by A J Wright
Evelyne’s face was turning a deep red. He was unable to speak.
‘She had done nothing wrong!’ Crosby went on. ‘Nothing! Her books… she lived for those books!’
Now Gilbert Crosby, perhaps sensing the gravity of what they were witnessing, left his place and slowly drew near, his arms raised. ‘Simeon,’ he said urgently. ‘You’re killing the man! Let him go.’
Ralph Batsford, too, stood up. He addressed not the hangman but Brennan.
‘Is this the same man who murdered Maria?’
Brennan, who was watching the hangman’s eyes closely, gave a shrug. ‘Until I can speak further with him, who knows?’
‘But it’s highly probable? There’s no reasonable doubt, is there, Sergeant?’
Brennan understood the implications in the journalist’s words. He kept silent.
Batsford raised his voice and spoke directly to the hangman. ‘You must do what you have to do, Simeon. But he has killed two women who did nothing wrong. Innocent, innocent women. Do what you have to do, man! If I were in your place…’
Brennan slowly knelt down a few feet from where Crosby had Evelyne in his grip. ‘You ready to die?’ he asked.
‘He can’t speak!’ rasped the hangman.
‘I wasn’t talking to him, Mr Crosby.’
There was a tense hiatus. It seemed that the room had grown much colder, darker.
With a sudden jerk, Crosby tightened his grip even more, and from Evelyne’s throat there came a desperate, choking rattle. Brennan saw his eyes roll upwards, and now, only the whites of his eyes could be seen, tiny veins seeming to throb angrily in protest.
Then, as if the full import of Brennan’s words had finally sunk in, the hangman relinquished his hold and lay back, leaving Evelyne gasping for breath and clutching at his throat with both hands.
27.
It was another death that prompted Thomas Evelyne to make a full confession.
While he was being held in police custody that weekend, word came from Bolton that his father had passed away. The police sergeant from Bolton, a personal friend of Brennan’s, had told him that a neighbour had found the old man slumped at the bottom of the stairs when she’d knocked on his door to check on him. She’d heard the strange bumping sounds, and when she’d flipped open the letterbox, she’d seen his body lying at an unnatural angle, his skull fractured by the fall.
Brennan refused the man permission to be escorted back to his home to pay his respects.
Thomas Evelyne blamed himself. He spent the morning cursing and railing against the whole world, finally calming himself down and whispering, in an almost sing-song voice, how only he was to blame, for if he hadn’t come to Wigan, he would have been there in the house to prevent the accident. And his dear, dear father would still be alive. Ailing, but alive.
His sense of guilt proved too much of a torment, and he asked to see Sergeant Brennan.
Within minutes, the two men were facing each other across the table in the small interview room.
When he spoke now, there was a hoarseness to Evelyne’s voice that was only partly due to his recent brush with a broken neck.
‘Everything you said was true,’ he began. ‘And now my father is yet another victim.’
‘You were in Violet Crosby’s room when the bellboy knocked on the door, weren’t you?’
Evelyne nodded. ‘I knew I didn’t have much time. Once the boy threw the brick through the window, I found the room she was in from the register and ran upstairs. When I knocked on the door, she just said, Enter. The door wasn’t locked. But then she was expecting someone, wasn’t she?’ He glanced down at his hands. ‘When the bellboy knocked, she was taking her last breath. A more merciful end than the one Goodfellow gave my beloved. And our unborn child.’
There was a long silence.
‘Maria Woodruff, too, was an innocent victim, wasn’t she?’
Evelyne nodded slowly. When he looked at Brennan, there were tears in his eyes. ‘I didn’t mean to kill her. That was a pure accident.’
‘There’s nothing pure about a crushed skull, Evelyne.’ There was harshness in Brennan’s voice. He had a fleeting vision of a young woman, beautiful, alive, eager to succeed in the career she had chosen.
‘But it was!’ Evelyne insisted. ‘It was an accidental meeting, you see? I was looking for that lunatic who’d drowned me with beer when she saw me across the street from her hotel. She came across. But she was the last person I wished to see. Not after I’d done what I’d done back at the Royal. I just wanted to be left alone and savour the fitness of what I’d done. A wife for a wife.’ His voice fell. He examined his hands once more, held together in prayer.
‘She’d discovered your real name, Mr Ridge, hadn’t she?’
Evelyne was too filled with grief and remorse to show any sort of surprise at Brennan’s words.
‘How did you know?’
‘My colleague in Bolton has spoken to your neighbours. Apparently, you’ve only recently moved to that address. Under the name of Evelyne. When I looked further into the articles Maria Woodruff wrote, I remembered one person – a frail elderly man as Miss Woodruff described him, telling her of how his son came home to find his wife murdered. His expectant wife. Miss Woodruff also wrote in that same section that she saw a framed photograph of the son, a handsome fellow. She recognised you – or suspected she did – from that photograph, didn’t she?’
Evelyne nodded. ‘She wondered why I was here in Wigan railing against capital punishment when all the while my wife had been murdered by an animal who escaped the gallows because of that man’s mistake.’
‘Why didn’t you deny it? Or even tell her the truth? There was no proof that you had done what you did. You could have brazened it out.’
Evelyne – or Ridge – shook his head. ‘I could see the light in her eyes. She demanded an interview, urging me to explain my side of the story. How would that have looked? It would be the equivalent of putting my head in a noose of my own making.’
‘So, what happened?’
‘There’s an alleyway opposite. We went in, to speak more privately. But she wouldn’t let it go. Told me I had a great opportunity, to explain my feelings. Why I, the bereaved husband of a murder victim, was even now supporting abolition. She said it was a noble and selfless thing to do, and she would be sure that my motives would be clear and prove influential. She had no idea, even then, even when she knew of Violet Crosby’s fate, that I was the one responsible. She thought I was filled with a selfless nobility as she put it. We argued. I made to go and she grabbed me. I turned and swung out at her, pinioned her against the wall. Then she slumped to the ground.’ He raised his voice now. ‘I didn’t mean to kill her!’
The room was silent for a while.
‘And now my father… my poor father…’ He looked Brennan directly in the eye. ‘I, too, read that article, Sergeant, though I didn’t say as much when I spoke with Miss Woodruff that first time. There was no mention of surnames. How did you know our real name?’
‘I checked up on the case, despite the fact that Miss Woodruff printed no names. I discovered the woman’s name was Ridge. I had all the clues I needed. The crime, the fact that it was committed by an escaped murderer. The murderer’s name being Goodfellow. The fact that Goodfellow’s survival from the gallows was attributed to a mistake on the executioner’s part. And finally, the name of the executioner being Crosby. It was, as I said, a thread leading directly to you.’
Thomas Ridge sat back and exhaled heavily.
‘Just one more thing, Mr Ridge.’ Brennan reached down and produced from a small folder a sheet of paper.
‘What’s that?’
Brennan placed it on the table and slid it across. As Ridge began to read, Brennan spoke softly.
‘It’s an official report from the prison where Crosby tried to hang Goodfellow. As you can see from the conclusions at the bottom of the sheet, the authorities completely exonerated Mr Simeon Crosby from any culpability.
It was discovered sometime later, after Goodfellow had escaped and killed your wife. One of the prison guards had become ill and was dying, and he subsequently confessed to being the cause of the equipment being faulty and failing to complete Goodfellow’s execution. He and a colleague, who had since left the job, had found themselves drinking in the execution shed on the night before the murder. They’d fooled around with the trapdoors. A silly game of Dare. With the most tragic of consequences. Until the following morning, they had no idea they’d damaged the equipment.’ He paused. ‘You see, Mr Ridge, it wasn’t the hangman’s fault.’
Ridge took his time. Then he said quietly, ‘Then whose fault was it?’
Epilogue
There was confusion on Constable Jaggery’s face as he reached for his pint in the Crofter’s. The place was already filling up, for it was Saturday evening, the snow outside making the warmth of the public house, with its roaring fire spitting sparks onto the large hearthstone, an inviting refuge.
While that was a far from unusual expression on the big man’s face, this evening, Detective Sergeant Brennan felt it his duty to help him become unconfused.
‘With the confession of Thomas Ridge, the inquest into Violet Crosby’s death will return a verdict of Wilful Murder when the court reconvenes. Whether the second inquest – into Maria Woodruff’s death – brings in a similar finding, or judges her death to be manslaughter, is the only point at issue. Ridge will be brought to trial later for both deaths.’
But it was obvious that wasn’t the issue as far as Jaggery was concerned. ‘That Dodds bloke,’ he said.
‘What about him?’
‘Well, why did the bugger run off like that? If he’d nowt to do wi’ owt?’
‘I never said that, Freddie.’
It always pleased Jaggery when the sergeant addressed him by his Christian name. He couldn’t repay the compliment, of course, but it established a deeper intimacy between them. He liked that sometimes, like warming your hands on a cold night.
‘No,’ Brennan went on to explain. ‘Mr Edgar Dodds fled from the town for an entirely different reason. It had nothing to do with the Crosbys or Maria Woodruff and everything to do with David Morgan.’
Jaggery frowned. ‘But he were his mate, weren’t ’e?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Brennan, taking a long, slow drink from his glass. ‘He was his mate all right. But in not the way you mean.’
Jaggery licked his lips. He looked across at the dancing flames in the grate. Suddenly, his face felt hot. ‘You mean they were… that way?’
‘I do.’
‘So why didn’t we drag that Morgan lad in then? They can get two years for that sort o’ thing.’
‘What proof did we have, eh, Freddie?’ Brennan sat back, gave a smile and took another drink. ‘Dodds left Morgan’s room when he heard the commotion at the front of the hotel. The smashed window would mean police showing up, and it wouldn’t look good if two men were found in a room together. That’s when young George bumped into him. Crosby’s room was round the corner of the corridor, remember? He thought he could slip out and not be noticed.’
Jaggery sat forward, shaking his head. ‘We ’ad proof, Sergeant. They were in each other’s rooms for a start. Morgan admitted as much. An’ when we went to Morgan’s room, that bugger were there again. I’m sure that’s proof enough. What did his lordship say about it?’
‘Captain Bell? Oh, I didn’t tell him.’
Jaggery’s eyes widened. ‘Bloody ’ell, Sergeant! He’ll go mad. You know what ’e’s like for the letter of the law.’
‘That’s exactly why I didn’t tell him.’
‘I don’t get it.’
It was Brennan’s turn to gaze into the flames. ‘What Dodds and Morgan did is against the law. Dodds fled and Morgan lied about having a wife. No law against that, of course, but lying to the police isn’t recommended. At any rate, I know nothing about Dodds or whatever his name is, but I do know something about the lad Morgan. He has a sister. And she is a schoolteacher. Has she done anything wrong, Freddie?’
Jaggery shrugged. ‘How do I know?’
‘Well let’s imagine she hasn’t, shall we? What do you think the effect would be on her career if it became known that her brother was a homosexual and had been sent to prison for gross immorality?’
Jaggery thought about it for a few seconds then shook his head. ‘But if we thought that road every time we felt some bugger’s collar, we’d never arrest anyone. Every one of ’em ’as relatives of one sort or another. His lordship would have a blue fit! Besides, we’re policemen, not vicars.’
Brennan closed his eyes for a second. Then he said, ‘Let’s just say I’m fed up with seeing victims at every turn. A victim’s not just the poor bloke or woman or child on the receiving end of a good hiding or worse. It goes further than that. Maria Woodruff understood that, all right. Tried to write about it.’
He recalled the passage she’d written:
Imagine a still and quiet pool… a stone dropped in its centre. See the ripples flow outwards, disturbing even the calmest of places! Imagine now, that that self-same pool is filled not with water but with blood. Ripples of blood! That is the common theme with all of these acts.
He kept his thoughts unspoken, for neither Jaggery nor Captain Bell himself would understand exactly how he felt.
But if he had the chance to prevent anyone else from becoming a victim, he would take it.
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