The Lamorna Wink (31 page)

Melrose continued. “Macalvie says it's blood out of stones.” He sighed. “I wish they had a takeaway window.”

It looked to Melrose, once they were inside, as if these were exactly the same people he and Macalvie had encountered. And why not? Where else was there to go? They pulled up to the bar and sat down between an old man in an oilskin and a heavy woman drinking pale beer. Sediment at the bottom of her glass suggested it was one of the local brews.

Perhaps it wasn't fat that had her bulging over into Melrose's allotted space; it might have been the layers of clothes she wore. Beneath a mustard-colored sweater was a plaid woolen shirt, its arms rolled up to show a grimy biscuit-colored flannel that might have been underclothing, but Melrose doubted it, for he saw something lumpy jut above the elbow, suggesting yet another garment beneath it.

Melrose was deciding on what conversational approach to take—she hadn't turned to give him so much as a glance—and found he was listening to the old man on Jury's left, apparently in fulsome answer to some question of Jury's, mapping out the watery course through Mounts Bay into the Atlantic that he apparently had once traveled as a fisherman.

Or a smuggler, thought Melrose, though it was more likely that role would have fallen to his grand-father. Now, upon seeing the woman's glass was empty, he asked the barmaid to refill it and to bring him an Old Peculiar. This done, he turned to his drinking companion, asking, “Are you a resident of Lamorna or just visiting?” This he decided was not the most brilliant conversational gambit.

The woman, whom the barkeeper had called something that sounded like “pig trot,” obviously agreed with him as to the appropriateness of his question. “Me? No. I just got off one of them Princess cruise ships, me. Docked out there, it is.” She had turned to him a face that obviously did not know on which side its bread was buttered.

Melrose pushed forward. “I'm Melrose Plant. Glad to meet you.” He thrust out his hand, but she ignored it.

“Peg Trott, that's me in a nutshell.”

“Have you lived here long?” Another boffo question.

“Aye.” She pulled a vile-looking cigarette from a pack on the bar. It was a brand Melrose hadn't seen before and enough to induce anyone to quit smoking.

Melrose hastened to light it. “Lamorna's quite charming.”

Peg Trott shrugged and inspected the coal end to see if he knew how to do it. Satisfied, she put the cigarette back in her mouth.

“You must be pretty excited about what happened here last week. The shooting, I mean.”

“Aye.”

Apparently, the aforementioned nutshell was to be taken literally. There was no more here for him than her name. Except her glass, empty once more. She picked it up and looked at it as if appraising the glassblower's skill.

Melrose gestured once more to the woman behind the bar, who then came to fill the glass. Having no luck himself on the conversational front, Melrose turned to his right, where the old man in the oilskin was still going on in answer to Jury's single question. And Jury wasn't even buying beers. Someone out there yelled, “Shut it, Jimmy!” the dictate lost in the Greek chorus of conversational waves.

While Melrose was girding up for another go at Peg Trott, he felt a hand on his shoulder, glanced in the mirror, and saw an artist named Mark Weist, one of several that lived here, looking less handsome than Weist was sure he was.

“Getting any further along with your investigation?” He laughed at this, seeming to think the question was droll.

“I'm not, but he is.” Melrose nodded toward Jury, who turned and was introduced to the painter.

“New Scotland Yard!” crowed Weist. “Bringing out the big guns, are we?”

Jury smiled patiently. “You've already met the big gun. Commander Macalvie.”

“Ah, yes. Smart chap.” It was all so unbearably condescending. “As I told him—Commander Macalvie—we didn't know the woman.”

Melrose marveled at Weist's range of the banal. He also seemed adept at making himself spokesman for Lamorna.

“Some-a' us did.” It was Peg Trott speaking. “Nasty bairn, nasty woman, ah don't wonder.”

“How so?” asked Jury.

“Bairn use to show herself in public.”

Thinking of the Cripps kiddies, Melrose thought, Don't they all?

“Ya know what ah mean? You, Tim.” She was leaning across Melrose to speak to the wiry little man beside Jury.

“Oversexed, she were,” said Tim.

“Whatever,” said Peg. “Found out t'ings, people's private business, then used it against them.”

“Blackmail, you mean?” said Jury.

“Call it what ya will. One poor soul name of McPhee—dead now, McPhee—she found out he was up at Dartmoor for fifteen years, put there fer takin' a breadknife t' his wife. Sadie tells it all over. So ah dunno did she try to blackmail him or not. He must not of paid; he hung hisself.” She fell silent, holding up her empty glass yet again.

If a few drinks were all it took to get her going, Melrose was willing to buy her the pub. The barmaid was right near them, listening. Indeed, a little crowd must have picked up on the ghoulish story and a half dozen had come to join them. The people within earshot were listening hard. A youngish couple, very London-looking, standing talking farther along the bar, became interested in this small drinking circle and came to join them. The woman had a spun-glass beauty, complexion fine to the point of transparence, eyes pewter-gray and clear as seawater, hair a limpid sort of white gold. She was wearing white silk. The man, equally good-looking, was dressed in tweeds and a black silk turtleneck shirt.

It was hard to tell who lived in Lamorna and who didn't. Melrose imagined it attracted people of high sophistication, the sort Mark Weist thought he was numbered among.

Peg Trott picked up her narrative. “When Sadie were only ten she were makin' indecent advances to men, puttin' her hand in their pants pockets, feelin' 'em up—you know what's what, you bein' a copper. She'd go creepin' up to windows after dark an' watch. Out at all hours, Sadie was. Turrible. Her mum was never no better'n she should be. Mum left, no one knew where to, and Sadie stayed on with her da. Raised a few eyebrows, know what I mean?”

Although she was addressing her remarks to the ingratiating Jury (even though it was the uningratiating Plant who was paying for her drinks), the clutch of people gathered round all nodded sagely.

Peg drank off her urine-colored beer and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Then she gets t'be fourteen, fifteen, and t'trouble
really
starts.”

Weist, who felt he was being crowded out by recent comers, said, “The Lolita of Lamorna!” When Peg ignored this explication of her story, he said, “
Lolita,
Nabokov's
Lolita.
”

She glared at him. “I know who bleedin' Lolita is.” She waited for Melrose to light her fresh cigarette and plowed on. “There come a man t'Lamorna, a London man name of Simon Bolt. Well, if our Sadie was bad news, this Bolt fella, he was worse. Ain't surprising them two found each other real quick. He said he was a ‘fil-um producer.' ” Here she drew squiggles in air to show her suspicion of Bolt.

The woman in white silk raised her satiny eyebrows and asked, “Pornography?”

Abruptly, Peg Trott nodded. “An' worse.” She seemed a trifle annoyed that some good-looking city woman was getting a march on her story. “There's some said devil chased 'em across Bodmin Moor.”

Some always do say the devil in these parts, thought Melrose.

“That's hardly surprising in good old haunted Cornwall,” said Weist, not one to get out while the getting's good. He tamped tobacco down in his briar pipe.

“Tim here—”

Tim nodded eagerly, though he didn't know how he would feature in this tale. “Tim said he seen the piskies over in the bluebell woods, and Lydi Ruche—over there”—she pointed to a table where sat three men and one rather hard-looking dark-haired woman—“says she be drivin' by the Merry Maidens an' seen this specter—this specter.” Peg enunciated clearly here, seeming to like the sound of the word.

“The Merry Maidens, that's the stone circle,” said Weist, offering an explanation no one had asked for.

Muscling Weist out with her voice, which she raised a decibel or two, Peg Trott went on. “Anyway, that ain't my point. This Bolt fella made fil-ums, like I said. He was livin' in the old Leary house that sits atop that cliff out there, and we heard from a woman used to char for him there was a room he kept just for runnin' these fil-ums. Oh, she never fooled with 'em; she was takin' her chances just to go in the room. But she said there was a projector and a stack of these tapes beside it.

“Simon Bolt and Sadie May—those two just had t'git together. Simon liked 'em young, is what people said, the younger the better. Sadie'd say t'me, ‘I'm goin' t'be in the pictures, me. I'm goin' to be a star.' ”

“He was shooting pornographic films, is that it?” Peg Trott nodded. “Worse'n that. T'was bairns. T'was Sadie helped 'em find the poor tikes.” Peg shook her head. “Why'd anyone want t'see kiddies die?”

Melrose frowned. “Die?”

“Well, that's what I heard.”

In the awful silence that befell them, they all stared at Peg Trott.

“Snuff films,” said the man in the black turtleneck.

T
he idea was so repugnant that several of them turned away just on hearing it. Yet the subject was too seductive to make them leave the little circle at the bar, and they turned back again.

“How is it that the Devon and Cornwall police didn't know this?” asked Jury.

Peg shrugged. “Prob'ly did and couldna catch him at it, like.” She accepted a light from Melrose. “He was in London lots when he warn't livin' up atop 'ere.”

Jury frowned. “Atop where, Peg?”

With her glass, she pointed off in some northerly direction and upwards toward the moon. “There's a road I kin show ya.”

“We'd appreciate it.” Jury tossed money on the bar and rose.

 

They did as Peg Trott directed—parked the car on the paved area and walked the rest of the way, about an eighth of a mile—on the public footpath.

The house had a beautiful prospect, finer than the view from Seabourne. It was a stark building unrelieved by any sort of architectural embellishment that might have softened its facade. There was at least none that Plant and Jury could see by the light of their torches. Jury kept a spare in the car, which he had given to Melrose.

He also kept a small box of lock-picking equipment. “Remind me to get a warrant next time I'm in Exeter.” The lock was old and easy. “I could've done it with my finger,” Jury said, as he pushed the door open.

The inside was bleaker than the outside. In the room facing seaward, there were a sofa and two overstuffed and ugly chairs. There was a small fireplace with a tiled surround and ugly Art Deco wall sconces.

They roamed from room to room, upstairs and down, then farther down into a basement that seemed to be doing service as a wine cellar.

“Good stuff,” said Melrose, blowing dust from a bottle of Meursault, a Premier Cru (straight from the abbé, doubtless. Or was he mixing it up with Lindisfarne?) “God, what a waste. Isn't anyone going to collect this wine?”

Jury was adding a skin of light to the walls as he shone his torch carefully round. But he saw nothing that might have served as a hiding place for the videos he was sure must be here and said so.

“Why do you think they'd be here instead of in London? According to Peg Trott he spent most of his time in London.”

“I don't think ‘instead'; rather, I think ‘in addition to'; he would have at least a small collection here.”

Melrose was studying a simple appellation of Puligny when Jury started up the cellar stairs and asked, “You going to have a wine tasting or are you coming along?”

Regretfully, Melrose returned the bottle to its shelf.

Upstairs, Jury made another torch circuit of the room. Melrose said, “We've already done that. What do you expect to find?” He switched off his torch and sat down on one of the chairs and lit a cigarette.

“I don't know. I'm working on the assumption that this house might have been the meeting place chosen.”

“Meeting place?”

“She obviously had a meeting arranged; I doubt she just ran into her killer on the public footpath.”

“They could have arranged to meet at the point where her body was found.”

“Yes, they could've. It's just that it's difficult to know a point in advance, unless there's a very clear marker. Sada Colthorp might have chosen to meet here because she was familiar with the house and because the house was out of the way; no one would see them.” Jury switched the light off and sat down too, on a sofa across from the chair.

It was the darkest dark Melrose had ever experienced. He could barely distinguish Jury's outline.

“I imagine they left the house to walk along the public footpath. Whose idea was that? The killer's, most likely. He—or she—wouldn't have wanted the body found too close to the house, so he put some distance between the house and the spot where he killed her.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why not have the body found in the house?”

“Because it would raise the possibility of a connection between Bolt and the Bletchley children's deaths.”

“You think that's what happened?”