Free The Lamorna Wink by Martha Grimes Page A

dotted the i’s on the lease. He had handed over a wad of money (in the form of a draft on his bank) and received the keys in return.
    Melrose was again at the house he was free to inhabit for the next three months, happily without the estate agent following him about or Agatha erupting on his horizon. Tomorrow he would take back the hired car, jump aboard the train to London, from there to Northants, collect his Bentley and some clothes, and return and live here for three months, or longer, or less.
    How fortunate he was to be rich. He only partly agreed with that glib saying that money can’t buy happiness. It certainly made misery a lot more bearable. Money was at the moment freedom to live here, or to live there, or to take a lease for three months and leave after only one.
    But that did not answer the question, Why was he using his freedom in this way? He had wandered into the large living room and was standing now before one of the long windows looking out over the weedy garden. He wondered if he was coming up against a midlife crisis and this move was the first sign of it. No, he decided, midlife crises were not an option with him; he was too sanguine. He was simply overpowered by the melodramatic quality of this house and its situation. He certainly was given to regard himself in more melodramatic terms. It was quite fun, really, to picture himself standing on a shelf of rock, looking out over the swell of the waves folding over the rocks: Ever stood she, prospect impressed. He couldn’t get those lines out of his head.
    He turned from the window in this smaller reception room and looked at the sheeted furniture, at its ghostly glimmer in what was fast becoming dusk. He moved over to an armchair, took hold of a corner of the sheet, flicked it off like a matador provoking a bull. He then went about removing the sheets from sofas and chairs, wondering where people put the laundry. At home, Ruthven and Martha took care of such things, made them disappear from sight (Melrose’s, at least) as if a party of elves had been at work while the house slept. Could he make it on his own? Perhaps he should advertise for a housekeeper. Yes, it would be good to have a housekeeper, not so much to keep house as to bring him up to speed on gossip. Although he would not have wanted anyone like Agatha’s char, Mrs. Oilings, he thought he could strike a happy medium between capable housekeeper and capable gossip.
    He wondered where he should dump the sheets. He considered putting the kettle on (so nice to have all of this equipment furnished) but decided to take a long, long walk round the house before tea. It rather delighted him, too, that he could do his own tea and drink it in the living room or library with no other company than portraits and pictures of those absent.
    He found himself trying to absorb what traces there were here of the lives of the Bletchleys. Maybe it was because the family depicted in those snapshots had been so beautiful—before the double tragedy—that he wished in some way he could join them.
    Melrose’s memory of his own father was fitful, fluid and vague. He had not been terribly fond of him, nor had he greatly respected him. His feelings were all for his mother. The seventh Earl of Caverness had spent most of his time riding to hounds and only occasionally taking his seat in the House of Lords—with, as far as Melrose knew, no particular effect on the country or himself. He remembered a distant man, if not an absolutely cold one; Melrose had wondered, when he was old enough to wonder such things, how his mother, a very warm and loving woman, a woman who had these qualities in abundance, could be happy with him.
    She had not been; she had been happy, but not with her husband. And knowing this had weighed Melrose down. He didn’t really know why.
    Nicholas Grey. Melrose had deliberately distorted the image of Nicholas Grey, again without understanding exactly why. Even