earlier… But I couldn’t have. They’d obviously monitored my trip. One of them probably called ahead to give my position.”
A flicker of pain brushed Macalvie’s face. “Fifteen minutes earlier I could have heard her voice, heard her cry. That was how I was supposed to think. The only consolation was she appeared not to have been mistreated.
“I called it in. Police, ambulance, they were there in under twenty minutes. While I waited I kept thinking, If I’d been smart I wouldn’t have taken the route they gave me-”
“No. Then they wouldn’t have gone through with it. They’d have stepped up the anxiety even more and then put you through it again. I don’t think there’s a way to outwit a person whose only motive is to make you suffer.”
Macalvie sat back. “That’s why I never dropped this case. Those two kids-”
“I know.” Melrose thought how Brian Macalvie never talked about himself. And yet you always knew exactly where you were with him. You might not know where he came from, where he lived, who his mates and girlfriends were, but you knew his mental geography. You knew his territory.
Macalvie shook his head, drank the rest of his whisky as if preparing to go, but still sat looking at the floor, or his shoes or shadows. “She felt so much safer with me in the house. Christ! Having me in the house was like having a ticking bomb there; I brought all that grief down on the poor girl’s head.”
“What happened to her? Maggie?”
“I don’t know. We broke up, of course, soon after the kidnapping. I begged her to stay. I thought I could help her, which was arrogant, I guess, but she wouldn’t; of course she wouldn’t. There was no way she could ever think it wasn’t my fault.”
The proprietress, toweling glasses behind the bar, had been giving them hurtful looks for half an hour now.
Macalvie looked her way, palmed his cigarettes back into his pocket, and said, “Let’s go.”
Outside they stood for a moment looking up at the stars and out over the water. Melrose said that not even the most vivid imagination would see such a bizarre murder here in Lamorna Cove.
“Not in Kirkcudbright, either.”
26
Setting his electric wheelchair on a collision course with Matron, down at the end of the long gallery, Morris Bletchley released the brake and sped down a highway of oriental carpet.
Here she came, stomping toward him, looking less and less confident that she would win this game of chicken. She had a great ski slope of a bosom flying downhill from some stiff lace thingamabob at her throat. Her hair was in its usual punishing bun, stuck sharply with several silver-headed pins, pulling her scalp back to within an inch of its life.
Just pray your maker has gone to prepare one of those rooms always on offer, thought Morris Bletchley, arrowed straight at her. Why had he ever hired her? Probably for the same reason he kept her on: With the name MATRON pinned to her chest, she looked like she’d come from central casting. You just knew that’s what a matron looked like. He’d had to put up with so many of those creatures when he was growing up, it satisfied his sense of the rightness of things that he should now be able to call the shots. There! she’d chickened out and was pressing her bosomy self flat against the wall. Moe stopped just short of her feet and asked innocently, “You wanted to see me, Matron?”
“Mr. Bletchley! I cannot put up with these ridiculous games you play.”
He loved the way she talked-such pomposity. “But that’s part of your job, to keep us old fools in line.”
“I wanted to see you about the Atkins woman. She’s come, she’s here, but she hasn’t-or her family hasn’t-her part of the fee. Which is small enough,” she added disapprovingly.
Moe Bletchley used a sliding scale; it was pretty much pay-what-you-can. Sometimes they couldn’t. He subsidized the rest. The scale in Mrs. Atkins’s case had stopped sliding at ten percent, which amounted to thirty pounds per day. Given it cost more like three hundred to provide rooms, medical care, full-time nurses, and gourmet food, thirty pounds was a drop in the bucket.
Well, it was Moe’s bucket and he could have whatever he liked dropped in it. He cocked his head and said, “So?”
She seemed astonished he should ask why. “How can we admit her when she hasn’t fulfilled the terms of her contract?”
“Why didn’t you tell her to sell her first-born grandchild?”
Matron drew herself up, tilting her breastplate even more. “
“I’ve been bending and relaxing for four years and you’re still here, ain’t you?”
She pressed the bridge of her nose, one of several mannerisms denoting victimization. She said, “If you feel my services are no longer necessary-”
“Oh, but they are, they are! You are a formidable presence; you set an example!”
Still higher went the bosom, but this time with pride. “I certainly
Moe flapped his hand. “I’ll talk to her later. You show her where her room is. I’m off to visit Linus Vetch.” Moe removed his baseball cap, rubbed the top of his head, and slapped the cap back on. He gave a little wave and snapped the wheelchair into a ninety-degree turn.
Rules. Matron lived for them; they were her sound and substance. But it was pretty hard to apply “rules” to the dying, much less enforce them. Heavy with anger and corsets, Matron turned on her heel and marched down the galleried hall.
Damn it all, thought Moe, wish we’d had her at Okinawa. Moe had served three years in the Second World War. In no hurry now, he rolled along on the deep blue and green oriental runner that not too long ago had been trod by Lord Bugger-all and his lady wife. They had sold up because they couldn’t afford their stately home, then called Sheepshanks Hall, any longer. No wonder, when these British aristocrats (whom he disliked without exception) tossed money around like confetti paying for big cars and horses and keeping a staff of fifty. They had been raised not to work but to lounge.
Moe was an American who’d spent the last part of his life in Britain. He’d peeled off all he wanted to in the States (millions) and come to see what was on offer in England (billions).
Moe had built up a fast-food chicken empire “from scratch” (as he was fond of telling people, most of whom didn’t get it, but then most people were pretty witless). He called this popular chain of eateries Chick’nKing. Franchises had sprouted all over England. He had even wanted to plant a few on the North York moors and Dartmoor, but the idea had met with little enthusiasm by the building-permit people and the National Heritage. Moe wasn’t long on aesthetics, except for the design and decor of his Chick’nKings. There he went to town; they were the brightest, boldest things on the horizon, painted in astonishingly brilliant colors. And he had broken the everyone-the-same commandment by having three different designs. It was his building planner-not quite an architect and a kid at heart-who loved to come up with fresh ideas for the shape of a new Chick’nKing. Some were egg-shaped, an enormous marine-blue egg, painted around with bands of Easter-egg designs and standing on its fatter end. There were two dozen of these. Another group was designed to resemble a hen laying, or rather sitting on a nest. Then there was the newest line Moe had christened Chick’nTots, designed expressly for the kiddies. (As if the others weren’t?) These were a huge hit with both children and parents. They were shaped like chicks and painted a buttercup yellow so bright you could see them half a mile away down the A30 to Truro. The Chick’nTots were popular with parents because there were small tables and chairs in a section set apart so the children could eat out from under the parental eye and even order from their own menus; it made no difference whether or not they could read since there were pictures of every dish. The kiddies’ area was tended by a pretty Disney World-ish princess with a pink neon wand. She was there in case the kiddies started throwing food at each other. Peace would be restored immediately; it’s amazing what a princess with a wand can do that mums and dads can’t.
Another big difference between Moe’s eateries and most others was the food. This had been brought about several years back. One of the Chick’nKings had run out of potato chips (tasteless but familiarly tasteless, which
