Free The Governess by Evelyn Hervey Page A

suddenly for sleep. Willingly she allowed her friend of old to help her off with her blood-marked dress and into her nightgown. Before Vilkins had left the room with a last ‘You get a good night, you’ve earned it,’ sleep had overtaken her.
    She woke from it, deep and seemingly dreamless, well before her usual time next morning and at once began going over in her mind the whole train of events that had led her to within an inch of being arrested for murder. For a murder she had been as far from committing as she was from flying to the moon.
    Then, with horrible abruptness, she found in her mind the inescapable question that her resolution to discover herself who had killed Mr Thackerton confronted her with. Who, under this same roof, was that murderer?
    Because it was certain that the murderer was one of the people in the house itself. Her own inquiries and observations at the time of the first sugar-mouse theft had convinced her that it was not possible for anyone to enter the premises unbeknown. The search which Mellings had conducted almost immediately after the murder, accompanied both by tall Henry and Mr Thackerton’s quiet valet Peters when they had been admitted to the house after their joint outing, had confirmed the fact. Sergeant Drewd’s here-and-there questioning of the whole household in the dining-room had underlined it twice over. No one could have got into the house to kill its Master.
    So his murderer must be one amongst them now.
    But, faced squarely with the thought, Miss Unwin could not bring herself, even within the privacy of her own mind, to name a name.
    The Sergeant the night before, in front of the whole family andall the servants, had accused her to her face of being ‘the woman of blood’. It was not something she could do to anyone else, however much her sense of logic rebuked her.
    She was being weak. She knew it. Worse, she was allowing herself to be absurd. She was not using the mind God had given her. But she could not bring herself even to think of a single name.
    She looked across at the battered alarm-clock on the chest of drawers that served as dressing-table in her small room. It was still much too early to get up and dress and to go to little Pelham with the dreadful news that his Grandpapa was dead. Best, she thought, to keep from him for as long as possible the manner in which that death had taken place. But important to tell him the bare fact before others, less careful than herself, broke it to him.
    In the cool early morning light penetrating the thin curtains over her window she tried to lie still and think of nothing.
    A forlorn hope.
    The image of Mr Thackerton’s blood-splashed white shirt front came battering back at once into her mind.
    She must force herself to examine rationally who it could be who – No. No, there was a better way of getting at it. She would not try to decide who in the house was a murderer: she would take a leaf out of Sergeant Drewd’s book and consider only whom she could clearly eliminate on the grounds of lack of either means, motive or opportunity.
    Yes, she could approach the dread question in that circuitous way.
    So, first, means. But everybody in the house, whoever they were, surely had the means to do that foul deed if they but had the will. The means were the Italian paper-knife so conveniently to hand at the end of the long library table. Whoever had gone into the library to speak to Mr Thackerton for whatever reason could have snatched up that appallingly sharp weapon and have plunged it fatally into his throat. Even the frailest of them all could have done that, old Mrs Thackerton, invalid as she was, or young Nancy from the scullery, young and tender as she was.
    So, opportunity.
    And, yes, it looked as though opportunity eliminated nobody either. From Sergeant Drewd’s rain of questions as he had stalked up and down the dining-room, firing them off at random, it had been clear eventually that no one had had occasion to be in