Why in God’s name had they packed him off to the south of France? It still made him blush to remember how he held on to his mother that day in Paris-her hand, her skirt, cool skin, warm wool. And his father’s embarrassment: “For heaven’s sakes, lad, be a man! Get a grip on yourself! Soldier on, lad!” And despite the fact his father would say it, Melrose was trying to do just that: get a grip. So hard was he trying that the voice at his elbow gave him such a start he nearly fell off the stool.
“Plant!”
“Commander Macalvie! My lord, how are you?”
“Me? I’m fine. You don’t look so hot, though. Where’s your sidekick?”
He meant Richard Jury. “In Northern Ireland. Sidekicking.”
“Christ, how’d he wind up there?”
“I don’t know. CID matter, some kind of inquiry connected with something in London.”
“Wiggins go with him? If he didn’t, I could use him here.”
Macalvie’s partiality for Wiggins had always mystified Melrose, as it mystified Richard Jury.
Pfinn came down the bar, drawn perhaps by Macalvie’s static electricity, the copper hair, the cobalt-blue eyes. Pfinn asked him what he’d have. If anything.
Pfinn always managed to make it sound like an imposition.
Macalvie asked for lager. “So what’s this emergency?”
“A woman’s missing from here, from Bletchley.” Melrose told him the details. “It hasn’t been your requisite twenty-four hours.”
As he’d been talking, the expression on Macalvie’s face changed.
“What’s she look like?”
“I don’t-” It was only then that Melrose realized her looks had never come up, not around him at any rate. Brown hair? Possibly. No, he did recall Johnny saying she was around his age.
“I can never tell what your age
“Very funny. I honestly don’t remember Johnny’s describing what she looked like, except to say she’s pretty.” Melrose paused. “Why does that look on your face bother me? Why, incidentally, are you in Cornwall? I don’t expect you’re sightseeing.”
Macalvie cleared his throat. “Where is this boy?”
“Working one of his several jobs.” Melrose consulted his watch. “It’s probably the cab at this hour… or else he’ll be getting the dining room ready here.” Melrose called to Pfinn, asked him if Johnny had come yet. No, he hadn’t. Not for another hour, most likely.
Melrose asked again. “So what are you doing in Cornwall?”
“Having a dekko at a body found not far from here. You know Lamorna Cove? It’s about five miles away.”
“A body. Male or female?”
“Female. We haven’t ID’d her yet.”
There was a silence before Melrose asked, “How long had she been dead?”
Macalvie took his lager, handed over some money, drank off a third, and said, “Not that long. No more than twelve, sixteen hours. Pathologist has to do a postmortem, of course.”
“Well.” Melrose’s stomach turned over. That really was the sensation.
“The nephew must have a picture of her.”
“I’m sure he does.”
“Well, I’d rather see that before I show him mine.”
“Yours?” Melrose said, his tone anxious.
“Can you get hold of him?”
“I’ll try his house, and if he’s not there I’ll call the cab dispatcher. There’re all of three cars to dispatch.” He turned to Mr. Pfinn and asked for the telephone and Johnny’s telephone number.
Giving out employees’ telephone numbers was not something he did. The same telephone ceremony was repeated as had been that morning. It would cost him a pound.
“No, it won’t,” said Macalvie, riveting the man with his eyes, then producing his identification. “And we’ll have that number, thanks.”
9
Johnny heard the telephone as he was coming up the path to the cottage. He fairly flew through the door and snatched it up as the last ring echoed in air.
Hell! He slammed the receiver down. The phone had become Janus-faced; on the one hand it might be Chris; on the other hand, bad news
He did not know, for all of his worry, how he’d been able to go about his daily routine of the caff, the cab, the pub in such a humor as to be-or at least make things appear to be-perfectly normal. To keep it down, the anxiety, the fear. “Deny” as Uncle Charlie was always saying. Deny, deny, deny. But this wasn’t denial; if it had been he
