The Lamorna Wink (11 page)

“The side of the dead, I imagine. He's not helping the RUC, it's just that something happened there that's connected with something in London. At least, I think.”

Diane was still worrying over the fashion sense of the dead-and-gone in Cornwall. “You don't know if it was a designer suit she wore, then?”

“What? You mean the unfortunate victim in Lamorna?”

“Yes. If it was, you know, a Lacroix, it would certainly narrow the field.”

“Narrow it to where? London? Paris? Rome?”

Diane's patience was being tried. “Not only there. There are some quite fashionable shops in Edinburgh. And the Home Counties. One would have to broaden the base a bit.”

Melrose shook his head. “Whatever the base is, you're way off it, love.”

“Actually, old sweat, she isn't,” said Trueblood.

“Are we breaking now for an Armani commercial?”

“If the woman was wearing Ferre or perhaps Sonia Rykiel, the garment could almost certainly be traced. You know, through the place where she bought it; or, if someone else bought it, then through that person.”

Melrose hated it when Diane made a sensible suggestion.

“I wouldn't mind knowing someone who'd buy me Ferre,” she said, and returned to the matter of Chris Wells. “Now, she sounds Cornwall through and through; what's in her closet is probably cardigans and plaid things and Barbour knockoffs from Marks and Sparks. Anyway, the question of her outfit doesn't really apply, does it? Are you sure she didn't just go off on her own?”

“No,” said Melrose. “I'm fairly sure she didn't. From what I've heard about her, she isn't a capricious person.”

“Then you think she was abducted? Or lured away somehow?”

Melrose nodded.

Diane sipped her martini, tapped her cigarette into the ashtray, and said, “I expect one has to make
some
sort of arrangement.”

S
urrey,” said Macalvie. He had called Ardry End to tell him that they'd ID'd the dead woman. She was Sada Colthorp, former wife of Rodney Colthorp, Lord Mead. He lived in Surrey. “For God's sakes, that's only a hop, skip, and jump from Northants.”

“I don't know how you hopped, skipped, and jumped as a lad—if you ever were; you were probably just a little policeman—but my hopping and skipping did not cover a hundred miles. That's how far Surrey is from here.”

“Don't be ridiculous. It's hardly fifty.”

Melrose knew he'd do whatever Macalvie asked him to, but it was more fun arguing about it first. Besides, he felt he deserved to let Macalvie know how much he was being put out. “Anyway, you said you'd already talked to Colthorp when he came to identify the body. So what good would it do for
me
to talk to him?” He knew the answer to that, too. For the same reason Jury was always asking him to step into the role of eighth earl.

“Because aristocrats have that in common—the aristocracy.”

“I stopped being one years ago. I've forgotten how.”

“Oh, come on. It's like riding a bike. You never forget.”

Melrose sighed. “I would if people let me.”

“Colthorp collects cars. Vintage autos. That's why you want to see him.”

“I do?”

“Sure. That old Bentley of yours. Isn't that an antique by now?”

“It may not be, but I am. Let me get this straight: it's because I too have an interest in vintage automobiles that I want to see this Lord Mead—what's his name?”

“Rodney. Rodney Colthorp.”

“Right. It's really his cars I'm interested in, and he'd be damned interested in my Bentley. Do you realize I know absolutely nothing about cars, including mine?” Knowing Macalvie couldn't care less, Melrose sighed and got out his pen. “So, which part of Surrey?”

As Macalvie told him, Melrose had the happy thought that if Surrey was not close to Northants, it was certainly close to London and, therefore, to Bethnal Green. He smiled.

L
ord Ardry.” Rodney Colthorp, Lord Mead, put out his hand and looked at Melrose with an enthusiasm that was flattering. He had answered the door himself, which testified to his being long on humility or short of cash. Staff did not include a full-time door opener, or, if it did, Rodney Colthorp had given the man a good deal of elbow room. Ruthven would be scandalized.

Lord Mead couldn't resist looking past Melrose at the latter's Bentley, one of the prewar models, or at least Melrose believed it was. It had been in the family for ages. He wondered if this man was astute enough to tell that Melrose—and his Bentley—were flying false colors. But all Rodney Colthorp said was, “What a beautiful automobile,” as he pulled at his gray mustache, a nervous, contemplative gesture. Then, as if he had forgotten Melrose was there, said, “Oh, sorry to keep you standing on my stoop. Come in, come in.”

Stoop
was not the word Melrose would have chosen to describe the area at the top of the two dozen marble steps he had ascended to reach the door. The house was on a much grander scale than was Ardry End, which it resembled.

Perhaps more glorious than the house was the expansive garden and lawn at the back, dotted here and there with sculptures, a gazebo, and a folly or two. It stretched as far as the eye could see. It was both windswept and sheltered by internal hedges, with broad brick paths and gate piers. There were bold tall grasses backed by young pines, box hedges, and long vistas that drew the eye to the steeple of a church somewhere. One path between low walls made its convoluted way, vanishing somewhere in the distance.

“Is that path there for walkers?”

“No. It's my butterfly corridor. I'm trying to keep species from disappearing completely and help them migrate. The Adonis blue is one. It's simply beautiful.”

Rodney Colthorp said this while they were comfortably seated in one of the several drawing rooms, this one furnished more informally than the larger room they'd passed whose furnishings were dark, heavy, and priceless.

Melrose drank Lord Mead's hundred-year-old Scotch and felt expansive.

Colthorp leaned his head back on his chair and sent both words and pipe smoke toward the ceiling. In a sort of meditation on the merits of aristocracy, he said, “Of course, you know this as well as I . . . but there are certain rituals, silly as they might seem to others, which should be retained or the whole damned boiling will go down. I know a lot of it seems like claptrap: the hunt, for instance. We do get a lot of these hunt saboteurs knocking about, being damned rude. I don't ride myself, but I can understand the appeal of it. What I fail to understand is why the great hue and cry of these animal liberationists doesn't concentrate on the real horrors of experimentation and slaughterhouses. I can only think the—” The cell phone, whose resting place must have slipped Colthorp's mind, was finally rescued from a spot between cushion and arm of the overstuffed chair. He excused himself and pulled up the wobbly antenna. The call was not to his liking, apparently, for he began it with a huge sigh, followed by a series of grunts, growing more and more impatient over the thirty seconds or so of the caller's comments. “No. No, Dennis, I've told you time and again I do not want to speculate, certainly not in a diamond mine in South Africa.” He shook his head, as if the caller could see how much he didn't want shares in a diamond mine, and shoved down the antenna, his expression registering extreme impatience.

Melrose smiled. “Your investment banker?” He wondered what such people did, actually.

“No. My son. He's the youngest, he's twenty-two. He's always on to me about the market. Day trading, futures, selling short, selling long—I haven't the least idea what the boy's talking about. He himself does quite well by it, has done for years. But that doesn't mean I'd be as lucky. Now. Where did you say you were from?”

“My home's in a village near Northampton, but at the moment I'm renting a house in Cornwall. Place called Bletchley.” Melrose waited while the name hit home. It took five seconds. Colthorp stopped in the act of tamping down his pipe.

“But that's where Sada—you know about the woman who was murdered near Lamorna Cove?”

“Yes, yes indeed. Quite a stir that's causing.”

“Police from Devon and Cornwall have been around here, and I've had to fly to Penzance to identify the body.”

Melrose feigned surprise. “Police here? Why? Did you know her?”

“I was married to her.”

Melrose managed to look appropriately shocked.

Colthorp went on. “Poor girl. Sada wasn't a very substantial person. I don't mean anything was wrong with her mind; rather, she had so little substance. Marrying her was—well, the purest folly. Looking back, and I've done a deal of that, I can't remember why I thought it a good idea at the time.”

“Who can? Not I, certainly. Hindsight would save us all, wouldn't it?” Melrose smiled sympathetically and held back from asking questions about Sada. On the contrary, he turned the conversation away from her before Colthorp began to wonder exactly why Melrose was here. “I'd love to see your cars.” Once around the grounds, as it were, Melrose was sure he could find occasion to reintroduce the subject of the dead wife into the conversation. Colthorp certainly seemed willing to talk about her.

“Yes, of course,” said Colthorp. “That's what you came for, after all. We'll go out to the garage. Sorry I rattled on.”

“Not at all,” Melrose was quick to put in. “How could you not speak of it, after all?”

Colthorp rose, set down his glass. “A bad business.” He shook his head. “A very bad business. Sada might have been troublesome, but lord knows she didn't ever deserve this.”

Troublesome.
Melrose made a note of that.

From the house they walked across the circular drive to a ten-car garage, although
garage
seemed the wrong word to describe such an elegant building, with its high windows gathering the late-afternoon sun and dashing it across the highly polished bonnets of the cars sitting inside. Melrose knew nothing about automobiles, other than how to drive them. He was, though, fairly certain that the first of them was one of the old Fords, a Model T, its black metal polished to within an inch of its life. This at least he could identify.

“Ah, yes. The old Tin Lizzie. They drove it to the top of Pike's Peak, if you can believe it. Those others”—Colthorp's gesture took in the next two cars—“there you've got an Overland Touring Car and a 1912 Cadillac Touring Car. Something, aren't they?”

Melrose fussed over them, hardly knowing what the fuss—which consisted of mumbled words of praise, peering inside, and noting the appointments—was about. He commented on the myriad once-felt-to-be “luxuries” of the cars, the turquoise and blue varnishes, the wonderful scent of old cracked leather, the big wheels, the running boards. “Marvelous, marvelous.”

They moved on to a cherry-red Lamborghini. “That's Dennis's. And that one farther along, there”—Dennis's father pointed out a black Porsche—“it's the latest model, one of their XK-Eights, quite a fabulous car. Fabulous price, too.”

Melrose bet he was looking at something in the neighborhood of 75,000 pounds. Fabulous indeed.

Colthorp went on. “He's young; he goes for that slick Italian stuff. Myself, I much prefer the more substantial ones, the touring cars, that kind of thing, or that Wolseley farther along.” He nodded toward a dark green car, its body of a graceful roundness that had long since fled the automobile scene. “It was Dennis who put me onto the Cadillac, courtesy of an American friend of his, 'bout—oh, ten or eleven years ago.”

Melrose calculated: if Dennis was twenty-two today, that would have made him twelve ten years ago. He could not help commenting on this.