Martha Grimes - The Lamorna Wink

“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.

Lord Mead laughed. “Oh, the friend himself wasn’t a child. No, no, he was a grown man. But Dennis knew him, right enough. Dennis always has had a lot of unlikely friends-for a boy, that is. A boy back then, I mean.” Colthorp chewed at the gray mustache and seemed to be ruminating on this point, as if he too were wondering about Dennis’s unlikely friends. But what he said was, “He never could like Sada, though.”

That didn’t surprise Melrose, not with inheritances and changing of wills in the bargain. He ventured a guess here, trying to keep it as tasteful as possible. “I expect that’s true of most children when a new mother-in-law comes along.”

“Loss of love and money, you mean? Oh, Dennis is quite sure of my love, and”-here he made a noise both of amusement and dismissal-“he doesn’t care a fig for my money.”

Melrose thought this rather disingenuous, considering the Lamborghini sitting there. “He has expensive tastes, though.”

“Mmm? Oh, I didn’t say he hadn’t. It’s his money bought that and the Porsche.” Colthorp chuckled. “For all I know, Dennis has more than I. He invests. Or did I tell you? That’s what the phone call earlier was about. No, Dennis didn’t trust Sada, didn’t trust the old friends out of her past who came here. Sleazy film folk, a few of them. When I met Sada, she was doing the occasional bit part in bad films. Might even have been a pornographic film or two, Dennis found out. One friend was a film producer who came here several times. Funny chap. What was his name? Bolt, I think. Bit of a wide lad, that one. Untrustworthy, bad influence. Good car, though. Dennis tried to buy it. Jaguar-mmm, can’t recall the model. Sporty little car, two-seater, I think.” He meditated on this for a moment and then got back to his ex-wife. “Sada had been down on her luck, as they say, when we met.” He sighed. “She wasn’t all that interested in automobiles, for some reason.”

Melrose smiled. “Hardly a suitable companion, then.”

Colthorp laughed. “Time we nipped over to that car of yours for a good look. Hack through the underbrush and lead the way!”

If there was a way to lead-considering the exquisitely kept lawns and gardens-Melrose led it. He hated the Bentley’s intervening on mention of the “troublesome” Sada. But as Colthorp seemed really to want to talk about her, the subject would come up again.

When he came abreast of the old Bentley, Lord Mead shook his head as if words couldn’t cover the subject. For once, Melrose was glad that Ruthven (or Momaday, when the spirit moved his grounds-keeper) kept the car polished to mirror brightness.

Colthorp walked twice around it before settling into staring at the car, tweeded arms folded across his chest. As Melrose had done earlier, Colthorp uttered appreciative words; unlike Melrose, they could be understood. “Where did you ever get it?”

“My father did, actually. It was the year before he died. He rather liked cars himself.” He remembered it now, the way his father had really been smitten with the car, how he had been like a teenager with his first ride. This was one of Melrose’s few fond memories. “He really did love this one.”

“And no wonder. Well, if you ever want to sell up, you know who to call.”

This might have sounded a little vulgar, had Colthorp not been so intensely drawn to the old car.

Now he rubbed his hands and said, “We’re due for a drink, I’d say.”

They retraced their steps to the house. Overhead, the whirring buzz of a helicopter stirred the eucalyptus and tall grasses. Colthorp looked up, muttered, “Bloody noisy old thing.”

Melrose had not thought the house that near to Heathrow.

Whisky in hand, they settled back into the same seats they had left, and Colthorp picked up the thread of the conversation about Sada. “We separated-oh, five years ago; she managed to go through the money I settled on her and in a year she was back, wanting more. I expect I should have told the police about that, but you know, it slips my mind most of the time. She actually threatened to sell the story to the tabloids. About me and… well, never mind, it’s not all that juicy a story. I must say, it made me queasy in my stomach to think she’d do something like that. Dennis threw her out with a ‘publish-and-be-damned’ attitude. He’s quite forthright, Dennis is.”