by Nicola Upson
‘How did Celia Bannerman react?’
Josephine thought before she answered, careful to distinguish between Celia’s reaction at the time and what she had said about the incident more recently. ‘She was shocked, obviously. I think she felt guilty because it happened while she was in charge, and because she brought Lizzie to Anstey in the first place.’
‘But it was professional sorrow rather than a personal sense of loss for a particular girl?’
‘You make it sound rather self-centred but yes, I suppose it was.’ She looked out of the window at a mill, admiring the way the light reflected off the sails. ‘It was so strange for us all—I’ve never known an atmosphere like it. Anstey was such a noisy place, you know, at every hour of the day—with so many girls crowded into it, it was bound to be. Yet the next morning the whole school seemed to be populated by ghosts. It didn’t last long, although it shames me to say it: I look back on her death now and I see the tragedy of it, particularly since I’ve talked to Gerry about it, but I think that’s an age thing. I hate to admit it, but there was a scandalous fascination about it for us girls. The teachers really felt it, though. I imagine there was an awful lot of black coffee drunk in the staff room that day, and a few recriminations handed round.’
‘I’m surprised Lizzie didn’t go to Bannerman when she got the letter. Wouldn’t that be the automatic reaction if you found out something like that—disbelief? A need to have it confirmed?’
‘It depends who told you, I suppose—she trusted Gerry and would have believed her. And we don’t know how much she remembered, do we? She wasn’t a baby when it all happened, so perhaps the story fitted with something she had a dim recollection of. Adults think they’re clever enough to keep things from children, but that’s often an illusion.’
‘All the same, you’d think she’d seek some sort of clarification, but she didn’t, as far as you know?’
‘No, not as far as I’m aware. If she’d gone to Celia, the suicide would have been prevented, I’m sure. Of course, I have no idea if she knew what an influence Celia had had on her life.’
‘I suppose it was suicide?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Archie—what else would it have been? She left a note.’ Penrose wondered if Fallowfield would be able to trace that note through the Birmingham police. ‘And it seemed significant to me that she’d chosen to die like her mother. Surely that would have been very hard to fake?’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he agreed reluctantly.
They passed a sign to Framlingham, and Josephine turned back to look in that direction. ‘We really are getting close to my roots now,’ she said.
‘What? You’re a Suffolk girl?’
‘On my mother’s side, a couple of greats ago. They brewed beer somewhere between Framlingham and Saxmundham, apparently.’
‘Just think—you could be related to Bill. That really would make his day, especially if there’s a free pint involved.’ He slowed the car to take a sharp right-hand bend. ‘Do you know it, then? Did you ever come here with your family?’
‘No, and as an adult I’m afraid my Suffolk travels begin and end in Newmarket. I’m easily waylaid by the Rowley Mile. I’d like to get to know it better, though,’ she added, as they drove down a high street flanked on either side by handsome houses and small shops. The sun finally broke through the clouds for a second, burnishing the pavements as if cued by her enthusiasm, and she exclaimed in delight. ‘This is lovely. I may have to move south after all.’
‘You don’t think it’s all a bit too perfect?’
‘Is there such a thing? What makes you say that?’
He pointed at a picturesque gabled building with a walled garden, set back a little from the road. ‘What would you say if I told you that a young servant girl of dubious morals was found murdered in that house after a violent storm, stabbed several times in the chest and with her throat slashed from ear to ear?’
She laughed at the melodramatic note in his voice. ‘I’d say it was a nice house, and I hope they cleaned up well. Who killed her?’
‘Supposedly a man called William Gardiner. He’d got her pregnant, despite having a wife and two children.’
‘Good God, was that here?’
‘You know about it?’
‘I read about it recently. It was in the newspapers at the same time as Sach and Walters. Didn’t they have to have two trials or something?’
‘That’s right—the jury couldn’t agree. It was eleven to one guilty first time round, and eleven to one innocent when they tried again.’
‘Why was it so contentious?’
‘The evidence was confusing. They found a bottle by Rose Harsent’s body which contained paraffin that someone used to set light to her clothes, and it was labelled as medicine for Gardiner’s children. The prosecution said it was incontrovertible proof of his guilt; the defence claimed that only someone certifiably insane would have been stupid enough to leave a clue like that there, and they said it was a set-up.’
‘I’m inclined to agree with the defence, although I suppose it could have been an extremely audacious double bluff. What happened in the end? Did they have a third trial?’
‘No, the judge tried to force a conviction based on the evidence, but the jury wasn’t having any of it and Gardiner was released. He caught the first train to Liverpool Street and disappeared in London.’
‘I can’t decide if that makes him more likely to be innocent or guilty. How could he have just disappeared, though? Surely he was notorious all over the country.’
‘Disappearing off the face of the earth was easier than you think back then—it happened all the time. Newspapers didn’t carry photographs the way they do today, and people only had his word for what his name was. There were far fewer official records than we have. Look at what you told me about Annie Walters—she went from place to place with a different name each time and got away with it, and she only moved from street to street. Walters’s trouble started when she stayed in one place for too long, but Gardiner wasn’t as careless and London was a long way from Peasenhall.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It feels like a long way today, too.’
‘That must have been a terrible existence for him,’ Josephine said. ‘Surely he spent the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, never quite knowing if he’d got away with it? It must have been like that for Jacob Sach and Edwards, too, I suppose.’
‘Yes, and all happening at the same time. You should build it into the book.’
‘You’ve got to be joking. One real crime is more than enough at the moment, thank you. Don’t give me something else to worry about.’ She fumbled in her bag for a lighter and lit them both a cigarette, hoping that Archie hadn’t noticed Marta’s diary in amongst the clutter. ‘It’s interesting, though—Rose Harsent sounds like exactly the sort of girl who Sach took in. It makes you think, doesn’t it? These girls or their children—all given a death sentence because men couldn’t take the consequences of their actions. I don’t get any sense that the twelve men on Sach’s jury were quite so analytical of the evidence. If it had been Gardiner’s wife on trial for murder, they’d probably have hanged her first time.’ She had a point, Penrose thought; he had been surprised by what he had heard of the lack of evidence put up in Sach and Walters’s defence and, while he doubted they were innocent, he could see a number of loopholes in the prosecution which a good barrister would have used to save them from the gallows. They reached a junction and Josephine looked at the map, intrigued by the names of the villages. ‘Left here,’ she said, ‘then right in about five miles.’
They turned off the main road just as a magnificent church appeared in the distance, and the landscape changed once again. Closer to the sea, the rolling, arable countryside gave way to heathland covered with a patchwork of heather, scattered fir trees and gorse bushes. Miraculously, one or two of the gorse bushes were still in flower, and the flash of yellow, though tired and faded, made a refreshing change after the muted greys of the journey
so far. At the edge of a small patch of woodland, a red deer moved shyly through the rhythms of light and shade created by the sun and the trees. ‘This must be stunning in summer,’ Josephine said, enchanted by the way in which such rich and varied scenery could exist in close proximity.
Walberswick itself was charming, too, perched on the Suffolk coast where the River Blyth joined the North Sea. The village obviously had a long history, Josephine thought, as they wound their way slowly into its heart: the variety of its architecture was fascinating, ranging from small cottages and converted fishing huts to large, rambling villas. Many of the houses had been built in the Arts and Crafts style which she loved and, by the time they passed the church, which sat defiantly in the ruins of an older, grander place of worship, she had identified at least three properties which she would have been very happy to own. ‘Not a bad place to retire to,’ she said.
‘Very nice,’ Archie agreed. ‘It’s hardly Holloway by the sea, is it? She lives on the green, so it must be quite central.’ The road offered no choices, and they found the heart of the village without difficulty. He drove a short distance further on, and parked outside the Bell Hotel, a welcoming, thatched building which looked out towards the estuary. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Have a look at the sea, I think—it’s a wonderful day for a walk. And we passed a tea shop opposite the green. I’ll wait for you there when I can’t stand the cold any longer, but don’t feel you have to hurry—I’ll pace myself with the scones.’
He smiled and watched her go, then headed back the way they had come. Ethel Stuke’s house was the last in a row of small, red-brick cottages on the left-hand side of the green, and he wondered whose sense of humour had named it after a famous siege. He closed the wooden gate softly behind him and knocked at the front door, although the fierce agitation of the downstairs curtains had already told him that he did not need to announce his presence. It was a minute or two before he heard the key turn in the lock, and he remembered that the former prison officer must be in her early seventies at least; when he saw her, though, he realised that it was not age but arthritis which had caused the delay. She was a tall woman, but bent low over two walking sticks, and her arms and legs were so thin that any sort of movement without injury seemed a small miracle in itself. ‘Miss Stuke?’ he said. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Archie Penrose from the Metropolitan Police. It’s very good of you to agree to see me at such short notice.’
She looked at him for a moment before speaking, and he tried to decide if hers was a hard face or if he had simply been influenced by what he knew of her style of pastoral care; in either case, Ethel Stuke was clearly not the type to indulge in social niceties. ‘Your colleagues weren’t very clear on what you wanted,’ she said, standing aside to let him into the sitting room. ‘I hope you’ve got a better idea of why you’re here.’ Her years on the Suffolk coast had done nothing to erode the harsh London edges of her speech. ‘Tea?’ she asked, with an economy born, he guessed, of years spent barking out monosyllabic orders; she managed to make the offer sound more like a challenge, and he was about to refuse when he noticed a tea tray in the corner of the room, carefully laid with cups and saucers and a selection of cakes. Perhaps Ethel Stuke’s bark was worse than her bite, or perhaps loneliness was too powerful an emotion these days for her reputation to matter. ‘That would be very nice,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
She went slowly through to the kitchen next door, and he took advantage of her absence to look around the room. It was fussier than he would have expected from someone who had spent most of her career in an institution like Holloway, but she could simply have been compensating in her later years for the trinkets and clutter which had been denied her until now. Most of the surfaces were covered in ornaments and pot plants—African violets, mostly, with a couple of aspidistras—but it was the bookshelves which interested him most. They were stacked with crime novels—Christie, Sayers and Allingham, interspersed with Freeman Wills Crofts and a Ngaio Marsh—and, although he couldn’t see a copy of Josephine’s book, The Man in the Queue, Ethel Stuke’s tastes seemed to bode well for the request he wanted to make on her behalf.
‘Have you been here long, Miss Stuke?’ he asked when she eventually came back into the room, her progress made even slower now by having swapped one of her sticks for the teapot. ‘It seems a lovely village.’ He resisted the temptation to help her, sensing that it would be looked upon as an insult; the last thing he needed to do was offend her before she had had a chance to tell him anything.
‘Sit down,’ she said, nodding to one of the armchairs by the fire. ‘I’ll bring your tea over.’ She added a slice of fruit cake to the saucer and put it down on the table next to him. ‘I came here to live with my sister when I retired eight years ago. It’s not so bad, I suppose. Full of people with too much time on their hands, and nothing better to do than worry about other people’s business, but I’ve met enough like that in the past to know how to deal with them, and they’ve not found quite such a warm welcome here recently. Mabel died in January, you see.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Don’t be. We weren’t close. She never liked what I did for a living. Having to tell people that her sister was in Holloway created the wrong impression, if you know what I mean.’
It was impossible to tell if she meant the comment as a joke or a simple statement of fact. ‘It’s your time at Holloway that I’d like to talk to you about,’ Penrose said, ‘and some of the prisoners you looked after and the officers you worked with.’ She seemed to brighten at the prospect of talking about the prison, and he understood for the first time that she had lived for her job in exactly the same way as Celia Bannerman, Mary Size or Miriam Sharpe; no wonder she was bitter about the other villagers; to her, a retirement home by the sea must seem like a cruel parody of the institution she had reluctantly left behind. ‘But first I want to check—have two girls come here recently asking about the same thing?’
‘No,’ she said, and Penrose’s heart sank; had he really come all this way to learn nothing except that he was wrong? ‘There was only one girl. She came last week.’
‘Was her name Marjorie Baker?’
She smiled. ‘I knew she was a wrong ’un as soon as I clapped eyes on her. Far too sure of herself—she’ll be in and out of that place all her life.’ Penrose noticed that the force of nature to which Mary Size had referred was much more evident when the former warder was sitting down and the physical frailty of her body was less noticeable. ‘What’s she done this time? Must be serious for someone like you to be interested.’
‘She hasn’t done anything, Miss Stuke, but I would like to know why she came to see you.’
‘She wanted to know about a warder I worked with at Holloway, a woman called Bannerman. She’s gone on to far loftier things since, of course.’ There was a note of resentment in her voice which she made no effort to hide, but Penrose was too satisfied to pay it much heed. ‘The Baker girl was interested in the early days, though, just after the prison had been turned over to women.’
‘What did she want to know?’
‘What Bannerman was like, what sort of prison officer she made—I got the impression that she didn’t really know herself what she was looking for. She didn’t ask anything specific—just let me talk.’
‘Would you mind if I did the same?’ She shrugged. ‘Start by telling me when you first met Miss Bannerman.’
‘1902. She found it hard to fit in, right from the start. Most of us at that stage had gone into the profession because it was in the family—it was just like going into domestic service in that respect—but Bannerman had chosen it. She came from nursing, which is what she eventually went back to, because she’d heard some lecture on the terrible medical conditions for women in prison and she thought she could make a difference.’
‘And she was wrong?’
‘Of course she was. She might get away with that nonse
nse now—there’s no such thing as discipline these days, as far as I can see—but she was fighting a losing battle back then. She was soft on the prisoners, and far too kind to them—most of us start that way, but it soon rubs off. No, Bannerman was too good for us—I don’t mean she looked down her nose like she does now, by all accounts; I mean she was genuinely a good person.’ She said it in the incredulous tone which most people reserved for extraordinary feats that were beyond the capabilities of an average human being. ‘There was no place for sensitivity in Holloway, and it was only a matter of time before she got herself into trouble.’
‘In what way?’
‘She got too close to the women—didn’t report them when they broke the rules, tried to interfere in their lives outside.’
‘Are you talking about Sach and Walters?’
‘Sach could twist Bannerman round her little finger, but then she was a manipulative bitch at the best of times—that’s why she was in there. Got someone else to do her dirty work and thought she’d get away with it. Smarmed her way round the chaplain and the prison doctor, and had Bannerman eating out of her hand. She honestly thought she’d get off, too—right until we took her to the execution shed. That soon wiped the smile off her face.’
It was the first indication of an attitude which went beyond duty and discipline, and it sickened Penrose; Mary Size’s efforts at reform became all the more admirable when he saw what she was up against. ‘I understand that Miss Bannerman found their execution difficult to deal with,’ he said.
‘She didn’t understand like we do, Inspector. She was like all these abolitionists who wouldn’t dirty their hands by talking to a real criminal; she couldn’t see that some crimes are so abhorrent to decent people that there’s only one answer.’
She assumed his complicity because he was a policeman, and he didn’t correct her. Rarely did Penrose allow himself to think about the morality of taking a human life in the name of justice—he would never be able to do his job if he did—but there was a more practical reason why he questioned the sense of the death penalty: the reluctance of witnesses to appear in a hanging case, and of juries to convict, meant that there were far fewer guilty verdicts in the courts than there should have been. Privately, he believed that justice and the families of the victims would often be better served by an alternative—but this was not the time for a debate on abolition. ‘Did Marjorie ask you anything about Sach and Walters?’