An Unwilling Accomplice (16 page)

It was rather apparent that Mrs. Neville had little patience with her stepdaughter.

She turned to give Simon directions, and very soon we were passing through the rather ornate gates that we’d just driven by.

The gateposts were brick, and crowned with a griffon. Close to, the gates themselves were lovely examples of wrought iron, tall, graceful, and intended to keep visitors out. The name
Windward
was engraved on a bronze plaque.

As a rule such approaches led to a looping drive that debouched before the main front. Here it led straight to one of the most beautiful early Tudor brick houses I’d ever seen. Crowned by chimneys and peaked roofs, it was a lovely rose color, windows set off by stone facings, and a large studded door in an arched frame that could have welcomed a King. And probably had.

Mrs. Neville must have heard my gasp of pleasure, for she said over her shoulder, “This doesn’t hold a candle to the house that went with the title. The Nevilles are a cadet branch.”

I stepped out of the motorcar to open the gates and then shut them after we and the goat had passed through. Continuing down the drive on foot gave me time to consider the house and the landscaping that set it off. I almost missed the wooden bench under the specimen maple tree. A man was sitting there, and at first glance my heart lurched. I thought it must be Sergeant Wilkins. Bandages were visible beneath the officer’s cap he was wearing, and there was the bulge of other bandaging just above the knee on his left thigh. Such leg wounds were very common—German machine guns were often set to scythe through the charging line of enemy just at knee height. It stopped a man in his tracks, and made it difficult for him to crawl back to his own lines. This man wasn’t using a sling.

On closer inspection, I realized he wore the smart mustache of an officer. And he was sitting there with the unmistakable air of a man who felt quite at home in these elegant surroundings. It was indefinable, but it was very real.

Could Wilkins pass himself off as a gentleman so easily? I didn’t know him well enough to say. He’d been well spoken, his voice that of an educated man. That didn’t necessarily mean he could cope with the complexities of a grand house like this one.

As the motorcar pulled up before the steps, Mrs. Neville waited for Simon to come around and open her door, then she called to the officer.

“Really, Major, this is too much. Take the goat back where she belongs.”

He got unsteadily to his feet, starting toward us. I was watching his face, but he seemed not to recognize either Simon or me.

But before he reached us, a housekeeper came to the door and called over her shoulder to a middle-aged footman. Without blinking, the footman walked over and untied the goat’s tether, as if he was doing nothing more than preparing to take our luggage out of the boot. His expression was bland, as if this was nothing out of the ordinary. He disappeared around the corner with the reluctant goat following him, balking every third step.

Meanwhile the Major had stopped. After a moment he returned to the bench and sat down heavily, careful of that leg, as Mrs. Neville said, “And where is your cane? You know you aren’t supposed to go anywhere without it.”

“I don’t know,” he said in a low voice. “I can’t remember where I left it.”

She made a noise of disbelief but said nothing more to him.

Turning to Simon and me, she thanked us for bringing her home, and walked on toward the open door.

It was dismissal. Simon had left the motorcar running, and he helped me into the front seat before coming around to take his place behind the wheel.

“I expect,” I said quietly as the door closed behind Mrs. Neville, “we aren’t presentable enough to be invited in to tea.”

But he didn’t laugh. Unsmilingly letting in the clutch, he went round the small circle and started back to the gates.

“Does that man—the Major—remind you of Sergeant Wilkins?” he asked.

“At first, yes, I thought surely it must be. But he isn’t the sergeant. Is he?”

“I don’t know the answer to that.”

“There’s the officer’s mustache.”

“A man can grow a mustache rather quickly, if he has a strong beard. A matter of days.”

“Yes, that’s true. But he didn’t recognize us, did he?”

“That’s the odd thing. Either he didn’t know us or he’s a damned fine actor.”

I got out to open the gates for us. I looked back at the house, and the Major was standing there beneath the tree, staring after us.

I’d never seen Sergeant Wilkins on his feet. Nor had I seen his coloring, except for the fair eyebrows and blue eyes. Not to mention the shape of his ears, the definition of his chin.

Removing bandaging he’d insisted upon having before he came down to London had made it possible to leave the hotel without being recognized as the man who’d been given a medal. That too Sergeant Wilkins had foreseen.

And I hadn’t been close enough to the Major to look directly into his eyes. But I had a feeling his eyebrows were also fair.

Getting into the motorcar once more, I said again, “Do
you
think it’s Wilkins? If you do, we ought to tell someone.”

“I saw less of Wilkins than you did. There’s a resemblance. Height, weight. But I should think Miss Neville will have something to say about our sending Scotland Yard here on such slim evidence.”

“It’s just possible that he rode the horse as far as he could, fell off or was thrown, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know—and reached the Dysoes on foot. But how on earth could he have persuaded Miss Neville that he’s someone else?”

“A very good question. I’d give much to know the Major’s name. I could look him up, back in London.”

“We could ask Maddie. It wouldn’t be all that strange for me to look in on Mr. Warren before we go on.”

Mr. Warren was still in a drugged sleep, snoring slightly when we got to the cottage after retrieving Simon’s valise. I was pleased to find that his skin was cool, no sign of fever developing. Maddie had taken as natural my comment about wanting to see the patient a last time. But I had the feeling he wished we hadn’t come back.

“We encountered Mrs. Neville on the road,” I said, covering Mr. Warren’s shoulder again with the clean sheet Maddie had spread over him. “She was telling us her views on Agriculture when we spotted one of the Windward goats tethered by the road. She insisted we take it back to the house.”

“The goats have got loose a time or two,” he agreed. “Clever beasts.”

Clever or not, they hadn’t learned to tether themselves.

“The Major was there. He seemed ill. Was he badly wounded?”

“He was. Miss Neville has insisted on nursing him. I’m told she knew him in London. Before the war, I believe.”

“London? Perhaps I know him—he reminds me so much of Diana’s brother, Major Havers. There were several cousins as well, if I remember. But I didn’t like to ask if he were related because he seemed to be in such pain.”

Diana’s brother was at the Admiralty and his name wasn’t Havers.

Maddie shook his head. “She hasn’t favored me with his name,” he said dryly. “He’s just ‘the Major.’ ”

I believed him. Miss Neville wouldn’t bother to introduce her fiancé to the likes of Maddie. But I’d thought the Major himself might have, as a courtesy to the man trying to heal him.

And yet there was something in the way he answered me that was interesting. As if the oversight had been deliberate.

He stood there, quietly waiting for us to take our leave.

I couldn’t think of another way of getting at what we wanted. And so we thanked him and went out to the motorcar.

Simon saw to the crank, then stood there for a moment, looking back down the road at the village of Upper Dysoe.

When he got into the motorcar, he said, “Kenilworth?”

“Do you suppose Tulley at the pub knows the Major’s name?”

We drove back to the pub, but there were more than a dozen patrons being served their lunch, and Tulley was morose, unwilling to talk.

We walked away and set out for Kenilworth.

But when we tracked down the lorry we were seeking, it had long since moved on to Oxford, and the shop owner who taken delivery of a pair of horsehair chairs told us that the lorry driver had been alone.

“In fact,” he told us sourly, “I had to help take out the chairs myself, which did no favors to my sciatica.”

Where had he lost his elusive passenger?

We had nearly run out of time. We couldn’t search every village, every hamlet. For that matter, the other man in the lorry could have stepped down in Kenilworth before the delivery of those chairs.

Reluctantly, I agreed that we’d done all we could. It went against the grain to give up, because we’d had some successes. Or thought we had. But they were so small that we couldn’t take them to Scotland Yard. We’d be accused of meddling. Inspector Stephens hadn’t interviewed me with the object of setting me off on my own inquiry.

“Cheer up,” Simon told me. “If he’s out there, he’ll be found. If not by you, then by the Army or the Yard. Or even your Inspector Jester.”

Which was true. Only I wouldn’t be allowed to see the sergeant, much less question him about what he’d done. To set my own mind at ease if nothing else.

The problem was, Sergeant Wilkins still traveled with us, for he was in both our thoughts as we headed south.

I smiled wryly as we reached the outskirts of Oxford. “We wouldn’t have got as far as we did if it hadn’t been for the bay horse, which had the good sense to come home on his own.”

But for all I knew, Sergeant Wilkins was Miss Neville’s Major, who seemed to have no qualms about shooting at people. Perhaps a side of our quarry I’d never seen. From the medical point of view, I wondered if either the sergeant or the Major was actually physically capable of hanging a man off Iron Bridge.

It would require a great deal of strength. Or a great deal of hatred.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

W
HEN
I
REACHED
Mrs. Hennessey’s, tired and dispirited, I found orders waiting for me. Apparently in my absence it had been decided that I bore no responsibility for Sergeant Wilkins’s disappearance or his subsequent actions in Ironbridge. That was such good news.

I wondered if my parents were behind this return to duty. But I was grateful for it, however it had come about. All the same, that early suspicion was now a part of my record, and through no fault of my own.

I had less than twenty-four hours to meet my transport back to France.

I was ten minutes from leaving to take my train to Dover when Mrs. Hennessey came up the stairs to tell me I had a caller.

“It’s that same man from Scotland Yard,” she told me, her face set with a mixture of exasperation at the interruption and gloom at my departure.

I went down to meet Inspector Stephens, and he rose as I came into Mrs. Hennessey’s sitting room.

“I understand you’re on your way back to France,” he said. “I’m glad.”

Surprised, I said, “I’m glad as well. Is that why you came to see me?”

“There was a question I needed to put to you. Do you think Sergeant Wilkins was physically capable of hanging that man on the iron bridge?”

It was the question I’d pondered as well, but I said nothing about that. “I don’t know,” I told him truthfully. “You would have to ask his doctor at Lovering Hall. Or perhaps find out why he had done such a thing.”

“We have spoken to his doctor. And he can’t give us a straight answer. He said that it is possible, in the heat of the moment, to do something one isn’t able to do ordinarily. I myself have heard of instances in France where a caisson fell on a man, and the rest of his company lifted it off him without thinking about their strength or their own wounds. They just got on with it. But the doctor also felt that the journey from London to Ironbridge could have taken a toll on healing wounds, depending on how the sergeant got there.”

“I never examined him,” I said. “You must remember that.”

“You are an experienced nursing Sister. I’d like your opinion.”

“Are you rethinking his guilt in the Ironbridge death?” I asked, intrigued.

“No,” he said, with a heavy sigh. “Just attempting to shed any light we can on the matter.”

They must be desperate,
I thought to myself, if they are here asking me questions.

Should I mention the Major and Miss Neville? I thought about that and decided against it. There was nothing I knew that could actually connect the Major with anything that had to do with the murder or Sergeant Wilkins.

“If I do think of something that will help,” I told Inspector Stephens carefully, “I’ll be in touch. That’s all I can promise.”

He was clearly disappointed. But he said, “Thank you, Sister. I appreciate your willingness to help.”

But had I been willing?

“Do you know why Sergeant Wilkins committed murder?” I asked.

“So far we’re still pursuing our inquiries.”

Which meant he didn’t know—or wasn’t free to tell me.

As we walked to the door, he added, “I understand the sergeant had a brother. He never spoke of him, but the Sister in Shrewsbury told me he dreamed about him sometimes. Nightmares might be a better word. Army records indicate that his brother died earlier in the war.”

“I asked him, at the audience with the King, if he had any family members present, but he gave me to understand that he didn’t. I found that rather sad. Most everyone had someone there. A wife or parents or sisters, all of them watching proudly.”

Inspector Stephens grimaced at mention of the ceremony. But he said, “Yes, very sad. They might have been able to give us something useful to be going on with. We’ve been to the town where the sergeant grew up, but they can add very little to what we know at present.”

It wasn’t quite what I’d meant, but from Scotland Yard’s perspective, information was more important than any sentiment.

He was just stepping out into the street when he turned and said, “The Sister at the Shrewsbury hospital tells me you came north to ask questions about the sergeant. Is that true?”