Harriet Vosper

Harriet Vosper is 49 and has lived in the Tilney house for four years. She was born in Reading, the daughter of a weaver and a seamstress, and learned early that whoever serves a great house must know more about it than its owners. She was a housekeeper, then secretary to a banking family, until she came to Balham when Beatrice's first husband died. She says her mistress couldn't even read the accounts, and that the house runs because she runs.

She sleeps in a small room under the roof, beside the service stairs, with an iron bed, a chest of drawers, a wicker chair and a window from which she sees the neighbor's chimney. Everything there has its place: the sewing basket, the inkwell, the prayer book with its worn spine. She rises before dawn, checks the servants' tasks and still has time to fold the sheets her own way. Few enter that room, and those who do leave the door open.

She has a round, serious face, with pale, matte skin, and wears small metal-rimmed glasses that she pushes up her nose when about to say something important. Her gray hair is parted in the middle and pinned under a white lace cap; her dark gray wool dress is buttoned to the neck, and her hands are red from work. She speaks softly and with great certainty, without hesitating, as if everything she says had already been checked twice.

She says she has lived in the house four years and that the management weighs on her shoulders. Asked who slept beside the master's room, she answers bluntly: the mistress, in a separate room. About Doctor Holbeck, she says he writes to the mistress every week and was at the house on Sunday, when Mr. Ambrose had gone out riding, and that a man of that age does not accept losing. Everything she tells comes with a date and time, and almost always points to someone else.

Harriet knows that whoever knows every door of the house is also the first to be asked who entered where. When the detective accuses her to her face, her low voice does not rise: she recalls that she cleaned up the master's vomit all night and tells him to look for the coachman. It may be the hurt of a faithful servant treated as a suspect. It may be someone who has always been one step ahead of everyone. The detective will have to decide which.