The Good Wife

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘And on the day you saw her at the races, what did you talk about?’

  ‘We only talked for a few minutes. Gus wanted to see the next race because that was the one that their horse was running in. She wished us luck with that. We talked a little bit about Italy and about what she had been doing, but really it was only what, ten minutes or so. At most. We said that we must get together, and I checked that she had our telephone number. We have a telephone for the business, of course, and they had one for the practice. We said that we would see what could be arranged. I think it’s rare for any of us to have had a day just for leisure, her husband’s practice was getting busier and I know Martha helped him a lot. And with this being a family business it’s often very hard to get away, but we were all eager to do so, to meet up again.’

  ‘Did she seem ill at ease? Was she looking around her, for instance?’

  Again they exchanged a glance and Gus frowned. ‘Well, she was, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I assumed she was looking for where her friend was with the children.’

  ‘She said she must be heading back, that she’d promised she’d only be a tick.’

  ‘She didn’t seem ill at ease, I don’t think. She seemed as relaxed as I remembered her.’

  His wife nodded agreement. ‘Then we went off in one direction and she went in the other.’

  ‘Back the way she’d come?’

  ‘I don’t know, she came up behind us, calling our names. We turned around, and there was Martha. So I don’t really know what direction she came from.’

  ‘She went off towards the stands, towards the fairground,’ Gus said. ‘She said that her friend was going to take the children on the fairground rides, so I assumed that’s where she was going to.’

  Emory had a copy of Mickey’s sketch map and he took it out now and asked the Mancinis if they could point out where they thought they had met Martha and the direction she taken when she left them.

  ‘One more thing,’ Emory asked them, a rather random thought just striking him. ‘Was she carrying her handbag?’

  ‘Well, I would imagine so.’ Gus laughed. ‘When do women go anywhere without their handbags?’

  ‘No. She wasn’t,’ Hazel stated emphatically.

  ‘Are you certain? Surely she would have it?’

  ‘No, I know she wasn’t. It was when we checked to see if she had our telephone number. She said she thought she did, you remember? But could I write it down for her just in case. And she apologized that she didn’t have a pen because she had left her bag with her friend. I never thought anything about it at the time. She said they’d been picnicking, I assumed she’d left it wherever they were picnicking, not that I gave it much thought. Is it important?’

  Emory nodded thoughtfully. ‘I think it might be.’ He pointed to the sketch map. ‘This is where she left her friend Nora Phillips and the children. They waited for her for a quarter of an hour then went to the fairground. This is where the body of Mrs Martha Mason was found. As you can see, judging by the direction she took when she left you, she could have gone to the stands or to the fairground or across here towards the area where she died. But this is where her bag was found. As you see clearly, it is between where Mrs Phillips stood waiting for her and where she met you. I think that is a little strange.’

  In fact, I think that is more than a little strange, Emory said to himself.

  Detective Sergeant Mickey Hitchens was busy sticking his nose into places where it was clearly not wanted. He intended to visit the family of the young woman who Mrs Richardson had told them completely disappeared. He knew this was not really of immediate relevance to the murder of Martha Mason but neither was he totally convinced by the argument that either her affair with Mr Harry Benson had been over or that the child she carried was not his. So far another potential father had not emerged, apart from Dr Phillips of course, so until he did, Mickey was quite content to examine the circumstantial evidence against Mr Harry Benson – if only because he really didn’t like the man.

  He had first gone to Mr Benson’s house and spoken to the other Mrs Richardson there, aunt to Grace, who worked for Dr and Mrs Phillips. Mr Benson was out, she didn’t know where or when he’d be back and she wasn’t very sure that she should welcome Sergeant Hitchens into the house with her employer not being present. But she did anyway.

  ‘I looked in that room, and you’ve left that fingerprint powder everywhere,’ she told him.

  ‘I’m afraid I have,’ Mickey agreed comfortably. ‘It’ll wipe off with a damp cloth. Though I’d rather you left it alone for a while. There might still be more to be learnt from that study of his.’

  ‘I very much doubt that. All he does is sit in there and drink and smoke too much. And if he’s in company then he sits and drinks and smokes even more.’

  ‘If you disapprove of him so much, why do you remain?’

  She shrugged. ‘Because it’s work,’ she said. ‘And because I had a great fondness for his mother and father and for him when he was small. I looked after him then. In those days, of course, this house had a full staff but the war ended all of that.’ She smiled and the smile softened her features. ‘Such parties they had. I used to help Madame dress, all silks and pearls and feathers in her hair. A beautiful woman she was and believe it or not he was a sweet boy.’

  ‘And how long have you been in service here?’

  ‘Twenty-seven years next May. Master Harry was a year old when I came. And a right handful he was then, but a darn sight easier than he is now, I can tell you. The trouble with young men his age is they’ve not seen the hardships their fathers went through. Judging by your age, you must have served. You and that inspector of yours, but the younger ones, all they want is to be irresponsible, to be mad and wild and gay.’

  ‘I’ve been told that he has had to sell some of the family possessions. That he is not as comfortably off as he would like other people to think.’

  She snorted. ‘He was well enough off when his father died. Had he been as careful as his father, he could have run this place the way it is meant to be run and still be comfortably off, as you put it. He tries to keep pace with those who have more than he does, that’s his problem. Gambling and drinking and womanizing, it would have broken his poor mother’s heart. I’m glad she’s not here to see it. Though if she had still been around I doubt if he’d have got away with it. After she died his father didn’t seem to have the wherewithal to correct him. And I know I’m speaking out of turn, and frankly I don’t care. I’ve been with this family a very long time and it cuts me to the quick the way he squandered everything.’

  ‘From the way you spoke to him the other day, it seems he might be conversant with the way you feel. You’ll forgive me for being blunt, but––’

  ‘Why does he put up with me? Why doesn’t he give me my notice? I’ll tell you why, because no one else will work for him and he knows it. He has a reputation now and any young woman coming to work here would have hers ruined, whether she gave into his blandishments or not. I told him straight, I would have no more young women working here. So he told me that he would therefore hire no one else and that I must manage alone, as though that was a hardship. He rarely eats here, I send his laundry out to be done, and there are three rooms in this house that he won’t let me enter to dust and clean, so my duties are not exactly onerous.’

  ‘Three rooms?’ Mickey asked.

  Mrs Richardson looked shamefaced. ‘I shouldn’t have told you that. It’s sheer foolishness. His study you know about, his bedroom, well he used to allow me in to change the sheets, though they are often in such a state that I told him he could do it himself. He occasionally remembers to put them in the laundry hamper and when he does I put fresh linen on the bed for him. But nothing more. I’m under instruction to touch nothing more in his bedroom. And the third room of course is his dressing room. Much of the rest of the house is covered down with dust sheets. You can’t believe how much it saddens me to see the place like this
. But what respectable young woman would allow him to court her, not with his reputation. What respectable father would allow his daughter to marry someone who would gamble her money away, who would never be faithful to her, and would leave her miserable and probably destitute?’

  Mickey wondered how much of this was exaggeration and how much pure exasperation. Mrs Richardson had counted this place home for twenty-seven years – she clearly felt she had an investment in this great big, empty house and he wondered where she would go if her employer did dismiss her, or did in fact lose everything.

  ‘Eliza Watkins,’ he said.

  ‘What about her?’ she said sharply.

  ‘Where do you think she went to? It’s an open secret that Mr Benson was probably the father of her child, and an equally open secret that he probably paid for her to get rid of it.’

  ‘You can’t prove any of that.’ She was defensive now. She might complain about her young master, but he was still hers; still in some part that little boy she had looked after from when he’d been only a year old.

  ‘So what do you think became of her?’

  ‘When a girl is shamed, she’ll go away from those who know she’s been shamed. I’ve no doubt she is in employment somewhere else where she isn’t known, and I wish her well.’

  ‘Did you provide her with references?’

  ‘I would have done, had I been asked. I feel sorry for the girl, for all that she was foolish, I’d not see her unable to get a place. But she never sent to me for references.’

  ‘It’s hard to get a position without references,’ Mickey observed. Unless they were fabricated, of course. If the girl had moved far enough away then it was possible that her references would not be checked. ‘There are rumours that she died.’

  ‘There are always rumours. People gossip, it is what people do. Especially about their betters.’

  ‘And you count your employer as one of their betters.’

  Mrs Richardson scowled at him. Then she seemed so reconsider. ‘She was only seventeen. Flattered by the attention, I’ve no doubt. Her head was full of dreams and promises, she believed that he loved her, of course, but she was just another conquest. I can’t deny that because it is common knowledge and because the fool of a boy never really made any secret of it. Eliza never told me when she fell pregnant, but I knew. Time was, in a household like this, girls were made to show the housekeeper evidence each month, that they were not in the family way. But I’ve never made my girls do that. There’s a cook housekeeper we had when I first got here, she was a stickler for it. They had to show their rags, and there would be hell to pay if they were late, or they tried to get out of it. I often think now this was as much to scare the young men as it was to frighten the girls. Not that I should be speaking about such a thing to a man, but I’m assuming that you are a married man.’

  Mickey admitted that he was. ‘But we are moving away from the subject,’ he said. ‘You don’t believe, any more than I do, that the girl is away working elsewhere.’

  ‘Why should I not believe that? Why should you not believe that? No doubt she gave birth to the brat somewhere, put it up for adoption or left it at a workhouse or orphanage. I expect he gave her money. Of course, I’m not comfortable with this, but the girl was foolish and would take no telling. She would have it that she was special. That he loved her. That he wished to marry her. Have you ever heard anything as absurd? Men say these things and young wealthy men the more so, but do they ever mean it? Do they my eye. They say what a girl wants to hear until they get what they want, and that’s that.’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ Mickey agreed. ‘Did your husband also work for the Bensons?’

  ‘No. I was widowed very early. Then this position became available, and I have been here ever since. My sister-in-law mentioned it to me, she knew the family, I came and had an interview and that was that.’

  Mickey took his leave of her shortly after, wondering if he could manage to get a warrant to search the bedroom and dressing room of Mr Harry Benson. Out of curiosity, he wandered back around the house and into the garden. It must once have been a very smart affair, he thought, but it was now overgrown and heavily brambled. Evidently Harry Benson did not employ a gardener. He was aware that Mrs Richardson watched him from window as he stood on the terrace and then went down the steps into what had once been a formal garden. Low walls on either side of the path directed him down more steps and on to a lawn, surrounded by tall spreading trees. Beyond this he could see glasshouses and what he assumed had once been a kitchen garden. This had been a substantial and well-loved property, he could see that, and it seemed strange to him that the son could wish to undo everything his parents had built up here. Was this the result of hatred, resentment or just carelessness? Mickey would have given his right arm to own somewhere like this and it angered him that a young man, who’d been served everything on a plate, would squander it so completely.

  And so it was that when he went to visit the parents of Eliza Watkins he was already predisposed to think the worst of young Harry Benson.

  The parents and siblings of Eliza Watkins lived on the outskirts of Newark-on-Trent, in a tiny terraced house with a very tiny yard at the back of it. Mickey was familiar with such houses, he’d grown up in one, though his current home was a few steps up, having three bedrooms and inside plumbing.

  But this was squalid. Mickey had been unable to get an answer by knocking on the front door and so had made his way round the alley at the back and found the wife. The husband was out, but Mickey didn’t think he’d gone out to work and the woman was evasive when he asked her. A girl of about fourteen was helping her mother do the laundry, the girl using a posher to pummel sheets in a bathtub. The woman was putting sheets through a mangle.

  ‘He ain’t ’ere,’ she told Mickey even before he asked. Mickey assumed she was referring to her husband.

  ‘So don’ think you’re gonna get money out o’ me. ’Cos there ain’t no bloody money.’

  Mickey assured her that he was not a bailiff or debt collector but was in fact a policeman. He was surprised to find that the woman actually seemed relieved, until he mentioned Eliza. The anxiety returned then, and she glanced meaningfully at the girl. Then telling the girl to get on with the job, she led Mickey inside.

  ‘What now?’ she demanded.

  Mickey glanced around the house and decided that actually the sheets they were washing were probably not hers. The sheets had looked clean; nothing in this house, including the woman herself, looked clean. Downstairs there was a single room. He guessed that upstairs there might be one or two. The single room was used for living and cooking and there was no real comfort here. One old armchair that he guessed was the father’s, some wooden stools and a pile of blankets and rag rugs in the corner, set on top of a folded paillasse on which somebody obviously slept at night and Mickey guessed by day made for extra seating. Mickey knew how difficult it was to keep the room soot free, especially when you used a coal-fired range for cooking, but this room spoke of someone who had given up even trying. Any surface that he accidentally brushed against was greasy and grimy, and impregnated with coal dust. Mickey guessed that anybody who brought their laundry here did so because the woman was cheap and also because they never got to look inside her house.

  She was staring at him impatiently. If she was aware of the judgements he was making, she gave no sign. It seemed to Mickey that she simply wanted the business dealt with and him gone.

  ‘How many of you live here?’

  ‘What you wanna know that for? There’s me ’n the old man, Becky you saw out back and four more little ones. Off at school, ain’t they. Though they’d be more use to me back here. But I can do without the school inspector breathing down me neck too.’

  No wonder Eliza had been looking for an escape, Mickey thought. ‘Eliza,’ he said. ‘Have you heard from her? Do know where your daughter is?’

  ‘Like you care. He did what they all do. Got her in the family way, kicked her out. I te
lled her he was only after one thing. Once he’d got that, he’d have no more time for ’er, but listen to me? Did she ’ell as like.’

  ‘And so what happen to her?’

  ‘Went away, didn’t she.’

  ‘There were rumours she sought to terminate the pregnancy. Who would she have gone to?’ It was a question he did not expect an answer to.

  Mrs Watkins laughed at him. ‘If you’re done you can go. Only two places Eliza can be, one is in some kitchen somewhere, and the other’s in the ground. Either she found another place, and don’t want me to know where she is, or she’s dead in a ditch somewhere, poor little bitch.’

  ‘Don’t you care?’

  ‘Where’s the caring ever get me? She made her bed, let her lie in it. What can I do to make a difference? You can’t tell young girls, foolish as ever, believed him, didn’t she?’

  ‘Do you think he paid for her to get rid of the child?’

  ‘How the ’ell would I know. Girls like that, find themselves in the family way, who knows what they’ll do. I seen enough what try and do it themselves, sure you ’ave too. Poor little bitches.’

  He had, Mickey thought.

  ‘But I don’t suppose a murder detective will be called to the likes of that. I heard about that Mrs Mason what was killed. She were a nice woman and din’t deserve that. But my Eliza were a nice girl too.’

  Mrs Watkins left Mickey to absorb the implied complaint. Mickey had in fact investigated several deaths that had resulted from botched abortions, but he didn’t think anything could be gained by telling Mrs Watkins that. She wouldn’t believe for a minute that he was really interested. She had already turned away from him and headed back out into the yard where her daughter was trying to turn the mangle but she did not yet have her mother’s strength. Mrs Watkins took back the mangling and pointed the child back to the battering of sheets. Their hands were reddened by coarse soap and, as it splashed on Mickey’s foot, what he realized was freezing water. The doors to both outhouses stood open and he could see that one contained a few bags of coal and the other the wooden bench seat of an unplumbed toilet. The stink of it reached him even way across the yard. He wondered what night the dilly cart came round bringing the night soil men to collect the waste. He wondered if they called it the dilly cart round here.