Mrs. Jeffries Defends Her Own (32 page)

“We do speak to one another and to many other people as well,” he replied. “What time did you come home that day?”

“John, do something,” Antonia cried. “You’re the master of the house, tell him”—she jerked her thumb toward the inspector—“to leave.”

The doors opened and Constable Barnes stepped into the room; a young black-haired boy wearing a faded green jacket and scuffed shoes trailed behind him. He nodded politely to Sutcliffe. “Good day, sir. Sorry to come in like this, but it’s rather urgent that I see the inspector.”

“What’s the meaning of this?” Lucretia got up. “John, I’m sorry you and Fiona have been inconvenienced by my husband’s death, but I demand that you do something about this. They’ve no right to come storming in here and badgering people without so much as a by-your-leave.”

“I don’t think they’ve badgered anyone,” Sutcliffe said quietly. “Don’t you want to know who murdered your husband?” He turned his attention to the new arrivals. “Come in, Constable, and bring the lad with you.”

Barnes gave the boy an encouraging smile, and they stepped farther into the room. “That’s Inspector Witherspoon. I want you to tell him exactly what you told me.”

“If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to leave.” Antonia started for the door. “I’ve a dreadful headache.”

John Sutcliffe stepped over and blocked the now-closed door. “I’ll have the butler bring you a powder.”

“Go ahead, young man,” the inspector said to the boy. “Tell me what you told the constable.”

But the lad wasn’t really listening. He was staring at Antonia Meadows. “She’s the one,” he said, pointing to her. “She’s the one that give me the note. She told me to make sure I took it to the Ladbroke Road Police Station.”

Antonia’s eyes widened. “For God’s sake, what is that creature talking about? I did no such thing.”

“You bloomin’ well did,” the boy charged. “You come up to me in front of the Notting Hill Station and give me a sixpence to do it. I weren’t the only one who saw ya, my mate was there, too.”

“You’re the one that sent the anonymous note to the police?” John Sutcliffe said. He stared at her coldly.

“Ma’am, would you care to explain yourself?” Witherspoon moved toward her. “How did you know that Mr. Dearman’s keys were in Mrs. Sutcliffe’s morning room?”

“I saw her put them there.” Antonia pointed at Fiona. “And I’m not ashamed of what I did. She murdered Ronald, and I knew she was going to get away with it if I did nothing.”

“Exactly when did you see this happen?” the inspector asked. He knew she was lying, but for the life of him, he couldn’t think of a way to prove it.

“When I was here on Tuesday with Lucretia. We stopped in late that afternoon. Lucretia wanted to discuss something with John.” She swallowed heavily. “I saw Fiona go into the morning room, and I went down there to visit with her while I waited. The door was open a crack, and I saw her put the keys into that box.”

“You’re lying,” Fiona stated. “I wasn’t in the morning room that afternoon.”

“Stay right here,” Barnes instructed the boy. He went to the door again, opened it, and stuck his head out. A second later, another boy, this one brown haired and wearing even scruffier clothes, stepped inside. “Do you see the woman in the room?” Barnes asked him.

Again, Witherspoon wasn’t sure what was going on. The constable was supposed to bring one boy back, the one who’d taken the note, not two. But he trusted Barnes and so he kept his expression serene, as if he knew exactly what was going to happen next. “Yes, if you do, please point her out to us.”

The boy gazed from one woman to the next, smiling a little as his eyes landed on the very lovely Miss Throckmorton. He moved on, his expression sobering. “That’s her.” He pointed to Antonia. “She’s the one. She stood there starin’ at that buildin’ for days, and the only time she ever moved was to look at her timepiece whenever the ferry blasted its ruddy horn. Don’t know why she kept checkin’ it. That horn blows every day at the same time.”

“Dear God, Antonia, what have you done?” Lucretia stared at her friend, her expression stricken, her face pale.

Antonia held out her hands and moved across the
room toward her friend. “Dearest, don’t be alarmed. I’ve done nothing. They can’t prove anything. This is all a tempest in a teapot.”

Lucretia’s arms went up, and she flattened her hands toward Antonia as though to ward her off. “Stay away from me. Oh dear Lord, what have you done, what have you done?”

Antonia stopped abruptly, and her odd, dreamlike expression was gone. Her lips curved down and her eyes grew hard. “What have I done?” she repeated. “I’ve set you free, you stupid woman. I’ve done what you didn’t have the nerve to do. I’ve put a bullet in his damned head. It’s a bit late to be acting like the grieving widow. You hated him and he hated you.”

“I didn’t hate him,” Lucretia shouted. “We had our differences and I know he wasn’t a good man, but he didn’t deserve to be murdered.”

Antonia’s face changed again; this time, she looked frightened, confused. “But I thought that’s what you wanted. Remember all those times when we were together, how we’d talk about both of us being free and traveling the world. I was free and I wanted you to be free as well.”

“Is that why you killed him?” Fiona asked archly. “To free your friend?”

Antonia whirled to face her. “I killed the bastard because he was bleeding me dry,” she snapped. “Just like he was going to bleed you dry, but you know what the best part was? It wasn’t putting a bullet between his miserable eyes; it was arranging it so the police would think you’d done it. It would have worked, too, if those nasty little creatures had kept their mouths shut.” She jerked her chin in the direction of the two boys.

“Maybe I woulda if you’d given me more than a sixpence,” the black-haired lad yelled.

Barnes caught Witherspoon’s eye, and both men edged closer to Antonia. Neither of them wanted to do anything that would shut her up; there was nothing better for a conviction than someone confessing in a room full of witnesses. Henry Anson and Miss Throckmorton were both staring in fascination at the spectacle.

“I know you always blamed me for taking John away from you, but this is monstrous,” Fiona said softly. John had come to stand next to her; his arm encircled her waist.

Antonia’s lip curled. “It was no more monstrous than you ruining my life. Good God, are you stupid? Because of you snatching him away”—she pointed at John—“I endured a miserable thirty years with Thaddeus Meadows.”

“But you were free of him,” Lucretia said.

“Yes, and for a few months I was happy.” She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “I had money and freedom. But then Ronald showed up on my doorstep. He had Thaddeus’ medicine bottles with him. He said that if I didn’t pay him every month, he’d tell everyone I murdered him, that I’d withheld his medicine and that was why he’d died.”

“He couldn’t have proved such a thing,” Lucretia said. “You were a fool to believe him.”

“But he could,” she admitted. She looked at the policemen. “But I’m not going to tell you how. If you want to hang me for his murder as well, you’ll have to prove it.”

The room went quiet; even the usual noise of the household seemed suspended as everyone stared at her in stunned disbelief.

“Bloomin’ Ada,” the brown-haired boy said. “She don’t
look like a killer, does she. Just goes to show, me mam is right: You can’t tell anythin’ about a person just by lookin’ at ’em.”

Once again, the inspector and Barnes locked eyes, and the two men moved toward her. “Antonia Meadows,” Witherspoon said, “you’re under arrest for the murder of Ronald Dearman.”

“I was hoping she’d make a run for it,” Phyllis announced as she took her seat. “But she didn’t. Mind you, it was exciting when they brought her out of the house. We had to scarper about a bit to avoid being spotted by the inspector and the two street lads.”

“Alright.” Mrs. Goodge looked at the housekeeper. “You’ve kept us in suspense long enough. How did you figure out it was her?”

Ruth, Luty, and Mrs. Goodge hadn’t even tried to get her tell them her theory as they knew it would be useless, and in the sense of fairness, they wanted to wait until everyone was together. While they waited, Ruth had gone home to write some letters (she was the correspondence secretary for her women’s suffrage group), Luty had taken Fred out for a walk, Mrs. Jeffries paced the downstairs hall, and Mrs. Goodge got the roast and vegetables for the inspector’s dinner into the oven.

But they were back now, and to Mrs. Jeffries’ utter delight, everything had gone well. “I didn’t realize who it was until the wee hours of this morning,” she admitted. “And even then, I wasn’t quite certain whether it was Antonia Meadows or Lucretia Dearman that had done it.”

“Ain’t you glad it wasn’t your sister-in-law?” Luty
said to her. “I mean, I know you ain’t friends but still, it musta been hard wonderin’ if she was goin’ to be arrested.”

“It was, but the most difficult part was that at one point, I thought she might be guilty.” She laughed. “But that turned out not to be the case, and if I’d been thinking clearly from the beginning, I’d have seen who the real culprit was much earlier. There were numerous clues that pointed directly to Antonia.”

“Yeah, she left a trail a mile wide.” Luty nodded, her expression glum. “But we didn’t see it till it was almost too late.”

“Go on, Mrs. Jeffries, tell us how you sorted it out.” Wiggins, who, like Phyllis, had missed both breakfast and lunch, reached for one of the sandwiches from the plate in front of them.

“It was the way Dearman tried to sack people that got me to thinking about what he was really up to,” she began. She had to be careful here; she’d already decided that it wouldn’t be fair to Fiona and John Sutcliffe to make their story public, and she knew that in the telling of how she’d figured it out, there were several pertinent clues she couldn’t explain. “He sacked James Tremlett for no apparent reason.”

“He’d seen Dearman by the back stairs getting an envelope,” Phyllis added eagerly. “So Dearman had to get rid of him so he could keep his secret about what he was up to.”

“Correct.” She nodded encouragingly. “I think we’ll make a detective out of you yet!”

“But who else did he try to sack?”

Mrs. Jeffries was ready for that one. “The typewriter girl. Dearman had bullied her into typing a private letter for him.”

“And it was probably to one of his victims,” Wiggins added, not to be outdone by Phyllis.

“That’s my suspicion, but luckily for her, she went right to Henry Anson and he saved her position. When we got confirmation that Dearman was a blackmailer, it opened up the floodgates, and all of a sudden, I began to look at some of the other information we’d learned differently.”

“Yes, but that could have pointed the finger of guilt at any of our suspects,” Mrs. Goodge said. “Look at Henry Anson, for instance. He said himself that he was sure Sutcliffe had hired him with the intent of forcin’ Dearman out of the company and that he’d even seen him goin’ through Sutcliffe’s desk. Seems to me that’s pretty strong evidence that Dearman was even tryin’ to blackmail Sutcliffe. I think that’s why he was kept on at the firm.”

“I agree,” Mrs. Jeffries said quickly. “I don’t think it was out-and-out blackmail for money. I imagine he hinted to Sutcliffe that he knew Anson was his illegitimate son, and whatever plans were in the works to force him out went out the door. At Dearman’s cottage, Wiggins found the letters that Anson’s mother had written to Sutcliffe. I suspect that Dearman had found them in Sutcliffe’s desk and used them to keep his position in the company.”

“Why would Sutcliffe keep something so private in his office desk?” Phyllis murmured.

“He wouldn’t risk keeping them at home,” Ruth
answered. “He’d not want his wife or one of the servants finding them.”

“And he didn’t know Dearman was a blackmailer,” Hatchet said. “He probably had no idea that the fellow regularly went through his desk.”

“What caused you to realize it was Antonia Meadows?” Phyllis reached for another sandwich. It was her third. “There seemed to be so many people who hated him.”

“A number of things,” she replied. “I kept thinking about how Blanche Keating had told you that right before Thaddeus Meadows died, she’d seen Dearman skulking about outside the house, and I wondered why. He didn’t approve of his wife’s friendship with Antonia, so why should he have been so interested in her husband’s passing? Then when Wiggins found the two unopened medicine bottles in Dearman’s cottage, it began to make sense. Thanks to you and your conversation with the maid, I was able to understand his actions.”

Phyllis grinned broadly. “Blanche also said that when Meadows first died, Antonia Meadows stopped making her and the cook pay for their own tea and sugar and that she was more generous with their food, like she had plenty of money. But then she started selling off all his things.”

“Maybe she just wanted to get rid of everythin’ that reminded her of ’im,” Wiggins suggested.

“No.” Mrs. Jeffries shook her head. “She suddenly started selling his things because it was just about then that Dearman began blackmailing her and money became scarce again. He’d found the unopened bottles,
and he’d been at the house when Meadows died. I suspect there’s a good chance that he’d seen something.”

“Seen somethin’,” Luty repeated. “You mean like her holdin’ a pillow over his face?”

“Really, madam, that’s a bit far-fetched,” Hatchet chided.

“Don’t you believe it,” she shot back. “There’s been more than one miserable marriage that ended when the sick one was laid up and too weak to fight back. Meadows died of pneumonia, so the doctor wouldn’t have been able to tell that she’d smothered him. He might have been a cheap, miserable miser of a feller, but no one deserves to die like that.”

“We’re only speculating here,” Mrs. Jeffries said. “But I think Luty is right. Whatever Dearman had on her, it was enough to make her begin making payments to him.”

“That’s probably when she decided he had to die,” Ruth said. “She’d been unhappy in her marriage and was finally free. I imagine that the moment he told her what he’d seen and that she had to pay him to keep quiet, he signed his own death warrant.”