The Man of Gold by Evelyn Hervey Page B

wanted to do was weep. She had seen in the old days friends and acquaintances taken away to be questioned by policemen a good deal less well-behaved, alot more evidently brutal, than Inspector Redderman and she had accepted it as part of life. But now the man who had been taken away was the man she loved.
    She forced herself not to let the tears fall.
    ‘’Ere, what you looking so down in the dumps about?’
    It was Vilkins.
    She had not even heard her coming, although usually her clumping steps in the old patched black boots she wore could be heard minutes before she appeared.
    ‘Oh, Vilkins. They’ve taken him, and – and I’m afraid, Vilkins. So afraid.’
    Vilkins stood there and looked at her, arms akimbo.
    ‘Thought you was spoony on him,’ she said. ‘And what’s that peeler hauled him off for? That’s what I’d like to know.’
    So Miss Unwin, plain Unwin once again, told her old friend just why Inspector Redderman had taken Richard to, the police office and just why she feared that he might never come back.
    ‘Well,’ said Vilkins when her tale was done, ‘he didn’t do it, did he? Poison the old skinflint?’
    ‘No,’ said Unwin.
    Just the one single explosion of sound. But somehow it cleared in her mind the last of the tiny niggling suspicion she had had that perhaps, somehow, some impossible how, Richard, her Richard, might have done that impossible thing.
    ‘’Course he didn’t,’ Vilkins said matter-of-factly. ‘You wouldn’t of got spoony about him if he was that sort. Not you, Unwin.’
    ‘Well, perhaps I might not have done. Perhaps I would somehow have known if that had really been the case.’
    ‘No p’rapses about it. I know you. You wouldn’t of done nothing so stupid as that. Not my Unwin.’
    Then all that Miss Unwin could do was to sit where she was in the dining room where somehow she had drifted and smile a foolish dazed smile.
    For a little Vilkins stood just looking down at her, apron askew as it almost always was, big feet in patched boots sticking out from under her skirt, a drip gradually gathering on the end of her big red dab of a nose.
    But then she spoke again.
    ‘Yer. That’s all very well, you an’ me knowing as how the Master couldn’t of done nothing like that. But that ain’t a-going to do for that old Inspector Red-what-d’you-call-um, is it?’
    ‘Well, no, my dear, it isn’t. It certainly isn’t, and that’s what I’m afraid of. Suppose no other notion of how old Mr Partington died gets into his head? Suppose he just goes on thinking that Richard was responsible, must be responsible?’
    ‘Yer. That’s what he’ll do all right.’
    But Vilkins’ gloom, lugubrious though it was, paradoxically gave Miss Unwin heart. That there was somebody still in the world so true to themselves made her believe, though without a shred of her customary logic, that truth would win in the end.
    ‘But he must be made to see that Richard is not the person responsible,’ she said.
    ‘What, old Rediface?’
    ‘Yes. He must be made to see that there could be someone else who did that terrible thing.’
    ‘Well, I dunno. He’s a policeman, ain’t he?’
    ‘But he’s a man too. He has a brain. He can think. Indeed, I rather believe he has more than the ordinary amount of brain, little though I saw of him. And if he has, then if I–’
    She stopped.
    If I
, she had said. And at that moment she had realised that it would be her, that it must be her, who had to put a different notion of what had happened in the house into Inspector Redderman’s head. There was no one else who would do it, who would want to do it.
    ‘Yes, Vilkins,’ she said on a new note of hopefulenergy, ‘If I can manage to persuade him that he must look elsewhere, then – then perhaps Richard will come back to this house, and …’
    Her voice faded into silence.
    ‘Then there’ll be them old wedding bells an’ happy ever after,’ Vilkins said.
    ‘No,’ she said, almost as