Sausage Hall

by Christina James

  Tim took the notebook from Jackie Briggs and turned it over in his hand. Viewed as a tome likely to yield up the secrets of a modern forger, let alone a murderer, it wasn’t encouraging. He was holding a thick-paged volume bound in heavy crinkled yellow leather, tied together with a pale pink bow. Towards the bottom of the front cover was a small oblong picture. It was an idealised domestic scene, the study of a tea-table adorned with floor-length napery, pink china and a vase of blue flowers. One of the flowers in the vase had been painted larger than the others and highlighted with a kind of line-drawn halo. Tim looked at the small picture more closely and decided that the book’s owner had probably embellished the cover by pasting on to it a cigarette card.

  There was no other writing on the cover. Tim opened the book carefully. It was not bound, but consisted of loose sheets and the front and back covers, held together with the ribbon. They creaked when he prised them apart. The first page proclaimed that the volume was My Ladye’s At Home Booke, this printed in a pseudo-archaic font. Underneath it someone had written in copperplate script Lucinda Jacobs, 1888. The ink had faded to a dull brown. The inscription had been crossed out, and beneath it inscribed in a much more childish, unformed hand Florence Hoyle: her booke. This writer had aimed to copy the other’s copperplate, but had not practised the dexterity needed to make the letters slope uniformly. The ‘e’s in Florence had been badly blotted and the ‘y’ of Hoyle was a deformed squiggle. Tim smiled wryly as he noted the mis-spelling of the word ‘book’, no doubt copied from the title page by a naive girl unable to recognise that it represented a rather twee marketing ploy on the part of the late Victorian manufacturer.

  Tim turned another page. This and all the subsequent pages were set out like the guest books still in use at some small hotels. Each contained three columns, headed respectively ‘Date’, ‘Observations’ and ‘Signature’. The ‘Observations’ column was twice the width of the others.

  There were two blank pages before the journal itself began. It had been composed in the same messy handwriting and was therefore almost certainly the work of Florence Hoyle. The writing traversed all three columns, ignoring them and the guiding feint lines as if they had not existed. All of the entries were in the same faded ink.

  Jackie Briggs was looking at him expectantly, hoping perhaps to be praised for having contributed something useful to the investigation. Tim smiled at her encouragingly before turning his attention back to the journal. His misgivings redoubled. The first pages seemed simply to be the semi-literate musings of an immature young girl.

  Madam give me this book. She says she now has a better. Shes been learning me to read and rite better and wants me to try ard. I said I went to the bord school but she said I could do better. I will try to rite in it every day.

  Madam ad visiters this evening. Cook and I was very bizy. Cook said that Madam as no bizness encurridging me to rite, that I’m a growing girl and need to get my rest when works finished. Ive stayed up to do it. I promist Madam.

  My day off. Jenny Wilson and I begged a ride to Spalding on Mr Shearers cart. He was going to markit. I’ve not been to markit before as Madam needs me when Cook goes. But Cook said there was so much left from the visiters that she didn’t need to go this week. Jenny and me bought ribbons. I went to see Ma in Gas Lane. Madam gave me wool for er and soop. Only Milly left with er now. Madam paid my half-years wage. I give it Ma.

  Tim skipped a few pages. Although there was no evidence that someone had been correcting Florence’s work, the spelling and style improved as she became a more practised diarist. The intellectual quality of the prose remained the same. Florence was concerned mostly with the trivia of her own life, and remarkably unobservant about the people whom she encountered. There were numerous references to ‘visiters’ in the first half-dozen pages, but Florence did not try to identify or describe them or say whether they appeared to have enjoyed themselves or what Madam’s reaction to them had been. He supposed that she must have been the ideal servant: hard-working, unquestioning, completely on-side and extremely incurious. But, for a diarist, these traits could hardly have been worse. He’d read diary accounts from the past by other uneducated people, some of which had been enthralling or full of insight: their authors’ shortcomings in learning had been more than compensated for by the perspicacity and the freshness of their observations. Florence’s prose, on the contrary, was lumpish and dull. He doubted that even the best education could have made her fascinating.

  Jackie Briggs was still hovering.

  “Did your grandmother ever describe Mrs Jacobs to you? Tell you what it was like to work for her, what she made of her character, and so on?”

  “She used to moan about the old girl quite a bit. She always called her that: ‘the old girl’. My grandmother was very quick-witted. She’d started work as a nanny and was later trained as a proper nursery nurse at Guy’s Hospital. It gave her a taste for what she’d missed. She was the eldest of a large family and often kept off school to help her mother with the babies. I suppose she was fond of Mrs Jacobs in a way, but she despised her for not making the most of her opportunities. I think that she found the long winter’s evenings in the old girl’s company very boring.”

  “Florence was a maidservant before she married her employer?”

  “Yes. Frederick Jacobs was much older than her – probably more than twenty years older. And she was at least fifteen years older than my grandmother. My grandmother was born in 1892, so Frederick must have been born in the 1850s or 60s.”

  “Did you know him?”

  Jackie Briggs laughed. Tim realised that it was an absurd question.

  “No, of course not. Florence was a very old lady when I was a child. Frederick must have been dead for many years. I was taken to see her a couple of times, but she was practically witless by then. Sometimes, though, she knew what was going on. She gave me a brooch from her jewellery box once. I’ve still got it.”

  “Curious that Frederick married out of his class, wasn’t it, especially as Florence didn’t dazzle with her wit?”

  “I suppose it was; although by all accounts she was very attractive as a young girl. He wouldn’t be the first man to have fallen for a pretty face.”

  “No, indeed.”

  “Do you know whether there were children?”

  “One son. My grandmother always called him ‘Mr Gordon’. He didn’t want to keep Laurieston House after Mrs Jacobs became too ill to stay there. It was him who sold it to Mr Kevan’s grandfather.”

  “Do you know what happened to him? Where he lived?” Jackie shook her head. “Is that book useful?” she continued, eagerly.

  Tim frowned. He didn’t want to disillusion her, and not just out of empathy. He suspected that there would yet have to be a lot more delving into Harry Briggs’ doings, and that Harry’s wife would be a much more co-operative source of information than Harry himself. Besides, she was so pathetically keen to know that she’d helped. Juliet could take a look at the diary. It wouldn’t do any harm. She might even be able to spot something cryptic in its primitive style. If there was anything to be gained from it, she would find it.

  “It’s difficult to say,” he said. “This throws some interesting light on what life was like in that house at the time. I’ve only read a few pages. There may be some more concrete information when I get further into it. Would you allow me to borrow it for a few days? I’ll give you a receipt, of course.”

  Jackie Briggs beamed gratification.

  Eighteen

  That afternoon, Patti Gardner was kneeling on the floor of the cellar at Laurieston House, carefully dusting away the earth from a skeleton with a brush. She paused to yawn: she and her team had been there until almost midnight the previous evening before calling it a day. She was wearing a white paper suit and a face mask, which stretched perilously as it was contorted by her wide-open mouth. She leaned even closer to the bones and examined t
hem with a magnifying glass.

  Tim Yates leant against the cold brick wall, watching her.

  “Have you found something interesting?” he asked.

  “That depends on what you mean by interesting. I can’t be sure – I’ll have to carry out some tests in the lab – but I’m beginning to think that these bones have been here for a very long time. And there are three skeletons, not one.”

  Tom whistled.

  “How long?”

  “If I’m right, probably longer than living memory. A hundred years . . . maybe more than that.”

  “So if it was murder, whoever did it would have died long ago?”

  She sat up on her heels and shyly met Tim’s eye. Aside from those occasions on which they were jointly engrossed in their work, their relationship had been strained since their brief fling before Tim had met Katrin. Tim didn’t know whether Patti still carried a torch for him. Certainly she found the fact of their former liaison much more embarrassing than he did. As far as Tim himself was concerned, it was ancient history, water under the bridge. If there was anything to regret, it was simply that friendship between himself and Patti now seemed to be impossible. He still liked and respected her and found her evasive behaviour rather sad. He smiled encouragement now.

  “As I said, I need to do some tests. But I think it’s likely that the skeletons have been here much longer than anyone currently living in this house. What happens when a crime’s so old that there’s no chance of finding the murderer alive? Would the police still decide to investigate it?”

  “Speaking personally, I’d always want to know what had happened, but unless the crime was a famous one, or there were surviving influential relatives of the victims demanding explanations, it would be left to the discretion of the senior investigating officer and his superiors. In our case, that means Thornton. Preoccupied as he always is with making his budget stretch far enough, I doubt if he’d authorise investigation into a cold case crime if there were no prospect of a conviction.”

  “A pity. Because that’s probably what’s going to happen. And, like you, I’d always hope to find the solution to a murder, no matter how old it is. Especially as there’s another fascinating factor to this case: one that I am quite certain about, without conducting more tests.”

  “What’s that?”

  “At least two of the three victims were female. And all were of African ethnic origin.”

  Tim was incredulous.

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “Yes. The shape of their skulls leaves no room for doubt. I’d say they were all from the same part of Africa and possibly related to each other. Lab tests might give me the answer to both of those questions, too.”

  “You mean that you can carry out tests to tell exactly where they came from?”

  “Probably. Testing their teeth, in particular, should narrow down where they lived to quite a small geographical area. And DNA tests should be able to tell us whether they were related.”

  “Isn’t it odd that several black women came here to their deaths a hundred years or so ago? There are very few black people living in the Fens even now. They must have been extremely conspicuous then. Perhaps we’ll be able to find some historical record of when and why they were here.”

  “Perhaps. But they didn’t necessarily die in this cellar; they were just buried here. And if they lived in the Fens for some time before that, they could have been held captive. If so, it’s possible that no-one knew about them except the person or people holding them. I’m going to get the bones transferred to the lab as quickly as I can now,” she added. “I assume that you have no objection to that? And that you’d rather we kept to ourselves their likely age until we’re absolutely certain about it?”

  “No objection, of course,” said Tim. “And yes – the further we get with exploring their identity before we have to consult Thornton about whether to proceed, the better. Though even Thornton might have to think twice before denying budget to investigate the deaths of three black women, however long ago they happened. He’ll be worried that some political lobbying group will take up their cause.”

  “I suppose that he might get extra funding from such a group, or from the government, to help to pay for the investigation if he allows it?”

  “He might,” Tim agreed. “I’ve no idea what his options might be. But you can bet that if there is any such money to get hold of, Thornton will know about it. It’s one of the areas in which he excels.”

  “Said without a touch of irony!” laughed Patti, behaving naturally in Tim’s presence for once. Tim also laughed, but stopped suddenly and frowned.

  “Something else occurs to me,” he said. “I should have thought of it before, given our reason for searching the cellar in the first place. Even in the nineteenth century, surely these women would have required passports?”

  “That depends on where they were born. You’re the historian, not me. But it’s my understanding that there have been some black people living in this country since the Middle Ages. Mostly in ports, I believe, particularly in the South of England. And the numbers of ethnic Africans living in the UK obviously increased rapidly in the latter part of the twentieth century. But even if they come from a much earlier period, as I believe may be the case, you shouldn’t rule out the chance that they might have been British citizens.”

  “I suppose not. I wonder . . .”

  “What’s that?” Patti exclaimed suddenly. “Tim, could you hold the light a little closer to here, please?” She pointed with her brush.

  Tim grabbed one of the electric lanterns that Patti had switched on to augment the dim electric lights in the cellar and held it close to her hand. She exchanged the brush for a tiny trowel, which she used gently to lever something free from its prison of bone. She held it up, gripping it with the thumb and forefinger of her latex-gloved hand.

  “It’s a bead,” she said. “A large, green bead. Made of malachite, unless I’m much mistaken.”

  Nineteen

  Tim bounded up the stairs to his office bearing Florence Hoyle’s notebook. He was impatient for Juliet to arrive. Despite her regard for authority, he knew that she would find the prospect of working through the journal so fascinating that she would ignore Superintendent Thornton’s instruction if he told them to abandon the ancient cold case, even if it meant studying Florence’s musings in her own time. Unlike Tim himself, Juliet was not a formally-trained historian, but she shared his interest in human psychology and far surpassed him in her ability to draw accurate conclusions from documentary evidence and forensic detail.

  Tim made himself a cup of tea. Through the glass of the kitchen cubicle he caught site of Andy Carstairs, red-faced, hefting his sports bag up the stairs. Andy had recently embarked upon a fitness campaign, although its effects had yet to be made manifest. Tim held up his mug and pointed at it. Andy grinned and nodded. Tim made more tea and carried both mugs through to the open area where Andy and Juliet, when they were both in the office, occupied facing desks.

  “Have you made any progress with the fake passports?” Tim asked, after they’d exchanged a few pleasantries.

  “I’ve been in touch with an expert in the Home Office. Her report came in yesterday. It appears that the stationery that we found at Laurieston House was authentic – the real stuff that is used for making British passports.”

  “Inside job?”

  “Possibly, but the Home Office expert, a fearsome woman called Veronica Something (by the way, I doubt if she’d ’ve deigned to talk to me at all if she hadn’t worked with Juliet in the past), thinks not. Apparently part of a consignment of the stationery was stolen about eighteen months ago. Intercepted en route, they say, though they don’t really know how it came to be lost. You may remember the internal report about it. It was played down at the time because the Home Office thought that we’d be more likely to catch the thieves if it d
idn’t make the press . . .”

  “Didn’t want to be caught with egg on their faces, more like,” Tim interposed. Andy grinned.

  “Whatever. I suppose that may explain why this Veronica is so prickly. Anyway, she thinks that the stuff used to make the passports may have come from that consignment. It’s quite difficult to establish if she’s right, but she’s asked the manufacturers to carry out more checks.”

  “Underworld job, then?”

  “Yes, but it had to be really, didn’t it? The standard of those passports was excellent. They’d never have been spotted as fakes if they’d included the photographs and personal details of the holders.”

  “You’re right. There can’t be many forgers with that sort of capability. I suppose you’ve checked out all the ones known to us who might have the skill to do it?”

  “I’ve started on it. I need the Met to help and they’re a bit snowed under at the moment.”

  “The real question that we need to ask ourselves is how a set of high-class fake passports found their way into the basement of a rich Lincolnshire businessman’s house in Sutterton. It’s not the usual sort of place for forgeries like these to turn up.”

  “Agreed,” said Andy. “Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Though I can think of plenty, most of them too far-fetched, one of them seems more than just a possibility. They might just be intended for use in this country by people who shouldn’t be here.”

  “Illegal immigrants, you mean?”

  “It’s a hunch worth looking at. If it’s correct, someone would still be running a considerable risk to get them into the country in the first place. There’d have to be something in it for them. Cheap labour, for example. An illegal immigrant with a kosher passport wouldn’t actually look illegal to a prospective employer. Quite literally, it would be the passport to a job.”

  “And the supplier of the passport takes a cut of their wages?”