The Governess (27 page)

The business took her more than ten minutes. Three times she thought she had at last found the right key, only to feel it stick when it had turned half-way in the lock. One of them jammed, and she felt a hot flush of frustration run all the way down her
back at the thought that she would not be able to free it. She imagined the door in front of her remaining obstinately unopenable till it was too late and Vilkins had been discovered in her place at the police station and a hue-and-cry had located her here.

But at last after patient wriggling with fingers wiped clean of sweat the key turned back and she was able to slip it out. The very next one she tried opened the door as sweetly and easily as if it had been used on it every day.

She almost stumbled into the room and only after standing there breathing deeply and trembling for long moment after long moment did she remember to take the hanging bunches of keys out of the lock and shut the door behind her. Then at last she brought her mind to considering where in the room what she sought might be hidden.

It was a chamber only a little smaller than her own, the privileged room of a privileged servant. The bed, like hers, had tall brass rails at head and foot. Its mattress, too, looked lumpy as her own, she reflected, as she dropped the heavy keys on to it, carefully examined the bedclothes neatly folded on top and passed her hand underneath it from end to end.

The only other pieces of furniture were a chair, clearly relegated from the dining-room when newer furniture had been bought, and a chest of drawers on which there stood a wash-basin with a ewer in it and, behind, a notably large looking-glass with a fine pair of hairbrushes on its shelf.

Yes, she thought, I was right. Once long ago Simmons was a woman who paid more than a little attention to her appearance, enough to have caught the eye of the younger Master of the house.

She began pulling out the drawers from the chest. If Sergeant Drewd had searched the room, as Vilkins had told her he had, he would have been hardly likely to have missed anything in them. But he would not have known that there was something well worth the finding hidden somewhere under the room’s low ceiling, something that Joseph certainly believed to be here. And if that something was a document of some sort, perhaps Joseph’s secret certificate of birth, then it might well have been hidden behind the drawers.

But her supposition proved incorrect. Nothing was fastened to the back or bottom of any of the drawers nor to the inside of the chest.

So where else?

She stood thinking furiously.

Unlike her own room on the floor below there was here no fireplace. So nothing could have been thrust up the chimney.

Where, if she had wanted to hide something herself, would she have put it? Of course, under a loose board in the floor.

She dropped to her hands and knees and began feeling carefully all over the worn drugget that covered the entire floor. Under it everything seemed firm. Would she have to prise up a board that Simmons had nailed down? It seemed unlikely. Nowhere had she seen any tool that Simmons could have used for that purpose, and somehow she could not see that sneaking, papery-faced figure gliding up here with a claw-hammer purloined from wherever tools were kept in the basement.

Then, on the far side of the room, within a foot of the wall, a plank under her pressing outstretched fingers rocked. She pulled back the drugget with tearing hands. And, yes, in a short length of board there where there ought to have been nail heads there were instead empty black holes.

With scrabbling fingernails she pried at the board’s edge. It came up.

Before she had got it quite clear she was able to see that underneath, lying among the brownish rubble between the joists, there was a small packet wrapped in oilskin.

She had been right. Joseph’s attempted break-in had indicated that there was something to be found in the room. And that something could only be something to Joseph’s disadvantage, something that would show clearly that he had had a strong motive for murdering his natural father, and perhaps his mother too. Something that would prove to Superintendent Heavitree and to Sergeant Drewd that she was not a murderess.

‘And what are you doing here, Mary, my girl?’

She had recognised the voice before two syllables of the sentence had been uttered.

Joseph’s.

Miss Unwin scrabbled round on the floor at the sound of Joseph’s threatening question and lunged to her feet. But she was trapped, she realised, in the furthest corner of the room with the chest of drawers to one side of her and the wall to the other. She was as far from the door as it was possible to be, but at least she was standing upright and facing her enemy.

Because she had no doubt that, the moment Joseph realised that the figure in the lavender dress was not Vilkins but herself, the enmity between them would blaze out. Joseph’s words as she straightened up and faced him confirmed this to be the utmost.

‘The blasted governess, by God. How did you get out of a cell, my fine miss?’

‘Never mind how I got out of the cell you did your best to put me in,’ Miss Unwin replied, feeling stir jn her veins a readiness for battle learnt in a hundred hard-fought childhood scuffles and, she believed, altogether forgotten. ‘Never mind how I got out, it’s time now you were put in, Joseph Simmons.’

It might have been wiser of her not to have said so plainly that she knew Joseph was the murderer in the house and what lay at the back of his crime. But she hardly believed any fair or flattering words were going to get her out of her present predicament. The glowering look on that long, waxen face, which she saw with renewed force now as a plain cross between father’s and mother’s, told her she was not going to quit the room alive unless she could fight her way out.

For some moments each of them now stood looking at the other, neither dropping their glance by as much as a quarter-inch.

‘Yes,’ said Joseph eventually, ‘you’ve stood in my way too long, curse you. I don’t quite see how I’m to get out of this new scrape you’ve got me into, but I dare say I’ll think of a way. I’ve done it each time before, ain’t I? And no thanks to you neither.’

‘It wasn’t me who got you into your scrapes,’ Miss Unwin answered. ‘It was your own greed and your own pride and nothing more.’

‘Was it, my girl? Was it then? Well, I’ll tell you what’s going to get me out of it now. Now and for ever. This.’

And from the tail pocket of his green plush livery coat he whipped a long and ugly kitchen knife.

‘Brought it up to force the door,’ he said. ‘But it’ll stand me in better stead now.’

Miss Unwin looked at him across the width of the room, conscious suddenly of how small it was. One good lunge forward and Joseph would be well within striking distance, penned as she was in the corner. And she had nothing with which to parry any blow from that dark iron blade.

Was she going to have escaped the hangman’s rope only to end her life at a murderer’s hands? Was all that she had done with her days on earth, her slow, hard rise, to come just to this? A squalid death in a little room?

A shiver of fear went uncontrollably through her.

She saw in Joseph’s eyes as he stood menacingly in the doorway that he had observed it. And that he delighted in it.

Her hand dived into the wide pocket of Vilkins’s dress, grasped the square box of lucifers she had dropped into it, pulled it out and all in one movement sent it shooting across the room right at Joseph’s face.

It would have done him little harm had it caught him fairly between the eyes. But he had had no time to see just what it was she had flung at him and he side-stepped from it and ducked down his head. The box struck the door-post behind him and clattered to the floor.

But, while his eyes had been momentarily off her, Miss Unwin had acted. She jumped out of her cramped corner beside the chest of drawers and, free to move, she reached across and seized from the far side of the chest the heavy earthenware ewer from where it stood in the basin there. To her relief, the moment she began to lift it she knew it had been left full of water. She had something heavy in her hands. A weapon. A weapon that could inflict real damage.

She raised it high in the air and stood with legs frankly apart, in an altogether unladylike stance, ready to throw or to swing.

Joseph at the door smirked.

‘Going to make a fight of it, eh?’ he said. ‘That’s more than the other two did.’

‘Yes, the other two,’ Miss Unwin answered, grasping at a sudden hope that she could after all make this man quail from a sense of shame. ‘Your own mother and your father. Both dead at your hands.’

But Joseph was not to be weakened so easily.

‘In my way, both of ‘em,’ he said. ‘In my way. He owed me, owed me. And he thought he’d never have to pay. And she, she’d have betrayed me sooner or later. I saw she was ready to do it.’

Miss Unwin moved a little to one side.

Could she, if Joseph came forward at all, yet make a dash for the doorway, get through, slam the door in Joseph’s face, escape?

Or would she have to bring her heavy jug hard down on his head? So hard that it might kill him?

Could she do that? Could she kill?

She was not sure. She knew how to fight, to fight to win. That she had learnt bitterly in her earliest rough-and-tumble days. But to fight to kill? That was a different matter. Could she do that?

Joseph had not moved from the door as she had shifted her position. But now he began to advance, taking short quarter-steps, careful to keep his balance, not for one moment taking his eyes off her. And with the dark kitchen knife held ready.

Ready to strike.

There could be no doubting that. Joseph had killed. He had struck and killed twice already. He was not going to hesitate at a third time.

Six inches nearer. And another six. Already he was within furthest striking range. He might want to get a little closer before he struck out with that black-splodged knife. But not much. Two more small careful steps only.

Miss Unwin saw that if she was to take the initiative she must do so at once. And she knew that, slim though her chances were against that long, dark knife, if she was to stand a chance at all she it must be who moved first.

And, yes, she would do it. She could do it. She could strike with force enough to kill. Strike for the temples.

She launched herself. Heavy ewer, outstretched arms, taut body, springing legs. All one. All intent to the last on striking home.

She was aware that Joseph was stooping to get under her rush with that black knife. She brought her arms hard down to counter the move and felt a jarring stop go all through her body.

As if it was a series of different pictures, she saw the ewer in front of her break. She saw pieces flying off. She saw the water it had contained spin out in a single sheet. She saw Joseph’s arm at its fullest reach, with the knife extended from it.

She felt a rip at the sleeve of her dress, knew the blow had cut through to the flesh beneath, knew she was falling forward unable to prevent herself.

Then for an instant she knew no more.

But still she was able through the blackness to direct it to depart. To force herself back to full alertness. To know that, sprawled on the floor half in and half out of the doorway, she would be at the mercy of the killer she had hurled herself on if her one desperate blow had not gone home.

She shook her head, and the blackness went. She put out her hands flat on the drugget in front of her and pushed upwards with all her might. She felt her knees press into something yielding and for an instant feared she would slide and fall.

But somehow, lunging and struggling, she got clear, scrabbled at the doorpost and got to her feet. She whirled round to face –

To find that it had been Joseph, lying inert on the floor, that she had been kneeling on, to see a thick coil of blood creeping out from beneath his head.

Then, though she had begun to tremble till her legs felt like water, she went back into the room, fell to her knees beside the turned-back corner of drugget, and plunged her hand deep into the hole that the floorboard she had removed had revealed. She grasped the oilskin packet lying there and, still on her knees and shaking now as if she was racked with the ague, she tugged the oilskin clear of the single thick folded sheet of paper it protected. Then she opened the sheet and saw in an instant what it was.

The birth certificate of Joseph, not Green, but Simmons, born
of Martha Simmons and – it was there clear to see – William Thackerton.

She had proof at last, better proof by far than any assertion of similarity of looks or gesture, that the man who lay insensible in the doorway there, the man who had tried to take her life, had good reason to have committed the murders that had taken place under this roof.

She was freed of the burden. Freed. Freed.

Sergeant Drewd handed Miss Unwin into the four-wheeler he had waiting outside the house with punctilious politeness.

‘Well now, miss,’ he said, all bouncing cheerfulness, as he settled down beside her, ‘we’ll soon have that – hum – fellow-conspirator of yours out of durance vile. What a fine ending to the case, eh? What a triumph it is.’

He rubbed his hands briskly together.

‘I’ll tell you something,’ he said, as the cab swung and jerked into motion, ‘This is the first time Sergeant Drewd has made use of a lady collaborator. The very first time.’

Miss Unwin checked unspoken a sharp query about just what had been the extent of that collaboration. She hardly had the spirit to put it in any case. The events of the hour or more since she had knocked Joseph unconscious had been so crowded that they had drained her of what little energy she had left.

Between recurring bouts of faintness she remembered herself calling out for help after she had read the wonderful document that cleared her of all suspicion. She had called and called again, she seemed to remember, and it had been little Pelham, of all people, who had eventually heard her.

He had come exploring up the stairs to the servants’ attics and had found her – how she had got there she never knew – kneeling beside the newel-post at the top of the stairs, clutching it for support.