The Man of Gold (11 page)

She wanted to sit down where she was in the hall – there was a pair of finely carved benches there now where in old Mr Partington’s time there had been not a stick of furniture – and weep. But she shook herself. Richard’s commissions had to be carried out first. The girls’ lesson had to be picked up again from where it had been interrupted when Richard had asked to see her and the two of them had to be told, without a quiver of voice, that their father had been suddenly called away on business.

So the rest of the day passed. Passed somehow, as if she
had been transformed into an automaton and the little clockwork engine inside her had been wound just long enough to keep her going through all the day’s usual activities.

But at last the girls were safely in their new white beds with the curtains’ pink knots released to hide them from the light.

Then the full reality of what had happened flooded back to her. Richard had been kept at the police office. She had steeled herself to that when he had given her directions which made it clear that it might be several days before he came home again.

But she had allowed herself tiny flickers of hope, little curtain twitches. Perhaps Inspector Redderman would ask Richard only a few questions in his laconic manner and Richard’s answers would be so clear, so true, that the Inspector would at once tell him that he was no longer needed. Then he would have come home and life would at once have jumped back to where it had been before.

It had not happened. Her sensible self had known all along that it would not happen. When an old man had died by poison in a household into which few if any others ever penetrated, then that man’s sole heir was going to be suspected of the crime however innocent he was. So Richard was suspected and Inspector Redderman was questioning and questioning him, hammering and hammering at him in the hope and expectation that at some moment he would break down and confess to the terrible crime.

That was the way the police worked. Miss Unwin from her days at the very bottom of the social pyramid, her workhouse days when she had lived among the dregs, knew much about the way the police conducted their business.

But now all she wanted to do was weep. She had seen in the old days friends and acquaintances taken away to be questioned by policemen a good deal less well-behaved, a
lot more evidently brutal, than Inspector Redderman and she had accepted it as part of life. But now the man who had been taken away was the man she loved.

She forced herself not to let the tears fall.

‘’Ere, what you looking so down in the dumps about?’

It was Vilkins.

She had not even heard her coming, although usually her clumping steps in the old patched black boots she wore could be heard minutes before she appeared.

‘Oh, Vilkins. They’ve taken him, and – and I’m afraid, Vilkins. So afraid.’

Vilkins stood there and looked at her, arms akimbo.

‘Thought you was spoony on him,’ she said. ‘And what’s that peeler hauled him off for? That’s what I’d like to know.’

So Miss Unwin, plain Unwin once again, told her old friend just why Inspector Redderman had taken Richard to, the police office and just why she feared that he might never come back.

‘Well,’ said Vilkins when her tale was done, ‘he didn’t do it, did he? Poison the old skinflint?’

‘No,’ said Unwin.

Just the one single explosion of sound. But somehow it cleared in her mind the last of the tiny niggling suspicion she had had that perhaps, somehow, some impossible how, Richard, her Richard, might have done that impossible thing.

‘’Course he didn’t,’ Vilkins said matter-of-factly. ‘You wouldn’t of got spoony about him if he was that sort. Not you, Unwin.’

‘Well, perhaps I might not have done. Perhaps I would somehow have known if that had really been the case.’

‘No p’rapses about it. I know you. You wouldn’t of done nothing so stupid as that. Not my Unwin.’

Then all that Miss Unwin could do was to sit where she was in the dining room where somehow she had drifted and smile a foolish dazed smile.

For a little Vilkins stood just looking down at her, apron askew as it almost always was, big feet in patched boots sticking out from under her skirt, a drip gradually gathering on the end of her big red dab of a nose.

But then she spoke again.

‘Yer. That’s all very well, you an’ me knowing as how the Master couldn’t of done nothing like that. But that ain’t a-going to do for that old Inspector Red-what-d’you-call-um, is it?’

‘Well, no, my dear, it isn’t. It certainly isn’t, and that’s what I’m afraid of. Suppose no other notion of how old Mr Partington died gets into his head? Suppose he just goes on thinking that Richard was responsible, must be responsible?’

‘Yer. That’s what he’ll do all right.’

But Vilkins’ gloom, lugubrious though it was, paradoxically gave Miss Unwin heart. That there was somebody still in the world so true to themselves made her believe, though without a shred of her customary logic, that truth would win in the end.

‘But he must be made to see that Richard is not the person responsible,’ she said.

‘What, old Rediface?’

‘Yes. He must be made to see that there could be someone else who did that terrible thing.’

‘Well, I dunno. He’s a policeman, ain’t he?’

‘But he’s a man too. He has a brain. He can think. Indeed, I rather believe he has more than the ordinary amount of brain, little though I saw of him. And if he has, then if I–’

She stopped.

If I
, she had said. And at that moment she had realised that it would be her, that it must be her, who had to put a different notion of what had happened in the house into Inspector Redderman’s head. There was no one else who would do it, who would want to do it.

‘Yes, Vilkins,’ she said on a new note of hopeful
energy, ‘If I can manage to persuade him that he must look elsewhere, then – then perhaps Richard will come back to this house, and …’

Her voice faded into silence.

‘Then there’ll be them old wedding bells an’ happy ever after,’ Vilkins said.

‘No,’ she said, almost as explosively as when she had decided that Richard Partington could not be the murderer of his own father. ‘No, I don’t know about that, my dear. That’s something too far away to be thought of. No, you must forget that I ever spoke of any such thing, that I even so much as hinted at if.’

‘Well, I don’t know as ’ow I can do that,’ Vilkins answered. ‘I mean, you ’ave spoke of it, ain’t yer? You ‘ave hinted. Well, you done a sight more than hint, if you must know.’

‘Yes. Yes, I did, didn’t I? But, Vilkins, I was so worried, so distressed. I said things I had not even let myself think before.’

‘Not much you didn’t,’ Vilkins answered. ‘’Course you did. Any girl would of done. Stands to reason. A nice-looking feller like that, even if he is a bit on the shortish side, a nice-looking feller showing ‘ow he felt about you, an’ you not know that you felt the same way about ‘im. Don’t give me that.’

Miss Unwin sighed.

‘I suppose you’re right really, dear Vilkins,’ she said. ‘But I promise you I did not let that thought ever take proper shape in my mind, truly I did not.’

‘Well, if you says so. Only you must be a sight stronger in the ‘ead than what I am. An’ in course you are. You must be, or you’d of never got where you are an’ left me behind with me broom an’ dustpan.’

‘Oh, Vilkins, I have not left you behind.’

‘’Course you ‘ave, and so you should. But that’s not the trouble just now.’

‘No, dear? Then what is?’

‘Just that if your Richard didn’t done do it, then who did? Who did?’

Not for the first time in her life Miss Unwin blessed Vilkins’ common sense. Unerringly, for all that she was not in any way clever or capable of understanding anything beyond the most elementary, she had laid her stubby finger on the crux of the matter.

If Richard Partington had not poisoned his father – and he had not, he had not – then who had? Because old Mr Partington had died from the effects of poison. Of arsenic. Doctor Sumsion’s scientific tests had proved that.

So someone must have administered that arsenic.

Administered it – Miss Unwin’s brain began to work again – over a fairly long period. Because the attack that had in the end carried off the old miser had been no different from the attacks he had suffered at intervals ever since her first night in the house and before.

Her thinking mind went step by careful step further forward. If arsenic had been given to the old man, never mind for the moment how, it must have been given to him inside the house or at the pin works. He had never once in all the weeks she had been in the house moved out of that limited round. Up in the morning to eat the scanty breakfast of cheap bread Mrs Meggs provided. More than half alum in place of flour, she had often said to herself. Then at once over to the works. There, as she had heard from Richard, he never moved out of his partitioned-off sanctum up on the gallery above the clanking and clattering machines that had over the years made him his fortune. If anything had to be done outside, it had been Richard who had been sent, given the exact fare for an
omnibus and sent like an errand boy to do just what he was told.

At midday Mrs Meggs would go hobbling across the yard, every day except Sundays, with a tray on which there was more of her cheap bread and two pieces of hard cheese, a bigger one for old Mr Partington, a smaller for Richard. Then in the evening the old miser would come back to the house to eat the dinner that Mrs Meggs had prepared. Those terrible meagre dinners she herself had endured day after day, made only a little more palatable when Captain Fulcher and his sister had come to dinner.

Captain Fulcher. The name seemed to lie at the logical end of her progression of thought.

There, if anyone, was a person who could have been, not cruel enough, but casually careless enough to have given an old man arsenic. And, after all, had not Richard said that his father had never had any of his attacks before he himself had first visited his Cousin Cornelia and afterwards she, with her brother, had begun to come to dine? Yes, the circumstances certainly told against Captain Fulcher.

But why, why would he have done a thing like that?

‘Vilkins,’ Miss Unwin said, hoping irrationally for some more help from her friend, ‘Vilkins, why would Captain Fulcher – you remember I have told you about him – why would he want to poison old Mr Partington?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ Vilkins replied. ‘I ain’ no blinking gypsy with her old crystal ball, am I?’

‘No. No, I suppose you aren’t, my dear. It was just that I hoped you could see what might be in front of your nose when I for the life of me could not.’

‘Ain’t nothing in front o’ my nose, ‘cept a drip,’ said Vilkins, lifting the back of her hand to deal with that.

‘No, but Vilkins, didn’t I tell you how each time that Captain Fulcher and his sister came to dine the Captain would bring two bottles of sherry because he so disliked not being offered any wine? Well, he could have put
arsenic into one of those before it ever entered the house.’

‘He could of, yes,’ Vilkins agreed solemnly. ‘Didn’t you tell me as ‘ow he always opened both the bottles at once, soon as ever he got ‘ere? I thought that was funny at the time. He could of saved one bottle, ‘case the first wasn’t all drunk.’

‘Yes,’ Miss Unwin chimed in. ‘When I saw him do that I thought it was no more than a reflection of his nature, that he was the sort of man who never did anything by halves, who never looked ahead and counted the costs.’

‘Terrible gambler, you did say.’

‘Yes, he was on the very point once, after a moneylender called Mr Davis came forcing his way into the house, of asking old Mr Partington for a loan. Only he realised that there was no chance ever of that.’

‘An’ ‘im with all them sovereigns under the flags.’

Miss Unwin almost gasped then. She stood rapt for a moment, hands clasped in an attitude not far from prayer. Grateful prayer.

‘Vilkins,’ she said at last, ‘you’ve done it again, put your finger on the very thing.’

‘’ave I? Well, that’s a miracle.’

‘Vilkins, Captain Fulcher knew about Mr Partington’s gold, I’m almost sure of that. He learnt of it from the girls. They would chatter and tease him and, though once when I heard them I did not realise that they might have told him anything they shouldn’t, later I did suspect it. I realised it when I was telling old Mr Partington that the girls knew where some of his hoard was hidden. I thought of Captain Fulcher for a moment then, but I didn’t dare tell Mr Partington his secret was known to a man like that. And then in all the troubles afterwards I forgot.’

‘Yer, that’s all very well, Unwin. But I can’t see what you’re so excited about, ‘opping up an’ down like you got fleas.’

‘But don’t you see, my dear? Don’t you see? If Captain Fulcher knew about that gold, wasn’t he almost bound to
try to get hold of some of it? He was being dunned, and then, without him mentioning that he had won money at the races or anything of that kind, suddenly he no longer spoke of being in difficulties. He must surely have got hold of enough of Mr Partington’s hidden wealth to stave off his creditors.’

‘Well, what if he did? Ain’t no reason to murder the poor old man, is it?’

‘Not unless he wished at all costs to prevent Mr Partington discovering he had been robbed and, as he was bound to do, suspecting anyone with access to the house. Not unless that.’

‘’Ere,’ Vilkins said, ‘you may be right.’

Miss Unwin drew herself up.

‘Yes, I may be right,’ she said. ‘Or I may not be. But one thing is certain. I have remembered facts and circumstances which Inspector Redderman is quite unaware of. And I must see that he gets to know of them at once.’

‘An’ ‘ow are you a-going to do that?’

‘Why, quite simply. I am going to tell him.’

She set off for the police office almost immediately. There was nothing to keep her. The twins were safely in their beds and Vilkins was there to make sure they stayed where they had been put.

On the steps of the police station, not so far along the Harrow Road, she did hesitate for a moment.