Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman (33 page)

“Everything seemed to start well enough for Violet up at the house. She was adapting well and was learning fast; I think she was almost enjoying it in her own way. On her day off she would come home for tea and tell me about her new life. Then she started to miss a visit or two, and after a while I knew things weren't going too well, because she stopped her visits altogether. I never guessed how badly things were going for her, though.

“By chance Mr. Wallace, from the drapery, asked me to take his place in the orchestra for the ball, because he'd hurt his wrist. It was an opportunity to see Violet and reassure myself she was all right.”

In the brief pause as Jim caught his breath, Lord Montfort heard one of the dogs scratching at the cottage door. It whined, but he did not move. He waited for Jim to continue.

“Well, it was worrying to see how she'd changed. She looked thin and I knew something was wrong, but she didn't tell me what.” Jim paused and Lord Montfort made himself meet his gaze. Jim's face was pallid and there was an expression of deep pain that was not from his illness.

“I decided that after the ball I would tackle Mrs. Jackson about her. I had almost decided that I would take her away, something was not right.” He paused, and Lord Montfort watched him hack into his handkerchief, his shoulders heaving. He forced himself to sit quite still without saying anything as he waited for Jim to continue.

“Well, later that night, things got more complicated. Violet was watching the ball from the little temple in the garden and Mr. Teddy came along and found her there.” Lord Montfort nodded as Jim repeated almost word for word what he had been told earlier that evening by his wife.

“Well, as you no doubt already know, Dick knocked Mr. Teddy down and thought he'd killed him. Dick didn't know what to do. He lost his nerve and came to me for help. He told me what he had seen in the pavilion, what Teddy had been trying to do to Violet. He told me she had confessed Mr. Teddy had raped her. Raped her repeatedly after she had come to the house. And there it was, the opportunity to clean up this nasty mess completely.” Jim bent forward and again pulled the cloth from his pocket. Lord Montfort looked away to avoid seeing the bright stain glistening on Jim's handkerchief and waited until the man had recovered himself enough to continue.

“I did what I had to do: Dick wouldn't get sent to jail for assault, Violet would be free to start her life over, and Mr. Teddy would not be able to damage any more young lives.”

“How did you do it?” Lord Montfort had a pretty clear idea from his wife's account, but he needed to hear Jim's side of the story.

“I had to get Dick to put Mr. Teddy onto the dray. The boy was in a panic. If he knew what I had in mind he would have caved in. And so I told him I'd hand Mr. Teddy over to the man who'd been looking for him—the ‘stranger' that had been hanging at the back of the pub that afternoon. I'd seen the man myself walking from the station to the village and I saw him later that afternoon getting into Mr. Teddy's motorcar in the lane behind my cottage. I told Dick no one in Haversham would see him again and he believed me. So he hauled Mr. Teddy through the hedge and stowed him in the toolbox of the dray. I went back to play violin for the last dance of the night.”

Short of breath, Jim stopped. Lord Montfort got up and poured him more water, and he noticed the that Jim's eyes were sunken deep in their shadowed sockets, as he took a cautious sip, and then another, before he could carry on.

“At the end of the ball we were driven over to the stables in the dray. When the rest of the musicians had gone to sleep, I went back outside and drove the dray up to Crow Wood. When I got to the wood the rain was heavy, the storm was coming in fast. I managed to tie off a length of rope to the gibbet. I made a noose, put it around his neck, and drove the dray forward.”

Jim's face was the color of wet putty. Lord Montfort got up from his chair and laid his hand on Jim's shoulder. More than anything he understood why Jim had killed the man who had so harmed his daughter. It was understandable but not forgivable. What kept England's “green and pleasant land” the most civilized country in the world were its laws. The first Baron of Mountsford had been present at the signing of Magna Carta, which had led to the rule of constitutional law in England. Laws had been written and refined over the centuries, laws that people of Lord Montfort's education and background had worked hard to instill and maintain. Without law, without order, England would just be France.

*   *   *

Clementine stood by the open window of the music room and looked down on the drive. It was late and she had just left her husband and Colonel Valentine, who were tying up the details of Jim Simkins's arrest. Watching from the window, she saw the two men walk out of the front door. As they moved away from the lights of the house they disappeared into the shadow of Valentine's motorcar. She heard the car door slam shut and her husband's voice as he called out a last good-night. She watched the lights of Colonel Valentine's motorcar disappear around the last bend and with a tremendous sigh of relief she closed the window.

The day had been enormously long and she was still trying to come to terms with the fact that one of the gentlest men she knew had committed murder. Because she was blessed, or cursed, with an abundant imagination, images of the frightened, vulnerable Violet had crept into her conscious thoughts wherever she went in the house. They had been quite vividly with her earlier that day, when she had laid the facts of her investigation with Mrs. Jackson before her husband.

Clementine had not expected congratulations and relief that she had saved the Talbot name from disrepute when she told her husband that she knew who had murdered Teddy Mallory. She had carefully rehearsed beforehand what she was to say, touching minutely on the process and prudently skirting around Mrs. Jackson's actual contributions. But Lord Montfort had asked questions and had kept asking them until Clementine had described every step along the way of their quest. It had been a relentless interview. As her story unfolded, his look of puzzled concern had given way to one of incredulity and then to shocked embarrassment. She had known all along that colluding with a servant to discover information about their friends and servants was in poor taste. But to have shared the secrets of their friends' intimate lives with Mrs. Jackson was a definite no-no. Her husband had made his disapproval quite clear, leaving Clementine feeling a bit grubby. In his opinion, she had forgotten her position and by doing so she had rather let the side down.

He ended by saying, “I'm rather surprised that you involved Mrs. Jackson.” His face and manner were chilly. He was covering annoyance and confusion by being distant.

“I could not have done it without her.” Clementine would not justify colluding with her housekeeper out of loyalty to Mrs. Jackson. She had made her apologies for her unconventional behavior earlier, and had no intention of repeating them. To grovel at this point would mean losing all self-respect.

“Then perhaps you shouldn't have done it at all.” This was his first direct criticism and it had hurt.

“I'm sad you see it that way, darling. I believed it was the right thing to do. As for Mrs. Jackson, the more I worked with her, the more I found I could trust her. She is a woman of remarkable integrity and loyalty, and awfully clever in her practical way. I think I trust her more than I would one of our friends.” This had been a startling concept for him no doubt. The loyalty of servants and friends was clearly divided in his mind.

“That all remains to be seen. I will have to square Valentine. I trust he will keep your name out of things, he is a gentleman after all.” He was coming around, but still a bit stiff and sniffish.

She did not say that Teddy, a gentleman only because of his position in society, had completely broken the code most gentlemen live by. She also understood that although her husband enjoyed and respected her natural intelligence, he was probably wistfully wishing for the days when she had used it only for planning gardens, organizing balls, and smoothing over spats on the boards of the charitable organizations she belonged to. They had parted politely, if not amiably, and Lord Montfort had trudged off to the village for his talk with Jim Simkins.

Now that Colonel Valentine had gone, Clementine would go downstairs and join her husband so that they might begin the business of being friends again. But before she did that she had one more thing she wanted to take care of.

The door opened behind her and Mrs. Jackson came into the room.

“Ah, here you are, Jackson. Yes, please shut the door. My goodness, you have had a long wait; Colonel Valentine had to have his say, of course.” Clementine settled herself in a chair and looked up at her housekeeper. “Jim Simkins confessed to the murder, it was just as you said.”

To her credit, Mrs. Jackson received this news quietly, with not a flutter of self-congratulatory pride, no display of vulgar excitement. She nodded, and Clementine heard the faintest sigh. “What a terrible business, m'lady, so very sad,” Mrs. Jackson said, and Clementine knew she was not referring to the death of Teddy Mallory.

“Yes, indeed it is. It's late, Jackson, and you have had a long day.” Clementine indicated the chair to her right. “Please take a seat, Jackson. Now, I should fill you in on the missing bits. Where should I start?”

“If you would be so kind, m'lady, was it perhaps Mr. Wallace in the shrubbery that night?” An inquiry, rather than a direct question.

“Yes, Colonel Valentine is sure it must have been. As we suspected from the drawings Oscar described to me and gave to the colonel, Mr. Wallace was a sort of go-between for a gang of thieves in London, run by a man called Baker. They specialized in country-house break-ins: good jewelry, old silver, and valuable paintings. Mr. Teddy provided information on the houses, the staff, how to get in and out, and what was worth taking. Mr. Wallace set up the burglaries. The police investigation must have prompted Baker to contact Wallace, and so when you came into the shop and noticed that his sprained wrist was miraculously healed, he worried that you had made the connection. It's quite amazing really. I still can't take it in. Mr. Teddy was up to all sorts of tricks it would seem.”

The distress Clementine felt at her husband's annoyance with her was beginning to fade and she warmed to her story.

“Colonel Valentine thinks that Teddy had planned to double-cross Baker and do a burglary on his own at Northcombe. The money to be had from the Staunton diamonds alone was stupendous. He'd found a man in London who would do the actual burglary, the man seen walking towards Haversham by both Stafford and Theo Cartwright. Mr. Teddy met him in the village and drove him over to the Northcombe estate on Saturday evening. The colonel thinks that Mr. Teddy planned to meet up with his burglar after the ball to pay him off and collect his haul.

“But Mr. Teddy underestimated Wallace and this Baker fellow. He didn't make it to the rendezvous at Northcombe at the end of the ball, of course, but Wallace did. Most likely Wallace took the loot from Teddy's burglar and went up to town to hand it over to Baker. By the way, Colonel Valentine will arrange for Mr. Wallace's arrest tonight, so we have no need to worry about him skulking around here anymore. That was a horrible moment, Jackson, I am so sorry.”

For the first time since she had come into the room, Mrs. Jackson's face showed something other than mere polite inquiry. She sat back in her chair and look of supreme self-satisfaction crossed her face. Clementine suspected that everything she had told her about Teddy's involvement with the Northcombe burglary was confirmation of what Mrs. Jackson had pieced together this evening.
What a brain,
she thought with admiration.

“I don't know how you worked it all out, Jackson. I mean, how did you get there?” Clementine leaned forward as if waiting for a word from God.

“I knew Violet had been out in the garden during the ball, m'lady, and Dick had bruised knuckles, afterwards. After my talk with Miss Lucinda I understood something of what had happened that night. But the timing was all off. I couldn't work out how Mr. Teddy was bound and put into the dray when he was last seen in the rose garden. It was Lady Verity reminiscing about watching the ball from the north pavilion when they were children. The minute she said they could come and go from the rose garden to the service area through a gap in the hedge, everything was quite clear. For the first time I knew how someone could have got Mr. Teddy to the dray without being seen from the terrace. I knew Dick was involved but he had to have had help. Whoever had helped him had killed Mr. Teddy.”

Clementine couldn't help herself: “Yes, it took two of them, didn't it? Dick could not have done it alone. He was in a scrape and he went to someone he trusted for help, giving Jim Simkins his opportunity. Poor Jim was desperate, his time was running out, and there would be nobody to look after…” Clementine couldn't bring herself to finish.

“What will happen to Dick, m'lady?” Clementine was grateful for Mrs. Jackson's tactful interruption.

“Not much, at the most he'll be bound over to keep the peace. After all, Jim made a full confession to Colonel Valentine that he hoodwinked Dick.”

“And Mr. Simkins?”

“Jim is terribly ill, so ill we doubt he will live to come to trial. He will stay in his cottage until then and not go to prison in Market Wingley. Lord Montfort will see to that.” Lady Montfort stopped for a moment and Mrs. Jackson saw her look down and away.

“Dr. Carter is arranging for Violet to come to be with her father. He doesn't have long to live, Jackson. It all ends here.”

They sat silently together for a few minutes.
Yes, it all ends here,
Mrs. Jackson thought as she saw Lady Montfort's distress and unhappiness at the unspoken failure of the Talbots to protect a young girl who had worked for them.