Malice in Miniature (21 page)

“Doctors! Pack of idiots!” he was shouting to the little group hovering around his chair, Richard and Meg and Mrs. Butler. His voice rose to a higher and higher squeak. “Nincompoops! They let my mother die, couldn't decide whether she had the flu or pneumonia. It turned out to be TB. She could have been cured, if they'd had the sense God gave a newt, but not by the time they—what do
you
want?”

“I brought you some tea, Sir Mordred. It's chilly out here, and I thought you—”

“I don't want it.” He turned his shoulder away from me. “I don't want anything. I have work to do.”

“But you might as well have some tea, now that it's here,” said Meg gently. “That can't hurt anything.”

“Killed Mrs. Lathrop, didn't it?” He eyed the tray with suspicion.

“That was her herbal tea, Sir Mordred,” I said, trying to be patient. “This is real tea, good Darjeeling, and if you don't want any, I'll have a cup myself.” I suited the action to the word. “Would anyone else like one? It's awfully cold out here.”

I poured, we drank, and when, after a moment or two, none of us showed signs of expiring, Sir Mordred condescended to accept a cup. “I'm sure it's very kind of you all,” he said with a grudging nod, “but I don't like fusses. Someone's always fussing about my health. I'm healthy as a horse. You simply startled me, Mrs. Martin. My nerves are on edge, and whose wouldn't be, with what we've been through here? I'm obliged for the tea, but I must get on with my work.”

“Can't we at least turn on some heat?” I begged. “Surely you can't do delicate work out here in the cold. I'd think your fingers would refuse to move.”

“Oh, very well, there's an electric fire next to the workbench. I suppose the room may be a bit chilly, though I'm roasting in these blankets.”

Americans and Englishmen are born with different internal thermostats, I'm convinced. My teeth were chattering. Richard found the electric heater before I did and turned it on, picking up a cloth from the floor as he did so.

“Where do you want this?”

“Put it on the bench. I don't like mess. I dropped it, I suppose, when I—um—became dizzy. I was cleaning my tools.”

“A bit rusty,” commented Richard, looking at the rag.

“Yes, it's the damp. I do my best, but metal
will
rust. I daren't put too much oil on them; a stain is so hard to get out of a tiny piece of wood.”

Eventually he shooed us all out, insisting he felt perfectly fit. I was the last to leave, staying to retrieve my rumpled coat and apologize once more.

“No harm done, Mrs.—er—Martin,” he said grudgingly. “But it has cost me a great deal of time, so if you don't mind . . .”

I couldn't think of any excuse to remain, in view of his obvious preference for my absence. I left him fanatically polishing the jaws of a vise and tramped back to the house to talk to Mrs. Butler.

I let myself in, someone having left the door unlocked, and finally tracked the woman down in the library. She was almost hidden behind a stack of books and pamphlets. Meg was elsewhere: with Richard, I speculated with a mental grin. I sat down beside the education director, who did not so much as look up.

“Mrs. Butler, thanks so much for your help. I was really in a state, and I'm afraid I wasn't very polite.”

“Not at all,” she murmured coolly. I wasn't sure whether she was uttering the standard English version of “forget it,” or agreeing with my own description of my behavior. I tried again.

“I was really worried about Sir Mordred, you see. Does he often collapse like this?”

“I'm sure I've no idea. I've been employed here only a few days.”

I seized on that. “Yes, Meg says you've done a marvelous job in the little time you've had. I suppose all the crises have meant you've had to put in a lot of extra time, coming back at night and that kind of thing.”

I was watching her carefully. She turned a page, picked up her pencil, made a careful note, and looked up at me.

“I shouldn't dream of coming back at night. I live quite some distance away, beyond the university. I have been hired to do a job, Mrs. Martin, not to worry about my employer's health or ruin my own with night work. I am kept extremely busy during normal working hours,” she added pointedly.

It seemed that no one wanted my company today. I plodded away; I doubt Mrs. Butler even noticed that I had left.

There was one more thing I wanted to do before I left the Hall, if I could get by with it. I wanted to have a look at Mrs. Lathrop's rooms.

Now was as good a time as any. Mrs. Hawes was probably down for another half-hour's nap, at least. I didn't know where the maids were, but if they were working hard, in the absence of any sort of supervision, they were more than mortal. If Meg and Richard were together, they wouldn't notice a herd of thundering busybodies, let alone just one who was trying to be inconspicuous. Sir Mordred was safely out of the way, and I had seen no police around at all.

Fine. I could snoop unobserved. If, of course, I could find the rooms in a house with fifty bedrooms. Slipping out of my boots—no point in leaving a trail of muddy footprints—I tiptoed up the main staircase, trying not to look the leering cupids in the eye.

It took me a while to find the rooms, but meantime I learned quite a lot about Brocklesby Hall. Most of it was obviously not in use. Many rooms, completely unheated, were filled with ghostly humps of furniture, shrouded in big once-white dust sheets. Cobwebs festooned the corners, and when I opened doors, there were often rustlings that I preferred not to speculate about. On the whole I hoped they were mice; the alternatives were even less appetizing.

Sir Mordred's miserliness was strongly in evidence on the upper floors of his fantastic mansion. Many of the light fixtures were without bulbs, so I did a good deal of stumbling in dark corners, especially where hallways indulged in entirely unnecessary three-steps-down-and-two-up routines. If anyone had been trying to track my progress, he would have had no trouble; with all my barging into things I was about as quiet as a rampaging she-grizzly. But no one interrupted me, and in due time I found the right rooms.

I could tell, not only because they were the first I saw that showed any sign of occupation, but because of the black dress draped pathetically across a chair. Evidently the rooms had been kept as Mrs. Lathrop left them that last night. I shivered slightly, and not just from the cold.

The rooms were large: sitting room, bedroom, bathroom. (Evidently, someone since the first Brocklesby had seen fit to modernize the sanitary facilities.) With a little love they could have been made pleasant and comfortable, but as they were I found them infinitely depressing. Heavy, dark paneling; heavy, dark furniture; even a heavy staleness to the air, which was only marginally warmer than in the disused rooms.

Mrs. Lathrop had made little effort to personalize her surroundings. There were no photographs, no knickknacks, nothing feminine lying around. Without the dress on the chair, they might have been a man's rooms.

There were a few touches. In the sitting room one small vase held some chrysanthemums. They were long dead, and the rank water contributed to the unpleasant atmosphere of the room, but the vase was beautiful, also valuable, if I was any judge. Certainly antique Chinese, very possibly Ming. An expensive, though very ugly, jewel box held a few pieces that looked to my inexperienced eye as though they were worth a good deal: a large, rather dirty diamond brooch, some massive gold earrings, one or two rings heavily laden with stones. I remembered that Jane had said Mrs. Lathrop's mother had been “gentry,” and wondered if the small collection of treasures was inherited.

The huge mahogany wardrobe held two more black dresses cut along the same lines as the one on the chair, a couple of sensible suits in depressing tweeds, and one appalling black taffeta evening dress. What a shame! The fabrics were good, the tailoring impeccable, but the garments had been made without any sense of style or flair. Even the Mrs. Lathrops of this world look better if they're properly dressed, and if she could afford to have her clothes custom-made, surely she could have had them made attractively, as well?

An image sprang up in my mind of Mrs. Lathrop, icily edging past Ada Finch in the King's Head. Well, maybe, after all, it wouldn't have mattered much what she wore.

Suddenly revolted, I realized I couldn't bear to go through her dresser drawers. Even if I had known what I was looking for, who was I to pry into the most personal belongings of a dead woman? She would have hated my seeing her clothes and the way she lived, and the heavy stuffiness, or my sense of guilt, was giving me a headache.

Thankfully, I closed the door behind me, groped my way back to the public area of Brocklesby Hall, and slipped out the front door. No one saw me leave.

I drove home with the car windows open. I got rained on, but the fresh air smelled wonderful.

When I got home, the telephone was off the hook, a sure sign someone had been trying to call me. Samantha doesn't like the sound of the phone ringing, so she knocks off the receiver and then tells it how annoyed she is. Most of my friends have by now gotten used to hearing unearthly yowls at the other end of the line. I replaced the receiver and thought about scolding Sam, but there was little point. Even on the doubtful chance that she would understand why she was being scolded, it would make not the slightest difference in her behavior. Some cats can sometimes be taught. Not Sam; her goal in life is to get her people properly trained.

I made a cup of tea and sat down, dissatisfied, with my morning's list in front of me. It looked even less helpful now than it had then. Mrs. Butler? She'd denied working late any night My questions had produced no reaction but mild irritation, and that only, it seemed, because they'd interrupted her work. I'd done nothing either to confirm her as a likely suspect or to eliminate her from contention. Her name stayed, but with a very large question mark beside it.

I sighed and considered Mrs. Hawes. She was an unpleasant woman, with an abrasive personality. She, of all people, would have had a splendid opportunity to doctor Mrs. Lathrop's herbal tea. But she would have had no reason to be abroad on a bicycle before dawn. Scratch Mrs. Hawes. I was convinced the bicycle woman held the key to Mrs. Lathrop's murder.

Was that a stupid conviction? Was it just as likely that the woman was a blameless passerby who would turn out to have been on her way to market with turnips in the bicycle's carrier baskets? It was entirely possible; Thursday was one of Sherebury's market days. And the fact of the market traffic, I realized with a groan, was going to make the job of the police much harder. Anyone could have been out on a bicycle for legitimate reasons.

But if our particular woman on a bicycle was irrelevant, we had reached a dead end. I would cling to my bicycle woman. A slim hope is better than none.

I had reached that stage, and had let my tea get cold, when the phone rang. I beat Sam to it by a whisker.

“Ah, you're home, my dear. Samantha answered last time. We had quite a lengthy conversation, if you can call it conversation when one party does all the talking.”

“Or screaming. I hope nobody was close to the phone on your end.”

“As a matter of fact, Betty placed the call for me. She is now convinced my home is inhabited by banshees, or whatever the Kenyan equivalent may be. What have you been up to, gadding about and letting cats answer the phone?”

“Only one cat,” I pointed out. “Emmy never pays the slightest attention. I suppose we really should get an answering machine. I've been chasing wild geese, to answer your question. And running up blind alleys and barking up wrong trees.”

“Sounds like quite a lot of exercise.”

“Not to mention going around in circles. Has your day been any more productive than mine?”

“I'm beginning to get a much fuller picture of operations here, and frankly, they're quite exciting. I want to talk about the whole thing in detail when I get home, but I really called because Derek told me some interesting things a couple of hours ago.”

“Oh? They haven't traced the bicycle woman, have they?”

“Unfortunately, not yet. They've eliminated a number of possible sources of information, speaking of those blind alleys of yours, but they're still trying. However, they've also been looking into the recent movements of Claude.”

“And?”

“It seems that Claude had managed to land himself in important trouble in London. He was in serious debt to some very nasty lads indeed. Gambling and drugs, apparently, although our sources are somewhat cagey about that. However, they all said that he was quite literally a marked man unless he came up with a fair sum of money in a week or so.”

“Good heavens! So you think he was killed by gangsters, and it didn't have anything to do with Brocklesby Hall, after all? But then why was he pushed into the lake, and—?”

“Hold hard! There you go again! No, his deadline was the end of this week, and the wide boys are odd about sticking to that kind of agreement. They'll usually give a man exactly as much rope as they say they will. No, the interesting thing is what Claude was saying to his mates.”

“I give up.”

“He told them he wasn't worried. He was going to get the money from his mum.”

“But, Alan! What kind of money are we talking about?”

“Somewhere around ten thousand pounds.”

“Alan, that's preposterous! Where on earth would Mrs. Lathrop come up with that kind of money?”

“Where, indeed?”

W
e tossed it around for a few minutes, but neither of us had any inspiration. I decided not to mention the jewelry I had seen. Certainly the police had seen it, too, and I didn't want to have to explain how I knew about it. I was sure, anyway, that it wasn't worth anything like ten thousand, even at full value, let alone from a pawnshop or secondhand jeweler's.