For the second time that day, Foster bade them goodbye. But it was a temporary goodbye. Tom and Helen were told they would have to return for the inquest, which would not be held for a week or two. They were allowed to travel on to London, where they arrived at Waterloo, weary, as it was getting dark.
Tom escorted Helen back to her Highbury home and left it to her to explain their adventures to the formidable Mrs Scott. He’d already had a twenty-minute conversation with Mrs Scott, while Helen was changing out of her travelling clothes upstairs, a conversation in which he had to tread the line between informing her of something and requesting it of her. He was conscious of being tired and haggard, of having escaped a murderer and spent the day waiting for news of a body. Yet something carried him forward. And he’d been agreeably surprised by Mrs Scott’s response. The lady had gone so far as to give him a sort of smile and to say that the news he brought was no real news to her and that any fool might have seen it coming. Tom wasn’t sure about the ‘any fool’ bit but he supposed that this was the closest he would get to assent and congratulation from Helen’s mother.
On the way up to London Tom had asked Helen to marry him. They were alone in their compartment, and were not interrupted by murderous gardeners disguised as old ladies or by police inspectors or anybody else. Tom asked, not on bended knee but sitting next to her on the buttoned carriage-cloth of the seat and holding her warm hand (she had removed her gloves), and Helen said yes, she said yes. Her hands were shaking slightly. So were his. Tom did not know whether it was the excitement of the proposal or the shock of the morning’s adventure. Both probably.
The next day they went together to see Mr Mackenzie, once Tom had deposited the Salisbury manuscript at the office. Some word of what had been happening in Salisbury must have reached old Ashley, the clerk with the corrugated forehead, because he actually expressed his pleasure at seeing Mr Ansell again and took personal charge of the manuscript. Tom wondered whether he would flick though its handwritten pages and be shocked by the contents, but Ashley was most likely beyond shock.
David Mackenzie too expressed his relief that Tom and Helen had returned unharmed.
‘I feel that I failed though,’ said Tom. ‘Our client is dead and the maunscript which I went to get was stolen.’
‘But the murderer has been found, and the manuscript recovered. And you have achieved one distinction which I think no lawyer in our office has yet managed.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘You have spent a night in gaol. You wrote to me about it.’
Tom had almost forgotten the letter. Looking back, his gaol experience seemed quite a minor event.
‘Tell me, Tom, did you have a chance to look inside it? The Salisbury manuscript.’
‘Just a glance.’
‘And?’
‘There were one or two encounters in it,’ said Tom uncomfortably, ‘which you would not want your servants to read — or the ladies for that matter.’
‘Tom!’ said Helen, clattering her cup into her saucer. ‘Never let me hear you say that again. I do not know about servants but whatever is fit for you to read is also fit for me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tom.
‘Ah,’ said David Mackenzie, ‘my wife has heard from her good friend Mrs Scott that you are to be married, and I see that it’s true.’
‘How so, Mr Mackenzie?’ said Helen.
‘Only a couple who were married or were very close to it would talk to each other in that way.’
So, the Salisbury business appeared finally to be over. And was over, when the couple journeyed once again to that city on the plain for the inquest on Adam Eaves at the beginning of December. The gardener, who had been erroneously identified as the corpse found in the cathedral close, was found to have killed himself while the balance of his mind was disturbed. Conclusive proof of this was to be found in his female disguise.
Train suicides were not unknown. There had very recently been one off the Blackwater Viaduct in Truro. This case, though, was dramatic and tortuous enough not merely to fill the pages of the Gazette but to excite the interest of the national papers, whose reporters could scarcely make sense of all its twists and revisions as to who had killed whom, and why and when and how. Well, could you?
However, the young couple, who’d given evidence at the inquest during a brief visit at which they stayed at the house of a delighted Eric Selby and his quiet wife, were more interested in another newspaper feature in which they figured as protagonists. They did not make the headlines this time. In fact, they had had to pay (at the rate of sixpence per line) for another item — it was a smaller, more discreet item — in which was announced the imminent marriage of Mr Thomas Edward Ansell and Miss Helen Georgina Scott.