Waxwork

by Peter Lovesey

  ‘Come now, that’s too steep,’ Allingham demurred. ‘You have a sweet disposition, always did.’

  He was incapable of stopping her now she had started. It was so sudden that it shocked, this baring of the soul by the woman who had consistently refused to confide a word. It seemed indecent, worse than nakedness.

  ‘I lacked any judgment, Simon,’ she said in a voice that did not expect to be challenged. ‘My actions were determined by impulse alone. Why do you suppose I married Howard? I could not give you a reasoned explanation.’

  ‘In matters of the heart—’ Allingham started to murmur.

  ‘It was a whim, like everything else in my life up to that time,’ she said, and her voice became less insistent, dreamier. ‘Howard was there, and I wanted him. I gave it no more thought than if I had seen a bonnet in a shop window. Oh, I don’t mean that my head was not full of him. I doted on him. To me he was charming, handsome, urbane and his prospects were boundless. Yet what I wanted in truth was gratification. I was thinking of myself.’ She sighed. ‘The difference in our ages, his possessive ways, his devotion to photography above all things, I dimly recognised, but I did not consider these as reasons to hesitate. I wanted him as my husband and that was the end of it. The end.’ Her eyes moistened. ‘Nothing would deter me.’

  She looked down at her hands again. Nobody spoke.

  ‘Simon, you of all people must have noticed that Howard and I … that the element one takes for granted in matrimony, the coming together of man and wife—’

  Allingham appealed to her, ‘Spare yourself, Miriam. There is no need to … ’

  The wardresses sat in silence, pretending to hear nothing, least of all what was unsaid.

  The prisoner continued speaking. ‘There had to be disenchantment. Really we entered into marriage without knowing each other.’ She smiled faintly. ‘To Howard I was something between a child and a piece of porcelain. I needed to be guarded, humoured, cherished and photographed. He liked me best when I was silent and completely still.’ She looked away, in her own thoughts. ‘It was difficult for me to accept after our courtship had been so full of variety and companionship. I had imagined the parties would go on as if nothing had changed. Instead I was confined indefinitely in Park Lodge. I might as well have been here. I even had a gaoler until I insisted she was dismissed. Howard didn’t understand why I could not bear the woman. You know him, Simon. A kinder, more solicitous man does not exist. If Howard had made me unhappy from malice I could have rebelled, but he was infinitely kind. He bought me trinkets, chocolates, little toys and hid them in places where I would come upon them unexpectedly. What could I do but persevere, try to convince myself it was not the greatest mistake of my life?’

  ‘Miriam—’

  ‘Please listen to me, Simon,’ she said quickly. ‘There is not much more. I believe even now I would be ready to face a life with Howard if he had been as honest with me as he was kind.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She hesitated. ‘That he concealed from me the truth about Judith Honeycutt.’

  Allingham’s features creased into a look of bewilderment. ‘But, my dear, you knew about Judith.’

  She looked at him with a gaze that seemed to penetrate his words and show them to be hollow.

  ‘There was the inquest,’ he said, trying to fill the space. ‘You knew about the tragedy. We all did. God knows, it was catastrophic for Howard. If he had stayed in Hampstead, it would have ruined him. I don’t mean to be callous about poor Judith, rest her soul, but she did not pause to think—’

  She cut through his words with a bare statement. ‘Simon, I know how Judith died.’

  He blinked and put his hand to his face. ‘Miriam, what are you saying?’

  She said with deliberation, ‘He told me himself. He confessed it to me as he lay beside me in our marriage-bed’—she spoke the word with bitterness—‘at a moment when he felt constrained to reassure me that he was capable of loving a woman. What consolation I was to derive from it, I cannot imagine, because he confided to me, his wife, that he and Judith … that he was responsible for her condition at the time of her death. Whether it was true I doubt, knowing Judith as I did, but that is of no account. Howard believed it. When she told him, it threw him into a state of panic. You know how exercised he becomes about the smallest things. Imagine this! She threatened a scandal unless he married her. To Howard, the suggestion was unthinkable. Whatever had happened between them was a furtive, foolish thing, no basis for matrimony. In his mental anguish he decided there was only one escape: to do away with her.’

  Allingham said, ‘Miriam, for God’s sake. This can’t be true!’

  Her colour was high. She began speaking more rapidly, unsubdued by his protest. ‘You can be frank with me. You were a true friend to Howard. You saved him, told him what to say at the inquest—’

  ‘No, no!’ Allingham agitatedly said. ‘Nothing of the kind.’

  ‘Simon, he told me the truth himself. Too late. By then I had married him. Can you imagine how I felt being the wife of a … ’ She smothered the word with an inrush of breath. ‘If there had ever been any prospect of our marriage succeeding, it ended that night he told me this.’

  Allingham was white. In a voice just audible, he said, ‘Miriam, I knew nothing of this. Nothing.’

  ‘I wanted you to know.’

  As words stopped between them, the sound of his breathing filled the cell. The prisoner appeared calmer, her hands resting loosely on her lap while she waited for him to absorb what she had said.

  In a lower key she resumed. ‘Perhaps you can understand what it does to a woman to be told such a thing. The last vestiges of those girlish dreams of mine vanished in a second. My husband was a stranger to me. He has been ever since. You are not blind, Simon. You must have seen for yourself.’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered in a whisper. ‘I could not fail to notice.’

  ‘You had seen me go wilfully into marriage with Howard. You knew it was madness, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘You foresaw the frustrations I would visit on myself. Tell me I detected from you the suggestion that I should think again. I mean those times you glanced at me in your special way or brushed your hand against mine.’

  The young man flushed with embarrassment.

  ‘I like to think you were trying to tell me in your own way about your secret sentiments. Simon, I would not speak like this if I could avoid it. Perhaps I am deceiving myself again, but I thought—I like to believe—’

  He responded. ‘You are right. If I could have spoken to you … I knew it would make no difference.’

  ‘Yes.’ A tear slid from her eye. She let it move slowly down her cheek.

  They said nothing for what seemed a long interval.

  The prisoner ended it. ‘Simon, if there were a chance to begin again, as we were in the Hampstead days, before I married Howard, do you think it possible that you and I—knowing all you did about the kind of person I am—’

  ‘I can think of nothing I would rather wish for,’ he gently interposed.

  She smiled, and sniffed to keep back tears, bowing her head.

  ‘It is better to forget such thoughts,’ he said.

  Her eyes came up slowly to meet his and fix them with a look of extraordinary intensity. ‘There is a way.’

  He appeared not to understand.

  She said, ‘If they find Howard, they will arrest him.’

  ‘They would be obliged to pardon you before any magistrate would issue a warrant,’ he said.

  ‘Howard will be brought to trial, as I was, unless he can convince them he is innocent and they drop the charge.’

  Allingham still wore a frown. ‘That is true, but—’

  She hesitated, watching him. ‘If it … happened … that he was unable to convince them—’

  ‘Miriam, what are you saying?’

  ‘That I should be free in the real meaning of the word.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not that way.’ His hand
went to the nape of his neck and clutched it. ‘No, I could never bring myself—’

  ‘Simon, he is guilty. Judith died in agony. Whatever view the law might take of the present case … ’

  Articulating each word as if it caused pain, he said, ‘I could not do that to Howard.’

  ‘Not for my sake?’ she asked, her voice rising challengingly.

  ‘He is your husband.’

  ‘In name only.’ She closed her eyes and said, ‘Simon, you are a man!’

  He sat staring at her.

  Bell, no less than he, was stunned. Emotional scenes were usual in the condemned cell. Until today, the prisoner had been unexampled in her self-control. Cold-blooded, she had seemed. Whatever was going on between these two—and it was not easy to divine—the meaning of what the prisoner had just said could not be plainer. Or bolder.

  ‘Simon,’ she said, ‘I would not ask you to say anything that was not true. Only to keep silent if the moment comes.’ She looked steadily into his eyes. ‘Will you do that for me?’

  In a dazed voice he answered, ‘I do not know that I have your strength, Miriam.’

  ‘You are a man!’ she said again. ‘For me, you will be strong.’

  He continued to look at her without saying anything.

  ‘Go now,’ she told him gently.

  He nodded.

  The prisoner’s face resumed its look of passivity, as if nothing more needed to be said.

  Bell felt for the keys on her belt.

  The governor cleared his throat. ‘You are, em, keeping well?’

  ‘Fit for work, sir,’ James Berry answered.

  ‘Very good. Let me see. When was it we last—’

  ‘April, sir. Mason, the Stepney murderer.’

  ‘So it was,’ confirmed the governor with a sigh. Small talk with the hangman was a cheerless business. ‘Is, em, everything in order for Monday?’

  Berry confirmed that it was. ‘I spent an hour in the execution shed this morning. Everything’s greased, sir. The traps drop nice and clean.’

  The governor nodded indulgently. Berry liked it to be known that he had checked the mechanism of the gallows. An unhappy episode in Exeter Gaol three years before, when the trap-doors had three times failed to operate, had left him sensitive to criticism. ‘You have the prisoner’s weight and height from the records, I am sure. Has there been an opportunity … ?’

  ‘Watched her at exercise this morning, sir. I see no problem. I take it the wardresses will see that the hair is pinned up. No reason to cut it.’

  ‘That will be attended to.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. And I assume I may visit the prisoner on Sunday evening, according to custom?’

  ‘If you wish. The husband will be asked to take his leave of her by seven. I suggest you choose a moment half an hour after that. There are other visitors to be fitted in—the clerk of St Sepulchre’s, the chaplain and myself, but you will not take long, I imagine.’

  ‘Fifteen minutes at most, sir. I like to give the prisoner some verses of a religious character to read, as you may recollect. My sister, sit and think, while yet on earth some hours are left to thee; kneel to thy God, who does not from thee shrink—’

  ‘Yes, yes. Admirable sentiments,’ said the governor. ‘You were good enough to provide me with a copy on a previous occasion. Berry, I think I should explain that this woman has already fully and freely confessed her guilt. It will not be necessary, or indeed appropriate, for you to inquire whether she wishes to make any statement about her crime. That is not to say, of course, that your exhortations to intransigent prisoners on previous occasions are unappreciated.’

  ‘Only two in my experience have gone without confessing,’ Berry remarked with a trace of pride.

  ‘Quite. And concerning the arrangements for Monday … ?’

  ‘I should like breakfast at half past six, sir. My usual, if it can be arranged. I shall be in the shed until I hear the bell begin to toll at a quarter to eight. Then I shall walk up the passage and wait with the other parties who will form the procession. Punctually at three minutes to the hour I shall enter the cell and pinion the prisoner’s arms. From what I am told she is unlikely to resist.’

  ‘There will be seven male warders in attendance in case of difficulties,’ said the governor. ‘Two females will escort the prisoner in the procession, but at the scaffold steps they will step aside and allow two men to support her while you fasten the cap and the leg-strap.’

  Berry gave a nod. ‘May I inquire who else will be present, sir?’

  ‘The chaplain, of course, the Under Sheriff and his two wandbearers, the surgeon and his assistant and two gentlemen from the press, making seventeen persons in all, apart from ourselves and the prisoner.’

  ‘Very good, sir. Just as long as they step out, I’ll have the job done as St Sepulchre’s strikes the hour.’

  A four-wheeler drawn by a large grey threaded through the Strand in the direction of Ludgate Hill, its destination Newgate Prison. Chief Inspector Jowett, seated opposite Sergeant Cribb inside, had the strained look of a man who had slept fitfully, if at all. The evening before, he had seen the Commissioner to request an interview with Mrs Cromer in the condemned cell. Cribb had waited in the corridor outside, in case he was called in. He was not. After forty minutes Jowett had emerged looking ashen. His lips had been moving as if he was talking to himself. Ignoring Cribb, he had returned to his office and closed the door. Twenty minutes later a clerk had come out of Jowett’s office and told Cribb that the meeting in Newgate would take place next morning. Cribb was to report to the Yard at half past nine.

  This morning Jowett was no more communicative. He had signalled Cribb’s arrival with no more than a grunt, then picked up his hat and walking-stick and headed for the street. It was Cribb who had told the cabman where to take them.

  Cribb did not need telling what had passed between Jowett and the Commissioner. The suggestion that Howard Cromer could be the real murderer of Josiah Perceval would not have been well received. Jowett had gone to the Commissioner convinced that Cromer should be arrested. Far from praising Jowett’s detective work, Sir Charles Warren must have erupted. That peppery old campaigner must have seen the consequences bearing down like the Dervishes in full cry: the need to inform the Home Office that the woman was innocent; the law made a laughing-stock; the Queen obliged to sign a Royal Pardon with unseemly haste; questions in the House; cries of police ineptitude; calls for a resignation.

  But he could not prevent them now from talking to Miriam Cromer. She alone could confirm what had really happened.

  Cribb had got what he wanted.

  Privately still some way short of an explanation of the murder, he had seen the necessity of convincing Jowett that Howard Cromer’s disappearance was as good as an admission of guilt. A hesitant Jowett would not have survived two minutes with Warren.

  From the start, Cribb had known he would need to talk to Miriam Cromer himself. He needed to form an opinion of his own. Other people’s assessments had supplied only contradictions. ‘If you ask me what sets her apart from other women, it’s an absence of pity.’ ‘She, poor innocent, suffered alone.’ ‘She is one of those enviable females who can cast a spell over men. Not one of you is capable of seeing her as she really is.’ He had not been helped by them. They presented postures, like the photographs round the sitting room at Park Lodge.

  Understand the woman, see her, hear her, and he would get to the truth. He would discover why she had confessed.

  His thoughts returned to the starting-point of this inquiry: the picture showing Howard Cromer at Brighton wearing the key to the poison cabinet on his chain. Its purpose was plain: to raise a serious doubt about the confession. The question nobody had asked was who had sent it. Who of the people connected with the case could have realised the significance of the picture? Miriam herself? She was in prison, and could not have sent it. Howard? If he had sent it, he was deliberately implicating himself in the murder. Allingham? What m
otive could their solicitor and confidant have had for sending it?

  Howard Cromer or Simon Allingham?

  If Cromer had sent it in a fit of conscience, why had he waited till now to flee from justice?

  His thoughts were interrupted by Jowett, who had recovered the power of speech. ‘Where are we?’

  Cribb looked out. ‘The Old Bailey is coming up, sir.’

  ‘Sergeant, I have decided to entrust the interrogation of Mrs Cromer to you. Your acquaintance with the more trivial details of the case is necessarily fresher than mine. I shall be present and you may defer to me on matters of procedure, but I fancy this will resolve itself quite easily now that we know the truth.’

  ‘As you say, sir.’

  The two detectives and the governor of Newgate walked stiffly through a low-roofed passage, the antipathy between them unconcealed.

  ‘I may say that this is unprecedented in my experience,’ Jowett remarked. ‘I have never spoken to a prisoner under sentence of death. Tell me, Governor, what is her state of mind? How is she bearing up?’

  ‘No better for this infliction, I assure you,’ the governor answered, signalling to a turnkey to unlock the oak door to the condemned wing. ‘My estimation when I saw her yesterday was that she was beginning to reconcile herself to her sentence. There was reason to hope she would face the end with dignity. God knows how this will leave her.’

  ‘Permit me to assure you that we have no intention of inflicting distress,’ said Jowett in a shocked tone. ‘Our purpose is to establish the truth. We should not be here if it were not in question. I venture to suggest that you would not wish to be a party to the execution of an innocent woman.’