The Governess (24 page)

‘Now, I’m sorry to hear you say that, my dear. And I’m not sure that I even believe it’s true. You tell it all to me just as it happened, and I’ll see if I can’t show you that perhaps you didn’t act in quite such a bad light after all.’

‘Superintendent –’

‘Now, my dear girl. No anger, I beg of you. No shouting. That sort of thing doesn’t become a young lady. Not at all. Now –’

But now it was Miss Unwin’s turn to interrupt.

‘Young lady?’ she said. ‘You call me a young lady. Do you know, Mr Superintendent, just how much of a young lady I am, or just how little of one? Hasn’t your precious Sergeant Drewd found that out yet?’

The kindly glow in Superintendent Heavitree’s eyes was replaced at once by a long look of cool shrewdness.

‘So that’s the way of things, is it?’ he said.

He shook his head.

‘You know,’ he went on, ‘it’s astonishing how often something of that sort turns up in a murder case. You wouldn’t think the bounds of society are broken as often as they are. You’d think, if you hadn’t had my sad experience, that people stayed in the station in life in which it had pleased the Almighty to place them. But, no. Time and again I’ve come across something like this. I must see that Drewd acquires the full particulars. They’ll be needed at the trial.’

‘But, Mr Superintendent,’ Miss Unwin said, her blood up. ‘Whatever my origins, I did not murder Mr William Thackerton. Nor did I murder Mrs Thackerton’s maid, Simmons. What proof that I did has Sergeant Drewd obtained?’

‘I am sorry to find you taking that tone, my girl,’ the Superintendent answered. ‘I am sorry indeed. But, since you ask, I’ll tell you. The Sergeant, who is as keen an investigator as any in the Detective Department, has obtained, firstly, a cambric handkerchief with your initials embroidered on it stained with blood.’

‘And where did he obtain that handkerchief?’ Miss Unwin
demanded. ‘A handkerchief which I have already agreed belongs to myself. Where did he get it?’

‘He got it, young woman, from where it might have been expected to be. From where you had hidden it. In the coal-scuttle in the room next to where you killed that poor soul Simmons. In among the sea-coals which you might well have believed would have been tipped on to the fire in that invalid chamber and burnt, except that with the particularly hot weather of the past few days for once the invalid did not require a fire.’

In Mrs Thackerton’s coal-scuttle, Miss Unwin thought. So that was what those little glinting black specks she had noticed had been. Coal dust. So her handkerchief, stained with blood – But with whose blood? Could it have been with Simmons’s own? –had been placed in that coal-scuttle. And found there by whom? Not by Sergeant Drewd himself. He had told her that ‘a reliable and public-spirited person’ had brought the handkerchief to him.

‘Well, if my handkerchief was found where you say, Mr Superintendent, then I tell you that it was put there by someone who wished to implicate me in the crime, or who wished to injure me. Who was it who brought the handkerchief to Sergeant Drewd?’

Miss Unwin already had her suspicions, suspicions of the person who had already shown his wish to injure her. She waited with impatience while the Superintendent consulted some sheets of close-written paper he had pulled from an inner pocket of his comfortable grey tweed suit. He turned over two or three of them. Then he looked up.

‘That handkerchief was brought to Sergeant Drewd by one Mary Wilkins or Vilkins, second housemaid at No 3 Northumberland Gardens,’ he said.

For a moment Miss Unwin felt as if the grey scrubbed boards beneath her chair had split apart and sent her tumbling to the nether regions.

Vilkins. Vilkins betray her. Vilkins play the Dirtyguts trick on her at the instigation of Sergeant Drewd. Her childhood companion, her friend when friendship was the only thing either of them had had in the whole world. It was unbelievable. It was impossible.

Then, yes, she thought, it is impossible. Quite impossible.

‘Superintendent,’ she said, ‘I am afraid I do not believe you.’

Superintendent Heavitree shrugged his massive shoulders.

‘It’s written here, plain as plain in Drewd’s report,’ he said.

He put his finger on the sheet in front of him and traced out the words.

‘At or about ten-thirty a.m. the second housemaid, one Mary Wilkins or Vilkins, came to me carrying a coal-scuttle which I had previously observed in the sitting-room appertaining to Mrs Thackerton, widow of the deceased. In that scuttle, closely attached to a large piece of sea-coal at the bottom, I observed a cambric handkerchief with a reddish or brownish stain upon it, which I later ascertained to be blood. I asked the said Wilkins or Vilkins under what circumstances she had made her discovery. She answered that while she was cleaning the aforesaid room she had occasion to notice that the coal-scuttle was not full. Wishing to remedy this, she requested Joseph Green, second footman, who was present –’

‘Stop,’ said Miss Unwin.

The Superintendent looked up.

‘You asked me to give you the full particulars, my girl,’ he said.

‘Yes, and I understand now how that handkerchief got into the scuttle. Joseph Green put it there.’

Superintendent Heavitree shook his head.

‘Come, miss,’ he said. ‘That’s nonsense. How could Joseph Green have got hold of your handkerchief, the handkerchief you have more than once admitted to be yours, and got blood on to it? Come now, that was the blood of the murdered woman, and you must know it to be so.’

‘No,’ said Miss Unwin.

The answer had come to her in a blessed moment of illumination. She had suddenly seen herself in the basement of No 3, had seen herself there on one of the days long ago they seemed, when in her first weeks in the house she had ventured into the kitchen quarters and had noticed, hung to acquire a proper gamey flavour, Mr William Thackerton’s favourite dish, a brace of hares. The blood that dripped from them had been collected in little bowls hung from their necks, and even after Mr Thackerton’s death hare had still been served regularly. She had been given a left-over leg
of hare for her supper on the very night that Simmons had been murdered. Yes, Joseph would have had access to a convenient supply of fresh blood.

‘No, Mr Superintendent, the blood on my handkerchief is by no means necessarily that of poor Simmons. It could well be from any meat that came into the kitchen. From the blood caught from a hung hare for instance, and hare is a dish served regularly in the house, I can assure you of that.’

She saw from the look on the Superintendent’s face that this was a possibility that had occurred neither to him nor to Sergeant Drewd. But, as plainly, she saw a moment later that he was not going to let such a consideration alter his fixed belief in her guilt.

‘Blood from a hare,’ he said, with clear scorn. ‘You’re telling me, are you, that Joseph Green deliberately splashed a handkerchief of yours with hare’s blood and put it in that coal-scuttle? Now, don’t go making things worse for yourself by wild accusations of that sort. Why should Joseph Green wish to do a thing like that?’

‘Because – Because of the stolen sugar-mice,’ Miss Unwin replied.

But even as she spoke the words she saw how ridiculous the whole story of the sugar-mice and of how she had set the elaborate trap that had caught Joseph would look to the Superintendent’s eyes. It must look absurd, set against the grim reality of murder.

Yet there was nothing else for it but to tell the story, now that she had uttered that give-away phrase. So tell it she did. Even in her own ears it sounded doubly ridiculous now.

‘I see,’ the Superintendent said when she came to a lame end with it. ‘I see. And that is all you have to tell me? All this balderdash, all this nonsense about sugar-mice is supposed to account for Joseph Green stealing one of your handkerchiefs, dipping it in the blood from a hanging hare and then placing it in a coal-scuttle and directing the attention of the young woman Vilkins to it? Is that what you are saying?’

‘Yes, it is,’ Miss Unwin replied.

But she could not bring much conviction to the words.

‘I see. And you go on to claim that you did not murder the maid Simmons?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And that you did not murder Mr William Thackerton?’

‘I did not.’

‘Well then, young woman, suppose you tell me who did commit those two murders. Suppose you tell me that.’

Miss Unwin, presented at long last with the opportunity of putting to a police officer who might listen the facts she had discovered to Mr Arthur Thackerton’s detriment, felt the irony of her situation at its keenest. Superintendent Heavitree might, she felt, have heard what she had to say with sympathy, despite his original conviction of her guilt, had she not just the moment before produced her long, involved and, on the face of it, ridiculously unlikely tale about Joseph, the blood-soaked handkerchief and the stolen sugar-mice.

But after hearing that, after saying in round terms that it was sheer balderdash, what credence would the Superintendent give to her account of Arthur Thackerton’s love-nest in Maida Vale? He would ask her how she had come by the information, and she would have to tell him that she had sent Vilkins as a sort of inquiry agent over to Maida Vale, and go on to retail to him her public-house conversations and her visit with the cats-meat man to the mews to see a gig with leopard-skin seats and milk-white harness.

He was not going to accept very much of that. Yet tell him she must. It was after all, surely, the truth of the matter. It was not herself who had murdered Mr Thackerton and Simmons but someone else under the roof of No 3 Northumberland Gardens. And who could that have been? Just possibly Ephraim Brattle. But that dourly ambitious young man’s account of what had happened the night Mr Thackerton had died she had absolutely believed from the very weight of the adverse circumstances he had freely told her of. Or it could be Mr Arthur, against whom she had certainly collected a great deal of circumstantial evidence. Yes, it must be Mr Arthur, unless there was some altogether unlikely other person whom she had never suspected at all or had hardly suspected, someone apparently out of any consideration but who yet by virtue of some logically unconnected circumstance might, despite all appearances, have turned murderer, Or murderess. But,
no, such a supposition was too far-fetched to be worth a moment’s thought. No, Mr Arthur was the sole person possible.

‘Very well, Mr Superintendent,’ she began, making her voice as steady as she could, ‘you ask me who did commit the two murders, and I will tell you whom I earnestly and sincerely believe it to be. It was

She came to a full stop.

Something had been niggling at her mind during the last stages of this fraught interrogation. Something she had said, or the Superintendent had said, had fired a tiny powder-train inside her head. It had burned steadily on, acknowledged by her only as an irritating distraction, as she had tried first to produce an account of the sugar-mice business that would seem moderately sensible and then to marshal her thoughts to present a case against Mr Arthur persuasive enough to overthrow the Superintendent’s fixed conviction of her own guilt.

That irritating something had burned and fizzled its way along the thin line of powder that had lain ready prepared in her head, little though she was aware of it. And now, suddenly, it had exploded within her.

She knew now, knew past uncertainty, just who, extraordinarily, unexpectedly, had killed William Thackerton and had then gone on for a yet more urgent reason to kill Simmons. She knew just why, in every logical step.

All she lacked, curiously, was a final willingness to name the name.

‘No, Mr Superintendent,’ she said, ‘I am unable, after all, to tell you who the guilty person at No 3 Northumberland Gardens is.’

‘Well, yes, my dear young woman, of course you are. Don’t think now that I hold it against you that you contemplated such a thing. It was very natural, very natural.’

The Superintendent looked at her almost as if she was a dog and he was about to pat her on the head because at the last moment she had not taken the joint of beef off the butcher’s stall.

‘So now,’ he went on, his hand reaching out once more towards the bell on the table in front of him, ‘shall we call in that shorthand-writer and get this business over once and for all?’

‘No, sir,’ said Miss Unwin. ‘I have nothing more to say.’

‘Really? I cannot persuade you? It is for your own good, you know. A full confession is much the best way.’

‘I have nothing to confess.’

Superintendent Heavitree pushed himself lugubriously to his feet.

‘Very well then. We shall bring you up before the magistrates tomorrow morning. They won’t have any doubts about committing you for trial, you know. And then it’ll be the Old Bailey.’

He shook his mutton-chop-whiskered head at her.

‘The Old Bailey,’ he repeated. ‘You won’t like that, you know. Never mind what comes after. You won’t like the Old Bailey at all.’

‘I dare say I shan’t, sir. But it seems I have no alternative.’

‘So hard,’ Superintendent Heavitree murmured. ‘So hard. So convinced in evil, and so young.’

At the door he turned to her once more.

‘Is there nothing I can do for you?’

‘Why, yes, sir,’ Miss Unwin answered. ‘If I am to remain here till the magistrates sit tomorrow morning I would much welcome a change of apparel. Would you be so good as to have a message sent to No 3 Northumberland Gardens. Perhaps the second housemaid, Mary, could come round with what is necessary.’

‘Yes, yes, my girl. I’ll see to that. I’ll see to that. It’s the least I can do. And, remember, if you should change your mind’

‘I do not think I will do that, Mr Heavitree. But thank you for your consideration.’

When Miss Unwin was taken back to the small cell at the far end of the row of women’s accommodation she found that Mrs Fitzmaurice was no longer there. She wondered whether Old Fits’s friend, the laying-out woman, had come in time to smuggle her that quartern of gin before she had been put into one of the communal cells alongside the other drunks and the trollops she was now sober enough not to attack. She hoped she had. She hoped the old bedraggled lady had had something with which to raise her spirits before she had been plunged into such brutally uncongenial surroundings.