The Breadmakers Saga

by Margaret Thomson-Davis

  ‘Well, it’s all over now so for God’s sake stop going on about it.’

  ‘All over? All over? What about the trial? And have you looked at that street down there? It’s packed with sightseers.’

  ‘It’s nothing of the kind. There’s a policeman moving everybody on.’

  ‘Oh, yes, and we know where all the folk keep moving to. Into MacNair’s shop, that’s where they go. You’re doing all right. You don’t care.’

  Melvin grabbed his pipe and tobacco pouch from the mantelpiece.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re blethering about. I don’t own the shop. I just manage the bakery for my father. I just get a wage like everybody else. Go and gripe to the old man if you’ve anything to say about how much money’s coming in.’

  ‘And that dreadful man - her husband - he’s still there!’

  ‘He didn’t kill the old woman. Sarah did.’

  ‘But he’s insisting that it was him who took the money, borrowed it, he says, calm as you please. If I know anything about men, it’s been all his fault!’

  ‘Calm? Baldy? He’s nearly demented. Do you not know anything about murders?’

  ‘What a stupid question!’ Hannah rolled her eyes. ‘As if I’d want to know anything about such things.’

  ‘Well, you ought to know that it’s quite common to have people confessing to crimes when somebody’s already been arrested. It happens all the time. In Baldy’s case, he’s obviously putting up a desperate fight to save his wife. No wonder the police won’t believe him. It’s pathetic.’ He jerked his head towards Catriona who was still sitting in silence, eyes riveted on motionless hands, hypnotized. ‘She told you what Sarah said to the police when they questioned her - “Ah stole Lil’s money. Ah’m a thief.” She kept repeating it over and over again so it’s an open and shut case. It doesn’t matter what Baldy does now. They’ll hang her!’

  For the first time Catriona looked up.

  ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘No,’ Hannah agreed. ‘You shouldn’t talk about these things. You’ll only upset her. Don’t worry, child. The poor woman’s mad. They’ll lock her away in an asylum. Something has to be done to protect decent, law-abiding folk from people like that, but there’s no need to talk about it.’

  ‘What’s the good of acting like ostriches? Murder with theft,’ Melvin insisted. ‘They’ll hang her. And quite right too. Murderers are nothing but a menace. Whether we like it or not we’ve got to get rid of them. They’re no use.’

  ‘Sarah’s no use?’ Catriona echoed. ‘Is that all there is to say about her?’

  ‘Aw, shut up! There’s been far too much emotional guff about the bloody murderer. Its always the same. What about the victim? Nobody ever bothers about the victim!’

  ‘I saw her lying there. I’ll never forget her as long as I live. But what good is killing Sarah going to do? It won’t bring Lil Fowler back.’

  ‘Well? Tell her!’ Melvin cocked a head in Hannah’s direction.

  ‘Tell her what?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth! By rights she should get the same as she gave. Somebody should stab a knife into her throat!’

  ‘Be quiet!’ Catriona rose, shaking so much that the table rattled under her hands. ‘Fergus, go through to the bedroom, please.’

  ‘What are you picking on him for?’ Melvin gaped with astonishment. ‘What has he done?’

  ‘He’s a child. He shouldn’t be listening to all this. He’ll be having nightmares. Fergus, go through to the bedroom I said!’

  ‘Stay where you are!’ Melvin’s voice coarsened. ‘I give the orders in my house.’

  Hannah gave a high-pitched sarcastic laugh. ‘Would you listen to the conceit of the man. Well?’ Her eyes prodded Catriona to speak again. ‘Are you going to let him away with it, child?’

  ‘Mummy, please!’ She was sweating now, the tablecloth under her hands wet and sticky. She was shaking so much she was terrified that she was about to take a stroke. ‘I don’t need you to … to force words into my mouth, and I’m not a child.’

  ‘You don’t need me? That’s what that evil man has been putting into your head, is it?’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Melvin groaned.

  Hannah rose up. ‘Look at him. Listen to him. If you don’t realize what a coarse, selfish, vain brute he is, then you’re a fool and I pity you!’

  ‘But, Mummy!’

  Melvin levelled his pipe at her. ‘Will you stop that, you stupid, stuttering ninny! You’re bumping my good table and making scrape marks on the linoleum.’

  ‘Listen to him!’ Hannah jerked on her gloves and snatched up her handbag in readiness to leave. ‘Never in all the years we’ve been married has your daddy talked to me like that. I’m sorry for you, Catriona. You’re not fit to cope with that man. The moment you married him you began making a stick to break your own back. He’ll be the death of you yet that man. As God’s my maker, I swear it. That man doesn’t care about you or anybody else. All that man cares about is himself.’

  Melvin aimed his pipe at Hannah. ‘Get out of my house!’

  ‘I’m going.’ Hannah glanced haughtily round at him. ‘But only because I’m good and ready to go.’

  ‘And don’t come back!’

  ‘I’ll come back as often as my daughter needs me. She’ll need me, all right. The poor child obviously doesn’t realize what she’s got herself into.’

  ‘I’ll see you to the door, Mummy.’

  ‘Stay where you are!’ Melvin bellowed. ‘You belong to me now, and you’ll do as I tell you.’

  Hannah let out another tinkle of sarcastic laughter.

  ‘For goodness’ sake! And here was me thinking your kind of Scotsman was dying out! You’re needing to be taught a few lessons, my lad. You’re needing to be brought up to date.’

  Despite her mother’s merry tone, it was obvious that underneath the haughty manner she was flustered. Her heart was visibly palpitating, and her ruddy cheeks looked hot. Catriona couldn’t help admiring the older woman’s courage and silently reviled herself for her own weakness, as she remained leaning on the table and allowed her to walk alone into the hall and away from the house.

  She longed to run after her and beg forgiveness.

  Melvin settled back to fill his pipe.

  ‘Thank God that’s got rid of her!’

  Catriona’s rage rushed up and out like boiling lava. ‘Don’t you dare speak about my mother like that. Especially in front of Fergus. And don’t raise your voice to me and order me about. Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare!’

  ‘You know,’ calmly Melvin lit a match, held it to his pipe and puffed a few times, ‘you look positively ugly.’

  Her eyes immediately lowered. She sat down, her hands clasped in her lap.

  ‘You’re not much of a housewife, either, are you? My Betty used to have every floor in this house and every stick of furniture shining like a new pin. A good skin of polish protects things. Didn’t you know that? Polish protects and takes care of things and makes them last. You’ve got to use some elbow grease of course. You’ve got to put on a good skin.’

  ‘And, Daddy!’ Fergus’s high-pitched childish voice interrupted. ‘My porridge was cold this morning.’

  Melvin jerked forward in his chair, pipe forgotten.

  ‘Do you hear that? His porridge was cold. What do you mean by it? What excuse have you got?’

  Catriona looked up.

  ‘An old woman has been murdered. A young woman, a neighbour of ours, is in danger of being hanged. And you ask me what excuse I have for letting Fergus’s porridge get cold?’

  ‘Aw, shut up! What happens to the Fowlers is their business. Your business is to attend to this house and me and my son.’

  Catriona lowered her eyes and said no more, but she had learned something important.

  She now knew how Sarah Fowler must have felt and how easy it would be for anyone to feel like committing murder.

  Jimmy made his
way slowly up the stairs. His face showed signs of strain. Thoughts of Mrs Fowler, of Sarah and of Baldy who was now practically living night and day in the bakehouse and talking desperately and incessantly about his wife and the trial - worrying thoughts were driving him to distraction. During the day while he worked, and tossing and turning and sweating in bed during the night, vivid three-dimensional pictures in realistic colour whirred and whirled through his mind, horrifying beyond all horror.

  Fear for Sarah’s fate jostled with anger and the intensity of his suffering for neighbour and friend. A thousand times in his imagination he was with her in Duke Street prison, a thousand times he made the imaginary walk with her to the scaffold.

  He had known Sarah, Mrs Fowler and Baldy all his life.

  He had not the slightest doubt that Sarah must have been strained beyond all human endurance. He had told the police so in no uncertain terms. The most terrible thing of all was that so many people did not know Sarah, or Baldy, or Mrs Fowler.

  To strangers this appeared only as a brutal crime motivated by greed and theft, and perpetrated on a helpless old woman. A young blonde from a tough area of Glasgow had robbed a helpless old lady and when the old lady had pleaded for the return of her money the young peroxide blonde had calmly lifted a kitchen knife and stabbed her mother-in-law to death.

  Letters in the papers, signed with pseudonyms like ‘Off With Their Heads’ and ‘Vigilante’ and ‘Shocked’, argued back and forward about capital punishment. The hate, the lust for revenge, the violence shown in some of the letters nauseated and depressed him beyond words. They talked of hanging being a deterrent. He couldn’t understand why. There never had been any evidence to show that it deterred. It certainly had not deterred Sarah.

  How many other Sarahs had there been, he wondered? How many Sarahs yet to come?

  He stopped on the first landing, his chest tight, his breath catching in his throat.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ Melvin’s wife was standing in her doorway, a polishing cloth and a tin of polish in her hand. She smiled a ghost of a smile at him, her eyes avoiding his. ‘I’m Catriona. You’re Jimmy Gordon, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ He wiped his floury hands on his apron before offering her one. ‘I only wish I was meeting you in happier circumstances. It’s … It’s …’ He shook his head, words failing him.

  ‘I know,’ Catriona agreed. ‘I can’t sleep at night just thinking about it. That poor old woman. And poor Sarah …’

  He was snatched back to the immediate present by the touch of her hand. He found himself staring in silence at the gentle face, his fingers tightening round her fingers, surprised by the familiarity of the warm flesh.

  ‘I listen to you playing the piano -’ she broke the silence with a small tremulous voice. ‘It’s lovely.’

  Their hands slid apart and Jimmy became aware of an aloneness he had never noticed before.

  ‘Do you mean that?’

  She nodded. ‘Melvin has a piano in the front room. It used to belong to Betty. Nobody plays it now, though. I think it’s badly out of tune.’

  ‘I’ll come down and try it sometime, if you like. See what I can do.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She blushed. ‘You’ll be welcome any time.’

  ‘I love music,’ he confided. ‘At one time I had very grand ideas. Oh, very grand ideas. I was going to be a concert pianist. A concert pianist, no less.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  He hesitated, not wanting to talk of his illness in case it would decrease his manliness in her eyes, unable to explain about keeping a roof over his mother’s head in case that sounded self-pitying or conceited.

  ‘I wasn’t good enough.’

  ‘I don’t believe it …’ Quickly she looked up, her sincerity unmistakable. ‘You’re wonderfully talented!’ Her blush deepened and she turned her attention to polishing her front door again.

  ‘You’re very kind.’ He smiled, then continued his way upstairs, more intensely disturbed than ever.

  Chapter 20

  Duke Street Prison, official address 71 Duke Street, was a dark, long, antediluvian building with row upon row of high-up, heavily barred slits, and was bounded by a dismal wall. The jutting front gable of the building had a clock that the tram-traveller could see over the wall. The clock had never been known to go.

  The prison used to be a house of correction for women ‘where they may be whipped daily’. It had also seen many children punished in the past. In one year alone, there had been imprisoned in Duke Street five children under ten years of age, fifteen between the ages of ten and eleven, seventy-six from twelve years to thirteen years, and a hundred and fifty-nine prisoners in the fourteen to fifteen years-of-age class.

  This was where Oscar Slater had frantically protested his innocence.

  Along the west wall were tablets that marked the graves of hanged murderers. The initials of each murderer and the year of the hanging were inscribed on the tablets.

  Unlike in America, the bodies of prisoners were not handed over to relatives. The reason stated in the Royal Commission report was: ‘hanging leaves the body with the neck elongated’. The Home Office had stated that ‘as now carried out, execution by hanging can be regarded as speedy and certain’. The Home Office was referring to a change in technique, a drop of variable length and a sliding ring which was supposed to hold the knot of the noose under the left jaw. This, they hoped, would prevent the difficulties of the past when the agony of suffocation without loss of consciousness could last up to twenty minutes, not to mention innumerable forms of mutilation: joints torn off by hitting the edge of the trap, heads partly or entirely torn off, and people having to be hanged twice and even three times in succession.

  This innovation referred only to England.

  When hangman Pierrepoint was questioned about the Scottish methods of hanging, he admitted: ‘It is very very old, antediluvian. It is time it was altered in Scotland.’

  These facts, gleaned from innumerable books, papers and authorities on the subject, milled round in Jimmy’s mind as he accompanied Baldy on one of his visits to Sarah in Duke Street prison.

  All the time that Baldy was talking loudly and aggressively about how Sarah was going to be all right and how he’d batter anybody to pulp with his bare hands if they even looked at her in the wrong way, Jimmy was silent, his thoughts completely swamping him.

  Only the other day when he’d gone into town for his mother’s prescription - she had become so worried and upset about Sarah, she couldn’t sleep without taking tablets - he had overheard a snatch of conversation in the chemist’s between a very respectable-looking man and woman. They had been voicing the opinion that they hoped the Fowler woman would not be hanged, although no doubt she deserved it - but, of course, they decided eventually, ‘hanging is quick and clean - they don’t feel anything - they never know anything about it!’

  He had turned on them, eyes blazing, heart pounding like a sledgehammer in his chest, and told them exactly what hanging meant, described it to them in accurate detail, sparing them nothing.

  They had been affronted and the man snorted indignantly. ‘How dare you speak like that in front of a lady, you young horror! Don’t you know you shouldn’t talk about these things? It’s not decent!’

  ‘You made the statement,’ Jimmy protested. ‘You said that hanging was quick and clean and the prisoner doesn’t feel anything or doesn’t know anything about it. I’ve only told you the facts.’

  ‘We don’t want to stand here listening to horror stories from you,’ the woman raised her voice, at the same time tugging her companion’s sleeve, desperate for escape. ‘I don’t know what this country’s coming to when respectable people can’t come into a chemist’s shop without being pestered.’

  ‘I’ve only given you the facts,’ Jimmy insisted.

  But the couple had stamped away from the shop in a flurry of fury. No doubt they would soon calm down over a glass or two of brandy or a nice cup of tea.
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  The worst of it was that while people like that were tucked safely away in their own unthinking and unimaginative little worlds, others were being allowed to act and, as a result, people were suffering and had suffered and would continue to suffer in a million different ways; in poverty and in ignorance and in wars, and as a result of wars, on every side, all over the world.

  As soon as they entered the prison, even Baldy fell quiet. The place was incredibly gloomy and oppressive. Inside this ancient building the Sarah they knew waited under sentence of death.

  A petition for reprieve had been forwarded to the Secretary of State for Scotland. The petition asked that the death sentence be commuted to penal servitude and referred to evidence of mental aberration at the time she committed the crime. Reference was also made to the jury’s unanimous recommendation to mercy.

  Baldy left the silent white-faced Jimmy in the gatehouse and, barrel chest stuck out, big shoulders back, gorilla-hands clenched in pockets, he strode after the prison officer who led him across the prison yard and into the main building to where he could speak to his wife.

  Sarah was looking prettier than she had done for years.

  Her blonde hair was brushed back and shining and she was wearing a green dress and a pink woollen cardigan.

  Baldy’s muscle-hard face screwed into a wink.

  ‘You’re looking great, hen. You’re going to be all right, eh?’

  Her face crinkled.

  ‘Ah’m all right as long as ah’ve got you, sure ah am, Baldy.’

  ‘By God you are, hen. I won’t let anybody lay a finger on you. You’re my wife. Are they treatin’ you all right, eh?’

  ‘Och, aye. Everyone in here’s nicer than the other. They’re all that kind to me. Fancy, the polis and all the high-heed yins. They’re all that kind. Ye’ve no idea! Even the holy yin comes to chat with me. And the food’s just lovely too!’

  ‘You’re all right then, hen?’

  ‘Och, aye, don’t you be worryin’ yourself so much about me. You’re an awful man, so you are.’

  There was a pause while she gazed at him and smiled at him.