The Old Contemptibles (35 page)

They were in the maze, privet hedges six feet tall, and Wiggins felt they’d been here for hours because of the similarity of every green corridor. Never mind, he told himself. He was only humoring Holdsworth in order to get him to talk about the family.

He refused to “pick up the speed” again. “I need to talk to you, Mr. Holdsworth.”

“So? Talk and push, Sergeant.”

“If you don’t mind, I’ll just rest for a bit.” Wiggins slapped his handkerchief across the moistness of a white bench and sat down, ignoring the hugely exaggerated sighs of Adam Holdsworth, who was twiddling his thumbs.

“I should think you’d be concerned about your great-grandson’s welfare, sir.”

Adam’s head whipped round.
“Certainly,
I’m concerned! I’ve made every provision for Alex.” He lowered his head. “It’s rotten about his mother; you probably know my grandson—” He looked away. “Well, you know about Alex’s father.” Wiggins nodded. “Graham was a perfectly nice boy. A bit weak, perhaps, and much too impressionable. But . . . I expect psychiatrists can’t work miracles.” He sighed. “I expect depression and despair can hit any of us, correct?”

Wiggins wondered if Adam had guessed at the apparent source of Graham Holdsworth’s despair. “Did the doctor ever indicate the cause of it to you?”

“Hmm? No. I wondered, though, about that troubled marriage. From what I could gather, it was largely Graham’s fault—well, his wish to get out of it. I don’t think Jane was heartbroken, but she wasn’t pleased, certainly. Madeline, however, was.”

“Miss Galloway?”

“Well, she’d wanted to marry him. Expect she was jealous as hell. I think she’s pretty colorless; of course, she’s always nice as nine-pence to all of us. Money. It’s always love or money or both. You know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she had thought she might just snag Crabbe after Virginia died.”

“What?”

“Why not? Happens all the time with employers and their secretaries. Then here comes Genevieve.
That
must have put the poor girl’s nose out of joint.”

“You don’t care much for Miss Galloway and Mrs. Holdsworth?”

“Hell, Sergeant, I don’t care for any of them now except Alex and Millie. The others are gone.” He squeezed the bridge of his nose tightly.

When Wiggins told him what they’d discovered about Virginia Holdsworth and what they suspected about Annie Thale, Adam sat there like a graven image. “Good Lord.” He was silent for a long time, looking about, unable to see anything except row upon row of green hedge. “Why not just kill
me
and be done with it, if it’s the money?”

Wiggins didn’t want to remind him that he, Adam, was eighty-nine. The old man hadn’t that long to go. And, Wiggins thought, this killer was very patient. It had been five years since the grandson and cook had died.

After a few more minutes of kneading his blue-veined hands, Adam said, “Move! I’m sick of all this talk of death and desolation. Come on, Sergeant, push!”

Obediently, Wiggins rose and spent another ten minutes pushing the old man at a fast walk.

Then he heard something like the sound of a death rattle. Immediately, he went round the chair to check for signs of life and discovered old Adam was laughing and tattooing the chair’s arms with his small fists.

Well, he certainly found a joke in all of this that was lost on the sergeant. As Wiggins started to push again, the old man demanded to know the time.

“Just going on nine-fifteen, Mr. Holdsworth.”

“What?
What?
I need my medicine. Supposed to take it on the half hour, that’d be nine-thirty, and by God if I don’t get it, there’s no telling! I go into fits! I’ll have a
seizure.
Happened once before. So get rolling and push me out of this damned place.”

Wiggins, thoroughly alarmed, pushed harder, and then remembered this was a maze and if he hadn’t found the exit yet, he wasn’t likely to in the next fifteen minutes. “You’ll have to point me in the right direction, sir.”

“What the hell are you talking about?
I
don’t know where it is.”

Wiggins’s alarm was turning quickly to terror as he trotted behind the wheelchair, going right, going left. Breathless, he managed to say, “Good Lord, sir! I’m a perfect stranger! How would I know the entrance?”

Bumping along, his head tilting in the wind, Adam said, “Because you’re a copper! You’re supposed to have some sort of deductive powers but you damned well don’t seem to be using them. Do you think I’d’ve been fool enough to come in here with just
anybody?”

 • • • 

Wiggins had his arsenal of drugs in his coat pocket. “What’s . . . the . . . medicine . . . for?” he asked between hard breaths.

“My insides.”

It wasn’t much to go on; still, undaunted, Wiggins reached in his pocket and brought out a charcoal biscuit, stopping just long enough to take a breather. “This works like . . . magic,” he huffed. His own lungs felt on the verge of collapse.

Adam bit it, made a retching noise and spit it out.

“I’ve an idea!” said Wiggins.

“First one today. What?”

“Crumbs. I’ll drop crumbs along the path and that way we’ll know if we’ve been on that particular part before. So’s we won’t be going round in circles.” Wiggins rammed a privet hedge while trying to maneuver round a corner.

“Help! HELP!” Adam shouted at the sky, or tried to. His reedy voice was growing weaker; he could barely get it out. “Ah . . . ahh . . . ahhh. I feel it coming on.” Then his head lolled.

Wiggins had been dropping crumbs all along their way, which had prevented his going down several openings since he could see they’d already been there.

From the chair came heavy, stentorian breathing. Then Adam said, “What I need’s a damned drink.”

Wiggins was relieved that he seemed a bit livelier and bumped him over several large rocks, careening round a corner.

“Time?” demanded Adam.

“Nine twenty-two.”

Now the groaning began and Wiggins was pushing at a run, leaving new crumbs behind him at the same time he was avoiding the old crumb trails. Wiggins knew what this sort of exertion, coupled with all this tension, would do to a nervous system. At last he saw it: “The exit! Straight ahead!”

No response was forthcoming from the lolling head of Adam Holdsworth. Wiggins stopped, gave him a gentle shake, felt the pulse. Still there, but for how long? He pushed faster out of the maze and across the green lawn. He could see at a distance someone—yes, it was the nurse named Rhubarb. He hailed her. She glowered at him, but he ignored the look. Wiggins, despite his breathlessness, just managed to convey the message to her.

Miss Rupert looked totally blank.

“Mr. Holdsworth’s medicine! You can see he’s ill.”

Miss Rupert studied Adam Holdsworth. “Looks all right to me. A person his age, eighty-nine, isn’t he? One expects a little slowing down.” With this unarguable comment, she set off down the path.

“Mr. Holdsworth is doing more than slowing down. He’s coming to a dead halt! I
insist
you go and find a doctor.”

“You needn’t get shirty about it, Sergeant. I know him better than you.” And she continued on her way.

Wiggins sat down at the edge of the mildly sloping lawn and dropped his head in his hands.

A heaving noise came from the wheelchair. He looked at the old man through parted fingers. Adam Holdsworth was laughing and slapping his leg—or the rug that covered it.

“Got you running like hell, didn’t I?”

Wiggins got up, his face set in stone. “Are you telling me it was all an act?”

Wham
went Adam’s hand across his knee. “Scared within an inch of his life, he was! But I’ll give you this, lad; that crumb thing was a damned good idea. Hard getting out of that maze.”

“You’ve been in it before, is that it?” asked Wiggins in his strangled voice.

“Hell, yes. I know every bend and turn and there are clues left all over the place. Well, you weren’t sharp enough to see the clues, but, still, no one else ever got out without help except Alex. So you’re not such a bad copper, after all.”

During this little dissertation on the sergeant’s competence, Wiggins had slowly walked round behind the chair, which was facing the long, sloping lawn, at the bottom of which sat the little stone cottage Helen Viner used as her office. “I appreciate the compliment, sir. Now, I must go and see if Superintendent Jury is here yet.”

With that, Wiggins pushed the wheelchair with his foot and sent it flying across the lawn, which had just enough incline to send the chair careering, but enough upward slope at the end to stop it.

Old Adam had his arms stretched out, bellowing to the skies: “Hallelujah! I’m about to meet . . .”

Who he was going to meet was lost on the wind.

Wiggins chewed on a charcoal biscuit and smiled thinly.

Then he saw the wheelchair bump and twist, heard what could have been a scream or a wheezy laugh, and walked down the lawn.

Definitely a wheezy laugh. “Brilliant, Sergeant! Let’s do it again!”

“No more playing silly buggers, sir.” He knocked the old man’s hand off the lever. “Superintendent Jury wants to see you.”

“No joy there, I’m sure.” Then he put his finger to his mouth and whispered. “Not a word; this is just between the two of us.”

“Depend on it,” said Wiggins, grimly.

 • • • 

More than was usual, Jury noticed, Sergeant Wiggins kept his eyes glued to his notebook. He was sitting in a black lacquered chair on one side of a long window.

In the companion chair sat a handsome woman, slightly built, beautifully tailored, and shrewd-eyed. Probably in her seventies, but looking sixty.

Adam Holdsworth told Superintendent Jury that his sergeant had given him a pleasant little push about the maze. He also said he found it difficult to believe that what had happened to Virginia and Annie Thale was anything but an accident.

“Who on earth would have pushed Ginny off those rocks? Not that arse of a Fellowes. And if you’re checking on poufs, check on him—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Adam,” said Lady Cray, studying the ceiling. “That stereotype of the artist is cretinous.”

“You don’t know him,” said Adam, testily. “Painter and flamer, I’ll bet.”

She shook her head as she rose and murmured something about leaving them.

“Please don’t leave, Lady Cray.” Jury held up the packet of letters.

Adam smacked his chair arm. “Jig’s up!”

“You took these from Dr. Kingsley’s office, Lady Cray?”

“Yes, I happened to find them there.” She inspected a fingernail with blood-red varnish, then quickly folded her hands under her arms and tapped her foot.

“They were tied with something,” said Jury. “String perhaps, or a ribbon.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Jury nodded. “Find anything like that? Or were they clipped together the way you gave them to Mr. Plant?”

Adam said to her, “Tell him, for God’s sake. Does he care you’re a ribbon fetishist? Better than heavy breathing.”

“I’ll just fetch it, then.” She turned at the door.
“Was,
Adam. I now find ribbons boring.” She left.

“My daughter-in-law”—thinking of Genevieve apparently disgusted Adam—“burned up the wire after you were at Tarn House yesterday. Clearly thought she was suspect number one in Jane’s
murder.
If
Jane was murdered. And who told you about Graham? Was it Helen Viner? She was treating him for depression.”

“No. She thought it would be unprofessional to comment on a patient. It was Millie’s aunt.”

“That
old battle-ax?”

Jury smiled. “It was her sister, Annie, who told Thomasina.” Jury didn’t want at this point to drag in Millie’s tales of Aunt Tom.

Adam shook his head. “Hell, I suppose it’s possible. What isn’t? But then why would he be fooling around with Annie?”

“He wasn’t; they were friends. I think the point of this is who would benefit most by your will. And who would have?”

“God. Money.” He gripped the arm of the wheelchair, cleared his throat and said, “Alex is chief beneficiary. And then Millie. That probably surprises you, but she’s all alone and she’s only a little girl.” Again he washed his hand over his bald pate. “Now, I’m pretty worried about them, I don’t mind telling you.”

“I don’t think there’s any danger, Mr. Holdsworth,” said Jury, mildly.
Not for now.

Lady Cray made her entrance on that note, walked over to Jury and dropped a carefully coiled ribbon into his hand.

Jury handed both the letters and the ribbon to Wiggins. “Work on this.” Then he turned both a smile and a question in his eyes to Lady Cray.

“They were in his bookcase—but, obviously, Mr. Plant would have told you that. He has a particular little row of books, half-dozen, fourth shelf up, fake spines. They’re hollow; he keeps them for liquor. There was another out of place, I thought, on the shelf above. Dr. Kingsley is undoubtedly alcoholic, not that that’s important, and it certainly hasn’t blunted his powers of perception. Oh, his eyes aren’t very good; but his mind makes up for them.
My
eyes, however, are perfect. These are not gray contact lenses you’re looking at; I could spot a raven in a flock of buzzards at a hundred feet, or a foot on a wheelchair from the ramparts.”

Jury noticed that Adam and Wiggins exchanged quick and half-hidden glances as Lady Cray poked her finger upward.

“It looked, you see, like a little ribbon bookmarker that hadn’t been pulled down completely to separate the pages. I happen to have a penchant for ribbons—especially red . . .
did
have, I should say. Now, I saw this ribbon during my ten o’clock appointment yesterday
morning—an appointment
not
requested by me, incidentally. I didn’t notice the book’s ribbon until the very end of the hour; consequently,
I
requested the hour be changed and that Dr. Kingsley see me thenceforth at three o’clock. Well, it didn’t make any difference—two, three, four—but I chose the first hour that came to mind. When one wants something, one doesn’t want to wait, don’t you agree? Yes. When I returned to his office at three
P.M
. I naturally looked at the shelf to make sure the ribbon was still there. I had, naturally, made my plan to get at it. Getting to the shelf and purloining the fake book wasn’t
precisely
as simple as nicking a pen; one can always do that, you know, with the pretense of reaching . . . oh, sorry, I’m sure you don’t want to hear about all of that. The point was to get him out of the room. So I asked for some chocolate, said I was feeling a dreadful anxiety attack coming on, and, of course, he knew about the problem with chocolate. Like ribbons.
But!
do you know, gentlemen, there’s something I’d forgotten. I can see you don’t. Alcoholics very often are fiends for sweets, especially chocolate. The good doctor simply opened his desk drawer, smiled and reached over a Wispa bar. Well,
that
was a setback. Until I realized that I myself had chosen this scenario, and that I
myself
had forgotten that I have no feelings at all for chocolate
bars,
only for boxed chocolates. I sometimes wonder if it has to do with the theater . . . with that play at the Haymarket my father—do forgive me; that’s hardly the point. Very well. I told him that to me, ‘chocolate’ meant the small, rounded ones, each in its separate place, rather like—do you know what it’s like? It only just occurred to me . . . like seats in a theater. I’m rambling. But after all, Dr. Kingsley
did
do me an enormous amount of good. Back to it: this quite decent man left his office to find a box of chocolates. Et cetera. And after he’d nicked—well, I like to think that—a tiny little box from someone’s desk, he gave me them, hoped I’d feel better, smiled that absolutely ingenuous smile and then—” She looked at her audience. “Is something wrong?”