The Lamorna Wink

“Chris Wells,” said Jury, “appears to be the chief suspect, doesn’t she, by virtue of her sudden disappearance just at the time the Colthorp woman was murdered?”

“Hold on a minute, Richard. She doesn’t sound at all like a person who runs away. She’s too responsible.” Melrose cited her work at the Hall, her care for her nephew. “Not only that, you’d surely have to be looking for two killers, not just one. I see no reason on earth you could say she was the one who planned the Bletchley children’s deaths or murdered Tom Letts.”

“But you don’t know her,” said Jury. “You’ve never met her.”

“No, you’re right. I’ve never met her.”

Macalvie broke the silence. “There’s another way to look at this woman’s suddenly taking off.” He turned from the window. “Maybe it was made to look that way. Maybe it was staged.”

Wiggins raised his head from the little stone circle and gave Macalvie a questioning look.

“To make it look like Chris Wells murdered Sada Colthorp.”

“Then where-” Melrose began. He didn’t finish the question. He thought it was almost too much to bear. And made worse because he hadn’t been given it to bear: the children, Tom Letts, the sadness of Daniel Bletchley and his father, and Chris Wells. He was a stranger to it all; he had no business feeling desolate; the actors in this tragedy, they were none of his business. And it wasn’t his tragedy. “You think she’s dead, don’t you?”

Wiggins had put his small notebook back in his pocket and was bending over Jury’s improvised calendar of events, his small circle of stones. “Sir, go over this again, for me.”

Jury rose and walked over to stand beside him, pointing clockwise around the stones. “These first two here: the Bletchley children died on the rocks; next, we’ve got Sada Colthorp and Simon Bolt, most probably arranging the death of the children. But to keep the sequence right, Bolt and Colthorp should be up here.” Jury moved the two stones to first place. “Next, Brenda Friel’s daughter, Ramona, dies. Moving four years ahead, Sada Colthorp is murdered; Chris Wells disappears; Tom Letts is murdered.” He looked at Wiggins, who had retrieved his notebook from an inside pocket. “Okay?” Jury turned away.

Wiggins shook his head. “No, that’s not right.”

Jury turned back.

Wiggins was reading from his notes and putting another stone down.

“What’s that for?”

“You’re forgetting the baby, the unborn baby.” He had put the second stone beside Ramona’s. “It’s actually two people who died here. And you’ve got the order wrong.” Wiggins moved the Friel stones up to first place. “The Bletchley kids died after these two, not before.”

Both Macalvie and Melrose had joined Jury at the table, and all three were looking at Wiggins’s new arrangement of the stones.

Macalvie turned to stare through the window, looking out through the black glass as if he should be able to see through the dark. “Jesus,” he said, and turned back again. “Jesus, how could I have missed-”

“How could we have missed it, Macalvie?”

Wiggins hadn’t, and he was wreathed in smiles. “It’s easy to overlook, sir. They all died in the same year, but Ramona Friel and her baby, they died early, in January. The Bletchley children’s deaths, that came months later, round about now, in September.”

Macalvie appeared to be looking around the room for something to throw. He picked up the blue Murano ashtray holding the other stones and stared down at them. Then, almost delicately, he returned the bowl to the table.

“Am I just slow here?” said Melrose, irritated that he hadn’t thought of whatever they’d thought of.

50

Where is who, sweetheart? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Brenda wiped her forearm across her temple, shoving back strands of hair.

“Chris didn’t leave suddenly. And I was right. She would never have left that way.”

Brenda looked up from the cookie sheets, annoyed with this nonsense. She stubbed out the cigarette she’d smoked down to the butt end. “Of course she did. What are you saying?”

He shook his head. “You went to the house and made it look not only as if she’d gone but as if she’d run. A few hours ago I ate a couple of those meringues she supposedly left in the middle of baking. They weren’t hers; they were yours.” He pulled over the stool at the end of the pastry table. “Meringues, yours and hers. That’s always been a kind of good-natured competition. It doesn’t look good-natured now, though.”

Brenda stood looking at him as he sat down on the high stool. She didn’t answer.

“I asked myself: Why would Brenda want to make it look as if Chris had run out?”

“This is so silly, darling.” Brenda sighed. “And what did you answer yourself?”

“I couldn’t. Not until I remembered the police were asking about Sada Colthorp. According to you, she and Chris had some kind of falling out four years ago. And you, you made it look worse by bringing it up with that detective and then refusing to talk about it. So what police are supposed to think is Chris kills her in a rage. Chris goes to Lamorna and shoots her. With this?” Johnny had pulled Charlie’s small gun from his pocket. It lay cold on his palm.

Brenda looked at the gun for a long moment, then up at Johnny for yet a longer one. Then she pulled open the knife drawer behind her. “No.” The gun came out of the drawer as if she were the one used to pulling silk scarves from sleeves and doves out of the air. “With this.”

The gun was twice as big, twice as black, twice as evil looking as the one Johnny held. He had never shot a gun in his life; he had never even handled a gun until tonight. But he was as deft with his fingers as a sharpshooter was, and he had the gun from the palm of his hand and between his thumb and forefinger in less than the blink of an eye.

“If you shoot that,” she said, “you’d probably hit me, but you would miss any vital spot. You’re not used to guns.”

“But you are.”

“If I fire this, Johnny, it would kill you.”

Looking at the barrel of that gun seemed to wake him out of a trance, as if up to that point this had all been a fantasy. His hand felt numb; he laid the small gun on the butcher block.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” That she must be was a fact that outweighed even the danger of the gun pointed at him.

“Chris?” Brenda snorted. “Of course not. She did go away. To Newcastle.”

The relief of what he felt as an almost comic turn in all of this made him laugh. “Newcastle? She doesn’t know anybody in Newcastle.”

“Really, sweetheart, you can be so arrogant. You think Chris had no life apart from you? Children, children.” It was an admonishment, her tone merely exasperated, as if they might have been chatting about the rearing of them. “They think they know everything about their parents. And their aunts.” Her smile was almost indulgent. “She has an old friend up there who needed someone right away to take care of her because her home help died suddenly. It was for two weeks, until this woman could go into one of those homes they advertise for ‘retired gentlefolk. ’ That always amuses me, that phrase; doesn’t it you? But you’re right. I did want to make it look as if Chris had run off and there wasn’t much time to improvise because Sadie May-the Viscountess, I should say-was in Lamorna.”

Johnny looked down at his empty hands. It didn’t come clearer; it just got deeper. Like a ladder to the sea you go down and down. Like the stone stairs in the rocks where the little Bletchley kids had wound up. Then he raised his head. “You killed Sada Colthorp.”

Brenda said nothing.

“Why?”

She still said nothing.