The permanent pleat between Miss Sweeny’s eyebrows deepened. “Why, yes, she did. After the reading of the will, she was quite upset and had me dispatch a note to Mr. Decamp. I usually send her secret notes with Billy, one of Mr. Dalton’s stable boys at Field’s End. He’s a good lad. Always discreet. However, since we weren’t at home, there wasn’t anyone to trust. I had to take it myself.”
Jasper leaned forward, bracing his elbows on the table. “In the storm? Did none of the other servants notice?”
“If they did, they didn’t say anything about it when I returned,” she answered with a light shrug. “It’s possible they assumed I’d gone to Field’s End for something Mrs. Dalton required. I brought her Mr. Decamp’s reply.”
“He wrote his reply?” At her nod, he asked, “Did you read it?”
Offense spread across her expression. “Of course not. I never would have snooped on my lady’s private correspondence.”
“We found his note,” Jasper continued. Because he’d prepared for this, he removed the scrap of paper from his pocket and slid it across the table. He gestured for her to read it. With trembling fingers, she opened it. Her eyes traveled over the words:Meet me at our spot. Wait until midnight.
“Do you know whatspotMr. Decamp was referring to here?”
“I…” She dropped the note back onto the table, visibly shaken. “I don’t know.”
Jasper didn’t believe that. “The two of them would have needed a place to meet. I don’t imagine she brought her lover to the house at Field’s End, nor do I think she would go frequently to his farm, where she might have been noticed.”
He placed the note back into his pocket and waited. Miss Sweeny finally bobbed her head.
“They would usually meet at night. Upon my word, Inspector, I never did see where they went,” she said emphatically. He believed her this time. “She would wait until Mr. Dalton went to bed, or whenever he’d drop unconscious from too much drink. I’d see her occasionally from a window at the house, when the moon was out. She’d be walking out toward the south field.”
“Why there?” he asked. “What is in that direction?”
“A barn. An old one, in disrepair,” she said sadly. “It’s the only place I can think of where they might have met.”
“So, Mrs. Dalton received a note from Mr. Decamp, asking her to meet him at their spot. This barn, perhaps,” Jasper recapped. “Is it far from Cowper Hall?”
The maid gave a confident shake of her head. “The south field sits between Cowper Hall and Field’s End. It would have taken, oh, about fifteen minutes to walk there. But in that storm, and in her condition…” The maid fought another trembling of her chin. “I thought the baby might help to tame her. That she might now have something or someone to devote herself to, rather than living recklessly as she had been.”
Recklesswas not a word Jasper would have applied to Helen Dalton, or at least to the nervous version of herself that she’d presented at the will reading and later that evening at dinner.
“Reckless how?”
Miss Sweeny exhaled, as if to calm herself. “My lady never had an easy time making the right decisions. I think she always found excitement in doing wrong with men.”
The phrasing intrigued Jasper. “Doing wrong in what way?”
“The affair with Mr. Decamp, of course,” she replied with a startled shifting in her seat. “She was bound to be caught out.”
He sensed the maid was holding back. Had Helen conducted other affairs with men in the past? If Anthony could not perform intimately as a husband was expected to do, it would not besurprising that Helen might have sought the company of men outside her marriage. It might have been wrong, as Miss Sweeny had said, but not completely shocking.
“What other bad decisions did Mrs. Dalton make?”
He thought of Francine Stroud’s buried fear that her daughter had been responsible somehow for Teddy’s fatal fall. If Helen had shared details of her affair with her trusted maid, she might have also confided in her about other secrets.
But Miss Sweeny shook her head. “None that I know of, Inspector.”
He would leave her statement for now. Jasper stood, and as he did, she, too, shot to her feet.
“Is that all, then?” she asked hopefully.
“Yes. Thank you for coming in, Miss Sweeny.”
The maid hesitated, as if she expected to be taken into handcuffs at any moment as she left the interview room. Jasper instructed a constable nearby to return her to the Perrys’ home, and then he turned toward the telegraph office.
As steward, Stephen Decamp would have had access to the viscount’s stables. He could have easily taken the horse and phaeton and driven himself and Helen to London in the middle of the night. The question now was, had he killed her? Or had he been the one to step into her spreading pool of blood after the killer fled?
An older constable in the telegraph office greeted him as Jasper stepped into the busy room. “Inspector Reid, what can I do for you?”
