The China Governess

by Margery Allingham

  Luke scratched his clipped black curls. ‘What was she doing there at all, do you know? Was she just ghouling about among the graves, or pinching flowers, or what? I mean was this an absoltely chance meeting, do you think, or was she interested in that one particular grave?’

  ‘Oh, of course it was our grave she was looking at!’ The idea of any other explanation seemed to astound her. ‘I thought “Ah, there’s somebody who’s heard the talk!”’

  Mr. Campion raised a warning hand but he was too late. Luke had heard.

  ‘What talk?’ he demanded, looking from one to the other of them with the same suspicious flicker.

  ‘Miss Saxon fell in the kitchen just before she had her fatal heart attack.’ Mr. Campion made the explanation carefully. ‘She appears to have been listening at a door and when Timothy Kinnit pulled it open suddenly, she fell in. Basil Toberman has been making a point of the incident. He’s inordinately jealous of the young man.’

  ‘Oh the tale isn’t true,’ said the irrepressible Mrs. Broome airily. ‘I was there and I saw what happened so there’s no question about that. Mr. Eustace hushed it up because she was a governess – not because of Mr. Tim.’

  ‘Hushed it up?’

  ‘Played it down.’ Mr. Campion spoke with more firmness than one might have supposed possible in one normally so casual.

  ‘All right,’ Luke conceded but he was still interested. ‘Why is he cagey about governesses?’

  ‘Because they had one who did a murder.’ Mrs. Broome was enjoying herself. As soon as Luke noticed it he calmed considerably.

  ‘A hundred and twenty years ago,’ murmured Mr. Campion testily. ‘Miss Thyrza Caleb and her Chair of Death.’

  ‘Oh?’ The superintendent was delighted. ‘It’s the same Kinnit family, is it? We used to have a book of famous trials in the house when I was a kid, illustrated with dreadful old woodcuts. I remember Thyrza with her white face and streaming hair. There was something funny about that story. Wasn’t there a postscript?’

  ‘I never heard it,’ said Campion. ‘I missed the crime entirely. It was new on me when Toberman told me the other day.’

  ‘Oh, no. It’s famous in its way.’ Luke was still searching his memory. ‘She committed suicide, I think.’ He shook his head as some of the details remained obstinately shadowy and turned a broadly smiling face to Mrs. Broome. ‘Well, anyway, you got it in and startled the poor copper,’ he said. ‘You’re old Bean-spilling-Bertha herself, aren’t you?’

  Nanny Broome was not amused. As usual when the joke was against her she made every effort to get her own back.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ she muttered, jerking up her chin. ‘Not like some people!’

  Luke’s interest was captured despite his better judgement. ‘Out with it,’ he commanded. ‘Who are you telling tales on now?’

  ‘No one. I’ve got none to tell, but Miss Saxon had. Painting her face, dyeing her hair, listening at doors, and over sixty years old if she was a day! What sort of governess was she?’

  ‘Better than no one,’ said Luke, flatly. ‘You can’t catch me with that sort of stuff.’

  ‘But she had a secret. She was always just about to tell it to me. She’d keep leading up to it and then being put off, or Mrs. Telpher would call her.’ Nanny Broome was labouring her points a little. There was a touch of desperation in her bid for drama. ‘She told me herself, only the day before she died: “I’m under a great strain” she said.’

  Mr. Campion took it upon himself to see that no more harm was done.

  ‘Miss Saxon was driving the car when the accident occurred that resulted in the tragic condition of the child who has been brought over here to hospital,’ he said. ‘It has been unconscious for two years.’

  ‘Oh Lord!’ Luke’s sympathetic grimace was lost in Mrs. Broome’s amazed reception of the news.

  ‘Oh, so that was it! Well! No wonder she wanted to share a feeling of guilt like that, and why she seemed more upset about the poor kiddie-widdie even than its own suffering mother.’ She paused and added brightly, ‘and why she dyed her hair.’

  ‘Eh?’ Luke’s eyes were sparkling. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I dare you.’

  ‘Because she knew she was too old to have been driving the car, of course,’ said Mrs. Broome, gathering her gloves and purse. ‘And now if you don’t need me any longer, sir, I’ll be getting back. There’ll be some clearing up to do and Miss Julia is staying the night, so I want to pop a nice hot bottle in her bed. Just to comfort her. She’s very young and no Mummie.’

  Luke got up. ‘Very well, be off,’ he said. ‘Thank you for your help. I don’t suppose I shall have to call on you again.’

  ‘Oh, I’m very glad.’ Disappointment was evident in every line of her body and her lashes made half circles on her cheeks. ‘I shouldn’t like to have to give evidence in court.’

  ‘God forbid that indeed!’ said Luke, ducking his chin in to his neck. ‘Run along, I’ll send you a box of chocolates one day.’

  She flashed a smile at him which was as gay and provocative as seventeen itself. ‘I don’t eat them,’ she proclaimed, triumphantly. ‘I’m slimming.’

  The last they saw of her was her seat, wagging as happily as if it carried a tail, as she trotted off into the shadows.

  Luke laughed softly. ‘It’s a crying shame one could never risk her in the witness box,’ he observed. ‘She’s got all the answers. It must have been tremendous fun being brought up by a woman like that. You’d know all the important things about the whole sex before you were seven.’

  Mr. Campion put out his hand for the photographs and studied them curiously. They showed a bedraggled sprite of a woman with a slack mouth and huge vacant eyes, who yet managed to convey a hint of cunning. She was unusually dishevelled, he suspected, which was what had so shocked Mrs. Broome.

  ‘What about Agnes Leach’s record?’

  Luke shrugged. ‘She’s a type and she has the usual long silly history. Shoplifting, soliciting, minor fraud. Our welfare people suffer from her. They get her job after job and each time she reforms completely for a couple of weeks until something else catches her attention and – whoops! She’s flat on her kisser again.’

  ‘I suppose Mrs. Broome did recognize these photographs?’

  ‘I’d take my dying oath she did.’ Luke spoke with the conviction of long experience. ‘She recognized her in the cemetery and these confirmed it.’

  Mr. Campion passed them back. ‘What was Agnes Leach doing there? Looking for an address?’

  ‘I should think so. “Looking at the flowers on the grave” suggests hunting among them for florists’ labels to me. Somehow or other – almost certainly from Miss Tray at the cobbler’s shop – she heard that the young man who was making the awkward inquiries was due at the funeral of someone called Saxon, and that there was an advertisement about it in The Times newspaper. No address was given in the paper but the place of burial was mentioned so she went there.’ He shook his dark head. ‘In my experience it’s almost impossible to underestimate anything which Agnes and her associates are likely to know for certain. They snap up bits of unrelated information and make a tale of them. They knew the name Stalkey, hence the destruction of the flat and the fire at the office, but apparently they didn’t know the name Kinnit. The chance of Agnes remembering it, if ever she heard it on her brief visit to the country, is remote. She is a simple defective. He, of course, is quite a different caper.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr. Campion, blinking behind his spectacles. ‘At last we come to the dark figure in the wood pile, the lighter of fires and smasher up of flats.’

  ‘Slasher of mail bags and dresses in the cinema, burner of bus seats, and at least three knife attacks on girls who ought to have known better than to be out with him.’ Luke spoke without venom. ‘He’s a problem child,’ he added unnecessarily.

  ‘Agnes’s son?’

  The superintendent leaned back, tipping his chair, and prepared to enjoy himself. ‘She says not
. To prove it he has a birth certificate and the marriage lines of his parents. An almost unheard-of possession in their vicinity! According to Agnes his name is Barry Comish. Certainly his reputed father appears to have done what he could for him.’

  ‘Stap me!’ murmured Mr. Campion, who permitted himself unlikely expletives when really shaken. ‘So that’s it.’ He was silent for a moment considering the ramifications of the new position. ‘Tell me,’ he said at last, ‘had Cornish any idea of the true story himself?’

  ‘None at all. He accepted Barry meekly. It was only this morning that Miss Aicheson woke him to tell him a tale about Timothy’s arrival at Angevin which was quite obviously the other half of one he had already heard from Agnes’s friends about the other boy. Agnes never invents more than she needs, you see. That’s the most dangerous thing about her.’

  ‘Yes. It would be. How did Cornish take the discovery that he had been swindled, virtually blackmailed, all these years by some wretched woman who’d pinched his son’s papers?’

  ‘He didn’t take it,’ said Luke slowly. ‘He’s an honest chap and he realized that Barry was probably behind the violence, so he came to me acting on a moral compulsion. I’ve got the impression that he’s tickled to death with Timothy, who seems to be very like him, but do you know I don’t believe he’ll ever attempt to own him to disown the other.’

  Mr. Campion sighed. ‘Poor man,’ he said. ‘He sees his great sacrifice rejected by the gods and so, no doubt, all the Misses Eumenides let loose again to plague him.’

  Luke eyed his friend curiously.

  ‘What a funny chap you are, Campion,’ he said. ‘I told him that he was clinging to a phoney cross. Also of course he’s a perishing official. He can’t bring himself to believe that there isn’t something sacred about a certificate!’

  ‘Let me get this absolutely straight for the sake of the record.’ Mr. Campion was diffident as usual. ‘Your suggestion is that Agnes Leach left Timothy with Mrs. Broome but retained his papers?’

  ‘Only by accident.’

  ‘Oh, I see. She left the mother’s possessions in a station cloakroom?’

  ‘Better. She parked the whole suitcase on an honest landlady who kept them until Agnes turned up again four years later. By that time Agnes had become baby-prone herself – after her chat with Mrs. Broome perhaps! – and had achieved Barry who was then about three years old. I imagine she dressed him up in anything she could find in the other woman’s bag and thought the certificates might fit him since nothing else did, if she called him four instead of three. He was backward, wasn’t he? So he could pass for a bit worse. It wouldn’t worry Agnes.’ His eyes began to dance. ‘Anyway I’ll bet it was the dear good nuns who looked up the father for her in all innocence once she produced the marriage certificate and told the story of rescuing the baby from the bombs. Agnes has that kind of history.’

  Mr. Campion sighed. ‘I believe all this,’ he said sadly. ‘What about Agnes and Barry now? Have they been pulled in?’

  Luke glanced at his watch. ‘I dropped the word to Munday, the D.D.I. at Ebbfield, who has probably got the boy by this time. His last known address was somewhere in Wandsworth. Sometimes it takes a few hours to locate a chap like that but there’s never any difficulty in picking him up in the end.’

  ‘I suppose not. You have some fingerprints from the arson business, haven’t you?’

  ‘Nothing very good. They were being treated in the lab when I left. I wanted to get an identification of Agnes from Mrs. Broome off the record, just in case the woman proved to be involved in a criminal charge and so become unavailable for private questioning.’ Luke was a little shamefaced about his own consideration and seemed to feel a need to excuse it. ‘I never see any point in involving people who have a little front to keep up if it isn’t necessary,’ he went on. ‘I didn’t know Mrs. Broome would be so convincing. She might have had to meet Agnes again before she could be sure. As it is, everything is plain sailing. You ought to be able to convince little Miss Julia’s papa there’s nothing worse than obstinate self-sacrifice in the lad’s family, and the poor old Councillor can choose his own bed of nails. Aren’t you satisfied?’

  ‘No.’ Campion was frowning. ‘The thing that’s worrying me, Charles, is why didn’t she follow her?’

  ‘Why didn’t Agnes follow Nanny Broome?’

  ‘Exactly. The only explanation must be that she had already found the address of the Well House and the name Kinnit, presumably on one of the wreaths. She must also have recognized Mrs. Broome. That meeting took place somewhere around early afternoon, leaving plenty of time for Agnes to telephone the news to anyone anywhere. She could have spoken to the cobbler’s shop, for instance.’

  Luke was listening doubtfully.

  ‘She might,’ he said. ‘Barry has any intelligence there is between them. He’s got a sharp mind in a warped sort of way. You feel he might attack the house because of Timothy?’

  ‘No,’ Mr. Campion was gently obstinate. ‘I think he might be bright enough to see how many beans make five. Surely the only person on earth who can testify that Timothy was the baby left at Angevin by Agnes Leach at the outbreak of war is Nanny Broome?’

  Luke sat up. ‘Corblimeah! he said. ‘And we’ve sent her home alone. Let me get on the telephone!’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Indictment

  ONCE HE WAS seated at the kitchen table with Alison and Miss Aicheson facing him, Mr. Telpher on his left and Eustace on his right, Tim and Julia in the background draped round the basket chair, Basil Toberman passed into a stage of ponderous arrogance.

  With his face crimson and his full mouth glistening he achieved a dictator-like appearance, squat, myopic and preternaturally solemn. The Kinnit family were bearing with him in their own peculiar way and sat smiling at him with tolerant superiority, but the rest of the company was suffering.

  ‘The bronze is unquestion – unquestion – unquestionably genuine,’ he announced, adding unnecessarily, ‘I have said it.’

  ‘So we hear.’ Miss Aicheson was almost as red as he was and had never appeared more masculine. ‘Don’t you think, perhaps, all this could wait?’

  ‘Silence!’ Basil had apparently decided to treat them as a public meeting. ‘I have just been half across Europe and have flown through the sky with one of the greatest experts the world has ever known. I speak of Leofric Paulfrey of the Museum.’

  ‘Professor Paulfrey!’ Eustace was delighted; his face lit up with pleasure. ‘Oh splendid. Now that’s an opinion which is really worth having. Does he say it’s fourth century?’

  ‘I say it’s absolutely genuine.’ Toberman was frowning with he effort of articulation. ‘It is a fellow to the Boy Jockey of the Artimisian wreck; in better condition. I am prepared to guarantee that it’s by the same man.’

  ‘Are you though!’ It was Eustace who spoke but both Alison and Geraldine Telpher looked up with exactly the same twinkling smile of good-tempered derision.

  ‘Laugh! Go on, laugh!’ Toberman’s thick hand shot out in a gesture which would have been a little oversize in a Pagliaccio ‘Laugh your heads off. You can do it today but it’ll be for the last time, because I’ve heard the truth about you and I never keep my mouth shut, do I?’

  ‘My dear fellow, if you’ve only got the truth about the Bronze it’ll be enough for one evening!’ Eustace turned the attack gracefully and shot an apologetic glance towards Julia. It was most discreetly done, but Toberman was in the state of over-awareness typical of certain toxic conditions and he pounced upon the girl, noticing her presence for the first time, apparently.

  ‘This is fitting,’ he declared with thick theatricality. ‘This is Rich. This is Justice. Bride of the Wonderboy meets Family Skeleton.’

  ‘I should hardly call yourself that, Toby.’ Tim was juggling with the situation. ‘What about a bit of beautiful shut-eye? Shall we go up to bed?’

  ‘No. Certainly and absolutely not. I am not as canned as that.’ Toberman began
to laugh a little himself. ‘I’ve got something to tell you, Timothy, and when I do you’re going to know I’m right just as I knew old Paulfrey was right when he told me. The man was afraid of flying, Timothy. I saw it. I saw it in his eyes and because I was queasy myself, as I always am in the air, I suggested we behaved like reasonable men and drank ourselves out of it and that’s how he came to tell me. Otherwise I don’t suppose he’d have brought himself to talk to me at all. The man was afraid. He was funky. He sweated. I saw it. To save his face he had to babble out something and because my name reminded him of the Kinnits he babbled out this glorious story.’

  ‘Which was that the Bronze was genuine,’ said Mrs. Telpher briskly.

  ‘God!’ Toberman regarded her with overdrawn contempt. ‘You’re a Kinnit and that’s typical. That’s the first, last and only thing you’d think of. Don’t worry, Geraldine, you won’t be left out. Professor Paulfrey was very interested to hear that you were staying with your relatives. He knew your late husband by repute, he said, and he knows the Van der Graffs very well indeed. He’s been staying with them. But it was your governess he was interested in and so was I, my God, when he told me.’ He lurched round to peer at the basket chair. ‘Timothy? Do you know what was the really interesting thing about the original Kinnit governess?’

  ‘Basil, you’re becoming an abominable bore!’ There was an unfamiliar edge to Eustace’s voice which jarred warningly on every ear in the room except, apparently, Toberman’s own.

  He swayed a little but was still remarkably articulate.

  ‘Don’t you believe it you silly old Kinnit,’ he declared. ‘Pay attention my little man. I have news for you. The family secret is out. Miss Thyrza is vindicated. She wasn’t guilty, Timothy. She didn’t kill the boy friend. It was her pupil, the thwarted fifteen-year-old Miss Haidée Kinnit whose immature advances he’d rejected, who prepared the trap for him. She did the murder and planted the blame, with sweet Kinnitty cunning, squarely upon her more successful rival, the unimportant and defenceless governess. Moreover, there is a very strong supposition that the family knew.’