An Unwilling Accomplice

by Charles Todd

  He stood up, looking toward the barn. “If someone threw something at the mare from that side of the wall, it had to be heavy enough to fly to the middle of the road. We must keep looking.”

  I walked back to the motorcar, then started forward once more. Perhaps I’d been wrong about the round stone.

  And then I saw it. A bit of wood from the roof that must have escaped the fire. There was a broken nail protruding from it

  “Simon, here!” I called, and he came at once. “Why would someone deliberately hurt my horse?”

  He took the bit of wood and examined it, then hefted it in his hand. Satisfied, he turned and went toward the side of the barn. “Mark the place where you think you fell,” he called, and I hurried to stand by the spot.

  “I’ll hit you,” he said. “Move away.”

  “You need the flank of the horse to aim for,” I said, refusing to budge.

  He took his aim, then hurled the bit of wood toward me. It sailed through the air in an arc, and then losing momentum, it began to come down, landing just at my feet.

  “Was it meant for me—or the horse?” I asked now, as he came back to join me.

  “You said you’d stopped and were looking for the goat. You might have turned and ridden toward the barn next. Whoever it was, he couldn’t take the chance. There’s no place to hide, come to that. At least not enough concealment left to escape detection. He decided to startle the mare into bolting and take your mind off the ruins. Only his aim wasn’t as good as mine.”

  “Then why did I find it so far from where I fell?”

  He picked up the bit of wood and held it out. “The nail dug into the mare’s flank. Enough to make her buck, and then it fell off as she raced back to the pub. That wasn’t a deep cut, remember? Tulley wouldn’t have accused you of using the whip if it had been deeper.”

  I tried to remember what I could from the moment the mare reared.

  “I think you’re right. She went up on her hind legs at first, startled—then bucked to dislodge whatever had stung her. Only it wasn’t a fly. It was that nail. Poor Molly, she didn’t deserve to be treated so shabbily.”

  “I don’t think he intended to hurt the mare. Still, we’d never have thought to come back here if it hadn’t been for that telltale cut.” Simon went back to search the barn, but there was very little to see. A few bent stems of blackened stubble and that was all. “He must have heard the mare coming and took shelter here until you’d passed.”

  “It couldn’t have been the Major,” I said, and told him about my visit as we walked back to the motorcar. “He would have had his work cut out for him to nip down those stairs, much less walk this far.”

  “I thought you were staying in Biddington. When I didn’t find you there, I came at once to Upper Dysoe.”

  And found me being threatened by Tulley. No wonder his anger had exploded into near violence.

  We rode in silence back to Upper Dysoe, where Simon mounted Molly and I drove the rest of the way to Biddington, which did little for my still aching shoulder, but I said nothing about that.

  It was necessary to explain the wound on Molly’s flank to her suspicious owner, but after viewing the small cut, he shook his head. “The Broughton lads,” he said. “They’re always up to some mischief or other. The constable will have a word with them.”

  “I don’t think it was the Broughtons,” I began, not wanting to get them into trouble. “This was on the far side of Upper Dysoe.”

  Frowning, he said, “I’ve not known them to wander that far. Still, father’s at the Front, mother can’t manage them. There’s a first time for everything.”

  “Do you know if there are any strangers about? Here in Biddington or in Upper Dysoe?” Simon asked.

  “Now that you mention it, one of the miller’s sons—young Matt—was telling people he saw a drunken soldier lying by the verge of the road this side of Lower Dysoe. Disheveled and dirty, he was. Matt was uncertain what to do. He took the sacks of flour on to the general store in Lower Dysoe, then came back to do what he could for the soldier. But the man had gone. He told his pa, but when they went back, they couldn’t find any sign of him. Warren sent word to the constable here in Biddington, who thought the man might be a deserter, but the Army didn’t have anyone from this area on their list. Warren wanted to believe he’d fallen on hard times, no work and no hope of finding any. He’d have taken him in and seen him right. He has boys of his own. One will be of an age to enlist soon. I reckon that worries the miller of nights.”

  I was reminded of the gardener’s boy, asking me about the war.

  “When was this?” A wounded man could appear to be drunk. Or an exhausted and hungry one.

  Mr. Oakham scratched his chin. “Let me see. It was after the Goldsmith twins were born. We wet their heads in the pub that very night, best we could with the little beer I could manage to find.” Nodding, he gave Simon the date.

  It was five days after the murder at Ironbridge.

  Could Sergeant Wilkins have got as far as Lower Dysoe by that time? It was possible. Just. With a lift from the lorry driver. Much would depend on how far he’d come before he’d lost the bay.

  Simon and I exchanged glances.

  Unless, of course, I suddenly remembered, it was the Major on one of his brief forays away from the house.

  I didn’t want to believe it was the Major.

  Simon thanked Mr. Oakham, and we went back to the motorcar.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’d like it to be Sergeant Wilkins.” But I told him about the Major’s wanderings all the same.

  “Let’s have a talk with Warren’s son. This could very well explain why someone wanted to startle the mare. If you nearly came upon Wilkins, Bess, he’d not want you to find him. You’re the only one in these parts who could recognize him.”

  We went to the mill. Warren was sitting on a three-legged stool, supervising the sacking of flour. Clouds of white dust rose high on the still air as the flour was shoveled into bags by two boys of about fourteen and fifteen who looked enough like him to be his sons.

  He nodded to us, and then recognized me. “Sister,” he said, trying to stand. It was awkwardly done with his shoulder still taped.

  “No, please don’t get up,” I said quickly, not wanting him to fall on my account. “I just wanted to see how you were faring.”

  “Maddie tells me it’s healing well enough. Deep wounds take their time, he says. And I’m to learn to spare it when I do start to work in the mill again. The muscles will have knit, he says, but they won’t be strong so soon.”

  “And he’s right,” I agreed. “It was a close-run thing.”

  “Aye. ‘Don’t tempt the Lord,’ ” he said, mimicking Maddie’s quiet tone of voice. “And I haven’t. You can see the lads doing most of the work.”

  “Speaking of your sons,” Simon asked, “which one is Matt?”

  “The taller of the two. Matt? Take a minute and come down here.”

  Matt willingly left the sacking to his brother and came down to his father. He was liberally coated in white flour dust, save for his lively gray eyes. Nearly as tall as his father, he had shoulders already widening into manhood. Another year, and he’d be enlisting.

  “Yes, Pa?”

  Simon spoke instead. “You were the one who found the drunken soldier along the roadside near Lower Dysoe?”

  “I did indeed, Sergeant-Major. I felt that sorry for him, and I’d have helped him then and there but for the flour in the cart. There was no room for him. When I came back, he was gone. I did look.”

  “Did you tell anyone in Lower Dysoe what you’d seen?”

  “I thought about it. But the shop owner in Lower Dysoe, Mr. Dedham, was in a hurry, and I didn’t like to annoy him. Short-tempered, Mr. Dedham is. Pa can tell you.” He looked to his father, who nodded. “So it was left to me to do something. I would have said he was too far gone in drink to move, and I couldn’t have been away more than twenty minutes at most
.”

  “What was the man’s rank?” Simon continued. “Could it have been Major Findley?”

  “I never thought about the Major,” Matt answered, surprised. “This man wasn’t an officer, but I was so worried for him I didn’t look for his rank. I expected to come directly back, didn’t I? This ’un was the worse for wear. Disheveled, like, and one side of his uniform was covered in burrs and twigs. As if he’d rolled down Dice Hill.”

  A niggling question occurred to me. Had Major Findley, whoever he was, begun his Army career as a private soldier? It would be too farfetched unless Miss Neville had given him his present rank. Bad enough to marry a man without title or standing. She would draw the line below the rank of officer. New uniforms could be ordered from a military tailor in London. They must have become accustomed to supplying proper gear to wounded men.

  But Matt wasn’t to be swayed in his opinion that the soldier he’d seen was not the Major.

  “What do you think became of him?” Simon asked.

  “I can’t say. He didn’t look to me as if he could drag himself off the road. But then I don’t know how long he’d been there. He could have come to his senses.” There was doubt in his voice. “What’s more, when I bent over him to see if he was alive, he didn’t smell of beer.”

  “Do you think some other Good Samaritan had come along and found him?”

  Matt faced Simon squarely. “I was hoping so,” he said. “I didn’t care to leave him there. But what was I to do?” He glanced at his father, as if asking for reassurance. “My cousin’s in France,” he added in explanation for his concern. “I’d have wanted to help him.”

  “You did the right thing,” Simon told him. “If I can find this man, I’d see that he gets medical care. The question is, how long had he been living rough?”

  “Not around here,” the elder Warren put in. “Someone would have stumbled across signs. What appears to be empty countryside to you is as familiar to us as our own hands. Lads roam the hills, a man will walk off a mood across them, and someone has an eye to where the sheep are. That’s how we managed to find the Major when he took one of his spells.”

  Yet someone had been lying there on the road outside Lower Dysoe. And he had to have come from somewhere. He’d had to have gone somewhere. He hadn’t simply disappeared.

  And that reminded me of something else.

  “When the Major was lost, did he ever say anything to you when you found him?”

  “Say anything?” Warren considered the question. “He was always a quiet ’un. I doubt I’ve heard him put three words together. But Hancock, the greengrocer here in Upper Dysoe, told me he wept the first time he was found. Hancock reckoned it was the relief.”

  But was it relief? Or agonizing disappointment that his escape hadn’t succeeded?

  “Is there a priest in the Dysoes?” I asked. “I haven’t seen a church.”

  “The vicar comes over from Biddington if he’s sent for,” Warren answered. “Before the war we talked about a church here in Upper Dysoe, but Mrs. Neville discouraged it. And the Bishop as well. A waste of money that could be put to better use, he said. We’d never have a congregation of a size to pay for the building of it.” He grinned. “Mrs. Neville, now, she said the Lord wouldn’t approve of taking perfectly good farmland for His house. Better to put it to the plow and feed the hungry.”

  We were going nowhere with our questions, and the Warrens were eager to return to their work.

  Simon thanked them, and we left.

  As we drove back toward Biddington, on impulse I said, “Please? Can we stop here? I’d like to speak to the greengrocer. Hancock?”

  “About Findley?”

  “Yes. There’s something wrong in that house, Simon. There’s a second note, I’ve told you.”

  “We aren’t here to save Findley, Bess.”

  “I know. But this time the message came to me. I can’t ignore it.”

  “Time’s growing short. If we’re to have any hope of finding Wilkins, we must concentrate on that.”

  “I’d just feel much better knowing what happened the first time Findley left that house.”

  With a sigh of frustration, Simon found a widening in the road where he could turn the motorcar. We drove back into Upper Dysoe and walked into the shop, next but one to the baker’s. A young woman was inspecting the rows of parsnips, cabbages, carrots and onions, peppers and beets, setting them to rights after the day’s marketgoers had picked them over.

  She looked up, and when we asked for Mr. Hancock, we were told he was in the back of the shop. And we found him there, lifting an assortment of gourds out of a basket.

  He was a tall, thin man, with tufts of graying hair for eyebrows. He started to say something, realized we were custom and not his assistant, and rose to his feet as if he were unfolding.

  Glancing toward the young woman in the front of the shop, he asked if he could assist us.

  I tried to capture that radiant smile of Diana’s, the one that opened all doors to her. It wasn’t very successful. I’m not Diana.

  “I’ve acted as nurse for Maddie when he treated Major Findley. We’re concerned about his knee, and whether he will attempt to wander again. Please, could you tell me how you found him the first time he—er—left the house unattended?”

  Hancock frowned. “It was odd, I can tell you that. He’d walked as far as he could, then crawled until he gave out. We’d been told he was off his head sometimes, from the war. When I came up to him, he lay so still I thought he might have fallen and knocked himself senseless. I knelt beside him and spoke his name. It was all of a minute before he lifted his face from his arms and looked at me. I could see he’d been weeping. I asked if he was all right, telling him I was there to take him home, if he could manage to walk just a little way with me. ‘How far to Dorset?’ he said. ‘Could I walk that far if I tried?’ I thought he was making light of the distance. ‘Not today, sir,’ I said to him. ‘Another day, perhaps.’ We managed to reach the road, where I had my cart waiting. Then he asked me if I’d post a letter, if he could bring it to me. I said, ‘If you ask one of the servants, sir, they’ll see to it.’ He just looked at me, and that was that.”

  The first attempt to contact Sister Hammond? Even then it had had to be forwarded from Dorset. Had he given up hope? And who posted it for him? Violet? I didn’t think so. Mrs. Neville? She clearly didn’t approve of the Major, and she might well help him leave that house.

  “Poor man,” I said aloud, thinking how desperate he must be. “And what did Miss Neville have to say when he was safely returned to her?”

  “She was angry with him. And more than a little frightened that he wouldn’t be found, I should think. I don’t like to speak ill of my betters, Sister, but it was all she could do not to roar at him. And then she calmed herself down enough to ask if he had hurt himself, if she should send for Maddie.”

  “How did you manage to find him?” Simon asked.

  “That was odd too. I thought I saw him coming over one of the Knobs. The hills that close us in. I left the cart there and then, climbing up to cut his track. But he wasn’t there. I had to walk another quarter mile before I found him.”

  “Are you certain it was the Major you saw coming over the hill?”

  “Who else could it be? There was only one man lost that day.”

  But another man at a distance might pass as the Major.

  We thanked him and left.

  Simon, speaking softly so that his voice wouldn’t carry as we walked out of the greengrocer’s shop, said, “I’ve never seen you smile like that before.”

  “My best imitation of Diana,” I answered ruefully.

  “Dear God.” He grinned in spite of himself.

  “I haven’t asked you what you learned in Stratford. Or wherever it was you managed to find a telephone.”

  Simon shook his head. “It was a complicated business. That’s why it took so long. Apparently Major Findley was reported killed in action. Much later
, that was amended to missing. Four months ago, he was discovered in a clinic in Dorset that treated severe head wounds. He had no idea who he was. But another officer who came there recognized him and gave him a name again. With that information the doctors were able to help him more in two months than they had in all the weeks before that. His memory was sketchy at first, and then it began to build on each new discovery. This according to Dorset. I telephoned them after I’d spoken to the War Office.”

  “Then what happened to him?”

  “The officer who recognized him must have told friends in London, and one day Miss Neville appeared on the hospital doorstep, so to speak, and convinced the doctors that a few weeks in familiar surroundings might do wonders for recovery. The Major was of two minds, but the staff convinced him to agree.”

  “And so Major Findley is who he says he is—or more to the point, who Miss Neville says he is.”

  “That’s right. My guess is that he got here to Upper Dysoe and changed his mind. Perhaps Miss Neville tried to convince him that they’d been close before the war, and he couldn’t remember, didn’t believe her, or had a change of heart.”

  “Then we’re left with the soldier Matt saw. And the one that confused Mr. Hancock.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I’d very much like to ask Major Findley. The question is, will Miss Neville allow it?”

  “I’ll brave her displeasure if you will.”

  But when we arrived at the house, the gates were open, and when we used the heavy knocker, it was Violet who came to the door.

  I asked for Miss Neville. Violet informed me that the mistress had gone riding. I asked for Mrs. Neville, but she had gone to sit with a tenant’s ill wife.

  “It’s actually the Major I’ve come to see,” I told the housemaid, indicating my kit, which I’d taken with me when I left the motorcar. There wasn’t much in it to attend a wounded man, but Violet wasn’t to know that.

  “This way, Miss.”

  She showed us up the stairs, although I knew the way, and then left us to enter the Major’s room alone. “He no longer needs a sitter in the morning,” she said in explanation. “The fever’s gone.”