The Governess (28 page)

‘Oh, Miss Unwin,’ he had said, ‘you’re back. ‘You’re back. Hip, hip, hoo – Oh, Miss Unwin, are you ill? You’re all blood on your arm.’

‘Yes, Pelham, I’m not very well. Can you go down and fetch Mellings and perhaps Mrs Breakspear. They’ll look after me.’

Then she had become yet more confused, seeing only a succession of faces all asking questions which she doubted whether she had properly answered at all. Till at last Sergeant Drewd’s violently checked brown suit had swum into her vision and she had made a huge effort to be coherent enough to explain matters fully to him.

‘Joseph Green, Joseph Green,’ he had said. ‘I’ve had my eye on that fellow ever since we took that cab ride together from Great Scotland Yard the night Mr Thackerton was killed. There was something about the way he said you had been the first to discover the body that never rang true to me. You can’t put much past me in that line, you know. Not very much at all.’

‘No, Sergeant. I am sure no one could.’

Then she had had to explain about Vilkins, since the Sergeant had not up till that moment thought to inquire how it was that someone he had left in a police station cell was back in the house where the murders had taken place.

By that time Mrs Breakspear had bathed her cut arm and had bound it up with clean rags, and soon afterwards she was let go back to her own room where she had contrived to take off Vilkins’s torn and bloody lavender dress and put on her own best grey merino with the tiny trim of lace at its neck.

‘Whoa, whoa,’ she heard the cabby call from his seat in front of them. The swaying growler came to a halt. The Sergeant opened its door, jumped smartly out and then turned and offered her his arm to make her own descent. She took it. She would have liked to have demonstrated her independence by refusing. But she knew that if she did her weakness might very well cause her to stumble and fall.

So, on the Sergeant’s arm, she entered once again the police station, passed through the battered counter in the front office with its jumble of black-bound registers and waited while the uniformed sergeant on duty there was given Sergeant Drewd’s account of the successful conclusion of his inquiry.

Then they went, as before, along the broad, bare-boarded corridor to the lobby guarding the station’s cells. The same constable was sitting at the table there, still painfully inscribing names in his
big book, though doing so now by the light of a single stub of candle in a lantern.

For a moment Miss Unwin believed she had somehow slipped backwards in time and was about to go through all her experiences of the day once again, to hear Mrs Fitzmaurice wake from sleep and introduce herself with such imperious formality, to learn about the laying-out woman, Mrs Childerwick, and the concealed quartern of gin, to be questioned by Superintendent Heavitree and asked once more to make a full confession, to conceive her plan with Vilkins and to go back, head concealed under her big straw bonnet, along the same corridor that lay in front of her, calling out in her voice of old Tm wanted back at me place, they’ll create something terrible

Then she pulled herself together. No, these thoughts had entered her dazed head for no better reason than that the poor constable labouring away at his writing had to stay on duty for long, long hours.

She hardly listened to Sergeant Drewd telling the fellow that he wanted to see ‘as a matter of urgency’ the prisoner in the end cell.

Then the constable was lumbering ahead of them, lantern held high, and by its dull orangey light she was able to make out, at last, stretched full length on the bench at the back of the little end cell, dressed in her own clothes so that it might have been herself lying there, her friend of old, Vilkins, comfortably snoring.

And, as the constable set down his lantern to unlock the door, she saw the mug of cocoa and slice of bread that ought to have been her own frugal supper still standing untouched just inside the bars. Vilkins must not have dared to take them for fear their deception would be given away.

‘Vilkins, Vilkins,’ she called as the cell door swung open.

She rushed in and flung herself down beside her friend.

‘Vilkins, it’s me, Unwin,’ she said, careless altogether now whether the Sergeant knew of her lowly origins or not. ‘Vilkins, I’ve come back to take you out of here. It’s all right, Vilkins dear. Everything’s all right now. Joseph caught me in Simmons’s room and he tried to kill me too, and they know now he murdered Mr

Thackerton and Simmons as well. They’ve already brought him here to a cell. It’s all as right again as right can be.’

Vilkins sat up, shaking her head to clear it. She scratched at her big red dab of a nose.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that ain’t so bad then, is it?’

This electronic edition published in July 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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eISBN: 9781448202904

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