The Governess (25 page)

Then she sat, all alone, on the narrow bench and thought over the astonishing sequence of events that had flashed into her head
at the very moment she had been about to try to make the case against Arthur Thackerton to Superintendent Heavitree.

It had been a phrase of the Superintendent’s that had set spark to the powder-train that had eventually exploded in illumination in her head.
Why should Joseph Green wish to do a thing like that?
Those had been the words that had set alight the thin trail of gunpowder that had lain, unbeknown to her, all the while in her mind.

The Superintendent had asked the question when she had accused Joseph of staining her handkerchief with hare’s blood and putting it in the coal-scuttle in Mrs Thackerton’s sitting-room. She had known it must be Joseph, determined she thought once again to spite her, who had for the third or fourth time played a malicious trick on her. It could have been no one else, since apparently Sergeant Drewd had had no direct hand in the business, and Joseph, so Vilkins had told her, had overheard the Sergeant’s story about Dirtyguts the burglar.

Then, as she had readied herself to answer the Superintendent, her outer mind had seen the cause of Joseph’s malice as the stolen sugar-mice. But her inner mind must have rejected that explanation even as she was about to put it to Superintendent Heavitree. And rightly so, she saw now. Because Joseph’s action in putting the handkerchief in Sergeant Drewd’s way was of much too serious a nature to be actuated by the petty malice she had supposed had inspired it.

No, Joseph had stained her handkerchief with blood for the sole purpose of making it appear that she had been Simmons’s killer, thus deflecting any possible suspicion from her real murderer. Himself.

It had all run on in Miss Unwin’s mind quickly as if a live spark had been travelling, hissing and fizzing, along a real line of gunpowder. Joseph had murdered Mr Thackerton. Sergeant Drewd had been right at least about one thing: the person who had discovered Mr Thackerton’s body had been his murderer. She must have seen Joseph, she thought, coming out of the library within minutes of the instant he had seized that Italian-work paper-knife, so ready to hand, and had thrust it in a blaze of fury into Mr Thackerton’s throat. He had been white as a sheet then. She had remarked on it.

Had thrust the knife into Mr Thackerton’s throat. No. Into his father’s throat. Into the throat of his natural father.

She had seen that, too, in her explosion of light. It was the reason that lay behind the murder, Sergeant Drewd’s missing motive. What had shown her the truth of the matter was simple: nothing more than the sudden recollection of Joseph standing in the hall on the day after she had failed to persuade Mrs Arthur to take any action against him for his repeated thefts of the sugarmice. It had been as the family had been going into breakfast after Morning Prayers, and Joseph had triumphantly confronted her, sticking the thumbs of each hand into the pockets of his white uniform waistcoat. She had taken the gesture at the time as being a mere parody of his Master’s most typical attitude. It had not been so. It had been a natural gesture passed down from father to son.

The cut of Joseph’s face should have confirmed the relationship for her. He looked very like Mr Thackerton. He had the same over-large features. It was only that she had always thought of him as a servant and of Mr Thackerton always as a gentleman, her employer, that had prevented her noting the plain likeness.

It had, too, been only that she had thought of Simmons as being a servant as well, a lady’s-maid of long standing, that had prevented
her seeing her as, in the distant past, Mr Thackerton’s mistress by whom he had had his natural son. No wonder when she had told Mrs Thackerton that her ‘long-serving friend Simmons’ was dead she had almost screamed a ‘No’. She had not been rejecting the fact of the death: she had been denying the friendship.

Why, she herself had even been forced to think about such relationships crossing the bar of society by that dreadful letter signed Commonsense in
The Times
. That self-satisfied correspondent had declared that when men had invalid wives they were known to go ‘seeking solace’ elsewhere. He had implied that Mr Thackerton had recently sought solace with herself and that in a lovers’ quarrel of some sort she had stabbed him. But the truth of it was, the truth of it must have been, that long ago Mr Thackerton had sought his solace with a maid who had once been a seductive, china-delicate person: for all that in her last days she had become a dried-up, papery-faced figure hard to imagine as ever having been pretty.

Because Simmons, too, had resembled her natural son. Both she and Joseph had had those remarkably long incurving teeth in those long faces.

Joseph, it was absurdly clear to Miss Unwin now, was in his looks an exact mixture of the most notable features of his father and his mother, of Mr William Thackerton, gentleman, and of Martha Simmons, lady’s-maid.

No wonder Mr Thackerton had hesitated in such an odd manner when she had told him which one of his servants it was who had been stealing his goods. He had held back the thunderbolt of instant dismissal because it was the man whom he had eventually been persuaded by Simmons to employ. No wonder that Joseph had been able to say that he had had no more than ‘a wigging’ from the Master. Mr Thackerton would not have dared to award any punishment more severe than a mere rebuke.

Then, on the last night of his life when Joseph had taken him his whisky and seltzer and had had the opportunity of another private conference, it was plain to her now what must have passed between them. Joseph, emboldened by his success in brazening out a crime as serious in Mr Thackerton’s eyes as theft of his goods,
must have demanded that he himself should step into old Mellings’s shoes as butler. He had spoken before of doing just that one day, and it had seemed ridiculous in someone who was only a second footman in the house and a notoriously lazy and careless servant too.

But Joseph had had his ambitions to rise in the world, though plainly he had always intended to do so without the labour of earning that rise. Then, when his father had refused his request, as doubtless astonished at such effrontery he would unhesitatingly have done, Joseph had seized that paper-knife and lashed out.

Then … then – Miss Unwin’s fast-working mind saw it all –Joseph had stripped from his hand the white glove that had become soaked in the jetting blood from Mr Thackerton’s neck, had crossed to one of the conveniently open windows of the library and had thrown it together with its fellow down into the enshrouding laurels beneath. From these when he had, providentially for him, been sent to Great Scotland Yard to summon police assistance it would have been altogether easy to collect the damning evidence and somewhere on the way to Westminster get rid of it for ever. And that very night, no doubt, amid all the confusion in the house he had had no trouble in abstracting lubberly John’s gloves and making them his own, leaving poor John to have to buy a new pair out of his scanty wages and so be susceptible to Ephraim Brattle’s unnecessary bribe.

Everything fell into place in the light of this account of what had happened at No 3 Northumberland Gardens the night William Thackerton had died. Even such a minor domestic detail as John losing his gloves. Why, she had noticed just before that terrible confrontation with William Thackerton’s blood-splashed body the way Joseph’s sweaty fingers had left marks on the silver salver with the seltzer and the whisky decanter on it which he had kept holding out stiffly in front of himself. She had seen that, and it had meant nothing to her. Then.

Even Simmons’s air of always being in possession of some secret or other, which Vilkins, poor simple Vilkins, had noted, was accounted for. And, of course, this accounted too for Mrs Thackerton’s strange falsehood about how long she herself had spent reading to her at the time of Simmons’s death. If Mrs Thackerton
was a rejected wife, then it was natural enough for her to feel a sort of awed admiration for somebody ready to beard her overbearing husband as well as performing the simple task of keeping little Pelham in order. It must have been only out of this feeling of admiration – Mrs Thackerton had openly expressed it more than once – that she had lied to save her.

Yes, everything fell into place. But not a shred of it was capable of proof.

How could she have explained to Superintendent Heavitree that Joseph Green and Simmons both had noticeably long teeth? How could she ask to see him now and tell him that? How would she be able, in giving evidence in her own defence at the Old Bailey trial, to point out that Joseph Green had placed his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets in exactly the same manner that murdered William Thackerton was wont to do?

No, she knew who had killed both Mr Thackerton and his mistress of long ago, Simmons, but it was she herself who would be tried for those murders and who could produce in answer to the charge scarcely more than the assertion of her innocence.

She sat on in her small cell, time and again butting up against this dilemma and each time backing off from it with not the least dent made in its iron surround. She was not guilty of the murders for which she was behind bars here now. She knew who was guilty. She could prove nothing.

At last, early in the evening, there was the sound of voices in the lobby at the far end of the row of cells. Miss Unwin thought she recognised a familiar one and her heart leapt up at the prospect of seeing a friendly face at last.

It was Vilkins, indeed, who came towards her along the row of the communal cells. Vilkins, her round red face under her garishly decorated wide straw bonnet looking like a disconsolate moon. Vilkins, carrying on her arm a large basket containing no doubt the change of under-garments Superintendent Heavitree had agreed to ask to have brought in.

The constable escorting Vilkins took the ponderous key from the ring at his belt, let her into the cell, locked the door behind her and said gloomily that she could tap on the bars when she was ready to be let out again.

‘Lawks, Unwin, you’re in trouble all right now,’ Vilkins said as soon as the constable had regained his distant lobby.

Miss Unwin managed a pallid smile.

‘Yes. Yes, I’m in worse trouble than I ever thought I would be during the worst of our childhood days together,’ she answered.

‘What they going to do with you?’ Vilkins asked. ‘They ain’t a-going to hang you right off, are they?’

‘No. No, my dear, they won’t quite do that. They’re going to take me before the magistrates tomorrow. The magistrates will find that there is a case to answer, and I will be remanded in custody for trial at the Old Bailey.’

‘The Bailey, but – But, Unwin, that ain’t very good.’

‘No. No, it isn’t good at all, my dear. I am innocent of all they allege against me, but I cannot see how I can prove it to them. Vilkins dear, I know who did commit those two murders, but there’s nothing that I can see that I can do to prove what I know.’

‘You know? Who was it then? Was it that Joseph?’

‘Why, yes. Yes, Vilkins, it was. But – but how did you know too?’

‘Nasty piece o’ work,’ Vilkins answered. ‘Always was. I always knew it. Only I didn’t like to say so to you, Unwin, ‘cos you’d of asked me for proof an’ all, an’ I don’t understand nothing o’ that. But I knew it were Joseph all along all right.’

‘Well, I wish I had been ready to listen to you while I was still out in the world and could perhaps have done something about finding that proof. Though what that could have been I don’t know.’

‘No, well, if you don’t, you don’t. But it’s a poor look-out now, Unwin, I’ll say that much.’

Vilkins shook her head beneath her over-large bonnet.

‘Yeh,’ she added. ‘That Joseph. I knew all along. An’ then this arternoon, too. This very arternoon.’

‘What this afternoon?’ Miss Unwin asked idly.

Too late, too late, she kept thinking to herself. All too late. Why did I not come to the same conclusion as Vilkins, if on better grounds, while I was still free and in a position somehow to do something about it?

She listened idly to Vilkins’s reply to her idle question, asked
only so as to keep saying something to her old friend in this doleful predicament.

‘What this arternoon? Why, only him a-trying to break into old Simmons’s room, that’s all. Dare say he thought there’d be some pickings there for him. Dare say he thought that.’

Miss Unwin sat up straighter on her narrow bench.

‘Trying to break into Simmons’s room?’ she asked. ‘Tell me about that. Did he succeed? How did he come to be doing it? How did you manage to see him?’

‘Oh well, that’s easy. I ‘ad to go up to me own room ‘cos I tore me apron somehow an’ Mrs Breakspear told me to put on another. Though I didn’t see why I should. ‘Tweren’t a very bad tear.’

‘No, I’m sure it wasn’t. But what was Joseph doing trying to break into his moth – into Simmons’s room? And did he succeed?’

‘ ’Course he didn’t. Not with me coming along an’ disturbing him. ‘Ow could he of? Pretended to be doing something else, didn’t he? Made a joke of it. But I know he’ll be back, trying again. He wasn’t making no joke about trying to get in there in the first place. I dare say he’ll be at it this very moment, if he knows I’m out o’ the way.’

‘Vilkins,’ Miss Unwin said with urgency. ‘There must be something in Simmons’s room that Joseph thinks would prove him guilty. He must be trying to get hold of it. And he must be stopped. Sergeant Drewd has got to be told, quickly.’

‘No need to tell ‘im,’ Vilkins answered. ‘He was the one what looked through all old Simmons’s things an’ then had the room locked up. He won’t be interested in Joseph trying to get in there.’

‘No. No, I suppose he won’t be. But what about Superintendent Heavitree? No. He’ll have gone back to Great Scotland Yard, if he hasn’t gone home long ago. Oh, what can I do? What can I do?’

‘Yeh,’ said Vilkins with lumbering sympathy. ‘You’re in a right pickle, Unwin, so you are. An’ you a lady, too. That’s what makes it worse, you know. That’s what makes it all the worse.’