An Unwilling Accomplice (27 page)

A niggling question occurred to me. Had Major Findley, whoever he was, begun his Army career as a private soldier? It would be too farfetched unless Miss Neville had given him his present rank. Bad enough to marry a man without title or standing. She would draw the line below the rank of officer. New uniforms could be ordered from a military tailor in London. They must have become accustomed to supplying proper gear to wounded men.

But Matt wasn’t to be swayed in his opinion that the soldier he’d seen was not the Major.

“What do you think became of him?” Simon asked.

“I can’t say. He didn’t look to me as if he could drag himself off the road. But then I don’t know how long he’d been there. He could have come to his senses.” There was doubt in his voice. “What’s more, when I bent over him to see if he was alive, he didn’t smell of beer.”

“Do you think some other Good Samaritan had come along and found him?”

Matt faced Simon squarely. “I was hoping so,” he said. “I didn’t care to leave him there. But what was I to do?” He glanced at his father, as if asking for reassurance. “My cousin’s in France,” he added in explanation for his concern. “I’d have wanted to help him.”

“You did the right thing,” Simon told him. “If I can find this man, I’d see that he gets medical care. The question is, how long had he been living rough?”

“Not around here,” the elder Warren put in. “Someone would have stumbled across signs. What appears to be empty countryside to you is as familiar to us as our own hands. Lads roam the hills, a man will walk off a mood across them, and someone has an eye to where the sheep are. That’s how we managed to find the Major when he took one of his spells.”

Yet someone had been lying there on the road outside Lower Dysoe. And he had to have come from somewhere. He’d had to have gone somewhere. He hadn’t simply disappeared.

And that reminded me of something else.

“When the Major was lost, did he ever say anything to you when you found him?”

“Say anything?” Warren considered the question. “He was always a quiet ’un. I doubt I’ve heard him put three words together. But Hancock, the greengrocer here in Upper Dysoe, told me he wept the first time he was found. Hancock reckoned it was the relief.”

But
was
it relief? Or agonizing disappointment that his escape hadn’t succeeded?

“Is there a priest in the Dysoes?” I asked. “I haven’t seen a church.”

“The vicar comes over from Biddington if he’s sent for,” Warren answered. “Before the war we talked about a church here in Upper Dysoe, but Mrs. Neville discouraged it. And the Bishop as well. A waste of money that could be put to better use, he said. We’d never have a congregation of a size to pay for the building of it.” He grinned. “
Mrs
. Neville, now, she said the Lord wouldn’t approve of taking perfectly good farmland for His house. Better to put it to the plow and feed the hungry.”

We were going nowhere with our questions, and the Warrens were eager to return to their work.

Simon thanked them, and we left.

As we drove back toward Biddington, on impulse I said, “Please? Can we stop here? I’d like to speak to the greengrocer. Hancock?”

“About Findley?”

“Yes. There’s something wrong in that house, Simon. There’s a second note, I’ve told you.”

“We aren’t here to save Findley, Bess.”

“I know. But this time the message came to me. I can’t ignore it.”

“Time’s growing short. If we’re to have any hope of finding Wilkins, we must concentrate on that.”

“I’d just feel much better knowing what happened the first time Findley left that house.”

With a sigh of frustration, Simon found a widening in the road where he could turn the motorcar. We drove back into Upper Dysoe and walked into the shop, next but one to the baker’s. A young woman was inspecting the rows of parsnips, cabbages, carrots and onions, peppers and beets, setting them to rights after the day’s marketgoers had picked them over.

She looked up, and when we asked for Mr. Hancock, we were told he was in the back of the shop. And we found him there, lifting an assortment of gourds out of a basket.

He was a tall, thin man, with tufts of graying hair for eyebrows. He started to say something, realized we were custom and not his assistant, and rose to his feet as if he were unfolding.

Glancing toward the young woman in the front of the shop, he asked if he could assist us.

I tried to capture that radiant smile of Diana’s, the one that opened all doors to her. It wasn’t very successful. I’m not Diana.

“I’ve acted as nurse for Maddie when he treated Major Findley. We’re concerned about his knee, and whether he will attempt to wander again. Please, could you tell me how you found him the first time he—er—left the house unattended?”

Hancock frowned. “It was odd, I can tell you that. He’d walked as far as he could, then crawled until he gave out. We’d been told he was off his head sometimes, from the war. When I came up to him, he lay so still I thought he might have fallen and knocked himself senseless. I knelt beside him and spoke his name. It was all of a minute before he lifted his face from his arms and looked at me. I could see he’d been weeping. I asked if he was all right, telling him I was there to take him home, if he could manage to walk just a little way with me. ‘How far to Dorset?’ he said. ‘Could I walk that far if I tried?’ I thought he was making light of the distance. ‘Not today, sir,’ I said to him. ‘Another day, perhaps.’ We managed to reach the road, where I had my cart waiting. Then he asked me if I’d post a letter, if he could bring it to me. I said, ‘If you ask one of the servants, sir, they’ll see to it.’ He just looked at me, and that was that.”

The first attempt to contact Sister Hammond? Even then it had had to be forwarded from Dorset. Had he given up hope? And who posted it for him? Violet? I didn’t think so. Mrs. Neville? She clearly didn’t approve of the Major, and she might well help him leave that house.

“Poor man,” I said aloud, thinking how desperate he must be. “And what did Miss Neville have to say when he was safely returned to her?”

“She was angry with him. And more than a little frightened that he wouldn’t be found, I should think. I don’t like to speak ill of my betters, Sister, but it was all she could do not to roar at him. And then she calmed herself down enough to ask if he had hurt himself, if she should send for Maddie.”

“How did you manage to find him?” Simon asked.

“That was odd too. I thought I saw him coming over one of the Knobs. The hills that close us in. I left the cart there and then, climbing up to cut his track. But he wasn’t there. I had to walk another quarter mile before I found him.”

“Are you certain it was the Major you saw coming over the hill?”

“Who else could it be? There was only one man lost that day.”

But another man at a distance might pass as the Major.

We thanked him and left.

Simon, speaking softly so that his voice wouldn’t carry as we walked out of the greengrocer’s shop, said, “I’ve never seen you smile like that before.”

“My best imitation of Diana,” I answered ruefully.

“Dear God.” He grinned in spite of himself.

“I haven’t asked you what you learned in Stratford. Or wherever it was you managed to find a telephone.”

Simon shook his head. “It was a complicated business. That’s why it took so long. Apparently Major Findley was reported killed in action. Much later, that was amended to missing. Four months ago, he was discovered in a clinic in Dorset that treated severe head wounds. He had no idea who he was. But another officer who came there recognized him and gave him a name again. With that information the doctors were able to help him more in two months than they had in all the weeks before that. His memory was sketchy at first, and then it began to build on each new discovery. This according to Dorset. I telephoned them after I’d spoken to the War Office.”

“Then what happened to him?”

“The officer who recognized him must have told friends in London, and one day Miss Neville appeared on the hospital doorstep, so to speak, and convinced the doctors that a few weeks in familiar surroundings might do wonders for recovery. The Major was of two minds, but the staff convinced him to agree.”

“And so Major Findley is who he says he is—or more to the point, who Miss Neville says he is.”

“That’s right. My guess is that he got here to Upper Dysoe and changed his mind. Perhaps Miss Neville tried to convince him that they’d been close before the war, and he couldn’t remember, didn’t believe her, or had a change of heart.”

“Then we’re left with the soldier Matt saw. And the one that confused Mr. Hancock.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I’d very much like to ask Major Findley. The question is, will Miss Neville allow it?”

“I’ll brave her displeasure if you will.”

But when we arrived at the house, the gates were open, and when we used the heavy knocker, it was Violet who came to the door.

I asked for Miss Neville. Violet informed me that the mistress had gone riding. I asked for Mrs. Neville, but she had gone to sit with a tenant’s ill wife.

“It’s actually the Major I’ve come to see,” I told the housemaid, indicating my kit, which I’d taken with me when I left the motorcar. There wasn’t much in it to attend a wounded man, but Violet wasn’t to know that.

“This way, Miss.”

She showed us up the stairs, although I knew the way, and then left us to enter the Major’s room alone. “He no longer needs a sitter in the morning,” she said in explanation. “The fever’s gone.”

“Very good news,” I responded, nodding.

Simon stayed by the door as I approached the bed. The Major had fallen asleep. I called softly, “Sergeant Wilkins?” And then when he didn’t answer, I changed that to “Major Findley?” And still he didn’t answer.

But as soon as I touched his arm, his eyes flew wide and he stared at me, and then the expression in them changed from recognition to suspicion, as if he’d never seen me before. His brows twitching together, he finally said, “You came with Maddie.” It was a statement not a question. “I thought at first you were someone else.”

“Did you?” I asked with a friendly smile as I stepped away from the bed. “Who were you expecting?”

He cleared his throat, trying to sit up. I added pillows behind his back, to make it easier. “Sorry, I must have been asleep.” He gestured to the powders beside the bed. “They’re fairly strong.”

As I listened to his voice, I had to accept the evidence of my own ears. Unless he was very clever at disguising it, this man couldn’t possibly be Sergeant Wilkins. Not that I had doubted Simon or what he’d learned. It was just the final proof.

“I’ve come to ask how you’re feeling,” I began.

“Better, more’s the pity,” he answered sourly. “You should have let me die.”

“I hardly think you were in danger of dying,” I said briskly. “But you might have lost that leg.”

He didn’t answer me, glancing instead across the room toward Simon. “Have you come for me, Sergeant-Major?”

“No, sir. I’ve been seconded by the Colonel to accompany Sister Crawford,” he answered smartly.

“More’s the pity.”

I didn’t know how much time we had, and so I got to the point rather quickly. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Major, but we’ve misplaced one of our patients. Do you remember the first time when you were—er—lost? Mr. Hancock, the greengrocer in Upper Dysoe, found you on the hillside and helped you reach his cart on the road below.”

“Yes,” he snapped, as if he preferred not to think about that day. “Why are you reminding me of it?”

“I thought perhaps you might have seen another soldier in the hills that day. Perhaps on the skyline? In the distance? I don’t believe you crossed paths.”

His quick response was no. But I read the truth in his eyes before he looked away. There
had
been someone else.

“Did you think afterward that it was a hallucination? But at the time, you might have believed for an instant that you were back in France.” It was possible, of course, that he believed the other man was escaping as well, and didn’t want to betray him. Had they spoken? I would give much to know. But I didn’t think the Major would tell me. His next words proved me right.

“No. There was no one to see, I tell you. I was alone.”

“He’s ill, Major. If you’ve seen him, it would be a kindness to help us find him.”

He turned back to me. “Why?”

I couldn’t tell him the truth, not about London and the King, about the Iron Bridge and the murder. “He’s violent. He’s already hurt someone.”

“How did he get away? Knock down one of the orderlies? Reach the road and beg a lift while the hospital was in an uproar? Or did he have help?”

“He must have done,” I said, wanting him to go on talking about this man he hadn’t seen. “He wasn’t well enough to go far on his own.”

He lay back then, lifting an arm up across his face, shutting me out. “As I should have done,” he said under his breath.

I looked for a way to engage his interest. “Your cases are quite different, Major. He wanted to find someone, and he refused to wait until he was fully healed. You, on the other hand, know precisely why it is you want to return to Dorset.”

“Dorset?” He laughed harshly. “I’d go to hell if it would help.”

Still standing by the door, Simon warned, “We haven’t much time.”

Nodding to Simon to let him know I’d heard, I asked the Major, “What’s wrong, Major Findley?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said, suddenly tired.

I could hear someone walking down the passage. Simon was right, we must go. But I risked one more question.

“Will you let me help you?”

“I don’t trust anyone. Not any longer.”

“But you sent a message to me, the last time I was here. By Violet. The upstairs maid.”

“No. Never. I swear it.” His voice was firm now, as if he’d heard the footsteps as well.

“I’m so sorry. I’d hoped that you could see your way clear to help this missing soldier.” I walked to the door, then hesitated, hoping he might decide to call me back.

He didn’t. He was listening to hear where the footsteps had gone. And so Simon and I went out into the passage, shutting the door. We made our way down the stairs, and no one stopped us as we left the house.