“Late at night, though, Mr. Bletchley, would someone expect to see you sitting up?”
“Why not? I never go to bed before midnight anyway. I’ve been known to sit in just about any room at night, reading or just thinking. So, yes, there’s a high probability of finding me sitting alone at night.”
Macalvie nodded. “Okay. Anyone in particular you can think of who’d want you dead?”
Bletchley was silent for a few moments, then shook his head.
“Why not?”
“What?”
“Why can’t you think of anyone, since you’re convinced the bullet was meant for you?”
Morris Bletchley looked straight at Macalvie but offered nothing.
Macalvie’s gaze was blue and unblinking. His hands, stuffed in the pockets of his coat, seemed to be pulling him forward on the settee. “Come on, Mr. Bletchley, you’re a billionaire. Are you telling me you can’t think of anyone in your will who might be eager for a hunk of your money?”
Bleakly, Moe smiled. “A number of them. But I don’t see the Sailors’ Home killing me for it.”
“Who has the most to gain?”
“My son, Dan, naturally. Now that the grandchildren are gone.”
“And your daughter-in-law.”
Moe Bletchley said nothing.
“As I recall, you’re no big fan of Karen Bletchley.”
“That’s right. Nor is she fond of me. I don’t think that means we’d shoot one another.”
“Oh, you might not shoot her. Why don’t you like her?”
Moe shrugged, as if it should be obvious. “I think I told you that night. She married Dan for his money. I know it.”
“How?”
“Commander Macalvie, if there’s one thing I can sniff out at a thousand feet it’s someone who’s in love with money. She was here, incidentally.”
“When was that?”
“Three days ago. She stopped by to see me.”
“Is this something she often does?”
“No, never. It’s the first time I’ve seen her in over a year, but that was in London. She doesn’t come back to Bletchley. I’ve seen Dan a number of times, but without Karen. That’s why I was surprised.”
“What was her reason?”
Moe looked over to the window through which the shot had come, but Melrose thought he was merely looking at blankness-the black sky, the blacker trees. “She said she wanted to see Seabourne again. She said she was trying”-he rubbed his eyes as if to bring something into inner focus-“to come to terms with Noah’s and Esme’s deaths. Well, I don’t have to remind you-”
“No, you don’t. But why now? Especially since the house is leased to a stranger. Didn’t she know it was taken by Mr. Plant, here?”
“Yes. She’d been to see the agent, Esther Laburnum, who handles the property for me.”
Macalvie leaned forward. “Mr. Bletchley, doesn’t it seem strange to you that she’d show up, first time in four years, just when all these other things are happening?”
Moe looked off toward the black glass of the high windows again. “Yes, I guess it does.”
After a few seconds of silence, during which nothing could be heard but the ticking of the longcase clock, Macalvie asked, “Who else might wish you harm? Given the way you’ve built up a business empire, there must be some toes you’ve stepped on; you must have made some enemies.”
“Sure. But not the shoot-’em-up kind.”
“Then what have you got that I don’t know about that someone either wants or wants to get rid of?”
Moe frowned. “What’s that conundrum mean, exactly?”
“That you have something you don’t know you have or, more likely, know something that you don’t know might be lethal. To someone else. A secret shared with you that you might even have forgotten. That’s merely an example. In other words, someone who thinks you’re a danger to him.”
“That’s just-too unlikely, Commander Macalvie.”
Macalvie sat back then and studied Morris Bletchley.
Macalvie, thought Melrose, didn’t want to remind him that leading two little children down a stone stairway to frigid water was even more unlikely.
38
I can’t eat strawberries, can’t touch ’em, me,” Sergeant Wiggins was saying, by way of sympathizing with Mrs. Crudup. “Minute I get a taste of one, like in some pud or trifle, I’m off.” Wiggins was sluicing the palm of one hand off the other to show how quickly “off” a strawberry could send him.
Old Mrs. Crudup looked tissue thin, someone whose every breath seemed proof that the air was unbreatheable, as if she might have been living at an extraordinarily high altitude and been brought down from it in a bubble. She was gossamer, as sheer as the gauze-like curtains at the window.
But she was not, apparently, so ephemeral that she couldn’t dip into the public complaint bucket and give as good as she got. “I know, I know, don’t tell me.” Her reedy voice wavered. “Strawberries is what’s caused all this, and that’s a fact. Sick as a dog, I am, sick as a dog. Could die before the night’s out.”
“Don’t say that, Mrs. Crudup. I can sympathize, I can sympathize.”
Apparently, thought Melrose, Wiggins had quickly picked up Mrs. Crudup’s habit of saying things twice. Melrose also noted that Mrs. Crudup was one of those patients whom Wiggins had been told he need not question. She was hooked up to enough IVs and machinery to furnish Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.
At Macalvie’s request, Melrose had gone to find out if Wiggins had discovered anything. Yes, he had apparently discovered that he, Wiggins, and the ghostly Mrs. Crudup both had a strawberry allergy.
But Mrs. Crudup, as Melrose learned from lounging in the doorway, suffered not from just an allergy but from a whole strawberry conspiracy.
“They disguise ’em in chocolate. They think I don’t know! Take ’em away, Mr. Wiggins! Take ’em away!”
Wiggins had the plate in hand. “Certainly I will. And I’ll just see Mr. Bletchley about stopping people bringing them round.”
Melrose interrupted. “Sergeant Wiggins?” Wiggins turned. “Commander Macalvie needs you.”
Wiggins bade adieu to Mrs. Crudup, who exacted a promise from him that he’d come back as soon as he’d dealt with the ones who were trying to kill her.
There had been three or four of the ambulatory old people standing in their own doorways when Melrose passed by. It was Mr. Clancy who had directed Melrose to Mrs. Crudup’s room.
Now, on the way back, there were several more. There was the piano teacher, Miss Timons-Browne, Mr. Bleaney, and Miss Livingston, who caught Wiggins’s sleeve in her small talons and rattled on about the murder of poor Tom.
Wiggins managed to disengage himself, but all down the hall voices called to him and seemed to want to haul him this way and that. Mr. Bleaney and Mrs. Noonan (also on the not-to-question list) were two of the most vocal. How in God’s name had he managed to visit, must less question, all of these people? Yet he waved to them or said hello, hello, as if he’d known them forever.
As he walked he was thumbing back the pages of his small notebook. “You remember the Hoopers?”
“Who could forget them? Oh, excuse me, they could forget them.”
“They saw something.”
Melrose stopped, turned. “What?”
“Someone or something, right round the corner.”
“Corner?”
“They were in the conservatory, playing chess.”
“At midnight? Good grief, are people permitted to wander around here at all hours?”
“Well, knowing how much Mr. Bletchley believes in his patients’ freedom, that doesn’t surprise me, sir.”
Melrose supposed not. He started walking again. “Someone or something. That just about suits them, given their memories.”
Macalvie sat on the same dark red settee, but across from him this time were the Hoopers. All three of them sat leaning forward, as if they were about to try out one-armed wrestling.