The Lamorna Wink

“Come on, Brenda, police aren’t stupid. The one who’s in charge is a commander. That’s one of the highest- ranking officers in the whole Devon and Cornwall force.”

She sighed what sounded like a long and pent-up sigh. “I expect you’re right.”

Johnny went back to looking at the snapshots of Ramona. They showed her at different ages over the years, as if she had magically been whisked from childhood to adolescence. A toddler, a schoolgirl, a teenager. Chris had told him Brenda rarely talked about Ramona; the sadness was too overwhelming.

He could remember Ramona, beautiful as a young girl, who in the last months of her life had all but faded away, as if she were vanishing right before everyone’s eyes, like the beautiful woman in a magician’s act disappearing into the locked trunk, empty when it was open. Now you see her, now you don’t. He crossed his arms and lowered his chin to rest on them, his eyes still on the pictures. “She was really pretty, Ramona was.” His own voice startled him slightly, for he had not meant to say it aloud, reminding Brenda of her daughter.

As if-you arse-the poor woman could ever forget. He felt the weight of her silence. Then she came to stand behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. “She was, wasn’t she?”

Johnny heard such woe in her voice, he thought he might cry himself. Instead he reached his own hand around and covered hers. He thought he almost knew how she must feel. It probably wasn’t possible to really know unless you had children and had lost them. It made him think of those poor little Bletchley kids. God. It hardly bore thinking about.

Brenda said, “Remember she used to baby-sit for you when you were eight or nine?”

“Too old to need a sitter, that’s sure.”

“Oh, go on. You would have thought the same thing when you were two.”

“I did. I was.” What Johnny remembered about Ramona was how much of a golden girl she had seemed to him. Her hair was flaxen, her skin with a sheen like sunlight. She had had bright amber eyes and her mouth was naturally pink. She never needed anything to enhance those colors. She’d gone off to some public school and then to London. When she’d come back, how pale she’d looked. As time went on her eyes looked hardly darker than water, her lips silvery. Some kind of leukemia that leaches color from you. The swinging door over there made a space she had walked through; the pavement outside sent up echoes of her footfall; the window reflected her image.

Brenda’s hand still rested on his shoulder, though his own hand had slid away, for he thought of it as cold comfort for her. He tried to imagine what the world after Ramona must be like for Brenda. Here was this space, this chair, Ramona had inhabited. Ramona had filled this room, now empty. How could Brenda stand it, the lack of her? The unfilled space, the silent pavement, the unreflecting window, the empty door? He put his head in his hands and thought of the lack of Chris, and the Gilbert and Sullivan tune went through his mind:

If anyone anything lacks,

He’ll find it all ready in stacks-

He got up; he had to go; he told Brenda he’d see her tomorrow and avoided looking into her eyes.

She called something after him, probably just Good night, sweetheart.

Passing the chestnut tree, Johnny stumbled over the big root he’d managed to avoid tripping over for years and went tumbling down, not hard, just in a stupid praftall. Embarrassing had anyone been around to see. He fell on his face and just lay there for a while.

Finally, he turned over, brushing earth and grit from his face to look at the dead white moon casting its beautiful, useless light across the pavement.

After a bit, he got up, swept some dirt from his jeans, and trudged on home.

36

PC Evans, when he’d received the call at midnight, decided that the presence of the Devon and Cornwall higher-ups had its sunny side. Let them handle it had been his second thought; his first had been blind disbelief.

He’d been pulling up his trousers when Mrs. E had half woken and mumbled a question as to where he was going. He’d answered by saying it was just a bloody cat up a tree. God knows he didn’t want to say “murder” and have her sit bolt upright in her cloth curlers and start firing questions at him. He tugged on his blue jacket, shoved some hard candy into his pocket-root beer barrels, his favorite-and went out, climbed on his bike, and wheeled along at a good clip to the Drowned Man.

Getting that old bugger Pfinn out of bed by pounding on the front door of the pub had been a bonus. Making him trudge up the dark steps to yell awake that detective from New Scotland Yard had been bonus number two. Yes, this was when he felt like a copper.

Feeling he was in charge of the mills of the gods, PC Evans sucked on a root beer barrel as he brought his palm down on the bell just to let everybody know he was down here waiting as the body grew colder by the minute. Evans had passed through his initial fright at the notion of having to take responsibility himself for the body at Bletchley Hall and was delighted he could pound on doors and ring bells and hurry people along who themselves would have to be the responsible parties.

Therefore it came as a sharp disappointment to him to discover, when he finally got up to the Hall, six police cars already there, blue lights turning. Also to find that scattered around the grounds, electric torches beaming light up and down, were at least a dozen policeman from Camborne headquarters. PC Evans recognized none of them. How had they got there so quickly?

The bullet had torn through the back of the wheelchair with enough momentum to make an entrance wound the size of a lemon and an exit wound in the front just below the rib cage the size of one of Evans’s root beer barrels before embedding itself in a panel of dark red textured wallpaper on the far wall, next to the door in which Matron stood, swaying a little.

Brian Macalvie, for once, was speechless, not because of focusing all of his attention on the crime scene, but speechless with disbelief. He was not shocked that someone had murdered a man, only that someone had murdered this man.

Detective Sergeant Wiggins was white-faced, his mouth agape. He was the first to speak, however. “Why? The poor devil-I just saw him this afternoon. So did Mr. Plant. Should I call him?”

Macalvie nodded. He turned to the stout woman in a flannel bathrobe who had called PC Evans. A long braid hung over her shoulder and she was hugging herself.

Constable Evans watched the police photographer set off flash after flash, making it look like a film shoot. Now, happy to take up his policeman’s duties if it meant merely telling Divisional Commander Macalvie who’s who and what’s what, he motioned toward the elderly man whose face looked hot and tight as a blister and said, “This is the man you want to talk to, sir. Mr. Morris Bletchley.”

Macalvie nodded. “We’ve met. In a minute.” In this minute, he was hunkered down before the wheelchair.

His diminished duties having been even more diminished, PC Evans thought, Arrogant bastard, and dropped his hand.

Macalvie peered up into the downturned face, the head that had dropped forward as if the dead man were sleeping. He then rose and walked around behind the wheelchair and looked at the splintered band of wood, one of several across the back of the chair.

Wiggins was back from making the call to Seabourne and said Mr. Plant would be right over. Ten minutes, tops.

Macalvie asked, then, “Who was he, Mr. Bletchley?”

“Tom Letts.”

Macalvie nodded. “Sergeant Wiggins, come here.”

Not “Constable Evans, come ’ere,” oh, no, just that emaciated boyo from Scotland Yard, come ’ere. Even though I’m the police presence in the village. No, no deference shown. Bastards! Evans stood straighter, just to let everyone know he wasn’t affected at all by being ignored.

A car pulled up outside, a door slammed shut, and the medical examiner from Penzance came in. “What’ve we