I watched her cross the hall purposefully and enter the conservatory. I would have made book on whom she hoped to find there.
7
The tea room was every bit as appealing as museum eateries usually are. I ate two thin sandwiches that tasted mostly of cardboard and mustard, drank some tea quickly before it ate its way through the paper cup, and repaired to the shop. The choices there were considerably more enticing; they were also expensive. It was the kid-in-a-candy-store syndrome. I agonized over the difference between what I wanted (nearly everything) and what I could afford, and finally bought not one book but three, a kitchen stove and sink, a set of bathroom fixtures, and, blowing the budget completely, a lovely six-room thatched cottage.
I stuffed my credit card back in my purse before meltdown set in and looked with dismay at the house I had just acquired. “I don’t have the slightest idea how I’m going to get that to my car. Not to mention where I’ll put it when I get it there.”
“That one will fit in most boots,” said the clerk, a round, pleasant woman in her thirties. “And we can find someone to carry it out for you.”
“It won’t fit in my boot unless I leave the lid up,” I retorted. “And as I drive a Volkswagen, with the boot in front, that would make driving a little awkward.”
“Oh, dear, it would, wouldn’t it? We could deliver it, perhaps . . .”
“No! I want it right away; this is a good time for me to get started working on it.”
The clerk smiled gently. She evidently had some experience with children, of whatever age; she knew perfectly well I wanted to get my purchase home immediately so I could gloat over it. “It is a lovely little house, isn’t it? A few scraps of chintz would make the most delightful curtains.”
I nodded eagerly. “And rag rugs, don’t you think? Or maybe braided—there are patterns in one of the books, and I have lots of leftover yarn.”
“Such fun to plan it all!” said the clerk sympathetically. “As good as a real house, I always think, and less trouble. And though I oughtn’t to say so, working here, I’d always rather make my own furnishings. Far more satisfying, to my mind.”
We smiled in complete accord. “I intend to try, anyway. I don’t have many talents except patience—and stubbornness—but I’ll take a stab at it. Most of the materials are free, that’s one mercy. But I do want to get started, so if we can get the house to my car, I’ll cram it in somehow.”
To my delight, the man she found to carry my purchase was Bob Finch. “Oh, you’re back to work, then!”
“For the past week,” he replied laconically.
“Good. I was afraid . . . listen, can we talk?” I whispered conspiratorially as he trudged down the path to the parking lot, my huge purchase cradled easily in his short, sturdy, brown arms.
Bob grunted. He always reminds me of one of those gnomes people buy as garden ornaments—weathered, compact, and silent. “’Ee’s gone to Lunnon,” he said briefly. “There’s only ’Er Worshipfulness, and she’s ’avin’ ’er nap after ’er dinner.” He was too polite to spit in my presence.
“Well, then. There hasn’t been any more trouble, has there? Sir Mordred has behaved well about your coming back to work?”
Bob shrugged.” ’Ee apologized. I keeps meself to meself; ’ee don’t bother me. An’ ’ee’s been gone since Monday. An’ ’er—I don’t pay no mind to ’er.”
“So you’re all right?”
He shrugged again. His mother is the one who does the talking in the family, perhaps because it’s hard to get a word in edgewise when she’s in full spate.
“Well, I’m sorry to say I haven’t been able to find out anything very significant about your—er—unpleasant experience, but I don’t think you’ll have any more problems. If Alan and I are right, whatever dirty work may have been afoot, there isn’t likely to be any more. Here’s my car. Do you think we can squeeze the house in?”
We were struggling with it when Richard Adam appeared from around the corner of the house. He frowned at Bob.
“So that’s where you’ve gone. I need your help with the pruning.”
“We’ll be finished here in a minute,” I said with a would-be conciliatory smile. He growled something, turned on his heel, and strode off.
“Goodness! Is he always so surly?”
Bob wedged the last awkward corner of the house into the backseat and closed the car door. “Nah. ’Ad a row last week wiv ’is ladylove.”
“Oh, dear, another one?” I opened the driver’s door and got in. “Over what, this time?”
“’Im.”
I wish Bob weren’t so fond of pronouns. It makes his conversation distinctly cryptic.
“Sir Mordred?” I ventured doubtfully.
“Nah. Told yer ’ee were in Lunnon. ’Im.” He jerked his head to one side and I saw, through a patch of bushes, the gleam of a big silver motorcycle zooming up the drive. The snarl of its engine reached my older ears a moment after Bob had heard it, as Claude took a corner in a spectacular skid that flung clods of mud over the shrubbery. The bike roared off toward the back of the house and disappeared.
“He didn’t see us,” I said with relief. I was not at all eager for another encounter with dear little Claude. “But what do you mean, they quarreled over him? Surely Mr. Adam doesn’t think—”
“An’ will that be all, madam?” said Bob in a loud, artificial voice as Mrs. Lathrop opened the front door and strode forward with a grim face that boded no good for either of us.
I started the engine.
“Just a moment, Mrs. Nesbitt,” said the housekeeper, holding up an imperious hand. I sat helpless, pinned in my car by the conventions, as she approached ponderously and put her hand on the frame of the open window.
“I wish,” she said stiffly, “to apologize for not welcoming you properly when you first visited. Of course, I could hardly know who you were, since you chose not to use your real name.”
“Dorothy Martin is my real name,” I said, every bit as stiffly. “I kept it when I married Mr. Nesbitt. If I’d known that my husband’s position mattered to you, we would have mentioned it. I didn’t realize that you mete out your hospitality on the basis of a guest’s social prominence. Excuse me.”
I rolled up the window, nearly catching her hand, and peeled out of the driveway almost as gracelessly as Claude, consigning Mrs. Lathrop and all her works to perdition. Pestilential woman! I was childishly disappointed; she’d ruined my pleasure in my new dollhouse. I drove so furiously on the way home that I forgot to worry about the roundabouts.
It wasn’t Mrs. Lathrop’s snobbery that bothered me most, nor even her rudeness. I’d actually been far more impolite than she, and (I admitted without a shred of guilt) I’d enjoyed it. No, what really irritated me was the loss of my precious anonymity, and with it my freedom of movement. If I’d had any hopes that Alan’s encounter with Claude had gone unreported, I was now disabused of them. From now on all Brocklesby Hall knew who I was, and my most innocent inquiry about miniatures would be viewed with deep suspicion. Soon it would enter Sir Mordred’s tiny mind that I had been less than candid with him on my first visit to the museum, and he would start wondering what I was up to.
No, correction: He would wonder what the wife of the chief constable was up to. Dearly as I loved Alan, it was galling to be viewed as nothing more than an extension of his job and personality. Not only did it make me less than a person, it also put a considerable limitation on my sleuthing activities.
Was it time for me to hang up my deerstalker and calabash and take up watercolors? Or miniature-making?
What a sweet, appropriate hobby for an old lady, I thought, making a face as I pulled the car into my sorry excuse for a driveway and considered how to deal with the house Bob and I had wedged into the backseat.
“Need a hand with that, do you?”
It was Jane, come to my aid. A never failing help in time of trouble, that’s Jane. My hat askew, we wrestled the bulky, awkward thing out of the
car and into the house, and Jane said, “Where?”
“On the kitchen table for the moment, I guess. Actually, I never thought about it. Oh, dear! It really is a problem, isn’t it?”
It was. The little house was nearly three feet wide, maybe half as deep, and over two feet high. If I was to work on it, painting and wallpapering and hanging curtains and so on, I needed space around it. And in my ancient cottage there was very little extra space, and certainly no workshop.
I must have looked crestfallen, for Jane grinned at me. “Buy in haste and repent at leisure, eh?” She tipped her head to one side, considering the matter. “A good, sturdy table, now. I’ve a folding one I never use. What’s in your spare bedroom?”
“A lot of junk, mostly.”
“Let’s have a look.”
Left to my own devices I would have dithered over the junk. Jane made short work of it, appropriating some for resale in aid of one or another of her good causes, ruthlessly stuffing the rest into plastic bags for the rubbish bin. I insisted on keeping the box of gaudy old costume jewelry to turn into dollhouse oddments, but nearly everything else went. By the end of the afternoon we had the twin bed pushed into the corner and the dollhouse ensconced in the middle of the room on Jane’s table.
I made Jane stay to supper, and over cottage pie and salad I told her about my morning at the Hall. She sighed (rather theatrically, I thought) at my account of the tangled relationships between Meg Cunningham, Richard Adam, and Claude.
“Getting yourself involved in other people’s lives again,” she said. “Sure to lead to trouble.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said wickedly, “that you pursue a deliberate policy of noninvolvement, yourself. Stand by and watch your friends hang themselves; never lift a finger. Right?”
She suddenly became very busy fending off the cats, who, as usual, were weaving themselves around her ankles, ready for any stray tidbits of attention or food that might come their way. She petted them absently and put her plate on the floor while I waited.
“Oh, well,” she said finally, resignation in her tone. “Daresay you can fend for yourself.”
“With a little help from my friends,” I agreed. “For instance, tell me about that witch of a housekeeper. I had thought Sir M. probably brought her from London with him, but Ada says they knew each other when they were both girls.”
“Sherebury born and bred,” Jane agreed. “Mother was gentry, but married an innkeeper’s son, good-looking, plausible fellow—went through money like water. By the time Emma came along they were headed for trouble, and then young Lionel . . . Linford . . . Lawrence—getting old, can’t recall his name—anyway, he went off to war and never came back. Emma more or less had to bring herself up; mother went to pieces when she got the news about her husband and was never good for much after that. Not good for a lot before that, if you ask me.
“Soon as she was old enough, Emma went into service as a superior sort of housekeeper-cum-factotum, and managed to do fairly well for herself even in those days of postwar austerity. Better as the country began to recover. Buried a couple of husbands—butlers—worked at some respectable houses. Bullies her employers into thinking she’s indispensable.”
“She certainly has Sir M. bullied. Alan thinks she’s nourishing a secret passion for him.”
Jane sighed. “What fools these mortals be! Myself, I’d as soon cuddle up to a Pekingese. Sooner. Even the silliest dogs have some sense; silly men, never.”
She refused dessert and went home, and I spent the evening with my dollhouse, planning decorating schemes, hunting up soft old scraps of cloth to make into curtains. The cats were just as interested as I, jumping in and out of the house and playing with my scraps. They also complained about Alan’s absence, running down the stairs to find him and then up again to inform me that he wasn’t there. He called just as I was climbing into an early bed.
“So tell me all about Bramshill,” I said when I had nestled myself comfortably into the pillows.
“It’s a pretty complex operation,” he said. “I’ve taken courses here over the years, naturally, but I never fully realized the scope.” He detailed the breadth of College activities. “I certainly wouldn’t care to be responsible for the day-to-day running of the College as a permanent job. But what they want me for, principally, is to overhaul the overseas aspect of operations, the advanced training of foreign police officers, before they hand it on to the next chap.”
“Well, you’ve got the experience for that, certainly. All that time you’ve spent in Washington, and Brussels—”
“And Nairobi and Hong Kong and New Delhi, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, I think I could make a contribution. But I need to learn a good deal more about the details before I take on the job. And of course I want you to look the place over thoroughly. You’ll like the manor house, I think. The tapestries in the drawing room must be seen to be believed.”
“Have you come across the ghost yet?”
He chuckled. “I’m told the poor lady seldom leaves the main house, and has so far totally avoided the students’ blocks. Perhaps if you come for the weekend she might condescend to materialize for you; they’ve found a guest room in the house for us. I’m free almost all of Saturday and Sunday; can you get away, do you think?”
“I don’t see why not. Give me directions and I might even try driving.”
“I shouldn’t, if I were you. You’d have to go through London or around it, in that ghastly traffic, and there are fairly decent trains from Waterloo. You want to go to either Winchfield or Hook; I’ve looked up the times for you . . .”
I wrote down his detailed instructions. “Okay, so I’ll call you from Waterloo Station Saturday morning, when I figure out which train I can catch, and you’ll meet me. Got it. Meanwhile, I miss you, and the cats do, too. You should have seen them, looking for you all over the house.”
“Tell them I’ll bring them a peacock feather to play with. The beasts are molting; their feathers are everywhere. And as for you . . .”
I ended the day feeling much happier than I had at its beginning, but my sense of well-being was shattered shortly after breakfast the next morning.
“Mrs. Martin, it’s Derek Morrison here. I don’t know if you remember me—”
“Of Town Hall fame! I met you over a corpse, with poor Ada Finch just recovering from hysterics. How are you, Chief Inspector?”
“I’m getting along splendidly, thank you, but I’m afraid Mrs. Finch is not doing quite so well. She’s here at the police station and asking for you. Her son, Bob, has been brought in for questioning.”
“Not more thefts at the museum!” I wailed.
Inspector Morrison cleared his throat. “Unfortunately not. There’s been a murder.”
I RAN OUT the door without even putting on a hat. Panting, I arrived at the police station in the High Street to find Inspector Morrison waiting for me in the front hall.
“Tell me,” I demanded.
“Mrs. Lathrop, out at Brocklesby Hall, died early this morning. It seems clear that she was poisoned, and Bob may have been involved. That’s virtually all I know at the moment.
“I think you should see to Mrs. Finch straight off; she’s on the verge of collapse. There’s a matron with her, of course, but I don’t think she’ll calm down until she talks to you. I won’t come with you; I’d be worse than no help. And I need to get back into the fray, but I wanted to brief you myself. The constable will direct you; I’ll find you in a bit.”
“Does Alan know?”
“Not yet.” Morrison looked grim. I gathered he wasn’t looking forward to passing the news along to his boss.
He left me in the care of an attractive young policewoman who took me to a small office on the next floor. Ada Finch was seated on a bench, her head in her hands, sobbing her heart out while the matron tried to comfort her.
I sat down on the bench next to Ada, gathered my wits about me, and spoke sharply.
“Ada, stop crying this minute and t
ell me what’s happening!”
It was a risky move that might have sent her over the edge into full hysterics, but I was gambling on Ada’s lifetime of deferring to “the gentry,” hoping that my sternest schoolteacher voice would act on her reflexes.
To my great relief, it worked. Ada sat up obediently, hiccuped, and accepted the wad of tissues I thrust into her hand.
She looked awful. Her bright blue eyes were swollen, her nose red from crying, her hair hanging in strings. I wanted to hug her, but sympathy at this stage would probably send her right off again. I hardened my heart, and when she finished blowing her nose and looked up at me dismally, I used my flintiest voice.
“That’s better. I must say you’ve disappointed me, Ada. I’d expect you to fight back, instead of melting like this. Now, what kind of a mess has Bob gotten himself into this time?”
What with her misery and her anger—mostly directed at me—Ada wasn’t terribly coherent, but I could get the details later from Morrison. My only goal just now was to get the poor woman calmed down.
“. . . and never mind what the bloody p’lice say, ’ee never done nuffink!” she concluded, glaring at me fiercely.
“I expect you’re right,” I said mildly. “Unless there was some sort of silly accident. Was he—umm—”
“’Ee never drinks on the job, as ’oo should know better than you! An’ ’ee knows ’is plants. ’Ee never put nuffink in there wot didn’t belong!”
Her lower lip jutted out; her eyes snapped. Much better. Maybe now I could actually get some information.
“I think you’d better tell me all about it, Ada. All I know is that she was poisoned.”
“An’ no loss to the world, neither! Just like ’er to cause trouble even by dyin’.”
That was just Ada venting her spleen, but it was dangerous talk, with the matron listening to every word. I put my hand over hers, squeezed, and said, “Tell me what happened.”
She pulled herself together, and when she spoke again, it was to the point. “I don’t know, only wot they told me, as wasn’t much. She takes—took—this tea, see, when she ’ad a bellyache from eatin’ too much. Not proper tea, but ’erbs and that. Peppermint, an’ ’oo knows wot.” She sniffed meaningfully. “It’d poison anybody, I’d think!
Malice in Miniature Page 8
