Malice in Miniature

by Jeanne M. Dams

  “Hmmm. Well, it sounds interesting, anyway. And it was found in Bob’s pocket? What made anyone look?”

  “I dunno. ’Ee didn’t tell me when ’ee rung me up. ’Ee just said they found it, and said as ’ee were pinchin’ it, and called the p’lice. But ’ee never!”

  “Well, that’s all right then,” I said briskly. “You don’t need to worry. We know Bob didn’t really take it, so he’ll be fine.”

  “But ’ow did it get in ’is pocket?” Ada wailed. “’Ee says ’ee never put it there, and ’ee’s never lied in ’is life. ’Ee ’as ’is faults, as I won’t deny, but a liar ’ee ain’t.”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? And, Ada, I hate to say it, but the only answer I can think of is, somebody wanted to get Bob into trouble. So the question really is, who? And why?”

  2

  That doesn’t necessarily have to be the case, you know,” said Alan. We were sitting at the kitchen table that evening, finishing pie and coffee and rehashing Bob’s dilemma.

  I had finally managed to reassure Ada, promised I would look into Bob’s difficulties as soon as I could, and sent her home somewhat comforted. I had offered to drive her, but she had refused.

  “You ’ates to drive; I’ll be all right on me own.”

  “Maybe Alan—” I began, but she shook her head.

  “Ta, but I don’t want me neighbors to see me comin’ ’ome with a p’liceman. It’s one thing for Bob to be in jail. ’Ee’s been there before now, sleepin’ it off. But I never had no truck with no p’lice, and when all’s said and done Mr. Alan’s a p’liceman, even if ’ee is ever so high up.”

  Alan, although as high in rank as one could get in police administration, and very near retirement, is indeed a policeman. I smiled now, thinking of Ada’s equating him with a constable on the beat, likely to disgrace her by association—Alan, who was on a first-name basis with the Dean and the Lord Mayor, among other Sherebury luminaries.

  “What’s funny?” he asked.

  I told him, and he smiled, too. “She’s right, though. A policeman I am and a policeman I remain, no matter how many years I’ve spent away from a beat. And I say again, you may have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It’s far more likely that someone else was stealing the tea set, had it in his hand, lost his nerve for some reason, and shoved it into Bob’s pocket.”

  I frowned. “Alan, I really don’t think so. Did I forget to tell you the thing was out in one of the barns? Apparently Brocklesby has set up a sort of workshop out there for repairing the houses and furnishings. They’d need work constantly, I should think, as tiny and fragile as they must be. But the thing is, what would anyone who didn’t belong there be doing in the barn? The security must be pretty good, if the collection has any genuine value. The insurance people would require it, or they would in America, anyway.”

  “Oh, British underwriters are quite as security-minded as American ones, I assure you. Especially in recent years, since so many of Lloyd’s underwriters lost their well-stuffed shirts in various disasters. So you’re right; it makes a big difference that the theft was from a nonpublic area. But what could anyone have against a harmless soul like Bob Finch? He’s surely never hurt anyone in his life.”

  “No, even in his cups he never picks fights, according to Ada. Just gets a bit lively and sings, she says. Maybe he kept someone staying in a pub awake too many nights.” I smiled a little, trying to rid myself of a nagging sense of unease.

  “Or piled up too big a tab for the publican’s liking,” Alan suggested gravely. “Or offended a brewery owner by drinking too much of the competitor’s product. Although it is a trifle difficult to imagine what benefit any of those affronted parties would derive from Bob’s arrest and incarceration. Dorothy, nothing makes sense, to be brutally honest, except to suppose that Bob lost his head and actually took the wretched thing!”

  “And that makes no sense either,” I argued, “even if one were prepared to suppose Bob would have done such a thing, which I am not. What would Bob do with a miniature tea set? He has no children. His mother is far too practical to want any such thing. And as for profiting from it—assuming it has some substantial value, which seems unlikely—how could Bob sell it? Let’s suppose, for the sake of the argument, that it’s rare enough to be worth a lot. In that case it’d be known to any dealer. Nobody reputable would touch it, and if you’re going to suggest that Bob is involved with a network of professional fences, I simply refuse to listen!”

  I finished a little more heatedly than I had intended. Alan grinned and put his hand over mine. “Always the defender of the underdog, aren’t you, my dear? Very well, Bob is as pure as the driven snow, and as his mother says, ’ee never done it. That gets us back to where we began. Who did, and why?”

  “At the moment, I don’t have the foggiest idea. I only know I don’t like the smell of it I really think I’ll have to go out there and get the lay of the land, and then maybe I can come up with some ideas. It sounds like an incredible place.”

  “It must be seen to be believed.” Alan pushed his chair back from the table and stretched. “And even then, the mind boggles. I’ve not been since I was a boy, when the old sinner asked my family to tea for some reason, but I distinctly recall having nightmares for weeks afterward. I do hope, my love, that you don’t expect me to accompany you.”

  I squeezed his hand and stood up to clear the dishes. “Not on your life; you’d cramp my style. Once a p’liceman, always a p’liceman, remember? People see you coming and instantly try to remember how many parking tickets they’ve ignored, or wonder if someone saw them driving that night when they were a little sloshed. Nobody would say a word to me if you were around. No, but I would appreciate your driving me out, if there are more than two roundabouts between here and there.” Driving in England is my nightmare; I’ve lived here well over a year now, but it doesn’t seem to get easier.

  “Driving lessons, first thing in the new year,” said Alan firmly. “Until then, of course I’ll drive you, and come to fetch you as well. I doubt anyone at the Hall would recognize me, but I’m delighted to have an excuse not to go.” There was a pause. “I suppose you’d like me to see what’s being done about Bob, meanwhile?”

  I ignored the hesitation. “Ada and I would be very grateful,” I said demurely, trying for an impish smile. It was evidently close enough; Alan grinned, stood, and gathered me up in a bear hug, and what we did for the rest of the evening has no bearing on this story. The dishes did not get washed.

  In the morning Alan went off to his office as usual, but phoned a little later to say that Bob had not been charged, after all, partly because the police were inclined to believe his story, and partly because Brocklesby, with a change of heart, had decided he preferred not to pursue the matter. “He was upset at the time, he said, but the little trinket came to no harm, and perhaps some mistake was made, after all. And Bob had always been a good worker, and he was prepared to overlook the incident.”

  “Alan, that’s very odd!” I said. “Why did he make such a fuss about it to begin with, then? And Ada mentioned something about his suspecting Bob of other thefts as well. You’d think he’d follow up. It’s good news, I suppose, at least for Bob and Ada. But I’m still going to go out there. Something’s going on, and I want to find out what.”

  “I must say,” Alan remarked, “it’s something of a relief to find you looking into something as frivolous as the theft of a toy instead of your usual murder and mayhem. I just hope—well, never mind. I asked my secretary to check the hours of the museum; it’s open every day but Monday from ten to six, and they serve tea. Shall I run you out after lunch, and meet you for whatever miserable fare they offer, at about—say, four or so?”

  “Museum food—ugh! We can take a look, anyway, but if it’s too awful we’ll go to Alderney’s.” The tea shop in the Cathedral Close is one of our favorite places, a constant threat to my efforts to keep my plumpness from turning to plain old fat. On the days that I vo
lunteer at the Cathedral Bookshop I’m all too apt to stop in at Alderney’s for a bite before and/or after work. One of these days all those cream cakes are going to do me in. It might be wiser to have thin sandwiches and stale scones at Brocklesby Hall, after all.

  The rain had stopped, but threatened to begin again at any moment. I was beginning to understand that the only predictable factor in English weather is its unpredictability, but these past few days we did seem to have settled into a stormy pattern. I poked my head out the door and squinted at the sky. Maybe there was time before the next downpour to carry out the next step in my plan. I shrugged into a sweater and trotted across my back garden to Jane’s kitchen door.

  Jane Langland is my best friend and chief source of information in Sherebury. It would be unkind to call her a gossip. The word implies a certain mean-spiritedness, a delight in the retailing of others’ failings and misfortunes, and Jane doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. She has, however, a keen interest in her fellow humans, and an encyclopedic knowledge about Sherebury and its inhabitants. She’s a warm, sensible sort of person, so people confide in her. And although she respects those confidences, when I, as a newcomer, need to know about someone, she passes along tidbits, benignly filtered through her compassion and deep understanding of human foibles.

  She opened the door before I got there. “Dorothy. Been expecting you. Cup of coffee? Just made some.”

  I never ask Jane how she knows things almost before they happen, but this time, grinning at the look on my face, she volunteered the information.

  “Saw Margaret this morning at Matins.”

  Which explained everything. Margaret Allenby is the wife of the Dean of Sherebury Cathedral. Ada Finch cleans her house for her twice a week, and since Ada talks every minute, she would have told Margaret all about Bob’s problems, including my promise to look into them. Margaret often attends the weekday services in the cathedral, and so does Jane—so do I, for that matter. The place is next door, after all, and the choir is well worth hearing even if there were no other reason to go.

  “So you want to know about Brocklesby,” said Jane, setting coffee down in front of me.

  “Among other things,” I admitted. “How’s Bob?”

  “Hungover,” said Jane succinctly.

  “Oh, dear. I suppose he went on a real bender when the police sent him home. Only to be expected, really.” I picked up my cup and took a sip. “My word, you make good coffee, Jane. My American friends think the English only know about tea.”

  “Used to be so. Coffee like dishwater. One thing we learned from the French. Credit where credit is due,” she added with determined fairness. “All right, Mordred Brocklesby.” She shook her head. “Odd sort of duck. Whole family is odd.”

  “Are there a lot of them, then? I had the impression they were a bit—scattered.”

  “Are—or were. Old Mordred is the last of the lot. No children, no brothers, no cousins—or no male ones, anyway. He was an only son of an only son, and his great-grandfather had just the one other boy.”

  “Who would have been,” I said, frantically doing genealogical tables in my head, “Mordred’s great-uncle—right?”

  “Right. He was the one who owned the Hall before Mordred. Died at age ninety-seven. Talk was, he didn’t want to leave the Hall to anyone. Had plans to turn it into a home for cats, but died before he could get through the bureaucratic maze.”

  “A cats’ home? He liked cats?”

  “Hated ’em. Hated his neighbor worse. Woman had asthma, terrified of cats.”

  “But that’s awful! He could have killed the poor woman if he brought a bunch of cats into the neighborhood!”

  “Mmm. Wanted to buy her property, enlarge his own. She wouldn’t sell. Her estate might have.”

  “And he had the energy to engage in all this plotting and scheming and—and sheer malice—in his nineties? Amazing!”

  “Family’s always been long-lived. Flourish like the green bay tree.”

  “I can’t imagine why he thought a feud was worth it, though, at his age. Oh, well. So Mordred inherited. Ada thought he changed his name when he came into the estate, but she also thought he was a more distant relation than he was, so I suppose she’s wrong.”

  “Not exactly. He’d given up the name, but he had to take it back when he inherited. Been calling himself Pendragon.”

  “Surely not!”

  Jane nodded, jowls quivering. Jane bears a distinct resemblance, in both appearance and manner, to the late Sir Winston Churchill, or else to the bulldogs she loves—if there’s a difference. “Mordred part is real.” She made a face. “The mother had a fixation on the Arthur legend, passed it on to her son.”

  “What an inheritance! But why such a nasty sort of name? I’m not thoroughly checked out in Arthuriana, but surely Mordred was the one who betrayed Arthur and spoiled everything in Camelot, wasn’t he?”

  Jane nodded. “Apparently Mum liked the villains best. Or else didn’t like her children. There was a sister, too, named Morgana, but she died or something.”

  I shuddered at the idea of naming a daughter after a witch. “What did he get knighted for? Mordred, I mean. Ada said he was a ‘Sir.’”

  “Distinguished Service to the Arts,” said Jane without so much as the ghost of a smile. Deadpan is the essence of British humor; it took me several months of living in Sherebury to be sure when someone was being funny.

  “Yes, of course, but really . . .”

  “His father made a packet in buttons or crisps or something—can’t recall—and Mordred’s devoted his life to spending it on dolls’ houses. Donated so many of them to the V and A they had to do something for him.”

  “The Victoria and Albert? I didn’t know they went in for that sort of thing.” When Frank was still alive we used to enjoy going to the big London museum on our visits to England, but I didn’t remember seeing any toys there.

  “Not the V and A proper. Museum of Childhood, run by the V and A. Toys, dolls, largest collection of dolls’ houses in the world—now.”

  “Oh. Okay, so Mordred became Sir Mordred because he gave them a lot of stuff. He must be a collector on a really huge scale—Ada says there are hundreds of houses at the Hall.”

  “Exaggeration. Few dozen houses, barns, whatever, I’m told. Lot of what they call room settings—boxes with a glass front, tiny furniture inside.”

  “And Brocklesby really spends all his time collecting this stuff?”

  “And looking after it, and repairing it, and making it. Good craftsman, they tell me.”

  “Well, I can believe what everyone says about his being odd. I can’t wait to see him in person. What’s he like?”

  Jane shrugged. “Don’t really know him. A Londoner, only lived in the Hall three or four years. Don’t care for the Hall myself. Never go out there.”

  “Why not? It looked interesting in Ada’s pictures, if somewhat grotesque, architecturally speaking.”

  “Grotesque is the word. Just don’t like the place, is all.”

  She shut her mouth firmly, and I looked at her in astonishment. Jane, as solid and sensible a person as I know, is not given to unexplained antipathies. “Oh, come on. You can’t stop there. Is it haunted, or what?”

  She shrugged and looked embarrassed. “There’s an—atmosphere. If you believe in that sort of thing. Probably because everyone who’s owned it has been unpleasant. Still contention and—mischief.”

  There was something in the way she said the word that resounded of the Litany. From all evil and mischief; from the crafts and assaults of the devil . . .

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged again. “Probably nothing. Seeing bogeymen in my old age.”

  “Jane, if you see bogeymen, the rest of us need to be put in an asylum for not seeing them.” I looked at her hard, but she would say no more. Eventually I gave up. “Well, I’m going out there this afternoon, unseen terrors or not. I’ll report back.”

  “Yes. Be c
areful.”

  It had not been a reassuring conversation.

  3

  It was pouring pitchforks and hammer handles, as my Hoosier father used to say, when Alan came home for lunch. “Shall we defer the Brocklesby Hall expedition?” he asked over his bowl of chili. Alan has developed a taste for American food, thank goodness, since it’s what I know how to cook.

  “Certainly not!” I replied indignantly. “You know perfectly well I want to go, never mind the weather.”

  “I had a suspicion, though it’s not the best sort of day for a place like—however. You’d best put on wellies. If I remember correctly, the car park isn’t paved.”

  To be on the safe side I donned not only Wellington boots but the full set of rain gear: yellow slicker, or oilskins as the English say, and the accompanying floppy yellow plastic hat. I looked like a large, elderly version of Paddington Bear. The hat certainly wasn’t my usual style, but I wasn’t about to risk one of my more frivolous creations in this weather.

  It was a wise decision. Alan dropped me off as close to the door as he could, but I still had to slog through a good deal of mud, and the rain was pelting down. I rang the bell and waited.

  The wait was long enough for me to conjure up a fine case of the horrors. From what little I could see of the house through the driving rain, it would have made a wonderful setting for a Gothic novel. The door itself, heavily carved, should, just about now, swing open on creaky hinges, and a Mrs. Danvers type should say, “Yes?,” with a rising inflection, a lifted eyebrow, and a tone of infinite menace. I actually tried the handle, and was foolishly relieved when the door was properly locked. Telling myself not to be silly, I rang again.

  The person who eventually answered did not in the least resemble the baleful housekeeper of Rebecca. She was young, pretty, and out of breath. “I’m so sorry! I was in another part of the house. We didn’t really expect any visitors on such a frightful day.”

  “This is the Miniature Museum, isn’t it?”