The Governess (6 page)

Did this mean then that the murderer was still in the house?

Miss Unwin blanched at the thought. But she made herself act on it. How long before had that blow with the paper-knife been struck?

She walked firmly over to the sprawled body and bent close to examine the wound. Yes, the blood from it was still wet and freshly scarlet. The murder could not have long been committed.

Perhaps whoever was responsible had hardly left the room when Joseph had arrived with the whisky and seltzer. Had she herself been only a little earlier in going down to listen for the library door she might have heard the murderer leaving.

Hurriedly she went out into the corridor again. Joseph was still standing where she had left him, looking for all the world, with the salver in his hands, as if he was about to knock discreetly at the door once more and wait to hear his Master call ‘Come in.’

‘Joseph,’ she said with urgency. ‘Rouse the house. It’s very
possible the murderer is still within doors. Mr Thackerton cannot have been long dead. Hurry, man. Hurry. Find Mr Arthur. Tell him what has happened, and then go and get Mellings and examine every door and window.’

Joseph stared at her, his pale face for a moment registering nothing. But then he obeyed.

‘Yes, miss. Yes. Oh God, I made sure the villain got away by the windows. But I’ll go, miss. I’ll go.’

From that moment everything for Miss Unwin became a blur of confusion. As she waited for Mr Arthur to come her mind jumped from thought to thought in a manner she despised in herself but could not now help.

Why had Mr Thackerton been killed? What senseless murderer could it have been who had struck him down? How on earth had it been that when Joseph had told her what had happened she had thought of nothing else but the sugar-mice business? What had possessed her then? And the house, was there really at this moment a man hiding somewhere in it? Prowling? His hands red with the blood of murder, seeking some way of escape? And what was to happen next? Ought she to have summoned the police herself instead of sending Joseph to Mr Arthur? He was no longer Mr Arthur: he was Mr Thackerton now, head of the house. Should she call him that when he came?

Oh why, why, was she thinking about such trifles when death had struck on the other side of that well-polished door behind her?

Mercifully, before yet wilder thoughts overwhelmed her, Mr Arthur did appear, striding along the corridor, tall, commanding, in elegant evening dress, white shirt front sweeping towards her in the gloom like the sail of a man-o’-war.

‘Miss Unwin. What is this? Joseph blubbering and mouthing. Something about my father. Is he ill? What’s the matter? Do you know anything about it?’

‘Yes, sir. I do. I am sorry to have to tell you that your father is dead. He has been killed.’

‘Killed? What nonsense, woman.’

Mr Arthur nevertheless hesitated with his hand on the brass knob of the library door and seemed to have to gather up resolution before entering.

Miss Unwin decided that she ought to go back in with him.

Mr Arthur came to a halt a good yard away from his father’s sprawled, blood-stained body. His normally ruddy cheeks –wine-ruddy, Miss Unwin had concluded shortly after her arrival in the house – turned almost mud-brown within the dark frame of his elaborate Piccadilly Weeper whiskers.

‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Good God. Who has done this?’

He shot a wild glance at the open windows.

‘No, sir,’ Miss Unwin said. ‘No one could have got in that way. Or have got out. The windows are too high. It is … it is possible, sir, I think, that whoever did this is still in the house. I have told Joseph to make a search with Mellings. Peters and Henry are out tonight, you know. It is hardly possible for anyone to have escaped as soon as this. The downstairs windows are barred or shuttered and the doors are kept locked. I had occasion only recently to think about that.’

She felt she was jabbering, but could not prevent herself.

Mr Arthur turned slowly and looked at her.

‘What are you saying, you foolish woman?’ he snapped. ‘You are asserting that someone within the household is responsible for this terrible crime. I order you to silence.’

Miss Unwin felt the full force of this rebuke. It was true: she had been doing no more than think aloud and had by no means seen the consequences of what she had said, that no one could have entered the house to commit the deed. If she had, she hoped she would have had the sense to stay silent. The accusation she had gone more than half-way to making was not one to be voiced lightly.

‘I – I will go now, sir,’ she stammered. ‘Pelham. I must see that he has not been disturbed.’

She turned and almost ran from the murder chamber. But even as she did so her mind was not to be prevented from telling her that, however serious the accusation was that she had inadvertently made, it was yet most likely to be true.

It was impossible for anyone to have gained access to the house in secret. She had thought about that long enough when she had been attempting to lay the blame for the stolen sugar-mice on the right head. No, she had hit on the correct and only answer. The
person who had killed Mr Thackerton was someone already inside the house.

Yet, softly opening the door of Pelham’s room and peering into its darkness, alleviated only by the tiny nightlight burning on the mantelpiece, she could not bring her mind even to consider who among those in the house might have struck that fierce and sudden blow.

Pelham was lying flat on his back, his arms above his head. His long child’s eyelashes rested gently on his soft cheeks. Perfect repose.

Miss Unwin gave thanks for it.

And as to the person, she thought, the police officers who come will have to meet with that problem.

It seemed to Miss Unwin that hardly any time had passed before the police, in the shape of one Sergeant Drewd, did indeed arrive. Mr Arthur, she gathered, had sent a note by Joseph in a hansom direct to Great Scotland Yard. So it was, in fact, a full hour before in response to a message delivered by Henry, back from his outing with Peters and looking odd without the green livery that his six-foot frame was such a fine clothes-horse for, she went down to the dining-room where she found the whole household assembled. Only Pelham, it seemed, sleeping his innocent sleep, had been excused attendance. Even Mr Thackerton’s new-made widow was there, sitting huddled in the chair from the head of the table pulled from its place for her, a woollen wrapper drawn round her and Simmons, even more papery-faced at this late hour of the night, at her side, whispering. Ephraim Brattle, too, had been woken from his bed up in the attic and brought to stand at the far end of the room, half-way between the family and the servants lined up in their Morning Prayer places in front of the shuttered windows.

They did not have many minutes to wait before Sergeant Drewd came in with Mr Arthur.

Miss Unwin’s first thought on seeing him was that he was too small. He had much the build of a jockey, and his air of the Turfite was added to by the brown suit he wore in the biggest and loudest checks she had ever seen. His manner, too, smacked of the jockey. His eyes constantly darted here and there as if he had a certain
winner gripped between his knees and the path to the post was blocked by slower, stupider horses. Only a pair of moustaches, waxed to the sharpest points, somewhat went against the racecourse flavour with a touch of the military.

‘Now, sir,’ he said to Mr Arthur, who had preceded him to the head of the table and was standing there looking very much as if, were the heavy Bible in its place, he was about to conduct Morning Prayers in his father’s stead. ‘Now, sir, I have had my account of the bare bones of this business from your man Joseph as we drove over here, and I have made my examination of the cadaver. So I propose here and now to put a few questions up and down to whoever I choose to ask them of

Mr Arthur, haggard of face between his exaggerated whiskers, jerked his head back in swift anger. Such brusqueness was no way for a paid policeman to address a gentleman in his own house.

‘I see you are offended, sir,’ Sergeant Drewd instantly countered, raising a hand as if he was bringing to a halt a loose horse in the paddock. ‘But I make no bones about offending you, standing at the head of your own table though you may be. A murder has been committed, Mr Thackerton, and I am here in this house of yours to see that its perpetrator is brought to justice.’

He darted one of his quick looks this way and that round the room, towards the rank of servants under the windows, towards the two Mrs Thackertons seated on the other side.

‘Now, there are two ways I might go about this business, sir,’ he went on. ‘I could go about it in your way or I could go about it in mine. If I go about it in your way I should question each member of the household in turn starting with your good self and working my way down to –’

He swung round and pointed his finger, like a quivering magnet spike, at John, his page’s tunic only half-buttoned, his big hands dangling rawly at his sides.

‘To that young lad there.’

John, pinned by the Sergeant’s extended finger like a butterfly stabbed down on to cork, positively trembled as if he was indeed a flutteringly caught victim.

‘And what should I discover by this process, sir?’ Sergeant Drewd asked, swinging round again to the new head of the house.
‘I will tell you. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Each one of those here present from top to bottom’ – he darted a glance again at John, who actually uttered a loud gasp as if it had pierced his very flesh – ‘each one of you would tell me what he or she thought he or she ought to tell me. That, and no more.’

The Sergeant at this last ‘she’ had sent his darting glance straight out towards Miss Unwin.

If I were not clear in my conscience, she thought as his eye caught hers, would I quail now? Perhaps I might. Perhaps I would.

‘But, sir,’ Sergeant Drewd went on, whipping round once more to face Mr Arthur, ‘if I proceed in my own manner, by asking my own questions here and there as the fit takes me, as my experience tells me that I should, how do you think I shall get along then?’

He actually had the temerity to pause and leave his question for Mr Arthur to answer.

After a silence that lasted all too long he did so.

‘I suppose you would get along all the better, Sergeant.’

‘That’s it, sir. That’s the ticket. You’ve hit the nail right on the head, as a gentleman should. We shall get along very much better if I tackle this sad affair in the way I have tackled – I won’t say hundreds, but I will say dozens – in the way I have tackled dozens of sad affairs before.’

‘Carry on then, Sergeant. You know best,’ Mr Arthur said in an effort to re-assert his authority.

Miss Unwin could not help registering that the effort was not a successful one. But she had no time for much other reflection. Sergeant Drewd was putting into practice the process he had described.

From person to person he darted. Sometimes he seemed to gallop round the wide dining table as if he was rounding the last bend before the finishing-post. Sometimes he swung aside, leant across the broad cloth-covered expanse of the table and shot one of his questions across it as if it were a billiard-ball and he was sending it streaking into a far pocket.

All the while, Miss Unwin saw as she followed his thought processes as well as she could, he was accumulating knowledge. Most of it she realised the reasons for. But sometimes, tease her
brain as she might, she could not discover the relevance of something he had asked, with every bit as much sharp significance as with his other more obvious questions.

One thing certainly became crystal clear to her. Mellings, assisted on their return by Henry and the ever-reserved Peters, had conducted a thorough search of the house and had confirmed that no door or window had been left open.

So – she could only half-admit the thought to her head – the person who had killed Mr Thackerton must be in this very room at this very moment.

An extra snap in Sergeant Drewd’s voice brought her attention fully back to him. He was standing in front of John, looking, although he was an inch or two the shorter, altogether cockily dominating.

‘And now, young fellow-me-lad, we come to the heart of it. That door beside the larder, the door out into the area, you drew back the bolt on that, didn’t you? You drew it back after Mr Mellings here had seen to it that that door was locked and bolted fast and then you bolted it up again? I know you did it, lad. None of your lies is the least bit of good with me. Come on now, out with it.’

John, who had been on the verge of tears for the past twenty minutes, burst now into a howl of wailing that would have convinced almost anyone that the Sergeant had suddenly hit on a simple and convincing solution to the way the murderer had got into the house.

It would have convinced almost anyone: it did not convince Miss Unwin.

She left her place at the foot of the family side of the wide table and whisked round in a moment to where John was standing at the foot of the servants’ rank.

‘John,’ she said, stepping up close to his noisily wailing figure so that her mouth was almost up against one of his burning red ears; ‘Stop that noise. Stop it at once.’

John’s wailing ceased as abruptly as if his vocal chords had been snatched out of his throat.

‘Now, John,’ Miss Unwin went on, ‘just tell the Sergeant the exact truth. Did you draw back that bolt? Or did you never go
anywhere near the door as you had no reason whatsoever to do? Now, John, the truth. Just the simple truth.’

But John, though plainly he was slowly seeing salvation just ahead, never got the chance to produce his answer.

‘Yes,’ Sergeant Drewd suddenly snapped out, ‘it’s time for the truth now, if it’s ever time for the truth. And the truth is here, staring every one of us in the face.’

Each person in the whole large room was frozen into immobility.

The truth? Staring them in the face? The truth already?

‘Yes,’ the Sergeant said, giving the two waxed points of his little sharp moustache twirls that seemed as if they would send them spinning like two miniature driving shafts. ‘Yes, the truth. The truth here and now. The truth in blood.’