Authors: Evelyn Hervey
‘Mean?’ Miss Unwin said. ‘But not, am I not right, that he was going to be mean? Are you sure he said he was going to be mean?’
‘No,’ Vilkins brought out in triumph, her red nose pointing up to the ceiling in exultation. ‘No, I’m sure o’ that now. He didn’t say as how he was going to be mean. He said something else altogether. But I’m blessed if I know what.’
‘Try to get at it another way. Mean was one thing, but what went with?’
‘No. No, I got it now. It weren’t mean at all.’
Miss Unwin’s spirits, hardly stirred by this quest even when it looked as if it might lead her to understand something of Sergeant Drewd’s aims, sank back abruptly into hopelessness.
‘No,’ said Vilkins, failing to notice that her friend had flopped back miserably on to her pillow. ‘No, it weren’t mean at all. It were lots on ‘em. It were means, he talked about. Means. Yes, means.’
Miss Unwin straightened up as if a galvanic shock had jerked through her.
‘Means?’ she said. ‘Did the Sergeant say that I had had the means to commit murder?’
‘Yes,’ Vilkins replied, her eyes brightly shining. ‘Yes, them was his very words almost. She had the means, he said, an’ – an’ she had the – the – the opportunity. But what is lacking is…’
‘Is what, Vilkins?’
Vilkins’s fiery dab of a nose sank floorwards.
‘Can’t remember, Unwin. Can’t bring it to mind at all.’
But Miss Unwin was hot on the scent now. Her grasp of logic, if it had been smothered by her troubles before, was firmly back in place again.
‘Means,’ she said. ‘The means to commit the crime. That must be the paper-knife that was so conveniently to hand there. That’s one necessity. And opportunity. That there was no one else present, or so the Sergeant believes. That’s the second necessity. So the third …? The third …? Yes, I have it. A reason, a motive, for my supposed act. Yes, a motive.’
‘That’s it. That’s it, Unwin. You ain’t got no motive. That’s what he said. You ain’t got no motive, or not anything he knows about. An’ without a motive, whatever that may be when it’s at ‘ome, he ain’t a-going to risk arresting you.’
‘Well, I suppose there’s something to be thankful for there.’
‘Yes, but all the same, what’re we going to do? That’s a poser if you like.’
‘Yes. Yes, it is. I can think of nothing but to hope the Sergeant never succeeds in finding me a motive for having done that horrible thing. Yet I cannot believe he will not find something sooner or later. I very much suspect he is the sort of person who must have success, cost what it may.’
‘Yes, I dare say you’ve the right on it there. He’s got the look.’
Vilkins lapsed into a gloom almost as thickly pervading as Miss Unwin’s.
But she it was, strangely, who came out of it first.
After two or three minutes of grim, if companionable, silent misery she suddenly lifted up her big nose like a dog scenting dinner.
‘There’s only one thing for it, Unwin,’ she said. ‘Only one thing for it.’
Miss Unwin scarcely stirred. But Vilkins went on undismayed.
‘Only one thing to be done. An’ you’re the one to do it. You’re the one what solved the mystery o’ the missing sugar-mice, an’ you’re the one what’s got to solve the mystery o’ the dead Master. You’ve got to do it, to save yore own skin.’
‘No. No, Vilkins, you don’t understand. The sugar-mice were one thing. But this … This is serious, deadly serious.’
‘Why then, all the more reason why you got to settle it. You can do it. I knows that. I knew you when we was only a pair o’ tiddlers, don’t forget. I knows as how you got the brains for anything. I knows that from long ago. But it’s up to you to use ‘em, Unwin. That’s just up to you.’
Miss Unwin sat there on the edge of her narrow bed, and bit by bit into her mind there crept a feeling of resolution.
Until at last she looked up.
‘Yes, Vilkins,’ she said, ‘you’re right. And bless you for making me know it. You’re right. I am the only one who can help myself now. It is up to me to find who did kill Mr Thackerton before Sergeant Drewd charges me with the crime. It’s up to me, and I will do it.’
Miss Unwin, her resolution taken, found herself overwhelmed at once by immense tiredness. She was hardly able to mutter to Vilkins how much she longed suddenly for sleep. Willingly she allowed her friend of old to help her off with her blood-marked dress and into her nightgown. Before Vilkins had left the room with a last ‘You get a good night, you’ve earned it,’ sleep had overtaken her.
She woke from it, deep and seemingly dreamless, well before her usual time next morning and at once began going over in her mind the whole train of events that had led her to within an inch of being arrested for murder. For a murder she had been as far from committing as she was from flying to the moon.
Then, with horrible abruptness, she found in her mind the inescapable question that her resolution to discover herself who had killed Mr Thackerton confronted her with. Who, under this same roof, was that murderer?
Because it was certain that the murderer was one of the people in the house itself. Her own inquiries and observations at the time of the first sugar-mouse theft had convinced her that it was not possible for anyone to enter the premises unbeknown. The search which Mellings had conducted almost immediately after the murder, accompanied both by tall Henry and Mr Thackerton’s quiet valet Peters when they had been admitted to the house after their joint outing, had confirmed the fact. Sergeant Drewd’s here-and-there questioning of the whole household in the dining-room had underlined it twice over. No one could have got into the house to kill its Master.
So his murderer must be one amongst them now.
But, faced squarely with the thought, Miss Unwin could not bring herself, even within the privacy of her own mind, to name a name.
The Sergeant the night before, in front of the whole family and
all the servants, had accused her to her face of being ‘the woman of blood’. It was not something she could do to anyone else, however much her sense of logic rebuked her.
She was being weak. She knew it. Worse, she was allowing herself to be absurd. She was not using the mind God had given her. But she could not bring herself even to think of a single name.
She looked across at the battered alarm-clock on the chest of drawers that served as dressing-table in her small room. It was still much too early to get up and dress and to go to little Pelham with the dreadful news that his Grandpapa was dead. Best, she thought, to keep from him for as long as possible the manner in which that death had taken place. But important to tell him the bare fact before others, less careful than herself, broke it to him.
In the cool early morning light penetrating the thin curtains over her window she tried to lie still and think of nothing.
A forlorn hope.
The image of Mr Thackerton’s blood-splashed white shirt front came battering back at once into her mind.
She must force herself to examine rationally who it could be who – No. No, there was a better way of getting at it. She would not try to decide who in the house was a murderer: she would take a leaf out of Sergeant Drewd’s book and consider only whom she could clearly eliminate on the grounds of lack of either means, motive or opportunity.
Yes, she could approach the dread question in that circuitous way.
So, first, means. But everybody in the house, whoever they were, surely had the means to do that foul deed if they but had the will. The means were the Italian paper-knife so conveniently to hand at the end of the long library table. Whoever had gone into the library to speak to Mr Thackerton for whatever reason could have snatched up that appallingly sharp weapon and have plunged it fatally into his throat. Even the frailest of them all could have done that, old Mrs Thackerton, invalid as she was, or young Nancy from the scullery, young and tender as she was.
So, opportunity.
And, yes, it looked as though opportunity eliminated nobody either. From Sergeant Drewd’s rain of questions as he had stalked up and down the dining-room, firing them off at random, it had been clear eventually that no one had had occasion to be in the corridor outside the library from the time Ephraim Brattle had left it, his instructions for the Lancashire works complete, till the time for Mr Thackerton’s nightly whisky and seltzer.
Nor, as it chanced, had there been anybody who had been in someone else’s attested presence for the whole of that time. The servants had had various duties to perform that had taken them-away from their fellows at different times, some short, some longer. Mrs Thackerton had been alone in her sitting-room. Mr Arthur had been alone in the billiards-room, his wife alone in the drawing-room. So on the score of opportunity, in strict logic, no one except the two men servants outside the house could be ruled out, unlikely though it was to think of old Mrs Thackerton or young lubberly John taking advantage of the opportunity to enter the library and strike the blow.
It came down to motive then. At once Miss Unwin felt inclined to dismiss all the servants under that consideration. Perhaps Peters, in the curiously close links between Master and personal valet, might be thought of as possibly possessing some reason for hating Mr Thackerton so much that he could come to wish to kill him. But Peters had been safely locked out.
Surely, surely Mellings, old and faithful, could have no possible reason for murdering his employer. Mrs Breakspear, fat and comfortable, was a yet more ridiculous conjecture. Simmons, too, for all her habit of moving silently and secretively about the house, was an old retainer, in the employ of the family ever since they had come to Bayswater. No reason why now suddenly she should murder. Even Joseph, proven liar, had no good reason to kill his Master. He had been rebuked by him, warned by him, in the library on the morning of his death. But not by the most far-fetched reasoning could that constitute a motive for murder.
As for the maidservants, none of them ever had anything to do with Mr Thackerton, except perhaps to move out of his way should he come upon them at work in the house somewhere and
to hear his prayers for them each morning. So neither Hannah nor Nancy, in her scullery, nor, least of all, Vilkins, could be taken into account. John, too, was as much out of the question. Yes, in her own early knowledge, boys of fifteen had taken lives. But why should John, little more than three months in the house, want to kill Mr Thackerton?
So that left the family.
A member of the family to have a reason for killing its head? Unthinkable. But it must be thought, sensibly and step by step.
First of all Mrs Thackerton. And, yes, looked at in cold logic, she could be said to have a motive for the murder. The old, old motive. A motive she herself in her young days in the lower depths had been acquainted with well enough, if only by rumour: the hatred of one person for another in what should be the most sacred relationship known to man. Yes, appalling though the idea might look seen from the quiet respectability which was her way of life now, a husband was the most likely murderer of his wife and a wife, woman though she was, the most likely killer of her husband.
But Mrs Thackerton, who so seldom left her two rooms, a murderess? It was in the highest degree unlikely.
On to the next in strict order. To Mr Arthur.
At once there forced itself into Miss Unwin’s mind, though she half-wanted to exclude it altogether, a very sound motive for Mr Arthur to have murdered his father. It came in the form of a Latin tag she had picked up in the course of her hungry reading. She had learnt what it meant, even though Latin itself was a masculine preserve she had not yet ventured to penetrate.
Cui bono?
To whom the good of it? And the answer was plain. The good of Mr William Thackerton’s possessions and wealth was to his son and heir, Mr Arthur Thackerton. To Mr Arthur, of whom she had heard his own mother say ‘fast-at Eton, fast at Oxford and fast still’.
Yet, Miss Unwin recognised, Mr Thackerton had always been ready to dispense largesse, where it showed. He would not have been at all niggardly with his son, as he was for instance to the governess in his employ.
Nevertheless, proceed in an orderly fashion. After Mr Arthur,
his wife. Hard to find any reason why she should have attacked her father-in-law, even supposing her to possess the necessary strength of will, and the person who had evaded reprimanding Joseph over the sugar-mice was as weak-willed as could be.
That left only, hovering between servants and family, Ephraim Brattle, confidential clerk. Could there have been some extraordinary quarrel concerning the firm’s activities that had led to murder? Business could be cruel enough, from all she had heard. But never in the newspapers or elsewhere had she come across any account of a business dispute leading to the striking of a desperate knife blow. No, leave Ephraim Brattle, tramping past the schoolroom landing on his way to bed, out of account.
Then was the only real possibility Mr Arthur? But if he was indeed his father’s murderer what could she herself do about it? Sergeant Drewd was plainly convinced that she was the guilty party. How on earth could she demonstrate to him that it was the new head of the house? If that was the case even.
The hands of the old clock on the chest of drawers that had seemed to be moving so slowly when she had first wakened, were now already almost at the time she should leave her bed.
Pelham. Poor little Pelham. He had to be rudely hauled out of his everyday happiness with the grim news.
Miss Unwin flung back the bedcover and hurried across to the wash-stand and its tall ewer of cold water.
It was the beginning for her of a day of expected anxiety that was to be marked, too, by unexpected events. But the thing she had dreaded most on waking, the need to break the news to little Pelham, passed off with quite unexpected ease.
‘Has he gone to heaven?’ Pelham inquired simply when she had told him.
For a moment Miss Unwin hesitated before replying. Had William Thackerton been a man deserving of heaven? Or even, making allowance for divine mercy, a reasonably good man? Well, no, he had not been. He had been overbearing to his family, indulgent to his son, yet more indulgent towards his grandson, seldom ever speaking to his invalid wife, contemptuous towards his daughter-in-law. To his servants he had been abrupt, if not harsh, with that sole, odd exception of his having let go unpunished
Joseph, the sugar-mouse thief. He had been generous only when his generosity could be openly seen as a sign of how far he had risen in the world.