The Man of Gold (16 page)

‘And speakin’ of mess,’ the old woman brutally interrupted, ‘you ain’t been poking an’ prying among the bits o’ things I left, ’ave you? Them’s not to be touched till I get back to take ’em, see.’

‘I am sure that no one would disturb anything you were unable to take with you,’ Miss Unwin answered, all the more coldly for her inner vexation that the subject of flies had just been pushed further off.

‘Well, don’t you go a-laying your thieving hands on ’em’.

‘Oo are you calling a thief, I should like to know.’

Here was an insult to her friend altogether too much for honest Vilkins.

‘I shall call a thief who I like. I dare say it’s to see what more you can prig you came down here for.’

‘That I have not,’ Vilkins retorted, her dab of a nose taking on tones of the fieriest red. ’I come ‘ere to –’

‘Vilkins!’

The exclamation was all Miss Unwin could think of to halt her companion before she had blurted out the true reason for their visit.

‘No,’ Vilkins said, ‘I ain’t a-going to be called a thief by no old woman what’s gone and –’

‘No! Stop! Stop!’

Miss Unwin saw, with despair, that only one course was now left open to her. Retreat.

‘Come, Vilkins,’ she said, ‘let us leave. That’s the only way to deal with such accusations.’

For a moment she thought her friend was not going to
listen. But after a second or so of red-faced furious silence Vilkins did turn away.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I won’t stay ‘ere to ‘ear no talk like that. It’s beneath me. That’s what it is. Beneath me.’

And gaudy bonnet and all she swept to the door.

Miss Unwin stayed looking at Mrs Meggs. Had she missed altogether her chance of putting the old woman to the test? No, she must not let it go, however barely and baldly she now must ask her precious question.

‘Then goodbye, Mrs Meggs,’ she said. ‘But, tell me one last thing. In what did you boil the fly papers?’

‘Fly papers? Fly papers?’ the old woman answered, peering at her from beneath her tangled eyebrows. ‘I don’t know what you mean about fly papers. I ain’t never had no truck with fly papers. Cost more’n they’re worth, they do.’

It was not the response Miss Unwin had hoped for. Far from it. But there was no more to be done.

She turned and left in Vilkins’ wake.

Their journey out of the Ratcliff Highway was quicker than their journey into it and down dark malodorous Nile Street. But the ease with which they accomplished their departure was no pleasure to Miss Unwin. AH she could think of was that the whole expedition with its very real dangers had been an entire waste of time. She had put a question to Mrs Meggs about fly papers, certainly. But it had had to be put so awkwardly, and it had elicited not the least glimmer of a guilty response.

Perhaps Mrs Meggs had obtained arsenic from some other source. It could be bought as rat poison after all. But an Act of Parliament of some thirty years before had laid down that it must then be mixed with a prescribed quantity of soot which ought to make it impossible to add in secret to human food.

So was Mrs Meggs innocent? Nasty and vicious though she was, it well might be that she had not sunk to murder. Perhaps she had been more content to wait to open her
public house than it had seemed. There were those extra large cups of tea she had continued to the last to bring to the old miser. She must have felt some deep regard for him.

But if she was not the person who had poisoned him, who was? It could not be Richard. It could not be. It must not be.

Then who could it be? The case against Captain Fulcher had certainly not been entirely disproved, for all that Inspector Redderman had treated it so lightly. Perhaps after all Jack Fulcher was the guilty one.

Or Cousin Cornelia? Could she have secretly introduced arsenic into the sherry her brother bought to take to the Harrow Road? It was surely possible. And she did have a reason for wishing that old Mr Partington was no longer living. If, as the little servant girl at the Captain’s lodgings had indicated, she had foolishly given all her inheritance to her brother and had even had to let her house in the country and stay in the London she thought so dirty and unpleasant, then surely the prospect of marriage with Richard when he had inherited his father’s wealth would be so much worth wishing for that she might well commit murder.

And murder would be needed. She could not have failed to have seen that the old miser would give his son nothing while he still had breath in his body. So had she, of her own accord and saying nothing to the brother she doted on, arranged that the breath should leave the old man’s body?

Surely it was possible. And in any case there was no one else in the household or with regular access to it who could have committed the crime. No one else at all. So it had to be Miss Fulcher, if it was not the Captain or Mrs Meggs. But how could she prove any of this? How could she obtain even enough evidence to bring once again to Inspector Redderman?

She could think of no way.

As at last the two of them came out of the Ratcliff Highway into somewhat safer streets where a cab might be had, she heard faint in the distance behind her the sound of the shanty that was being sung by the circle of drunken seamen as they had arrived.

Oh, Mexico was covered in snow
The grub was bad and the pay was low

But Mexico is not covered in snow, she thought in a burst of fury with the whole place, and with herself. What was needed here was a sharp lesson in geography.

For most of the long cab journey from the East End through the City and Westminster and on through Bayswater till at last they came to the Harrow Road Vilkins sat as silent as Miss Unwin. Miss Unwin felt no inclination to berate her friend for the discomfiture they had experienced. With hindsight, she suspected that, whatever she had managed to say, old Mrs Meggs would not have yielded an inch. Her own silence was the result solely of feeling that she had now nowhere to look for evidence that would show Richard not to be guilty.

But, as at last their ancient growler turned into the Harrow Road, the reason for Vilkins’ unusual lack of talk emerged.

‘Unwin,’ she suddenly burst out, ‘I done it good an’ proper, didn’t I?’

‘Do what, Vilkins dear?’

‘Done it. Done it.’

Miss Unwin smiled in the straw-smelling darkness of the old cab.

‘What “it” my dear? What “it” have you done?’

‘Ruined it, spoilt it, upset the ‘ole apple-cart of it.’

‘Ah, our lack of success with Mrs Meggs. You’re blaming yourself. But there’s no need, really there isn’t. I see now she was altogether too tough a bird to be caught in any springes we might set.’

‘You sure?’ said Vilkins, shedding doubt like a coster’s donkey shedding its harness as soon as its cartload of vegetables was sold. ‘Really sure? ‘Course she was an old devil, like you’d said. What blooming cheek calling me a
thief, and you. I’d ‘ave liked to ‘ave given ‘er a good clap round the chops, so I would.’

‘Well, I doubt if that would have advanced matters very far. Think what would have happened if she had called the police.’

‘Now, you must be off your rocker, Unwin. ‘Er call in the peelers? She wouldn’t never dare. An’ they wouldn’t never come. Not down Nile Street, they wouldn’t.’

‘Yes, I dare say you’re quite right there. But all the same giving poor old Mrs Meggs a clap round the chops wouldn’t have helped us.’

‘It’d ‘ave ‘elped me. Given me some satisfaction.’

Vilkins fell back then into a silence that was happy.

But before their journey was quite done, while Miss Unwin was looking in her purse wondering whether the small supply of money that had been all she had dared take on so dangerous an errand would be enough to pay the cab-man, her companion broke out once more.

‘’Er an’ ‘er old bits o’ things. I bet there isn’t a rag worth ‘aving among the lot o’ them. An’ telling me to keep my ‘ands off of them.’

Miss Unwin looked up from her careful counting of coins.

‘Not a rag worth having,’ she echoed. ‘I dare say you’re right, my dear. Old Mrs Meggs wore the same garments, I swear, every day that I saw her in the house. But if she left behind nothing worth having, why was she so insistent that we were not to lay our hands on anything?’

‘Spite, most likely,’ Vilkins said.

‘No. No, I think not.’

‘Well, what was it then? If you’re so clever.’

‘Something … Something she did not want us to see.’

‘What you mean?’

‘Vilkins, what if there was something in old Mrs Meggs’s room, something that she either forgot in the heat of her departure to take with her, or for some reason could not take?’

‘What if there was?’

‘Well, what if it was something – I don’t know what – that when she saw us she realised might incriminate her?’

‘What’s incriminate?’ said Vilkins.

‘It’s proof that someone is a criminal, Vilkins dear. Something that proves that. It could be proof that after all Mrs Meggs is a murderess.’

‘Well then, we’ll ‘ave to look, won’t we?’ said Vilkins.

Look they did, before they had so much as taken off their bonnets. Miss Unwin paused only to make sure from a sleepy cook that the twins had stayed safely in their beds all the time she had been away.

‘Mrs Miller,’ she asked next, ‘did you find anything belonging to Mrs Meggs when you moved into her room?’

‘Move into her room?’ the cook replied with some indignation. ‘I tell you, Miss, I wouldn’t no more have slept in that room than what I would fly.’

‘Really? I knew nothing of this. What was wrong with the room?’

‘Dirt,’ said Mrs Miller. ‘Dirt of ages and mess. Lord knows what she’d stored away in there, but it was too much for me to think of shifting. When we get that boy for the boots and knives that the Master said we could have, I’ll get him to clear it all out for the rag-and-bone man. But till then, there it must stay. I’ll not soil my hands with it.’

‘No,’ Miss Unwin said, ‘but I will. This minute.’

And off she went with Vilkins, carrying one of the new bright brass oil-lamps that Richard Partington had bought by the dozen, to inspect the old housekeeper’s lair.

It was a strange sight that met their eyes. Little wonder, Miss Unwin thought, that Mrs Miller had refused so much as to go in.

Up each wall from floor to ceiling there were stacked and piled discarded household objects of every sort. Even the one small window near the top of the back wall was three-quarters obscured, and further layers were piled in
front of those already up against the walls.

‘Why,’ Vilkins said in tones of deep awe, ‘she must of kep’ every blessed bottle that come into the ‘ouse the ‘ole time she was ‘ere.’

‘I do believe you’re right, my dear. She seems to have had an especial fondness for bottles. I wonder at it. She could have had many a halfpenny selling them at the door.’

‘P’raps she was a-saving ‘em up, to add to ‘er nest-egg,’ Vilkins suggested.

‘You may be right. And perhaps, after all, that’s why she wanted us not to interfere with them. That and no more.’

Her heart began to sink.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Vilkins said. ‘If you ask me you was right in the first place. She went on so about the blessed things. Somewhere among ‘em, like as not, there’s something what you called incrimerating.’

Miss Unwin looked at the dusty array, the jars and bottles, the gallipots and pipkins, the flagons and carboys.

‘But, oh, Vilkins,’ she said, ‘where are we going to begin? How can we find the one thing in all this mess that Mrs Meggs wanted to keep from us, if it’s there at all?’

Vilkins scratched her head under her garish bonnet.

‘Begin at the beginning, I s’pose,’ she said.

‘No,’ Miss Unwin answered, suddenly seized with a notion. ‘No, it should be begin at the end.’

‘Begin at the end? That’s daft, Unwin.’

‘Oh, no, it isn’t, my dear. Don’t you see? Whatever it is that Mrs Meggs doesn’t want anybody to know about, always supposing there is something, whatever it is is likely to be something that she used recently. The bottle or jar or whatever it turns out to be which she used somehow to give old Mr Partington the arsenic’

‘All right then. But ‘ow do we tell where the end is what we got to begin at?’

‘Simple, I think. We look for the least dusty objects we can see.’

‘All right.’

Vilkins stooped and held the lamp low down near the floor. At once it was obvious that some of the bottles and jars lined up in the outer row were less dust-covered than others.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘look at these. Cleaning stuff, though you wouldn’t of thought any o’ that had been used ‘ere for many a long day. But ‘ere it is, that old Cor Rosy Subjec’ mate.’

‘Oh, Vilkins,’ Miss Unwin began, ‘you should say –’

And then she stopped.

Her eye had been caught by a comparatively clean and sparkling bottle standing next to the cleaning fluid ones which Vilkins had been commenting on. And the name on its label, written in the flourishing, confident handwriting of a chemist’s shop proprietor, was ringing loud and furious bells in her head.

Fowler’s Solution. As directed
.

Surely she had come across that name somewhere quite recently, and in a context that was somehow relevant to her present purpose.

‘But where?

‘Vilkins,’ she asked, ‘have you ever heard of Fowler’s Solution?’

‘Something to do with catching fowl, I should think.’

Miss Unwin laughed.

And as she did so the place where she had seen those words in their correct meaning came floating back into her mind. In
Potherton on Poisons
, no less. Fowler’s Solution was one of the many sources of arsenic that the learned professor had listed. It had come far down in his tables since it did not contain more than one per cent of arsenic trioxide in a neutral base. But it was there. Fowler’s Solution was a standard remedy for a certain mouth
infection and it was also – Miss Unwin began to feel excitement pulsing through her – a general tonic. Had Mrs Meggs, always concerned about her Master’s health, first just taken to adding Fowler’s Solution to his tea each evening? Was that why she had invariably given him that extra large cup?