Two for Sorrow

by Nicola Upson

  ‘But in a respectable street like this, you wouldn’t expect to see anything out of the ordinary. That’s what was clever about it.’

  Josephine nodded. ‘And I suppose all there was to see was exactly what you’d expect from a nursing home. Listen—why don’t you leave me here for a bit and do what you need to do? I’d like to walk up and down the street and try to get a feel for what it was like back then.’

  Fallowfield looked doubtful. ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right on your own?’

  ‘Of course I will. As you said—it’s the height of respectability. Come back and fetch me when you’re ready.’

  ‘All right, but I’ll be half an hour at the most.’

  She watched him turn the car round and force his way back into the busy traffic on the High Street, then crossed over to get as close a look at Claymore House as she could manage without drawing attention to herself. The terrace was late Victorian and must have been almost brand new when the Sach family took it. Where had the money come from? she wondered. Was it Amelia’s growing business that had made the move possible, or did the family have other means, either through her husband’s earnings or some sort of private income? She looked long and hard at the house, which was an enviable residence even by today’s standards. Having read widely about the times, she was mindful of the conditions that drove women to kill, but this wasn’t poverty—this was climbing your way up the social scale in a calculated manner, and she was even more convinced that Sach’s guilt was the greater of the two, bloodless as it was. Sach had trained as a nurse and midwife—why was an honest living not enough for her? Josephine thought about all the hard-working young nurses she nodded to each day at the Cowdray Club, and all the dedication she had witnessed in her own life; admittedly, great advances had been made in the status of nurses as professionals over the last thirty years but they were still very poorly rewarded in comparison with other working women—materially, at least. Yet how many of them would countenance putting their training to illicit ends purely for money, taking advantage of vulnerable people who had no choice but to depend on them? She could think of no profession which was easier to abuse, and no line that would be harder to cross.

  Peering through a gap in the terrace, Josephine could just about see to the rear of the houses, and tried to imagine what Sach had thought as she watched her daughter playing in one of those yards. Could she really have believed that she was building a secure future for Lizzie? Or—and this was a terrible thing to think—was her own child merely a smokescreen for her crimes, the perfect alibi in a world where, as Fallowfield said, women bore children but did not kill them? She walked to the other end of the road so as not to appear too ghoulish, then took out her notebook and jotted down her first impressions of the house and neighbourhood, mentally revising the few details that had already been sketched out in the draft she had written the night before. As she was doing so, a man came out from the house opposite and looked at her curiously. ‘Taking an interest in Hertford Road?’ he asked, smiling at her. ‘You must be after the child killers. A journalist, perhaps?’

  ‘No, nothing quite that sensational,’ she said, then added vaguely: ‘I’m just doing a bit of research for a book.’ He looked interested, but was too polite to question her further. ‘I don’t suppose you were here at the time?’ she asked hopefully.

  He shook his head. ‘No, sorry. My wife and I moved in just after the war and I don’t know anyone who’s been here longer. But we’ve all heard about the woman who ran the nursing home and killed babies.’ Josephine didn’t put him right, but she was interested to see how stories were corrupted in the telling: Sach would be mortified to know that, after all her careful work to distance herself from the actual bloodshed, history had her down as the murderer. The man shuddered. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?’ he said, walking on.

  By the time she had finished making notes, her chauffeur was back in place at the end of the street and she walked over to meet him. ‘Have you seen all you need to?’ he called through the window, and Josephine nodded. ‘Then how about a quick trip over to Islington to see Walters’s lodgings? If we go straight there, it’ll still be daylight.’

  ‘Have you honestly got time to take me all the way to Islington? I know how busy you are—Archie said things were frantic at the moment.’

  ‘It’s amazing how long you can wait to talk to a witness, you know, and the traffic in Finchley can be shocking at this time of the day.’ He winked at her. ‘Anyway, what Inspector Penrose doesn’t know can’t hurt him.’

  She got in, and the aroma of bacon rose up from a parcel on the dashboard. ‘It’s way past lunchtime and I thought you might be hungry,’ he said. ‘There’s a good cafe round the corner, but if we stop there we won’t get to Danbury Street before dark.’

  Touched, she unwrapped the greaseproof paper. ‘I said lunch was on me, Bill. You’re doing me enough favours as it is.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure, Miss. Your treat next time.’

  They set out again, driving back the way they had come for a while, then striking off to the left. As the sergeant negotiated a network of smaller streets off the Caledonian Road, Josephine admired the unhesitating way in which he chose his route; not a Londoner by birth, Fallowfield nevertheless belonged to the city in the way that incomers often do, held there by a bond which was all the stronger for its element of choice. It was hard to imagine him as the new boy which he must have been during the time of Sach and Walters. ‘Do you remember much about the case?’ she asked, finishing her sandwich and, as directed, dropping the bag by her feet, where it joined the remnants of a week’s worth of lunches eaten on the move.

  ‘Not really, I’m afraid,’ Fallowfield said. ‘To be honest, you’re so busy during those early years trying to keep on top of the cases you are involved with that there’s precious little time to take an interest in those that don’t really concern you. I’d heard about it, obviously, and there was a lot of talk about it at the Yard because Walters lodged with a couple of coppers, but the trial was all done and dusted by the time I had anything to do with it. Delivering the Billingtons was as close as I got to it.’

  ‘I was astonished when I found out where Walters lived,’ Josephine said. ‘Why on earth would she take a room in a house with two policemen?’

  ‘Well, she wasn’t too bright, by all accounts.’

  ‘She certainly wasn’t well educated if any of her statements are to be trusted, but I’m not so sure about bright. I wonder if that was just a card she played—wanting to be thought more stupid than she really was.’

  ‘Perhaps it was a sort of double bluff, then—the most brazen thing she could think of. Killing children under a copper’s nose is almost too ridiculous to be true.’

  ‘If so, then it backfired.’ He looked questioningly at her. ‘They got suspicious about the babies she brought home with her—although God knows why she took them there at all—and had her followed. She was caught red-handed with a dead child. I wonder if she’d ever have been rumbled if she’d chosen to live somewhere else?’

  ‘What other evidence was there?’

  ‘Well, there was one witness who said she’d seen Walters in a cocoa-house in Whitechapel a day or two before, holding a baby wrapped in a blanket. She was suspicious because the child didn’t move or make any sound at all, but Walters came out with some nonsense about its being under anaesthetic. Then there was another woman—Evans, I think her name was.’ Josephine rummaged in her bag for her notebook and turned back a few pages, holding the words at arm’s length so that she could read them without glasses. ‘No, sorry—Nora Edwards. It seems to me that she hanged them both, really. She’d answered Sach’s advertisement in the newspaper and had gone to the nursing home to have her child. Sach tried to get her to give the baby up, apparently, but she refused because she wanted to keep it. She stayed on at the home, though, and started to work for Sach as a servant. At the trial, she testified that Walters took babies away from Sach’s
premises on a regular basis, and that she was told never to tell the mothers where they went, or with whom.’ She put the notebook back in her bag and thought for a moment. ‘You know, when I read the trial reports, that was the part I really couldn’t understand. Edwards must have known what was going on—I’m even more convinced of that now I’ve seen the sort of premises that Sach used—so why did she stay? How could she do that, knowing that her own child had so nearly met the same fate? At best, she was enabling it to happen by turning a blind eye—at worst, I wonder if she had more to do with it than was ever suggested. Perhaps she turned evidence against Sach and Walters to save her own skin.’

  ‘Possibly, but don’t forget she was an unmarried mother. There won’t have been many options open to her, and it sounds like Sach offered her security—a roof over her head and no questions asked about her circumstances. That must have been like a gift from heaven. Principles are one thing, Miss, but the moral high ground may as well be Timbuktu if you’re lying in the gutter.’ Josephine was quiet, thinking about what he had said. ‘I’m not saying that this girl was in the right,’ he added, ‘and I’m certainly not condoning what Sach and Walters got up to—but let’s not forget that women went to that nursing home for a reason, and I don’t see anybody rushing to make the men who got ’em pregnant take their share of the blame.’

  ‘It’s funny you should say that,’ she agreed. ‘I found it outrageous that the men who gave evidence in court—the fathers, I mean—were all allowed to stay anonymous while the women had their names and descriptions plastered all over the newspapers.’ She looked at Fallowfield, ashamed that a man in his fifties who worked in a notoriously chauvinistic profession had been less judgemental of her own sex than she was. ‘You’re right, of course—there’s more than one way to destroy a life. It’s a pity there aren’t more men about like you, Bill.’

  He smiled. ‘I’m sure it’s easier to be fair-minded when you’re a bachelor and long past the courting age. Look—there’s the Angel. We’re only a couple of minutes away now.’ The traffic was at its height here, where several of the great northern roads converged. They drove slowly past the underground station, then a substantial Lyons Corner House, which looked shiny and familiar in comparison with the shabbiness of the other public buildings, and Josephine was relieved when Fallowfield turned left into the peace of Colebrook Row. A pleasant line of public gardens stretched half the length of the street, separating it from the neighbouring terrace and providing a welcome contrast to the elegant but relentless Georgian housing on either side.

  Danbury Street ran parallel with Colebrook Row and was reached via another string of uniform houses. The buildings here were slightly more modern—early Victorian, Josephine guessed—and not as spacious; most had just three floors, including a basement. The area was closer to the heart of the city, and many houses showed signs of multiple occupancy, suggesting that a lot of the accommodation was still rented rather than privately owned. ‘Which one was it?’ she asked, opening the car door. Fallowfield pointed over to his left. Josephine looked up at the building in which Annie Walters had killed at least twice, and was interested to see that it was one of the few houses which looked genuinely loved. It was nearly dark now, and the November evening was hinting at snow to come, but the warmth of the softly lit rooms could not have been further from the drab, suffocating boarding house that she had imagined from the newspaper descriptions of Walters’s lodgings. Better kept than most, the house was obviously in the middle of preparations for a family celebration: a child’s toy hung in one of the upstairs windows, and a pile of presents stood proudly in the window to the right of a smart front door. As she watched, an attractive woman led a girl of three or four to the sink in the basement kitchen, and lifted her up so that she could wash what looked like pastry off her hands. The woman glanced up at them and smiled, but Josephine—embarrassed to have been caught staring—moved hurriedly away, pulling Fallowfield with her.

  ‘It’s the same time of year that Walters was arrested, almost to the day, but it couldn’t be more different, could it?’ she said, as the two of them loitered suspiciously further up the street. ‘It chills me to see a child there. I’ve always thought that buildings must hold some sort of trace of what’s happened in them, but I doubt that family has any sense of the sadness which one of those rooms witnessed. And thank God—they’d be horrified, I’m sure. It’s one thing to gawp at a house of notoriety, but quite another to live in it.’ She looked around her, trying to build up an impression of the sights that had greeted Walters as she came and went from her lodgings each day, and something further up the street caught her eye. ‘That’s not a canal up there, is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, Miss—it’s the Grand Union,’ Fallowfield said, intrigued by her surprise. ‘Why? Is that important?’

  ‘I don’t know about important,’ Josephine said, walking up the road to take a closer look, ‘but there’s an account in the newspapers of the journey that Walters took to dispose of the dead baby on the day she was arrested. She went all the way to South Kensington Station, partly on foot and partly by bus, and I’d assumed that was because there was nowhere safe for her to get rid of it closer to home. But surely it would have been much easier to weigh the body down and throw it in the canal?’

  ‘Like Dyer, you mean.’

  ‘Is that what she did?’

  ‘Yes—she got away with it for years. Then the stupid woman wrapped a dead baby up in some brown paper that had her address all over it.’

  They stopped at some railings and looked down into the water. ‘Why would you risk tramping all over London with a dead baby clutched to your bosom when you have a canal less than a hundred yards from your doorstep?’

  ‘Maybe it was too close to home,’ Fallowfield suggested. ‘Or maybe she liked the danger. Some people do, you know. Then they push their luck too far—and God bless ’em for their arrogance, otherwise we’d never catch them.’

  Josephine had gone quiet, trying to imagine what it felt like to carry death so close and to picture the sort of woman who would choose that rather than take the easier option. She thought again of how Walters had stopped to drink cocoa with a lifeless bundle in her arms, how she had taken the children home with her rather than dispose of them as quickly as possible. ‘Perhaps I’m wrong to try to understand her,’ she said. ‘Perhaps she was quite simply a monster.’

  ‘Then she’d be the exception, Miss. I’ve arrested a fair few murderers in my time, and they’re usually depressingly ordinary people, caught on the wrong foot. Evil isn’t as common as weakness,’ he added gently, and she wondered if he was trying to reassure her.

  ‘Evil or weakness—the end result is much the same for the victims. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know how many there were or what happened to the other bodies.’

  ‘No. Kids turned up dead all the time back then—for lots of reasons, not just baby farming. It was the hardest thing we ever had to deal with—and it didn’t get any easier for happening so often.’

  ‘Although judging by what I read this morning, East Finchley had more than its fair share,’ she said wryly. ‘To my cynical eye, rather too many seem to have turned up there just before Sach and Walters were arrested, although no one tried to make the connection.’

  ‘They didn’t have to—they only needed one body for a conviction.’

  ‘I wonder if Walters ever worked for other women?’ Josephine said as they headed back to the car. ‘Her share of the money was very small in comparison to Sach’s, and it crossed my mind that she might have had a few clients on the go at the same time. Baby farming obviously wasn’t an unusual crime.’

  ‘It certainly wasn’t, although there were different degrees of it. Some women—like Sach and Walters—had a thriving business going, but others were tarred with the same brush for much less.’

  ‘Yes—I read about another woman who was in court while Sach and Walters were on remand. The stories ran side by side for a bit in the press. El
eanor Vale?’

  Fallowfield shook his head. ‘Doesn’t ring a bell, Miss.’

  ‘No—she wasn’t as notorious because she didn’t kill the babies, just abandoned them in railway carriages where they were sure to be found. But reading about her brought home to me how profitable the baby trade must have been.’

  ‘Surely they didn’t hang her for that?’

  ‘No—two years’ hard labour, I think. But it seemed ironic to me that the barrister prosecuting her was the same one who defended Sach.’

  ‘That’s the legal system for you, Miss—nothing if not consistent.’

  She laughed. ‘Bill, you mentioned finding me some other people to talk to—who did you mean?’

  ‘Well, I could probably find someone who knew the coppers involved at Walters’s lodgings. Seal, one of them was called—I think he’s gone now, but he had a son who took after him and went into the force. Shouldn’t be too difficult to track down, and he’ll remember what the house was like even if he never met Walters.’