The Governess (15 page)

Miss Unwin felt suddenly that all was lost. If this elegant venomous tiny creature really believed that she was the murderer at Northumberland Gardens, or even if she was determined to pretend to believe it, then she was never going to say anything about what Arthur Thackerton had told her. She was not going to admit that he had been deeply in debt because of her or, much less, that she had been pressing him for money to pay off her creditors.

But Miss Unwin did not altogether let misery overwhelm her. Some small part of her mind still worked in its old logical way. A small part that told her that something she had just heard had been somehow wrong. A small question that demanded its answer.

Then she found it. It was the way Rhoda Bond had been
talking. Under pressure the veneer of the ladylike had blistered and peeled. The shrimp-girl, long ago thrust deeply away inside, had been brought to the surface.

And the revelation showed a possible way forward still.

‘Please,’ Miss Unwin said abruptly, ‘please think of it from my point of view. Let me tell you something. I’m not the lady of scant means working as a governess that you’ve probably taken me for. I’m like you. I was never a poor girl in a village by the sea making a living from my shrimp-net, but –’

‘I was not. Where’d you hear that? What damned lies.’

‘There’s no shame in having been what you once were. I’m not ashamed that I was a foundling who came into the world with nothing at all. With less than you even. It’s where you’ve reached to now that counts. That’s what should make you proud, when you look at this room and think you’ve learnt to live in a way as genteel as anybody in the land.’

Rhoda Bond, born under some much less fine a name, did look as Miss Unwin had told her to at the elegant room they were standing in, facing one another. And an expression very different from the hard anger of a moment before came on to her face. Though just what it was compounded of, of pride or doubt or fear, it was hard to say.

But Miss Unwin was not going to let slip the advantage she had gained this time.

‘Yes, we’re two of a kind, you and I,’ she said. ‘Two of a kind. We’re the sort who know what life’s like at the bottom of the heap, and we know how hard it is to fight the way up. And something else. Neither you nor I, if I’m right in what I think, has any intention of sliding back down there again, not if it’s to be helped in any way. So won’t you tell me the truth? When I know it for sure, I’ll be able to see what can be done, for both of us.’

‘The truth? What truth?’

‘Arthur Thackerton, does he have debts because of this house? Were you pressing him for money? And has he said in the last few days that he can pay and will?’

‘There was a telegraph message,’ Rhoda Bond said. ‘It came on the morning after the murder, if you must know. It said he’d pay up after all.’

She flung the words out as if she did not quite know whether she should be doing so or not. But there was one thing more Miss Unwin had to be sure of.

‘And you had been pressing him?’ she asked.

The elegant head framed in its tumbling dark curls tossed upwards in pride.

‘I’d told him if he didn’t pay by next day I’d go to his old father for the money.’

Approaching Northumberland Gardens about an hour later Miss Unwin felt she had only one more hurdle to get over. Sergeant Drewd. Would she be able to tell him what she knew before he had found out her own secret down in the country and become so doubly fixed on the notion of her guilt that he would not even listen to her?

The actual telling of her news to him was something about which she was reasonably confident. She suspected that he had all along been blankly unwilling to consider the new head of the house as a murderer, for all the bravado of his /
can go about it your way or I can go about it my way
at his first encounter with Mr Arthur. But she guessed that, if she could contrive to make him believe that the idea of investigating Mr Arthur’s Maida Vale love nest was his own, then the business would be done in an instant.

Yet would he be there to be cajoled in that way? Or was he still down in the country digging out the circumstances of her own early life like some busy robin unearthing worms from a neat lawn?

However, when Henry opened the door to her ring at the visitors’ bell the Sergeant was standing there in the hall almost as if he had been waiting especially to receive her.

Had he? Was this after all going to be the moment of her arrest?

‘Ah, it is Miss Unwin. The very person.’

Then not a word more.

Miss Unwin realised at once what the object of his silence was. She was now expected to ask, with a display of humility, why it was that she was ‘the very person’. Sergeant Drewd liked nothing better than to be danced attendance on.

Yet the very crudity of his manoeuvre reassured her. Surely the answer to the question she was to put,
Yes, Sergeant, and why, if you please, am I the very person?
could not be
Because, madam, I wish to arrest you on a charge of murder
.

So it was with an inward smile that she asked the Sergeant the exact question he had begged for.

‘Because, madam,’ he replied, with a little jounce of his jockey’s frame, ‘I feel it my duty to communicate to you a piece of important intelligence, and Sergeant Drewd is not the man to shirk his duty.’

‘I am sure that you are not, Sergeant. But, please, what is it that you have such a duty to tell me?’

The Sergeant gave a quick twirl to the pointed ends of his moustache.

‘It is the result of certain investigations I have been making ever since the funeral obsequies of the late Mr William Thackerton.’

‘Indeed? I had noticed your absence from the house.’

‘Absence from the house, yes. Absence from the scene of the crime? Well, now, that’s another matter altogether. Yes, indeed, I don’t think it can be said that Sergeant Drewd was absent from the scene of the crime.’

Miss Unwin repressed her impatience. The Sergeant was certainly creating plenty of difficulties in the way of her learning his ‘important intelligence’. But he had, too, aroused in her a real curiosity. Away from the house but not absent from the scene of the crime, what could he mean? Where had he been? Not, surely, after all down in the country digging out her own little miserable secret?

‘But Sergeant,’ she said, with a touch of sharpness, ‘I should have thought it was your duty to communicate any new intelligence to Mr Arthur Thackerton.’

‘And so I will, miss. So I will. Yet there’s one individual, I believe, who has a prior right to hear it. Yes, one individual. And that individual is yourself. I make no bones about stating that it has been yourself that I have held under the very gravest suspicion from the outset of my investigation. And not without evidence, miss. Not without evidence.’

‘Yes, you saw blood on my dress. Blood that I had not noticed. Blood that had got there when I went to see if I could tell how long Mr Thackerton had been dead.’

‘Yes, indeed. There’s not very much that escapes my eye, I can tell you. Neither in this house, nor in such other places as I see fit
to conduct my inquiries. In places such as the London premises of the Thackerton Patent Steam-moulded Hats Company.’

These last words at least were unexpected.

Inquiries in Mr Thackerton’s office? What concerning the murder could possibly have occurred there? And to judge by the confident twinkle in the Sergeant’s eye his inquiries had not been without success.

‘In Mr Thackerton’s London premises?’

Miss Unwin wished at once she had not echoed the Sergeant’s words in such a simpleton way. Her question immediately put an extra bounce of pleasure into his whole carriage, as if he had a fine piece of horseflesh under him and was heading the field at odds of a hundred to one. But she had been deeply confused by what he had said: it went so contrary to what she had come back to the house determined to tell the Sergeant as soon as she could.

‘Yes, indeed, miss. In Mr Thackerton’s office, and in connection with a certain Mr Ephraim Brattle, confidential clerk to the deceased. As well as having something rather more to do with him.’

Ephraim Brattle.

Miss Unwin’s mind leapt and darted. Ephraim Brattle who had been within the house on the night of the murder. Ephraim Brattle who had been the last person, by his own admission, to have seen William Thackerton alive. The dark-visaged, locomotive-determined person they were all of them used to seeing in the house as often as one night a week before his journeys to the Lancashire manufactory. Mr Thackerton’s confidential clerk. But with something more to do with him than that. What could it possibly be?

Well, doubtless the Sergeant would tell her in his own good time.

But this must mean – the realisation came flooding in on her – that Mr Arthur Thackerton was no longer the sole person who had any real motive for the murder. Whatever it was the Sergeant had found out about Ephraim Brattle it was plainly something that was a reason for his having killed William Thackerton. That much at least had been clear from all the nods and winks.

And if Mr Arthur was no longer the only person with good
reason for having committed the crime, why then the whole tower of suppositions and inferences she had built up about him at such trouble and risk to herself and to Vilkins was all at once a heap of useless rubble. Yes, she had proved Mr Arthur had a far better reason for wanting his father dead than anything the Sergeant or anyone else could know about, but that did not mean she had proved he had actually killed his father.

She had some shreds of logic still left.

But not enough to warn her to put a look of half-admiring inquiry on to her features.

‘So what is it that you have discovered about Mr Brattle, that has suddenly put me out of your reckoning, Sergeant?’ she asked.

A closed look came down over the Sergeant’s features like a descending curtain.

‘Out of my reckoning, miss? Ah now, I don’t think we can go quite as far as that. We in the detective fraternity don’t put people out of our reckoning so very easily. There’s no one in an affair like this that we don’t suspect. From start to finish. From the very start till the moment the black cap goes on Mr Justice’s head at the Old Bailey and sentence is pronounced.’

‘Indeed, Sergeant?’

It crossed Miss Unwin’s mind that she had just been given an excellent opportunity for suggesting to the Sergeant that he ought to be suspecting Mr Arthur Thackerton. But wasn’t the time for that past? What could she tell him now that would make it more likely that Mr Arthur had been the murderer under this roof than that Ephraim Brattle had? Nothing. Nothing.

But what did the Sergeant know about Ephraim Brattle that made him the more likely suspect?

She managed now to put on the air of wheedling weakness that she should have contrived earlier.

‘But you have come to suspect Mr Brattle more than anyone else, Sergeant, haven’t you?’ she said. ‘Won’t you tell me just what your inquiries at the office brought to light?’

‘You may ask, miss. You may ask. But whether you’ll get to know is quite another question.’

Sergeant Drewd was not to be so easily placated once any suggestion had been made about his judgement.

With a quick straightening of his little ramrod back he marched over now to the hall-stand where his brown bowler hat was hanging, took it down with a flourish, set it on his head at a cocky angle and indicated to the quietly waiting Henry that he was ready to leave.

But before Henry had quite got the door open for him he was unable to resist adding just a few words more.

‘Still, if you’ll take my advice, miss, you’ll look in the
Mercury
newspaper tomorrow morning. I dare say you’ll find something of interest there. Dear me, yes, something mighty interesting.’

So Miss Unwin was left with another long period of pricking uncertainty, made endurable only because she was kept busy until Pelham had been seen through the last hours of his day. His velvet suit with the broad lace collar had to be put on for his nightly visit to the drawing-room and the poem he had learnt earlier had to be gone over to make sure he could say it. Then down in the drawing-room a sugar-mouse’s head had to be snapped off and no more – Miss Unwin found herself listening for that grunt of a laugh from the direction of the fireplace and the small fit of coughing that often accompanied it – and then, upstairs, the mouse had to be deposited in its customary place on the landing table, safe from thieving fingers now, and then, with supper finished, it had to meet its end. Next, just one game of Snakes and Ladders. Bath. Then prayers. Finally the night-light had to be lit and a soft good night said.

But at last in the schoolroom Vilkins came up with her mutton chop and pot of tea and she could turn her mind fully to consider how her situation had changed. Vilkins, of course, wanted to know how her expedition to Maida Vale had gone and had to be told about it at length and then, despite the joy at its success that had lit up her round face as if it was a turnip with a candle inside it, she had to be told of this newest, most perplexing development.

‘But, Unwin, what could that Sergeant have found out about that old Brattle, go about the ‘ouse and never a word to no one an’ so determined you wonder where he’s a-going to fetch up?’

‘Vilkins, dear, I can’t tell what Sergeant Drewd has in his mind, and I’m sure I never will, puzzle my brains how I may. If it had
been something that could easily be guessed he would not have left me in ignorance. You may be sure of that.’

‘Well, if you say so.’

‘I do. I think I know that man by now. I’ve had to wonder so much about him.’

‘I dare say you ‘ave. But he’s off your mind now. That’s one thing.’

‘Is he, my dear? I wish I could be sure of that. Did I tell you that he said to me that he always suspects everybody up till the moment the Judge passes sentence? It may have been said only to frighten, but I don’t doubt he would be quick enough to go back to his old ideas about me if whatever he’s found out about Ephraim Brattle proves to be a disappointment to him.’