Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
The sun had slipped beneath the London skyline, and a cold rain had started to trickle down by the time Jasper left the Perry residence.
He’d come into Paddington Station on the afternoon train from Harrow and immediately set out for Portman Square, where Helen Dalton would stay whenever she visited town.
He’d wondered if he might meet Sergeant Warnock there, or perhaps Roy Lewis, or whoever had been available when he’d wired the Yard from Harrow Constabulary earlier.
But when Jasper arrived on the Perrys’ doorstep, he was informed that a sergeant and pair of constables had already come and gone with their quarry.
After a brief conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Perry, Jasper had set out for Scotland Yard.
A coating of sleet had started to accumulate on the cobblestones by the time he arrived at Met headquarters wet, cold, and hungry, but he merely doffed his damp hat and overcoat and tossed them onto a chair as he entered the CID.
He stalked past Constable Wiley, who’d stood and started to say something, but didn’t finish before Jasper went straight into his old office.
Lewis wasn’t there, but all he needed was an item in the evidence box stored on one of the chairs.
He found it and, giving it a cursory look, grinned. It was what he’d hoped for.
He went to meet Detective Sergeant Warnock, who’d stood from his desk when Jasper arrived. The young officer was now waiting by the office door.
“I put the suspect in the interview room. She tried to run, sir, but she didn’t get far.”
Hearing that she’d tried to escape only bolstered Jasper’s good mood. He was now certain of the woman’s guilt.
Thanking Warnock, Jasper went to the interview room, which was being guarded by a uniformed constable. Inside, Dora Sweeny sat in a chair, her cuffed wrists resting on the small table. Helen Dalton’s maid hitched her chin when she saw him enter and drew her hands into her lap.
He closed the door and looked the woman over. The last time she’d been in that chair, she’d been weeping, her eyes red and swollen in stark anguish. Now, she wore an expression Jasper often saw upon the faces of guilty suspects—defiant righteousness.
“I’ve been to see the Perrys,” he began. “They cannot account for your whereabouts yesterday afternoon and evening. It seems you were out running errands and helping with the arrangements for Mrs. Dalton’s return to Harrow until nearly nine o’clock in the evening.”
He stayed on his feet, too restless to sit. Miss Sweeny made no reply.
“However, I don’t need to question Mr. Dalton or Mr. Cowper about the help you provided during those hours, because I know that was a lie.
You see, Miss Sweeny, as large as the station in Harrow is, and as busy as the stationmaster is there, he is remarkably adept at keeping an eye on who comes and goes from his terminus. You arrived on yesterday’s 3:25 train.”
The maid stayed stonelike, except for the rapid fluttering of her lashes.
“I presume that after leaving Scotland Yard, you started to think about Stephen Decamp’s note to Helen that I showed you earlier, the one asking her to meet at their spot after midnight.
You knew they must have gone to London together, and with my interest in Stephen, you must have put together what he’d done.
He had every reason to kill your mistress.
Every motive, especially with Helen now carrying his baby.
Their affair was about to become known to Mr. Dalton, and to the viscount himself. Stephen was sure to lose his position.”
Miss Sweeny pressed her lips together tightly, her defiant expression beginning to falter.
“When you arrived at his farm yesterday, you found him soused,” Jasper said.
He now knew Stephen had been at Sam Everton’s farm the day after Helen’s murder, drinking himself into oblivion. The stop in Sudbury along the rail route had set Jasper back more than an hour, but he had a clearer picture of where Stephen had been, and what state he’d been in.
Devastated was the word his former farmhand had used to describe him. And the more Stephen imbibed, the looser his tongue became.
“He welcomed you in. Even tied up his collie for you, because he knew you were afraid of dogs.”
Without Nadia Stroud’s comment at the uneasy dinner the night of the storm, about Helen’s maid being afraid of dogs, Jasper would not have known to connect Miss Sweeny to the tied-up collie.
“What then, Miss Sweeny? Did you encourage Stephen to have a seat at the dining room table, while you poured him another drink?” Jasper had turned over numerous possibilities as he’d traveled from Harrow.
“I’m curious, though. Did he already have his revolver with him?
In his devastation, maybe he was already leaning toward ending it all. ”
The maid finally met Jasper’s stare. “He shot himself.”
“No, he didn’t. Perhaps he would have, but you couldn’t risk that he’d back down, could you?” He pulled from his coat pocket the note that had been left on Stephen’s table, in front of his body. Then, he laid out the note Stephen had sent to Helen the night of the storm.
“I’ll have a graphologist compare these writing samples, of course, but have a look,” he urged, taking the seat across from her. He touched the tips of the two Ws in the suicide note.
“There is a slight, fanciful tilt of the middle arch of the Ws in this note. I cannot live with what I’ve done.” He then tapped the W in the note delivered to Helen the night of the storm, asking her to wait until midnight. “There is no such tilt of the middle arch here.”
She huffed a sound that Jasper took for amusement. “People do not always form their letters the same way every time, especially when someone is drunk as a wheelbarrow.”
He took from his pocket the handwriting sample Dora herself had given just after Helen’s body was found and set that one out for her as well. He tapped the W in her surname and allowed her a moment to see the same fanciful tilt of the middle arch. Her false bravado crashed.
“I believe a graphologist would agree that you authored the suicide note, Miss Sweeny. So, stop wasting my time, and let’s get to the reason why you did it.”
He waited as she visibly calculated what to do next.
She had been seen in Harrow the day of Stephen’s death, and she’d lied about her whereabouts.
The handwriting samples would only be another strike against her in a court of law.
Murder was murder, and if she confessed, she would either be imprisoned for a great many years, or she would face execution.
Though clemency was more often granted to women than it was to men.
“Cooperate, Miss Sweeny, and I will do what I can to see that you do not hang.”
At the flaring of her eyes, he knew he had her.
“She trusted him,” the maid said softly.
As she kept speaking, her voice began to climb.
“My lady, she trusted him, and he killed her. He killed the babe inside her too. And he lied. All these years, he lied and tricked her into thinking he was a good man, but Stephen Decamp was nothing but a murderer.”
“He lied and tricked her all these years?” Jasper’s attention caught on that phrasing. “How do you mean?”
Miss Sweeny’s chin lifted, and she looked to be reconsidering her decision to speak.
“Cooperation is your best chance, Miss Sweeny,” he reminded her. “How did he lie and trick Helen all these years?”
The maid sighed in resignation. “The tear catcher.”
Jasper braced his arms on the table. “What do you know of it?”
He’d made no mention of the trinket found in Helen’s hair to the maid.
But then, he remembered what Ursula had said earlier in the butler’s pantry at Cowper Hall.
“You were dismissed from Helen’s room when Ursula brought up the letter from Mrs. Stroud to myself and Miss Spencer.
But you listened at your mistress’s door, didn’t you?
You heard Ursula tell Helen about the small glass vial found in Theodore’s hand after his death. ”
But there had been no mention of it being a tear catcher.
Which meant Dora Sweeny had already known of it.
“You were Helen’s maid before she married. Nadia informed me that Helen had given it to someone. A man. Did Helen tell you that she’d given it to Stephen?”
“She never said his name, but I knew it was him,” the maid answered. “My lady always wore the necklace strung with that little tear catcher, and when it disappeared from her jewelry box, I feared I’d be accused of taking it. But then she told me she’d given it away.”
“How do you know she gave it to Stephen?”
Miss Sweeny lifted a shoulder. “She said she’d given it to a man she shouldn’t have. A man that society would never approve of.”
The viscount certainly wouldn’t have approved of Stephen. Society, too, would have put Helen and the butler’s son through the wringer.
“And when you heard Theodore was found with the tear catcher in his hand, you presumed Stephen was involved,” Jasper said.
The maid was solemn, but there was also an undercurrent of anger she couldn’t suppress.
“Stephen would meet my lady on the roof of the Craven Hill house,” she said, echoing what Nadia had revealed earlier in the butler’s pantry at Cowper Hall.
“I don’t know how he and Master Teddy found themselves on the roof that night, but if Stephen had the tear catcher, and they struggled… ”
“The boy might have grappled with Stephen and grabbed hold of the tear catcher before being pushed,” Jasper finished theorizing for her. But that was all it was. A theory. And one the maid had not properly thought out.
“Explain to me then, why Helen would have asked Stephen to take her to London. If she suspected the small glass tube her mother wrote about was her old tear catcher, and Helen knew Stephen was the last one to possess it, why would she involve him?”