The Lamorna Wink Part 26

"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 gla.s.s 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 b.u.t.t 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 compet.i.tion. 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.

"And if Chris left right then, it would look like she did it. That was the idea, wasn't it? But if you're telling the truth, she'll be back. What then?"

"Newcastle police will pick her up. When I finally tell them where she is. She could call at any time." With her free hand, Brenda reached for the pack of cigarettes, found it empty, balled it up, and swore softly.

Got to get out of here, thought Johnny. Get out of this kitchen. Get back to where I'd have, if not a sporting chance, maybe a fighting one. Just knowing that Chris was alive had cleared his mind utterly, even of fear. He could think now. "If I worked it out about those meringues, I'm sure somebody else could too."

"That was very clever of you, sweetheart. I knew you were smart, but not that smart. I honestly don't see how anyone else would, but"-she moved in a sideways walk, over to a coat rack, and unhooked her coat-"I'll just get rid of what's left. Get up." She struggled into the coat. "Come on. And remember something. I will shoot you if you try to run. So walk beside me when we get outside."

The sporting chance was now on offer. At least, in his own living room, he might be able to find a way out of this. Johnny turned slowly, as if reluctantly, and waited while she turned out the lights. Then he moved toward the swinging door, wondering if he could slam it back in her face when she followed behind him, knowing he couldn't. She would shoot him. The total folly of so doing did not occur to her; how would she ever explain that to police? It hadn't occurred to her because her thoughts were pointed like an arrow to one thing and one thing only, and he still didn't know what it was. He had no doubt of that at all. He walked through the tearoom where the moonlight still flooded the window embrasure as if nothing had happened. It was almost consoling to think that rooms you walk through still hold fast to their ident.i.ty.

"If you did anything to Chris, I'll kill you Brenda. I will. She's all I have." He opened the door. The bell sounded its tiny discordant chorus of welcome.

"Like Ramona," said Brenda, "was all I had."

51.

It was after midnight by now, and Macalvie decided there wasn't a h.e.l.l of a lot they could do until they had some hard evidence. "What," asked Macalvie, "did she have against the Bletchleys?" No matter what their theories, they had nothing to link her to the murder of Sada Colthorp or to Simon Bolt's film.

As Macalvie and Wiggins were leaving, Melrose beat a little tattoo on Wiggins's shoulder, saying, "Well done, Sergeant. Well done. We none of us saw it except for you."

Wiggins tried to be casual about it; he held up his notebook and said, "It's just good note-taking, Mr. Plant. The Bletchley kids' death-well, that was so dramatic it's easy enough to forget poor Ramona Friel." He added generously, thereby deprecating his own role in any solution, "And we don't really know, do we? We've still got Tom Letts's murder to deal with. a.s.suming, of course, that Mr. Macalvie is right and it's not Morris Bletchley we should be thinking about. That's just theory, too."

Jury stood there, listening to Wiggins. He smiled. It was probably the most the sergeant had ever said about a case without a meditation on his or someone's illness. It was certainly the first time Wiggins had ever called into question a theory of Macalvie's.

They said good night.

Back in the library with whisky in hand, Melrose said, "Noah and Esme, poor benighted kiddies. You wouldn't think a mother, any mother, could be part of such an arrangement."

Jury raised his gla.s.s and watched the dying fire through a half inch of whisky that turned the hearth into a liquid amber sea. "Daniel Bletchley. What if it wasn't Chris Wells but Ramona Friel he was having an affair with?"

"It was Chris Wells. Anyway, the night his children died-that couldn't have been Ramona Friel. Poor girl was dead."

Jury lowered his gla.s.s. "What I meant was earlier. If he'd had an affair with Ramona Friel and the child was his and she died of complications in childbirth, I would imagine a mother would l.u.s.t for revenge."

Melrose frowned. "What complications?"

Jury looked at him.

"Leukemia isn't a complication of childbirth. I have no idea how pregnancy could affect such a disease."

"It wouldn't, as far as I know. But it might have made no difference to her mother. She died, and so did the baby. Brenda Friel would make that add up to murder," said Jury.

"Then why in h.e.l.l not grab a gun and kill Dan Bletchley if she thought he was the father? No, you're wrong. Bletchley isn't, I think, a profligate man. It would take a most unusual woman-woman, not a twenty-odd-year-old child-to move Daniel Bletchley."

"Perhaps. You've met him, I haven't. I feel sorry for that boy, Johnny. How old is he? Sixteen? Seventeen?"

"Seventeen. He's a magician. Amateur, but pretty good, I think."

"No kidding?"

Plant nodded. "He loves gambling. Not that he can get into it much in Bletchley. But you know what he wants to do? Go to Las Vegas. That's what he wants. I guess for somebody like that, Las Vegas is the Promised Land. He wants to go to the Mirage and see Siegfried and Roy."

"Don't think I know the lads."

"No. Well, you don't know much about the States."

"Does not knowing Siegfried and Roy const.i.tute not knowing much about the States?"

"Everybody knows them. They're the magicians with the white tigers. They can make an elephant disappear. They can make anything disappear." Melrose looked up at the ceiling. "Except Agatha."

"An elephant? Jesus. How do they do that?"

"Well, they don't, do they? Charlie told me you obviously begin with the premise that they don't do it. If you accept that premise-and it's amazing how often people really don't-you go on with that in mind. It's mirrors, or something. I didn't really understand-" Melrose stopped abruptly, thinking.

"What's wrong?"

"Why didn't we do that with Johnny?"

"What?"

"Accept the premise that his aunt wouldn't go off without word to him? And if we accept it-well, it means she did leave word-a note-or she told somebody else."

Jury sat up. "The disappearance was all staging." He shut his eyes and leaned his head back. "Siegfried and Roy." He sighed. "We could use a little magic."

52.

He wished he'd got some exploding cigarettes from Charlie. But with his luck one would go off in Brenda's face and she'd shoot him.

A cigarette was what she wanted, and he found a pack in the pocket of Chris's blue wraparound ap.r.o.n, the gardening one. Chris wasn't supposed to be smoking, but the ap.r.o.n pocket was safe enough. He never did any gardening. "A putter about" was the way Chris referred to digging on her hands and knees.

She had stood in the kitchen with the gun in her hand, watching him crush all the meringues and toss the crumbs in the sink and wash them down the drain.

Now they were seated in the living room. Instead of the green baize-covered table for performing card tricks, he'd chosen the trunk in the alcove, with Brenda across the room in Chris's favorite overstuffed chair. Johnny motioned toward the gun Brenda had placed on the gateleg table by the chair and which, he knew, she could retrieve in far less time than it would take him to lunge for it. "What're you going to do?" he asked.

She did not so much exhale smoke as let it slowly escape through her slightly open mouth. It made Johnny think of ectoplasm. "I don't know, do I, sweetheart? I may have to leave Bletchley, and that might mean taking you with me."

He tried to hide his anxiety and was grateful for the time he'd spent in perfecting a poker face and the attention he'd paid to body language, his own and that of others. His own he had under control. And he had trained himself to notice the tiny "tells" that give people away. Others didn't have themselves under control unless they were also in the business of not-giving-away-police, for instance. That detective, Macalvie, would have made a good magician.

"What are you thinking about?" Brenda frowned.

He didn't answer immediately. Silence, Johnny had found, could be a formidable weapon. After a few more beats of it he said, simply, "Nothing."

She smoked and watched him. "You've very cool, sweetheart. You know that, I guess. Quite amazing for someone your age. Quite stunning."

He didn't comment. She wanted him to ask questions. He could tell that in order for her to maintain her belief in her control over this little tableau, she needed him to appear the one without the answers. Thus, if he did ask a question, it would be innocuous. He would not ask her again about Chris. Whatever had happened to Chris, that was Brenda's ace in the hole with him. It could be dangerous to thwart her, but he had to try every trick in the book to get himself out of this. He picked up the deck of cards he'd left on the table hours ago-a lifetime ago, a childhood ago. He held the deck up. "Mind?"

"Yes." She picked up the gun.

He set the cards down. "Why?"

"Because you want to. I don't trust you, sweetheart. You're up to something." Her smile seemed to snag on an unhappy memory.

Briefly, he laughed. "A pack of cards wouldn't stop a gun."

Surprisingly, she found that amusing and laughed, too.

Johnny wondered what she really thought of him right now. He knew how much she had always liked him, and he felt sad. Even now, and her over there with a gun she just might use, even now it saddened him. But this feeling he could box off until it was safe. That she did like him so much was in his favor because it left her more vulnerable.

She said, "Oh, go ahead," and sighed as if he were an obstreperous child. "Show us a trick, why don't you?"

He took up the deck, feeling for the slick card, shuffled it, fanned the cards out in a half-moon, swept them up again, shuffled again. None of that made the slightest bit of difference to a trick, but it gave him a few seconds to think. That was what he needed, time to think while appearing to be concentrating on the cards. He could do one slick card trick after another without thinking about the tricks themselves. He saw the pack of cigarettes she'd put down on the coffee table and looked around the room and spotted an ashtray he'd missed earlier. He said, "Mind if I get a cigarette?"

"I'll get it."

"And that ashtray over there?"

Holding the gun, she brought the ashtray and picked the cigarettes up with the same hand. The gun never faltered. "Just when did you start smoking?"

His answer was a smile. "Thanks." Her eyes were on his movements as he took out a cigarette. "Match? Or there's a lighter in that desk drawer. Charlie left it."

Her smile was rueful. "Now why would you want me to go and get the lighter when there's a book of matches right inside this." She turned over the pack of cigarettes to show the matches nestled inside the cellophane.