Gallows Court

by Martin Edwards

  She pouted. ‘You’re getting bored with me.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said hastily. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You are!’

  The hint of neediness troubled him. Was this why her affair with the married man had fallen apart? He dreaded the thought of upsetting her.

  ‘It’s just that I’ve got an early start tomorrow. I’m off to Southend. Mary-Jane’s married sister lives there. She may be able to give me a lead.’

  ‘Lucky you – a trip to the seaside!’

  ‘In the freezing cold. I’ll take my warmest scarf.’

  ‘I was only joking.’ Her tone softened, as if she regret­ted her outburst. ‘Your job can’t be easy. Interrogating people during the darkest days of their lives. When Ollie McAlinden was lodging here, I asked him how he could bear it.’

  Jacob bit his tongue. He couldn’t imagine his ambitious colleague at the Clarion ever suffering from prickles of conscience. And why should he? A journalist’s job was to ferret out the truth.

  ‘I bet it keeps you awake at night, worrying that you might hurt them.’

  He pecked her on the cheek, reflecting that his work had never cost him a moment’s sleep. Yet after an hour in bed, he was still wide awake, restless thoughts making his head ache. Once or twice lately, he’d drifted off with memories of Nefertiti, the Nubian Queen of Magic and Mystery, floating through his brain. Tonight, the image of a different woman filled his mind. Her cold eyes stared at him through the fog, while he recalled Tom Betts’ hoarse whisper.

  Rachel Savernake.

  *

  Trueman, clad in chauffeur’s cap and a greatcoat, was waiting for Rachel when she slipped out of the gallery. He’d parked the Phantom in a side street five minutes away. He was carrying an umbrella, but didn’t unfurl it despite the drizzle. They walked side by side, Rachel humming ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. The moon was skulking behind a cloud. As they turned the final corner, Rachel slowed almost to a standstill, straining her eyes in the darkness.

  The street was narrow and poorly lit. One side housed a row of small, shuttered shops, the other a disused box factory. There was nobody in sight, just a mangy cat prowling in search of scraps. The Phantom was fifty yards away.

  Ahead of them, barely visible in the gloom, a squat shape emerged from the shadows. A stocky man in cap and muf­fler, clutching something that might be a weapon. Trueman lengthened his stride, but in a whirl of movement, the man lunged forward, and Trueman seemed to lose his balance, as he struggled to ward off the attack.

  Behind Rachel, someone stepped out of the warehouse doorway, and clamped an arm around her shoulder. The man was taller than her, and his grip was powerful. She felt his breath, a smell of stale beer and onions, warm and sticky against her skin. His knee pressed on her spine. His other hand brought a knife up against her neck. The blade pricked her skin.

  ‘Lie down!’ the other man growled. He and Trueman crouched in front of each other on the cobbles, each waiting to pounce. The man brandished a jagged piece of broken pipe. ‘Else we slit her throat.’

  Rachel squealed. ‘Help! I am just a poor, defenceless woman!’

  A sudden flick of the knife sliced through her necklace of pearls. Trueman uttered a low, agonised groan.

  ‘Not really so poor, are you?’ her assailant hissed. ‘I bet them pearls are real.’

  As he spoke, Trueman thrust forward with his umbrella. A long steel point ripped through the squat man’s midriff, as Rachel seized her attacker’s wrist, jerking it in a smooth, violent movement. She heard a crack of snapping bone, and the knife fell from his hand.

  Yelping in pain, he slipped on the rain-slicked cobbles, and sank to his knees. She swung her leg, and raked a pointed heel across his face. He screamed and clutched at his damaged eyes as Trueman seized his companion’s neck in a chokehold, and began to bang the man’s head against the cobbles. Once, twice, three times.

  Taking a gun from her coat pocket, Rachel pointed it at the man who had assaulted her. Blood streamed from the gash on his face. He uttered a gurgle of self-pity and pain.

  ‘Not so defenceless, either,’ she said.

  Juliet Brentano’s Journal

  31 January 1919

  I keep my door locked. Supposedly, I am free to come and go as I please, but really I’m trapped. Trapped forever, whether or not the weather worsens, and the island is cut off from the mainland for days on end. Bolts and chains may not shackle me, but I’m still a prisoner, on my own at the top of this rambling old house. Like a Princess in the Tower.

  Except that I am not a princess.

  Why lock myself in? It’s hard to explain, even to myself. The Judge could not climb the winding flight of eighty-five steep steps that leads to my door. The exertion would kill him.

  Rachel never comes here. She prefers to give me a wide berth, terrified that I might infect her. Mother taught me long ago that with a single cough, I could rid myself of her hateful presence. From the moment we arrived on Gaunt, she made her hostility towards me plain. Yet it took time for me to realise how cruel she is.

  Whenever servants annoyed her, she took revenge by poisoning the Judge’s mind against them. Invariably, they were dismissed without a character. The last governess the Judge employed, a fat spinster called Miss Donachie, was devoted to a silly Pekinese almost as plump as herself. Six months ago the dog disappeared. Twenty-four hours earlier, Miss Donachie had finally lost patience, and chastised Rachel in my hearing for dumb insolence. When she realised her pet had vanished, the governess was beside herself.

  Rachel couldn’t contain her glee. Eventually, she announced she’d found the dog’s collar, while clambering over an outcrop of rocks on the north shore. She pointed out a smear of blood on it. But the poor creature was never found.

  Nobody doubted who was responsible. Everyone knew that, if Rachel was in a temper, someone or something must suffer. Miss Donachie departed at the next low tide, and three maids and the cook followed her across the causeway, never to return.

  Rachel was jubilant. ‘See?’ she hissed at me. ‘That’s how you kill two birds with one stone.’

  Of course, the Judge didn’t punish her. He blamed the servants, and said they were envious of his beloved daughter. In an outpouring of senseless rage, he dismissed those who remained. Subsequently, Henrietta came to work here. She’s a woman of thirty, pleasant in appearance, but unmarried. She was engaged to a sheep farmer who got himself blown to bits at Ypres, and since then she’s scraped a living to care for two ailing parents. Their medical bills are ruinous, and she’s desperate for money. The Judge has to pay through the nose to bring anyone in. Even so, Henrietta says she wouldn’t stick it but for me and my mother.

  A man called Cliff agreed to help with labouring jobs around the Hall. He was invalided out of the army with shell shock, and needs to earn enough to look after himself, his young sister, and their widowed mother. Finally, Harold Brown turned up, claiming to have worked in a great house as a butler. A likely story. Henrietta caught him eyeing the Judge’s gold candlesticks.

  Mother liked Henrietta. She’d never found anyone to confide in before. Apart from me, and I’m sure she sheltered me from a great deal. She took care to avoid talking about the Judge or his daughter, but one day, I overhead her talking to Henrietta.

  ‘If you ask me,’ she said, ‘Rachel Savernake is as mad as the old brute who fathered her.’

  8

  ‘My only regret is that the wicked creature took the coward’s way out.’ Agnes Dyson’s eyes glistened as she turned away from Jacob to stare at the waves leaping beyond the promenade. Were the blustery conditions making her eyes water, or was she fighting back tears? ‘I’d gladly have hanged him myself, after what he did to my poor sister. May he rot in hell!’

  She twisted her woollen gloves in her bare hands, as if rehearsing how to make the punishment fit the crime. Jacob couldn’t find it in his heart to blame her, for all his nagging doubts about judicial execution. Cases like Edith Thompson�
��s troubled him. Had she really deserved to have her neck broken because her young lover had murdered her husband?

  ‘It must be hard for you.’ He imagined himself as a priest with a distressed parishioner. ‘I gather you and Mary-Jane were very close.’

  ‘We were sisters.’ Agnes’ tone softened. ‘There were eleven years between us – we had a brother, but he died in infancy, poor lamb – but we never lost touch, even when our paths wound in different directions. She was a good-hearted woman, was Mary-Jane. Never a bad word to say for anyone. Lovely to look at, too, quite beautiful in her younger days. Always respectable, mark my words. Nobody ever got up to any funny business with her, whatever tittle-tattle you hear from people with minds like sewers.’

  After a stiff wind had blown him from the station to her boarding house, he’d agreed to Agnes’ proposal of a walk while the rain held off. Out of season, Bella Vista was quiet, and he guessed she didn’t want the girl clearing up the breakfast things to eavesdrop.

  Mary-Jane Hayes had been identified from the personal possessions bagged up and left a few feet from her decapitated corpse. Her purse was full of money; the mo­tive for the murder had not been theft. The newspapers had skirted around the false rumours that Mary-Jane was a prostitute, but the killer’s butchery of the corpse invited comparisons to the Whitechapel murders, as did the police’s inability to turn up any clues to the crime. The Great British Public could be relied upon to put two and two together and make five, assuming the worst of the victim as well as of her nemesis.

  ‘So I gather.’ He gave an embarrassed cough. ‘To be candid with you, Mrs Dyson, my own newspaper wasn’t blameless. Our chief crime correspondent is in hospital, and the story was covered by other people who aren’t… well, all I can say is thank goodness for the stroke of luck which meant I could break the story of Pardoe’s confession and suicide.’

  ‘You’re young,’ she said. ‘How do I know I can trust you? After what happened to Mary-Jane, I’ve been pestered by reporters from dawn till dusk. They all promise to tell the truth, and none of them do. They only want a good story.’

  ‘I happen to believe that the truth is a good story.’ The phrase sprang to his lips from nowhere, and pleased him. ‘You must decide whether you can trust me.’

  They trudged on in silence. Agnes Dyson was sturdily built, with thick greying hair which flew about in the wind. Large brown eyes and high cheekbones were her most attractive physical features, and judging by photographs he’d seen of her late sister, they ran in the family. Mary-Jane had been the beauty, but for all the ferocity of her rhetoric, Agnes Dyson was hardly the forbidding seaside landlady of caricature. But the brutality of murder brought out the worst in everyone, not just journalists.

  ‘Shall we walk onto the pier?’ he suggested. ‘We needn’t go right to the end. I hear it’s the longest in the country.’

  ‘In the world, never mind the blessed country,’ she assured him. ‘Last year, they made it even longer, and Prince George came for the official opening. The electric railway is being extended, too, but I’d rather exercise my legs. Twenty-five years of cooking for other folk doesn’t do your figure any good at all.’

  ‘Good heavens, Mrs Dyson, don’t be so modest!’ he said with cheerful gallantry.

  She laughed, and he rejoiced inwardly. ‘It’s as well you’ve wrapped up warm. The sea breezes are sharp at this time of year.’

  ‘My parents used to take me to Bridlington in all weathers. Bracing, they call it, when the wind blows in, a euphemism for freezing cold. The climate here is positively tropical compared to East Yorkshire.’

  She proceeded to explain to him exactly why Southend-on-Sea was the finest resort in Britain. Quite apart from its never-ending pier, trippers could pick and choose between such attractions as the Hippodrome, the Victoria Arcade, and the Wall of Death at the Kursaal Amusement Park. As if all that were not enough, a new boating lake on the front and an art gallery were both in prospect.

  ‘I’ve seen the advertising posters at Tube stations,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to come back when it’s warmer. We can’t change what happened to your sister, more’s the pity, but I’d like to make sure that we print the truth, not distorted rubbish.’

  She sniffed noisily, and turned her head away from him. ‘If you can pull that off, Mr Flint, I’d be eternally grateful.’

  ‘Please, call me Jacob.’

  ‘You remind me of my own son. He’s a rating in the Royal Navy. Always loved boats and sailing, ever since he was little. Poor Mary-Jane never knew the joy of motherhood. Or the worry of it, I might add.’

  ‘She never married, did she?’

  ‘A lovely fellow with a baker’s shop in Chalkwell courted her for years, but he had his leg blown off in France. They fitted him up with an artificial replacement, but he was in terrible pain, and shot himself a week after we signed the armistice. My son was already at school when war broke out. She doted on him, but really she always wanted children of her own. The snag was, she was getting on for thirty, and there weren’t many men around. She used to joke about it. “You know what I am? A superfluous woman.”’

  ‘A horrid term. Nobody is superfluous.’

  ‘But some people feel they are surplus to requirements, Jacob. Because she looked so lovely, chaps kept asking her out, but all she said to me was that the spark was lacking. It didn’t help that she was shy. I was always the chatty one in the family. Once she’d lost her Mr Right, she never found anyone to match him. As time passed, she devoted herself to her work. There wasn’t a more dedicated nurse in Essex, I promise you.’

  ‘She moved to London seven years ago?’

  ‘It was time to spread her wings, she said. She saw an advertisement for a job at Great Ormond Street, and applied on the spur of the moment. When they offered her the posi­tion, she leapt at it.’

  ‘You saw less of her after that?’

  ‘Yes. I wrote to her regularly at first, but she was never much of a correspondent, Mary-Jane. She and I were both busy with our lives, and it didn’t…’

  She bent her head, and Jacob put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You imagined you had all the time in the world to see each other in future.’

  Agnes Dyson looked up at him. ‘That’s right,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘When… anyway, no use crying over spilt milk, eh?’

  ‘Why did she leave London?’

  ‘A job was going at an Orphans’ Home on the outskirts of Oxford. Deputy matron, with a view to taking overall charge. The matron was getting on – she’d had the job for thirty years – and wanted to call it a day. It was a big step up, very well paid, but with much more responsi­bility. She sent me a postcard, saying it was the chance of a lifetime.’

  ‘Yet she didn’t stay there long?’

  ‘No, it came as a shock when she dropped me a line to say she’d left.’

  ‘Do you know why she resigned?’

  ‘No, she never explained. I can’t believe there was any unpleasantness. She wasn’t the argumentative sort, wasn’t Mary-Jane. I suppose she found that being in charge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Less time with the children, more time with paperwork. She never had my head for business, and perhaps she couldn’t face the prospect of becoming matron. So she went back to London, and rented a flat in the building where she’d lived before, in Mecklenburgh Square. She was wondering whether to go cap in hand to Great Ormond Street, and ask for her old job back.’

  ‘Did she ever mention Lawrence Pardoe to you?’

  ‘Not once.’ She mustered a mirthless smile. ‘Mary-Jane didn’t confide in me about men. I suppose the age difference…’ A gull squawked overhead.

  ‘I see.’

  Agnes Dyson gazed across the estuary towards the distant shores of Kent. ‘I never knew Mary-Jane play a mean trick in her life. She cared about her patients, and loved the little ones. To think that beast destroyed her so callously makes my blood boil. All I can do now is make sure she’s remembered for the right reasons. W
ill you help me do that, Jacob?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, startling himself with the fervour of his reply. ‘You can depend on me.’

  *

  ‘You risked your lives,’ Mrs Trueman said, pouring coffee from a silver pot. ‘And for what?’

  Rachel yawned. ‘We were never in danger. The ruffians would have come to grief even if they’d taken us by surprise. Those hours of training in ju-jitsu with Trueman were well spent. No wonder the Suffragettes’ Bodyguard proved so formidable.’

  ‘But did you learn anything to make the whole affair worthwhile? Or did you just want to prove yourself in a tussle with a man?’

  ‘Admittedly, they knew precious little.’ Rachel tasted her drink. ‘Even when they were begging for their lives, they told us nothing of interest. Scarcely worth the sacrifice of a fake pearl necklace. A go-between hired them, a publican from Shadwell. He said his principals didn’t want us dead. Just warned off. If I wasn’t on the train back to Cumberland within forty-eight hours, they’d find me again. And next time, they’d throw acid in my face.’

  The housekeeper shuddered. ‘Like poor Martha.’

  ‘They won’t hurt anyone else.’

  ‘Plenty more roughnecks where they came from.’

  ‘Last night proved that I’ve made my mark. Nobody mourned Claude Linacre, but Pardoe meant something. There’s a stench of panic in the air.’

  The telephone rang, a rare enough occurrence in this household for the women to exchange glances. Within moments, Martha appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Inspector Oakes of Scotland Yard,’ she said. ‘He wants to come here this afternoon.’

  *

  The moment he arrived back in Fleet Street, Jacob despatched a telegram to the matron of the Oxford Orphans’ Home, asking if he could meet her the following day. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. His next move was to invade the smoke-filled fortress of the Clarion’s City editor.

  William Plenderleith was a morose sceptic whose exco­riations of capitalism stemmed from a strict Calvinist faith rather than from adherence to the teachings of Marx. Jacob had scant understanding of the arcane mysteries of high finance, but on the rare occasions when he read Plenderleith’s columns, he realised how they suited the Clarion’s readership. Even those who cared nothing for the subtleties of the stock market could thrill to Plenderleith’s thundering denunciations of incompetence and corruption. He was not so much a commentator as a hellfire preacher.