by Nina Allan
“We were going to leave London,” Tichener said. “We were happy.”
Helen confirmed that she knew Tichener by sight from the women’s group, but denied she knew anything about an affair between her and Dillon. She reaffirmed that her own relationship with Dillon was as good as over, and the idea that she might have murdered him out of jealousy was ridiculous. “What Edwin did with his time or his affections was none of my business,” she said. “If it is true that this young woman put her trust in Edwin, I would have been afraid for her, not jealous.”
But the tide had turned. Louise Tichener’s evidence, together with Irene Wilbur’s statement, the clothes and travel tickets hidden at Daphne Evans’s flat – the evidence seemed damning. Paradoxically, Helen’s fortitude under questioning – her refusal to break down on the witness stand – may actually have helped in securing a conviction.
Helen Bostall was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. She was hanged at Holloway Prison on the morning of August 14th, 1928. Three weeks after her execution the hangman, Arthur Rawlin, resigned from the prison service and took up a position as a warehouseman for a minor shipping company part-owned by friends of his brother, a decision that meant a considerable drop in his standard of living. More than one enterprising journalist clamoured for Rawlin’s story, but he refused to comment, saying merely that he was done with the hanging game and that was that.
* * *
I thought that was interesting. Rawlin wasn’t the first hangman to lose his stomach for the profession, either. John Ellis, who executed Edith Thompson in 1923, ended up committing suicide. Although some said it was his alcoholism that did for him, most people agreed that Ellis never got over the appalling brutality of Edith’s execution. There have been others, too – look them up if you don’t believe me. It was thinking about Arthur Rawlin that prompted me to call on Lewis Usher. Lewis was an old client of mine – I’d helped him fight off the property acquisitions company that wanted to tear down the historic Methodist chapel that backed on to his home in Greenwich and turn it into a Tesco Metro – and it was during our war with Sequest Holdings that I happened to find out that he was an expert on British murder trials as well as an enthusiastic collector of murder memorabilia. I always enjoy going to see Lewis – he tells the most amusing anecdotes, and his house on Crooms Hill contains more weird and wonderful collectables than you’d hope to see in most provincial museums. When I visited Lewis on that particular afternoon in late November, I was hoping he might have something enlightening to tell me about the Bostall execution and I was not disappointed.
“Do you think Arthur Rawlin resigned his job as a hangman because he came to believe that Helen Bostall was innocent?” I asked him.
“It’s a strong possibility,” Lewis said. “There was more to it than that, though. People gossiped that Arthur Rawlin was in love with Bostall, that he believed he was, anyway. The prison governor reported that he used to visit Helen Bostall in her cell, during the run-up to her execution. There was a strange little article about it in the Evening Standard afterwards. You’d probably put it down to Stockholm Syndrome now, but it really was quite odd.” He spooned more sugar into his tea. “You do know I have his watch?”
I felt my heartbeat quicken. “Arthur Rawlin’s watch? The one he used to time his executions?”
“I think you’ll find it was Albert Pierrepoint who used to do that. Rawlin might have copied him, I suppose. There was certainly a cult of personality around Pierrepoint at the time. It’s Rawlin’s watch though, definitely, whatever he used it for. I have the full provenance.”
“Could I see it?” I found myself becoming excited in a way that seemed completely out of proportion with what Lewis had told me. It was just a watch, after all. But it was as if I knew, even then, that I was about to make a significant discovery, not just about Arthur Rawlin but about Helen Bostall.
“Of course. Won’t be a tick.” He eased himself out of his chair and shuffled off towards the side room where he kept most of his collection. I couldn’t help noticing he seemed to be relying on his cane more than he had on my last visit. Still, he seemed in good spirits. I gazed around the living room – the ancient red plush sofas, the fake stuffed dodo in its glass case, the walls and mantel shelf crowded with photographs of his wife, the stage actress Zoë Clifford, dead from a freak bout of pneumonia some ten years before. The place had become something of a haven for me during the Sequest case, which had happened to coincide with the first stage of my breakup with Ray. How glad I had been to come here, to escape from my own thoughts and misgivings into this cosy little corner of theatreland, where the fire was always lit and the stories were always taller and more preposterous than my own.
A place suspended in time, a lacuna in the fraying fabric of the everyday world.
“Here it is,” Lewis said. I jumped, startled. I’d been so absorbed in my thoughts I hadn’t noticed him come back into the room. He was carrying a small bag, made from yellow silk with a drawstring opening. “I can show you the papers too if you’d like to see them, but this is the watch.”
He passed me the bag. I reached cautiously inside. Things inside bags make me nervous. You don’t know what you’re getting into until it’s too late. In this case, Rawlin’s watch, which was a full-case silver pocket watch about two inches in diameter. The front of the case was engraved with a lighted candle. On the back was a skull, the eye sockets and nasal cavities etched out in darker relief. The classic vanitas, life and death, light and darkness, the universal allegory for time’s passing.
Perfect for a hangman, I thought.
“He may have commissioned the engraving personally,” Lewis said, as if reading my thoughts. “Although the design isn’t unusual for the time. The Victorians were heavily into mourning jewellery, as you probably know.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s more my brother’s area, to be honest.” I flipped open the front of the case. The watch’s white enamelled face was simple and plain, as if in deliberate contrast to the gothic extravagance of the case. There was a date stamped on the dial, 1879, and the name of the maker – Owen Andrews. The name meant nothing to me but I made a mental note to ask Martin about it later.
“It’s a tourbillon watch,” Lewis added. “Very expensive, even at the time. An ordinary working man like Rawlin would have had to save several months’ salary to purchase this.”
“What’s a tourbillon?”
“A means for stabilising the watch’s mechanism, so it doesn’t lose time. Here.” He opened the back of the watch, revealing its workings, which resembled a complicated mechanical diagram, all gears and levers. “And have a look at this.”
He angled his hand, showing me the inside back of the watch’s case, and the photograph that had been secreted there. The image showed a young woman, with short dark hair and light eyes, a narrow, straight nose and a high lace collar: Helen Bostall.
“There is a possibility that the photograph was placed inside the watch later – after Rawlin’s death, I mean,” said Lewis. “It’s unlikely though. You won’t read much about this in the newspapers, but if you delve a little deeper you’ll find there are several contemporary accounts, from colleagues and family and so on. All of them agree that Rawlin was living in a fantasy world.”
“About him and Helen being in love, you mean?”
“Yes, that, but it went even further.” He chuckled. “I read one letter from Rawlin to his younger brother where he was going on about travelling back in time to prevent the execution he himself had carried out.”
“That’s ridiculous. Poor man.”
“Plenty would say he got what he deserved. Not everyone would feel sorry for a hangman.”
I did, though. We can’t all choose our jobs, and was Rawlin so different from the soldiers sent out to kill other soldiers on the battlefields of World War One? I tried to imagine how he must have felt, becoming properly aware for the first time of what his job meant, what it was he actually did, and the imagini
ng was not pleasant.
“Too bad we can’t bring him back to talk to the Americans,” I said. I smiled to myself, thinking how Martin would disapprove of my poor taste in jokes. He would love to see this watch though, I thought, which gave me an idea. “Please say no if you want to,” I said to Lewis, “but could I possibly borrow this? Just for a day or two? I’d like to show it to my brother.”
“The watch?” He fell silent, and I was fully expecting him to demur, to begin explaining how he didn’t like to let items from his collection leave the house, especially an item like this, which must be valuable even aside from who had once owned it. “I’d like you to have it,” was what he actually said. I felt so surprised and so shocked that for a moment I couldn’t answer him.
“Lewis, don’t be silly. I couldn’t possibly. I’m sorry I asked,” I said, when I had regained the use of my tongue.
“I mean it,” he insisted. “I’ve been wanting to leave you something – in my will, I mean. To say thank you for being such a good friend to me. But it’s difficult to know what someone might like. If I know you like this, then you’ve made my task easier. You’ll be doing me a favour.”
“You’re not ill?”
“Dying, you mean? No, no more so than usual. But I am eighty-six.”
“Lewis,” I said. “Thank you.”
“It’s my great pleasure. So long as you don’t use it to go running off after repentant hangmen.”
We both laughed at that. Both of us, at the same time. But I’ve sometimes had the feeling – call it hindsight, if you want – that neither of us really thought it was funny.
* * *
Helen’s defence rested on the fact that the evidence against her was circumstantial. No one – not even Irene Wilbur – claimed to have seen her in the vicinity of Milliver Road at the time of Dillon’s death, and no matter how many times the prosecution cross-examined Daphne Evans over Helen’s alibi, she never deviated from her original statement: Helen had arrived at her apartment just before seven, they ate some sandwiches Daphne had prepared and talked about Edwin. Helen still felt guilty for what she was planning – to walk out on him without a word of warning – but Daphne remained adamant she was doing the right thing.
“I never liked Edwin,” she said. “He wasn’t trustworthy. I was glad when Helen decided she was leaving him. I knew she wasn’t happy.”
When asked whether she considered Dillon to be a violent man, Daphne hesitated before replying and then said yes. “I would have said he could be capable of violence,” she added. “I was afraid for Helen, just sometimes, but she always told me I was being foolish so I had to believe her.”
* * *
The prosecution’s most important witness was Irene Wilbur. Her insistence that there had been a ‘furious altercation’ at 112 Milliver Road just before eight o’clock was more instrumental in securing a guilty verdict than Helen Bostall’s fingerprints on the murder weapon. You didn’t have to be a lawyer to understand that anyone could have used that knife, that the killer would have been likely to grab the first weapon that came to hand, especially if the murder had been opportunistic rather than planned. That Helen Bostall kept a carving knife in her kitchen drawer was hardly damning evidence.
On the other hand, Irene Wilbur was adamant that she had heard two people yelling at each other, that one of them had been a woman. And she had Gerald Honeyshot of the Red Lion to back her up regarding the time.
Why would Irene Wilbur lie? When asked by the prosecution if she had any reason to dislike or resent Helen Bostall, if there was any previous bad feeling between them, Wilbur was equally adamant that there was none. “I barely knew her,” she stated. “I’d not been living at Milliver Road for more than a fortnight. I’d seen Miss Bostall a few times to say hello to but that was all. She seemed friendly enough. A bit aloof perhaps but not what you’d call unpleasant.”
In fact, Irene Wilbur had been resident at 112 Milliver Road for just ten days. The defence did not appear to find anything suspicious in that, and why would they? People move house all the time. Wilbur’s assertion – that she had moved to Camden from Putney because she had numerous friends in the area – seemed entirely reasonable.
I don’t know what kept me picking away at Irene Wilbur, but I did. I didn’t like the way she had been so relentless in the way she’d given her evidence, so determined, almost, that Helen was guilty. Wilbur had persisted, even while knowing that Helen might face a death sentence if convicted. Why such animosity towards a woman she claimed not to have known? I didn’t get it. Those who did think to criticise Wilbur at the time did so on the grounds that she was a natural attention-seeker, altogether too enamoured of seeing herself in the newspapers. An interesting hypothesis, but I wasn’t so certain.
Was it possible, I wondered, that Irene Wilbur had been a stooge? Most newspaper accounts of the trial made mention of Wilbur’s ‘smart’ attire, and several made particular mention of a jade and diamond brooch she wore. Everyone seemed to agree she was ‘a handsome woman’.
After pursuing the matter a little further, I discovered that Irene Wilbur had moved away from Milliver Road less than a week after Helen’s execution, that she had returned to her old stamping ground of Putney, and to considerably smarter lodgings than she had occupied previously.
If Irene Wilbur had been paid to provide false evidence, it suggested not only that Dillon’s murder had been carefully planned, but that Helen had been intended to take the blame for it all along.
If this was so – and once I stumbled upon the idea I found it difficult to give up the conviction that it was – then Irene Wilbur would have to be connected with Edwin Dillon in some way, or rather with his enemies, who would scarcely have risked employing a stranger to do their dirty work.
On top of my research into the lives of Helen Bostall and Edwin Dillon, I now found myself grubbing around for any information I could find about Irene Wilbur. I soon discovered she had been married at the age of twenty-one to a Major Douglas Wilbur, who had been killed at the Battle of Amiens in World War One. They had one child, a daughter named Laura, born in the February of 1919, a full six months after her father’s death.
Those dates seemed odd to me. Of course it was entirely possible that Major Wilbur had been afforded leave prior to the Amiens campaign, that Laura could have been conceived then, but it didn’t fit somehow, not to my mind, anyway. Douglas Wilbur had been an experienced, valuable and loyal officer. It was inconceivable that he would have left his post immediately before such a crucial offensive.
There was also the fact that Irene Wilbur was thirty-eight years old at the time of Laura’s birth, that during the whole of her twenty-year marriage there had been no other children.
What had changed?
If Douglas Wilbur was not in fact Laura’s father, who was?
I looked back once again over the trial records, focussing on any mention of Irene Wilbur’s home life, no matter how minor. Which is how I came to notice something that had not registered before, namely that Laura Wilbur had not been resident at Milliver Road, that at the time of the murder she was staying instead with a person Irene Wilbur described as a ‘near relative’, a Mrs Jocelyn Bell, close to the Wilburs’ old address in Putney. When questioned about why her daughter was not in fact living with her, Irene Wilbur said it was a matter of Laura’s schooling.
Once again, it was possible. But by now I was coming to believe it was more likely a matter of Irene not wanting her daughter anywhere near a house where she knew there was going to be a murder. Wilbur would not be staying long at Milliver Road, in any case. Far better to keep Laura at a distance.
I was filled with a sense of foreboding, the feeling that always comes over me when I understand I have made a discovery about a case that has hitherto kept itself obstinately hidden. I knew that I was close to something, that the pieces of the truth were more than likely already assembled, that it was simply a matter of arranging them in the correct order.
; The first step, I decided, was to try and find out a little more about Jocelyn Bell. And in the meantime I still had to talk to Martin about the hangman’s watch.
* * *
People say we’re alike, Martin and I, but I’m not so sure. We look alike, and I think what our mutual friends might be picking up on is our shared tendency towards poking around in subjects no one else gives a damn about. We both like finding things out. Of the two of us though, I believe it is Martin who is the better human being. Martin cares about people, which is why he is so good at his job. When I tell him this, he always insists that I must care about people too, or I wouldn’t put such time and effort into fighting their corners.
Perhaps he’s right. But I still think what I enjoy most about my work is the thrill of argument, the abstract battle of opposing forces. If ‘doing good’ happens to be a side effect of that I’m not going to knock it, but it isn’t the driving force behind what I do.
I don’t think so, anyway. You’d better ask Martin.
I hope he meets someone else. He’s borne up remarkably well since Miranda died, but that’s Martin all over, never one to make a fuss.
I was always the one who made a fuss. Getting cancer then going crazy then marrying Ray. Martin was there for me through all of it, no matter how much I managed to screw up.
He can cook a mean curry, too.
“Have you ever heard of a watchmaker called Owen Andrews?” I asked him once we’d finished eating. I poured us both another glass of wine. It was odd, the way his face changed. A lot of people might not even have noticed, but I’m used to watching other people’s body language and I know Martin back to front anyway. The moment I said the name Owen Andrews, it was as if someone had suddenly switched a light on inside him, then just as rapidly flicked it off again. Something he didn’t want to talk about? Or felt uncertain of? Could have been either. I’d been telling him about my research, my various theories about Irene Wilbur. I’d deliberately held off mentioning Arthur Rawlin because once you get Martin on to the subject of watches it’s difficult to get him off it again.