The China Governess (27 page)

‘Yes, she did. I knew I'd frightened her but I never expected that. The next morning she vanished. I thought she was hiding so I didn't say anything but looked after the baby. I was so busy and so happy with him that I kept putting off mentioning that she'd gone. Then, when Mr. Eustace practically owned to him, naming him like that, I didn't bother any more. I made up my mind that she was a maid sent down to bring him to me.' She paused and took a defiant breath. ‘If you don't believe me I can't help it. But I'm not a liar.'

‘No,' said Luke, grinning at her. ‘You're not dull enough! I believe you. What about the kid's clothes? I don't suppose they were anything to write home about, but didn't you keep anything? A bootee or a bit of embroidery or anything at all?'

She shook her head. ‘The only thing I kept that Timmy had when he came to me was most unsuitable for a baby,' she said. ‘It was a cotton head-scarf tucked under his shawl. It was a lovely pale blue. Blue for a boy. It had little jumping white lambs on it and writing made of daisy-chains. “Happy and Gay” it said. All over it. It was just my meat and I've got it somewhere and I'll show it to you, but it wasn't special. There were hundreds of scarves like it in Woolies that year.'

‘If you're certain of that, don't bother.' He shook his head regretfully. ‘What's your observation like?' He had taken his worn black wallet from his pocket and was looking for something amid the bursting contents. ‘This is a curio in itself,' he said to Campion. ‘They wouldn't let me borrow the file of course, but the photographic section got me these in fourteen minutes flat.' He produced
two small photographs of a woman, one full face, one profile, and handed them to Mrs. Broome who wore the expectant expression of a player awaiting his turn in a quiz game. A single glance, however, wiped everything but dismay from her face.

‘Oh, doesn't she look awful!' she said aghast. ‘She's not as bad as that, not even now. What are these for? Her passport?'

‘You could call it that,' Luke said dryly. ‘Is it she?'

‘Oh, yes, I can see it's her. They're not as bad as that.'

‘Do you remember the name she gave you?'

‘She didn't give me any name. If she had I should have remembered it and it would have saved a lot of trouble.'

‘Wasn't it on the pink ticket?'

‘I had no time for tickets! You have no idea what it was like. We had hundreds of mummies and kiddie-widdies in the house – hundreds! All wanting – my goodness! – all sorts of things.

‘What did you call her?'

‘Me?'

‘Yes, when you were getting down to the intimate details. “Ducky”?'

‘No, I should never have said that. I'm very particular how I talk.' She was thinking, casting her mind back as he was persuading her to. ‘I'm not sure, but I think I called her “Agnes”. She must have told me that was her name if I did. It's not a favourite of mine.'

‘All right, don't worry. Have you ever heard of a Mrs. Leach?'

‘No. Is that who she says she is?'

The superintendent ignored the question. He was looking at some scribbled notes on a sheet torn from a telephone pad.

‘I understand,' he said at last, ‘that you told Mr. Campion here that you didn't have a chat with her in the cemetery. It was a chance meeting and although you thought you knew her you didn't place her until you were on a bus coming home. Did any word pass between you at all?'

‘None.' With the recollection of Mrs. Telpher's reaction to her habit of addressing inanimate objects fresh in her mind, Nanny Broome was cautious, sticking carefully to the letter of the truth
‘I might have said “excuse me” as I passed her to put the wreath on the grave, but nothing more.'

He nodded acceptance. ‘You say she was kneeling?'

‘I might have been wrong. She might have been just bending, looking at the flowers.'

Luke scratched his clipped black curls. ‘What was she doing there at all, do you know? Was she just ghouling about among the graves, or pinching flowers, or what? I mean was this an absoltely chance meeting, do you think, or was she interested in that one particular grave?'

‘Oh, of course it was our grave she was looking at!' The idea of any other explanation seemed to astound her. ‘I thought “Ah, there's somebody who's heard the talk!”'

Mr. Campion raised a warning hand but he was too late. Luke had heard.

‘What talk?' he demanded, looking from one to the other of them with the same suspicious flicker.

‘Miss Saxon fell in the kitchen just before she had her fatal heart attack.' Mr. Campion made the explanation carefully. ‘She appears to have been listening at a door and when Timothy Kinnit pulled it open suddenly, she fell in. Basil Toberman has been making a point of the incident. He's inordinately jealous of the young man.'

‘Oh the tale isn't
true
,' said the irrepressible Mrs. Broome airily. ‘I was there and I saw what happened so there's no question about that. Mr. Eustace hushed it up because she was a governess – not because of Mr. Tim.'

‘Hushed it up?'

‘Played it down.' Mr. Campion spoke with more firmness than one might have supposed possible in one normally so casual.

‘All right,' Luke conceded but he was still interested. ‘Why is he cagey about governesses?'

‘Because they had one who did a murder.' Mrs. Broome was enjoying herself. As soon as Luke noticed it he calmed considerably.

‘A hundred and twenty years ago,' murmured Mr. Campion testily. ‘Miss Thyrza Caleb and her Chair of Death.'

‘Oh?' The superintendent was delighted. ‘It's the same Kinnit family, is it? We used to have a book of famous trials in the house
when I was a kid, illustrated with dreadful old woodcuts. I remember Thyrza with her white face and streaming hair. There was something funny about that story. Wasn't there a postscript?'

‘I never heard it,' said Campion. ‘I missed the crime entirely. It was new on me when Toberman told me the other day.'

‘Oh, no. It's famous in its way.' Luke was still searching his memory. ‘She committed suicide, I think.' He shook his head as some of the details remained obstinately shadowy and turned a broadly smiling face to Mrs. Broome. ‘Well, anyway, you got it in and startled the poor copper,' he said. ‘You're old Bean-spilling-Bertha herself, aren't you?'

Nanny Broome was not amused. As usual when the joke was against her she made every effort to get her own back.

‘I've got nothing to hide,' she muttered, jerking up her chin. ‘Not like some people!'

Luke's interest was captured despite his better judgement. ‘Out with it,' he commanded. ‘Who are you telling tales on now?'

‘No one. I've got none to tell, but Miss Saxon had. Painting her face, dyeing her hair, listening at doors, and over sixty years old if she was a day! What sort of governess was she?'

‘Better than no one,' said Luke, flatly. ‘You can't catch me with that sort of stuff.'

‘But she had a secret. She was always just about to tell it to me. She'd keep leading up to it and then being put off, or Mrs. Telpher would call her.' Nanny Broome was labouring her points a little. There was a touch of desperation in her bid for drama. ‘She told me herself, only the day before she died: “I'm under a great strain” she said.'

Mr. Campion took it upon himself to see that no more harm was done.

‘Miss Saxon was driving the car when the accident occurred that resulted in the tragic condition of the child who has been brought over here to hospital,' he said. ‘It has been unconscious for two years.'

‘Oh Lord!' Luke's sympathetic grimace was lost in Mrs. Broome's amazed reception of the news.

‘Oh, so that was it! Well! No wonder she wanted to share a
feeling of guilt like that, and why she seemed more upset about the poor kiddie-widdie even than its own suffering mother.' She paused and added brightly, ‘and why she dyed her hair.'

‘Eh?' Luke's eyes were sparkling. ‘Go on,' he said. ‘I dare you.'

‘Because she knew she was too old to have been driving the car, of course,' said Mrs. Broome, gathering her gloves and purse. ‘And now if you don't need me any longer, sir, I'll be getting back. There'll be some clearing up to do and Miss Julia is staying the night, so I want to pop a nice hot bottle in her bed. Just to comfort her. She's very young and no Mummie.'

Luke got up. ‘Very well, be off,' he said. ‘Thank you for your help. I don't suppose I shall have to call on you again.'

‘Oh, I'm very glad.' Disappointment was evident in every line of her body and her lashes made half circles on her cheeks. ‘I shouldn't like to have to give evidence in court.'

‘God forbid that indeed!' said Luke, ducking his chin in to his neck. ‘Run along, I'll send you a box of chocolates one day.'

She flashed a smile at him which was as gay and provocative as seventeen itself. ‘I don't eat them,' she proclaimed, triumphantly. ‘I'm slimming.'

The last they saw of her was her seat, wagging as happily as if it carried a tail, as she trotted off into the shadows.

Luke laughed softly. ‘It's a crying shame one could never risk her in the witness box,' he observed. ‘She's got all the answers. It must have been tremendous fun being brought up by a woman like that. You'd know all the important things about the whole sex before you were seven.'

Mr. Campion put out his hand for the photographs and studied them curiously. They showed a bedraggled sprite of a woman with a slack mouth and huge vacant eyes, who yet managed to convey a hint of cunning. She was unusually dishevelled, he suspected, which was what had so shocked Mrs. Broome.

‘What about Agnes Leach's record?'

Luke shrugged. ‘She's a type and she has the usual long silly history. Shoplifting, soliciting, minor fraud. Our welfare people suffer from her. They get her job after job and each time she reforms
completely for a couple of weeks until something else catches her attention and – whoops! She's flat on her kisser again.'

‘I suppose Mrs. Broome did recognize these photographs?'

‘I'd take my dying oath she did.' Luke spoke with the conviction of long experience. ‘She recognized her in the cemetery and these confirmed it.'

Mr. Campion passed them back. ‘What was Agnes Leach doing there? Looking for an address?'

‘I should think so. “Looking at the flowers on the grave” suggests hunting among them for florists' labels to me. Somehow or other – almost certainly from Miss Tray at the cobbler's shop – she heard that the young man who was making the awkward inquiries was due at the funeral of someone called Saxon, and that there was an advertisement about it in
The Times
newspaper. No address was given in the paper but the place of burial was mentioned so she went there.' He shook his dark head. ‘In my experience it's almost impossible to underestimate anything which Agnes and her associates are likely to know for certain. They snap up bits of unrelated information and make a tale of them. They knew the name Stalkey, hence the destruction of the flat and the fire at the office, but apparently they didn't know the name Kinnit. The chance of Agnes remembering it, if ever she heard it on her brief visit to the country, is remote. She is a simple defective. He, of course, is quite a different caper.'

‘Ah,' said Mr. Campion, blinking behind his spectacles. ‘At last we come to the dark figure in the wood pile, the lighter of fires and smasher up of flats.'

‘Slasher of mail bags and dresses in the cinema, burner of bus seats, and at least three knife attacks on girls who ought to have known better than to be out with him.' Luke spoke without venom. ‘He's a problem child,' he added unnecessarily.

‘Agnes's son?'

The superintendent leaned back, tipping his chair, and prepared to enjoy himself. ‘She says not. To prove it he has a birth certificate and the marriage lines of his parents. An almost unheard-of possession in their vicinity! According to Agnes his name is Barry
Comish. Certainly his reputed father appears to have done what he could for him.'

‘Stap me!' murmured Mr. Campion, who permitted himself unlikely expletives when really shaken. ‘So that's it.' He was silent for a moment considering the ramifications of the new position. ‘Tell me,' he said at last, ‘had Cornish any idea of the true story himself?'

‘None at all. He accepted Barry meekly. It was only this morning that Miss Aicheson woke him to tell him a tale about Timothy's arrival at Angevin which was quite obviously the other half of one he had already heard from Agnes's friends about the other boy. Agnes never invents more than she needs, you see. That's the most dangerous thing about her.'

‘Yes. It would be. How did Cornish take the discovery that he had been swindled, virtually blackmailed, all these years by some wretched woman who'd pinched his son's papers?'

‘He didn't take it,' said Luke slowly. ‘He's an honest chap and he realized that Barry was probably behind the violence, so he came to me acting on a moral compulsion. I've got the impression that he's tickled to death with Timothy, who seems to be very like him, but do you know I don't believe he'll ever attempt to own him to disown the other.'

Mr. Campion sighed. ‘Poor man,' he said. ‘He sees his great sacrifice rejected by the gods and so, no doubt, all the Misses Eumenides let loose again to plague him.'

Luke eyed his friend curiously.

‘What a funny chap you are, Campion,' he said. ‘I told him that he was clinging to a phoney cross. Also of course he's a perishing official. He can't bring himself to believe that there isn't something sacred about a certificate!'

‘Let me get this absolutely straight for the sake of the record.' Mr. Campion was diffident as usual. ‘Your suggestion is that Agnes Leach left Timothy with Mrs. Broome but retained his papers?'