The Lamorna Wink

The Adonis blue is one. It’s simply beautiful.”

Rodney Colthorp said this while they were comfortably seated in one of the several drawing rooms, this one furnished more informally than the larger room they’d passed whose furnishings were dark, heavy, and priceless.

Melrose drank Lord Mead’s hundred-year-old Scotch and felt expansive.

Colthorp leaned his head back on his chair and sent both words and pipe smoke toward the ceiling. In a sort of meditation on the merits of aristocracy, he said, “Of course, you know this as well as I… but there are certain rituals, silly as they might seem to others, which should be retained or the whole damned boiling will go down. I know a lot of it seems like claptrap: the hunt, for instance. We do get a lot of these hunt saboteurs knocking about, being damned rude. I don’t ride myself, but I can understand the appeal of it. What I fail to understand is why the great hue and cry of these animal liberationists doesn’t concentrate on the real horrors of experimentation and slaughterhouses. I can only think the-” The cell phone, whose resting place must have slipped Colthorp’s mind, was finally rescued from a spot between cushion and arm of the overstuffed chair. He excused himself and pulled up the wobbly antenna. The call was not to his liking, apparently, for he began it with a huge sigh, followed by a series of grunts, growing more and more impatient over the thirty seconds or so of the caller’s comments. “No. No, Dennis, I’ve told you time and again I do not want to speculate, certainly not in a diamond mine in South Africa.” He shook his head, as if the caller could see how much he didn’t want shares in a diamond mine, and shoved down the antenna, his expression registering extreme impatience.

Melrose smiled. “Your investment banker?” He wondered what such people did, actually.

“No. My son. He’s the youngest, he’s twenty-two. He’s always on to me about the market. Day trading, futures, selling short, selling long-I haven’t the least idea what the boy’s talking about. He himself does quite well by it, has done for years. But that doesn’t mean I’d be as lucky. Now. Where did you say you were from?”

“My home’s in a village near Northampton, but at the moment I’m renting a house in Cornwall. Place called Bletchley.” Melrose waited while the name hit home. It took five seconds. Colthorp stopped in the act of tamping down his pipe.

“But that’s where Sada-you know about the woman who was murdered near Lamorna Cove?”

“Yes, yes indeed. Quite a stir that’s causing.”

“Police from Devon and Cornwall have been around here, and I’ve had to fly to Penzance to identify the body.”

Melrose feigned surprise. “Police here? Why? Did you know her?”

“I was married to her.”

Melrose managed to look appropriately shocked.

Colthorp went on. “Poor girl. Sada wasn’t a very substantial person. I don’t mean anything was wrong with her mind; rather, she had so little substance. Marrying her was-well, the purest folly. Looking back, and I’ve done a deal of that, I can’t remember why I thought it a good idea at the time.”

“Who can? Not I, certainly. Hindsight would save us all, wouldn’t it?” Melrose smiled sympathetically and held back from asking questions about Sada. On the contrary, he turned the conversation away from her before Colthorp began to wonder exactly why Melrose was here. “I’d love to see your cars.” Once around the grounds, as it were, Melrose was sure he could find occasion to reintroduce the subject of the dead wife into the conversation. Colthorp certainly seemed willing to talk about her.

“Yes, of course,” said Colthorp. “That’s what you came for, after all. We’ll go out to the garage. Sorry I rattled on.”

“Not at all,” Melrose was quick to put in. “How could you not speak of it, after all?”

Colthorp rose, set down his glass. “A bad business.” He shook his head. “A very bad business. Sada might have been troublesome, but lord knows she didn’t ever deserve this.”

Troublesome. Melrose made a note of that.

From the house they walked across the circular drive to a ten-car garage, although garage seemed the wrong word to describe such an elegant building, with its high windows gathering the late-afternoon sun and dashing it across the highly polished bonnets of the cars sitting inside. Melrose knew nothing about automobiles, other than how to drive them. He was, though, fairly certain that the first of them was one of the old Fords, a Model T, its black metal polished to within an inch of its life. This at least he could identify.

“Ah, yes. The old Tin Lizzie. They drove it to the top of Pike’s Peak, if you can believe it. Those others”- Colthorp’s gesture took in the next two cars-“there you’ve got an Overland Touring Car and a 1912 Cadillac Touring Car. Something, aren’t they?”

Melrose fussed over them, hardly knowing what the fuss-which consisted of mumbled words of praise, peering inside, and noting the appointments-was about. He commented on the myriad once-felt-to-be “luxuries” of the cars, the turquoise and blue varnishes, the wonderful scent of old cracked leather, the big wheels, the running boards. “Marvelous, marvelous.”

They moved on to a cherry-red Lamborghini. “That’s Dennis’s. And that one farther along, there”-Dennis’s father pointed out a black Porsche-“it’s the latest model, one of their XK-Eights, quite a fabulous car. Fabulous price, too.”

Melrose bet he was looking at something in the neighborhood of 75,000 pounds. Fabulous indeed.

Colthorp went on. “He’s young; he goes for that slick Italian stuff. Myself, I much prefer the more substantial ones, the touring cars, that kind of thing, or that Wolseley farther along.” He nodded toward a dark green car, its body of a graceful roundness that had long since fled the automobile scene. “It was Dennis who put me onto the Cadillac, courtesy of an American friend of his, ’bout-oh, ten or eleven years ago.”

Melrose calculated: if Dennis was twenty-two today, that would have made him twelve ten years ago. He could not help commenting on this.

Lord Mead laughed. “Oh, the friend himself wasn’t a child. No, no, he was a grown man. But Dennis knew him, right enough. Dennis always has had a lot of unlikely friends-for a boy, that is. A boy back then, I mean.” Colthorp chewed at the gray mustache and seemed to be ruminating on this point, as if he too were wondering about Dennis’s unlikely friends. But what he said was, “He never could like Sada, though.”

That didn’t surprise Melrose, not with inheritances and changing of wills in the bargain. He ventured a guess here, trying to keep it as tasteful as possible. “I expect that’s true of most children when a new mother-in-law comes along.”

“Loss of love and money, you mean? Oh, Dennis is quite sure of my love, and”-here he made a noise both of amusement and dismissal-“he doesn’t care a fig for my money.”

Melrose thought this rather disingenuous, considering the Lamborghini sitting there. “He has expensive tastes, though.”

“Mmm? Oh, I didn’t say he hadn’t. It’s his money bought that and the Porsche.” Colthorp chuckled. “For all I know, Dennis has more than I. He invests. Or did I tell you? That’s what the phone call earlier was about. No, Dennis didn’t trust Sada, didn’t trust the old friends out of her past who came here. Sleazy film folk, a few of them. When I met Sada, she was doing the occasional bit part in bad films. Might even have been a pornographic film or two, Dennis found out. One friend was a film producer who came here several times. Funny chap. What was his name? Bolt, I think. Bit of a wide lad, that one. Untrustworthy, bad influence. Good car, though. Dennis tried to buy it. Jaguar-mmm, can’t recall the model. Sporty little car, two-seater, I think.” He meditated on this for a moment and then got back to his ex-wife. “Sada had been down on her luck, as they say, when we met.” He sighed. “She wasn’t all that interested in automobiles, for some reason.”

Melrose smiled. “Hardly a suitable companion, then.”

Colthorp laughed. “Time we nipped over to that car of yours for a good look. Hack through the underbrush and lead the way!”

If there was a way to lead-considering the exquisitely kept lawns and gardens-Melrose led it. He hated the Bentley’s intervening on mention of the “troublesome” Sada. But as Colthorp seemed really to want to talk about her, the subject would come up again.

When he came abreast of the old Bentley, Lord Mead shook his head as if words couldn’t cover the subject. For once, Melrose was glad that Ruthven (or Momaday, when the spirit moved his grounds-keeper) kept the car polished to mirror brightness.