“Yes, sir. Detective Sergeant Wiggins.”
Melrose knew this slight condescension would end smartly when Wiggins got a deeper whiff of this hospice-nursing-home outfit.
“Well, Sergeant, I reckon I don’t know any more about the Wells woman than I did when I talked to your cohort here.” He leaned his head in Plant’s direction. “Chris Wells helps us out, and she’s damned good at it, too. Drove one or two of the guests to see their families, took ’em to hospital, that sort of thing. So I did have contact with her, but I didn’t know anything about her family or friends. Come on, let’s go in the drawing room-they won’t mind,” he added, with a look at the old ladies.
Who hadn’t, Melrose decided, moved an inch in any direction. Light wavered, shadows shifted in these blue environs, creating an underwater effect much lovelier than that of the Drowned Man. Melrose found it as good as a sedative and wasn’t surprised that the old ladies had fallen asleep. He was having a hard time keeping his eyes open himself.
“Let’s go out to the sunroom; I need a smoke and you can’t do it in here. It would be hard on our emphysema patients.”
“And yourself,” Wiggins said sententiously.
Moe rose from his wheelchair and shoved it out into the hall. “I need to stretch my legs. Come on.”
They sat around the same table. The two old chess players were absent, but an old woman at the other end of the sunroom was feeding coins into a slot machine with her face so close to the display she could have licked it.
“Are your patients here all wealthy?” asked Wiggins.
“No. Why? Are you supposed to be if you’re dying?”
“Oh, no, it’s just that this is clearly an expensive operation.”
“True. But I can afford it. If they were rich, why in hell wouldn’t they just buy what they needed? Someplace in Arizona or the south of France, nurses round the clock, fancy equipment?” He grunted as he lighted his cigarette, then remembered that Melrose smoked. “Sorry. You?” He offered the crumpled pack around.
Melrose shook his head, turning away the cigarettes, not wanting to smoke under Wiggins’s steely stare. As soon as they could get back onto the topics of murder and disappearance instead of emphysema and other illnesses, he would light up himself. It shouldn’t take long. He said, “But the south of France, that’s not really what’s wanted, or not all of what’s wanted, is it?”
Both Moe and Wiggins raised a puzzled eyebrow. Wiggins said, “I’m not sure I follow, sir.”
“If you’re dying, you don’t want to do it alone. If you have no family, or even an indifferent family, and few friends, you’d likely be shuttled off to hospital, cheerless and antiseptic. That’s not a cheering picture, is it?”
“No, it isn’t,” said Moe Bletchley.
As hospitals were high on Wiggins’s list of places where he’d most like to settle down, he ignored the question and took from his inside pocket one of the pictures Macalvie had given him of the dead woman. “Her name is Sada Colthorp. Did you know her?”
Moe frowned as he brought the picture close to his face and then held it arm’s length away. He tried several different positions, as if moving it about would make it speak more tellingly of the woman shown. He shook his head. “Got any other shots of this woman?”
Wiggins pulled out a morgue picture, a full-face shot.
Bletchley put them side by side. “She looks vaguely familiar. What did you say her name was?”
“Sada Colthorp. You might have known her as Sadie May. Her maiden name.”
Frowning, he shook his head. “Nope. Neither name rings a bell with me.”
“She lived in Lamorna Cove as a girl.”
Moe shook his head again. “Still doesn’t ring a bell.”
At just that moment, from the dining room beyond and out onto the sunroom’s tiled floor jolted Morris Bletchley’s wheelchair, occupied by a young man with dark hair, probably in his early thirties. He was holding a big white box on his knees. “Woodbine delivery!” He opened the big box to reveal iced doughnuts and several different kinds of pastry. Melrose’s quick tally showed that there were at least twenty pieces of pastry and a dozen doughnuts.
“What the hell are you doing in my wheelchair, Tom? I keep telling you.” Moe peered into the box, more interested in the éclair he removed from it than the occupancy of his wheelchair. “Damn, these are good!”
“Brenda brought ’em. Did you know she used to live in Fulham? Right next door to Putney.”
“You told me. This is Tom-”
A clatter of coins interrupted Moe Bletchley’s introduction. It came from the direction of the slot machines. The old lady was jumping up and down, at least as well as her stick legs could manage.
Moe Bletchley looked her way. “That damned machine pay off again? Have to fix it.” He grinned and finished his introduction. “This is Tom Letts.”
Tom Letts’s good looks seemed fragile. His skin was pale, like Johnny’s. Unlike Johnny’s it bore the terrible stamp of Kaposi’s sarcoma.
AIDS. Melrose hadn’t even thought of this as one of the several terminal illnesses that would be likely to turn up at Bletchley Hall.
Tom said he was pleased to meet them and looked around, as if one of them, but he wasn’t sure which, had something to say he had waited a long time to hear. He had one of the most ingenuous smiles Melrose had ever seen, and again he was reminded of Johnny Wells. They could have been brothers.
To Wiggins he said, “You here about the murder in Lamorna?”
When Wiggins nodded and smiled, Melrose marveled that the detective sergeant’s response to Tom’s disease was not to cut and run but one of kind regard. Wiggins, who claimed to be sought out by every springtime blade and blossom to test their pollen on, this same Wiggins could sit here and not turn a hair confronted by the ravaged body of a victim of AIDS.
“This woman.” He handed Tom the pictures, though Melrose was pretty sure Wiggins didn’t expect him to recognize her. He really just wanted to include Tom in.
The two old chess players had come in and were seated in their same chairs, chessboard between them. The white box from the Woodbine now caught their attention and they began making their way toward it.
Moe leaned toward Melrose and Wiggins and whispered, “Got to make allowances for these two. Their memories are shot to hell.”
Memories shot to hell proved no obstacle to Sergeant Wiggins.
“These are the Hooper brothers,” said Moe Bletchley. “And that’s Miss Livingston coming along. She’ll make it eventually.”
Leaning on her cane and holding an antique mesh purse, heavy with coins, Miss Livingston made her slow way toward them, a look of grim determination stamped on her acorn face.
The two old gentlemen wasted no time on the strangers; they went immediately for the pastry. Hands started and hovered indecisively over the box.
Said one of the Hoopers, “I’m having my usual, a… a…”
“Doughnut,” said Moe, almost absently, as if he was used to supplying the Hooper brother with information.
“Right!” Hooper’s hand snapped down and plucked up one with chocolate icing.
“So am I!” exclaimed his brother. “I’m having a”-he looked at what his brother had taken-“I’m having one of those… one of those…”
Miss Livingston had reached them by now. “Doughnut, you goddamned fool!” she yelled. “Here get your paws off.” And she parted them like Moses did the Red Sea. “I want one o’ them puffy things.” She reached nimbly into the box for a cream puff. “Hello, cutie!” she said to Melrose.
He lavished a smile upon her, rose, and pulled a chair around. Gray-haired Miss Livingston put Melrose in mind of a small bird of prey, with her little beaky nose, darting eyes, and fingers tough as pincers.
One of the Hoopers watched the chair being pulled around and then followed suit, dragging over a bentwood chair from against the wall. His brother did the same, and now all seven of them were gathered around the table, the new people turning owlish eyes on the four who had been there.