After a few seconds of silence, during which nothing could be heard but the ticking of the longcase clock, Macalvie asked, “Who else might wish you harm? Given the way you’ve built up a business empire, there must be some toes you’ve stepped on; you must have made some enemies.”
“Sure. But not the shoot-’em-up kind.”
“Then what have you got that I don’t know about that someone either wants or wants to get rid of?”
Moe frowned. “What’s that conundrum mean, exactly?”
“That you have something you don’t know you have or, more likely, know something that you don’t know might be lethal. To someone else. A secret shared with you that you might even have forgotten. That’s merely an example. In other words, someone who thinks you’re a danger to him.”
“That’s just-too unlikely, Commander Macalvie.”
Macalvie sat back then and studied Morris Bletchley.
Macalvie, thought Melrose, didn’t want to remind him that leading two little children down a stone stairway to frigid water was even more unlikely.
38
I can’t eat strawberries, can’t touch ’em, me,” Sergeant Wiggins was saying, by way of sympathizing with Mrs. Crudup. “Minute I get a taste of one, like in some pud or trifle, I’m off.” Wiggins was sluicing the palm of one hand off the other to show how quickly “off” a strawberry could send him.
Old Mrs. Crudup looked tissue thin, someone whose every breath seemed proof that the air was unbreatheable, as if she might have been living at an extraordinarily high altitude and been brought down from it in a bubble. She was gossamer, as sheer as the gauze-like curtains at the window.
But she was not, apparently, so ephemeral that she couldn’t dip into the public complaint bucket and give as good as she got. “I know, I know, don’t tell me.” Her reedy voice wavered. “Strawberries is what’s caused all this, and that’s a fact. Sick as a dog, I am, sick as a dog. Could die before the night’s out.”
“Don’t say that, Mrs. Crudup. I can sympathize, I can sympathize.”
Apparently, thought Melrose, Wiggins had quickly picked up Mrs. Crudup’s habit of saying things twice. Melrose also noted that Mrs. Crudup was one of those patients whom Wiggins had been told he need not question. She was hooked up to enough IVs and machinery to furnish Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.
At Macalvie’s request, Melrose had gone to find out if Wiggins had discovered anything. Yes, he had apparently discovered that he, Wiggins, and the ghostly Mrs. Crudup both had a strawberry allergy.
But Mrs. Crudup, as Melrose learned from lounging in the doorway, suffered not from just an allergy but from a whole strawberry conspiracy.
“They disguise ’em in chocolate. They think I don’t know! Take ’em away, Mr. Wiggins! Take ’em away!”
Wiggins had the plate in hand. “Certainly I will. And I’ll just see Mr. Bletchley about stopping people bringing them round.”
Melrose interrupted. “Sergeant Wiggins?” Wiggins turned. “Commander Macalvie needs you.”
Wiggins bade adieu to Mrs. Crudup, who exacted a promise from him that he’d come back as soon as he’d dealt with the ones who were trying to kill her.
There had been three or four of the ambulatory old people standing in their own doorways when Melrose passed by. It was Mr. Clancy who had directed Melrose to Mrs. Crudup’s room.
Now, on the way back, there were several more. There was the piano teacher, Miss Timons-Browne, Mr. Bleaney, and Miss Livingston, who caught Wiggins’s sleeve in her small talons and rattled on about the murder of poor Tom.
Wiggins managed to disengage himself, but all down the hall voices called to him and seemed to want to haul him this way and that. Mr. Bleaney and Mrs. Noonan (also on the not-to-question list) were two of the most vocal. How in God’s name had he managed to visit, must less question, all of these people? Yet he waved to them or said hello, hello, as if he’d known them forever.
As he walked he was thumbing back the pages of his small notebook. “You remember the Hoopers?”
“Who could forget them? Oh, excuse me,
“They saw something.”
Melrose stopped, turned. “What?”
“Someone or something, right round the corner.”
“Corner?”
“They were in the conservatory, playing chess.”
“At midnight? Good grief, are people permitted to wander around here at all hours?”
“Well, knowing how much Mr. Bletchley believes in his patients’ freedom, that doesn’t surprise me, sir.”
Melrose supposed not. He started walking again. “Someone or something. That just about suits them, given their memories.”
Macalvie sat on the same dark red settee, but across from him this time were the Hoopers. All three of them sat leaning forward, as if they were about to try out one-armed wrestling.
“Okay,” said Macalvie. “Exactly what did you see?”
The Hoopers leaned even closer to Macalvie, looking puzzled. “And you might be-?”
“Macalvie, Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.”
They all had, of course, been introduced, or at least the Hoopers had introduced each other. But that was all of fifteen seconds ago.
“A policeman?” said one of them, his squiggly eyebrows dancing.
Melrose expected Macalvie might be about to reach across the seductively reachable distance and knock their heads together. On the Hoopers’ part-well, they appeared to be waiting for Macalvie to go on.
So he did. “You told Sergeant Wiggins, there, you saw someone or something at the time we judge the shot was fired.”
The Hoopers sat; the clock ticked.
Then one said, of a sudden, “It was…”
The other snapped his fingers. “Yes, it was a…”
They looked at one another, urging one another forward. “It was a…”
Macalvie shut his eyes, tightly. When he opened them he turned to Wiggins. “Is it hoping for too much that you-?”
Wiggins, whose brow was furrowed as if in sympathy with the Hoopers’ brows, blinked. “Oh. Oh, of course. Sorry, sir.” And he started thumbing through his notebook, turning page after page after page.
Melrose wondered what in hell he could have in it. How many people up there in their bedrooms had he interviewed and for how long?
“Here it is.” Wiggins read. “Hoopers: ‘We were just in the middle of our game, I mean, nobody knows just what the middle is, anyway it was just on midnight, for a moment later the clock chimed. We looked out-we saw this person, well, more a shape it was, going past the window.’ ”
“And?” asked Macalvie.
“I’m afraid that’s all I’ve written down, sir.”
Macalvie looked at the Hoopers. “You saw this shape. Can you be a bit more precise there?”
“It was a…”
“He could’ve been-kind of small.”
“Or
Just at that moment one of the uniformed police outside raised the window around the corner from the one the shot had been fired through and called to Macalvie, asking if this was what he meant.
“Yeah. That’s what.”
“Just when the conversation was getting interesting.” Melrose walked over to the window.
Finally, the Hoopers were excused. The little woman who’d been sent to get the coffee came in with a tray of cups and saucers and biscuits. Matron followed her with an enormous coffeepot. Having observed the party
