Two for Sorrow

Chapter Eleven

Sylvia Timpson looked suspicious, then horrified when she opened her front door to Fallowfield on Saturday afternoon. Clearly policemen were as unwelcome in the claustrophobic suburbia of Westcott Road as they were in Campbell Bunk, because she ushered him over the doorstep of her small terraced house with unseemly haste, then carefully positioned herself in the hall to ensure that he could go no further without an explanation.

‘I would have thought that any more questions about this unpleasant business could have been handled at the club, Sergeant. I don’t appreciate being bothered in my own home.’

Fallowfield smiled politely at her. ‘I’m afraid it’s a different unpleasant business this time, Mrs Bishop,’ he said, noticing her surprise at his use of her married name. ‘Marjorie Baker was killed last night, and I need to ask you a few questions.’

At first, she seemed to struggle to place the name, and then said: ‘The Motley girl? She was at the club yesterday lunchtime. But why do you need to talk to me?’

‘We’re speaking to everyone who saw her on Friday,’ Fallowfield said non-committally. ‘Might I come in for a minute?’

‘Yes, of course.’ She led him through to a typically unused front parlour where the only thing that caught his attention was a photograph on the mantelpiece of a young woman in a nurse’s uniform, standing on the pavement outside St Thomas’s Hospital. She saw him looking at it. ‘That was taken so long ago now that even I don’t recognise myself,’ she said, and there was a note of bitterness in her voice which she made no effort to hide.

‘I didn’t know you’d been a nurse, Mrs Bishop.’

‘Why would you?’

‘Is that how you came to be at the Cowdray Club?’

‘How I ended up there, you mean? Yes. I lost my nursing career because I was foolish enough to get married, Sergeant. Now I sort mail for the women who were cleverer than me—women who’ve kept their independence—and the women who are too rich or too titled to care. It’s funny how life works itself out, isn’t it?’

‘You regret your marriage?’

‘I was one of those starry-eyed young women who gave themselves up to the service of the sick during the war. It was a typical nurse-and-wounded-soldier marriage, like a thousand others. We all felt as though we needed to make up to those boys for what they’d gone through, but that was all they were—boys, looking for a mother figure. The gratitude was welcome for a while, but it soon wears off.’ Her description of the marriage was very similar to her husband’s, Fallowfield noticed. ‘But what can this possibly have to do with Marjorie Baker?’

‘I believe you were on duty yesterday when Miss Baker came to the club.’

‘That’s right. She delivered some things from Motley for Miss Bannerman.’

‘How long was she there?’

‘About fifteen minutes, I suppose.’

‘And who else did she talk to?’

‘Miss Size was there. They obviously knew each other already.’ From her tone, there was no difficulty in guessing what her opinion was on the rehabilitation of prisoners. ‘And Lady Ashby made the usual exhibition of herself in the foyer.’

‘In what way?’

‘She made it very clear that she was looking forward to her fitting, if you know what I mean. That was it—except Baker wanted to see Lucy Peters, so I made her wait outside until Peters’s break. We can’t have staff fraternising in the foyer.’

‘So Miss Baker and Miss Peters talked?’

‘I assume so. I saw Miss Baker afterwards, waiting on one of the benches in the square.’

‘And she didn’t go anywhere else in the building or speak to anybody at the club?’

‘No.’

‘Was that the only time you saw her yesterday?’

She looked at him sharply. ‘Of course it was.’

Fallowfield nodded. ‘Just a couple more questions, then. Where were you last night, between nine o’clock and midnight?’

‘Here.’

‘And can your husband confirm that?’

She laughed suddenly, but Fallowfield could not tell whether it came from scorn or relief. ‘Ah, so that’s it. Was Miss Baker one of my husband’s indiscretions, Sergeant? Is that what this is about? Oh, don’t look so defensive. You men—you stick together through thick and thin, don’t you? Must be another legacy of the war, I suppose. Well, actually Lionel can confirm that—we were at home together all evening. We listened to the wireless, went to bed at around ten o’clock, and said approximately three words to each other all evening. So there you are—you have the alibi you came for.’ She seemed almost regretful about it, and Fallowfield had no doubt that she was telling the truth. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘Lionel isn’t a murderer—he doesn’t have the backbone for it.’

‘You must see a lot of comings and goings in your job, Mrs Bishop. In your opinion, is there anybody at the Cowdray Club who would have the backbone for it?’

‘Several people, I should think—although I can’t imagine that a seamstress fresh out of Holloway would inspire that sort of energy. Have you tried looking in the gutter, Sergeant? One of her prison friends, perhaps—you should talk to Lucy Peters.’

‘We will, Mrs Bishop. In the meantime, can you tell me exactly what Marjorie left at the club yesterday?’

‘A parcel full of material samples and two letters, both for Miss Bannerman.’

‘Two letters?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were the envelopes handwritten or typed?’

‘Both handwritten, but not by the same person; one was flamboyant and written in ink, the other was in pencil, with more ordinary lettering. But the envelopes were the same.’

‘So both envelopes came from Motley with the parcel?’

‘I assume so.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Bishop. You’ve been most helpful. I won’t keep you any longer.’

As she showed him to the door, he glanced into one of the other rooms off the hall which was obviously used by the Bishops on a regular basis. On the centre table, there was a typewriter and a stack of paper, but the door was closed too quickly for him to see more. ‘Looks like a nice machine,’ he said casually. ‘Do you have much correspondence?’

‘It’s my husband’s,’ she said quickly. ‘He uses it for work. Good day, Sergeant.’

Lucy sat at a corner table in the Oxford Street Lyons, and watched as a young woman lifted her baby out of its pram and settled it comfortably on her lap. For some reason, children seemed to be everywhere that Lucy went; sometimes she found herself following a mother with a baby, wondering if it was the little girl she had given up. Usually, she managed to convince herself that her behaviour was down to a natural desire to find out what had happened to her child; occasionally, though, she felt in her heart that knowing would not be enough: the only thing which would stem this inconsolable grief was to have the baby in her arms again.

It was strange, this constant longing for something which was initially so unwanted. The idea of being pregnant when the shame of prison was still so new had been too intense an emotional trauma to come to terms with immediately; she had hidden the knowledge for as long as possible, pretending to others and especially to herself that all was well. Denial was followed by fear. She knew nothing about having a baby and had nobody to ask, so threw herself into the heavy labour that prison demanded, hoping against hope that something might happen to release her from this trap. Ironically, it was her sense of isolation that changed the way she felt about her child: alone at the most destructive time of her life, Lucy began to rely on her baby as the only person who made her feel worthwhile, her only friend in a hostile world. By that time, it was too late: she had already agreed to adoption and set in motion a process which could not be reversed, and, as the pregnancy progressed, Lucy came to fear that her one legacy to the child would be her own sense of abandonment.

She drained the cup of tea that she had nursed for more than an hour, and tried to fight the pain which returned to haunt her whenever she thought about the weeks leading up to her confinement but, even eight months later, the memories were cruelly vivid. Expectant mothers were supposed to be moved to the hospital wing for the final month of their pregnancy but, when it came to Lucy’s time, there were no free beds and she had continued in her own cell, locked in night after night with no means of summoning help in an emergency except a temperamental bell. Her sense of panic grew at the thought that the baby might come while she was alone but, in the end, she almost wished it had: there was nothing joyful or familiar about the birth, and the staff treated her so brutally that they might have been conspiring with her baby to punish her for what she was about to do.

Afterwards, she was given twenty minutes with her daughter. She spent them trying to memorise the child’s features, wishing that people would stop talking so that she could take in everything about this small part of her which was about to be removed, angry at them for wasting her time. The emotions she felt were so new that it was impossible to know how to respond to them, but she remembered that her hands were like ice, and she had desperately tried to warm them so that her baby’s only memory of her would not be this cold, unfamiliar touch. Then she heard the door open, and knew that someone had arrived to separate them. She tried to ignore it, and moved over to the far side of the bed, turning her body to the wall to protect the child, but it was no good. For some ridiculous reason, she had tried to smile when they took her away, had made an effort to look nice, as if this moment could somehow be stamped on her baby’s consciousness as deeply as it was on hers. But she felt the scream start up inside her before the door closed, and it had never gone away.

The woman with the pram got up to go, and Lucy followed her out into the street. She walked a few paces behind, and then, as the mother paused in front of one of the sparkling Christmas window displays which were beginning to appear along Oxford Street, Lucy grabbed her opportunity. While the mother was distracted, she reached gently into the pram and pulled the blankets down to take a closer look at the baby’s face, but she had underestimated the other woman’s vigilance. She stared at Lucy in horror, and snatched the pram away; realising how this must look, and with no way of explaining that she just wanted to find her child, Lucy hurried off into the anonymity of Oxford Circus.

She slipped into the Cowdray Club through the Henrietta Place entrance, hoping to get down to the kitchens before anybody noticed she was late. ‘Lucy—wait a moment, please.’ Celia Bannerman was standing by the carved oval balcony which overlooked the lobby from the mezzanine level. ‘I’d like a word with you before you start work.’

Celia had thought long and hard about what to do when Lucy Peters returned from her afternoon off, and had decided that she was unwilling to let the girl face the police without some sort of gentle warning. She didn’t doubt that Lucy was behind the thefts at the club and she would have to be disciplined accordingly, but Celia had no intention of allowing it to get out of hand in light of what else had happened; Lucy was fragile at the best of times, and there was no telling what she would do if the news of Marjorie’s death were sprung on her by an unknown and unsympathetic police inspector. The reputation of the Cowdray Club was at stake, and containment was to be fought for at all costs.

She looked down at the girl’s anxious face through the oval well-opening and cut off her apologies for arriving back late. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said reassuringly. ‘Come upstairs with me for a moment—your evening duties can wait. I’ve told Mrs Lawrence that I’ll be needing you for a while.’

Lucy’s apprehension turned to suspicion, and Celia wondered what sort of impression she usually made on the girls if this was their reaction to a few words of kindness from her. She led the way up the back stairs to her own rooms on the third floor, and asked Lucy to sit down. The girl perched uncomfortably on the edge of the settee, and Celia tried not to be irritated by her timidity. ‘Now, Lucy—there are some serious matters that I need to speak to you about. I don’t want you to be alarmed, and I promise to take care of you, but it’s vital that you’re honest with me.’ Lucy nodded. ‘The police were here this afternoon, asking about some of the items that have gone missing from the club recently, in particular Lady Weston’s silver photograph frame. Do you know anything about it?’

‘Just because I’ve been in the nick before, you assume it’s me?’ Lucy said angrily, but the defiance was half-hearted.

‘Did you take it, Lucy?’ Celia asked patiently. Lucy nodded. ‘And the other things? The scarf and the money.’

‘Yes.’ She looked up, and Celia saw the panic in her eyes. ‘What will happen to me, Miss? Will I have to go back inside?’

‘Not necessarily, Lucy. The police will have to know, of course, but I’ll help you all I can if you’re honest with me now. Tell me why you took those things. None of them were worth much, so why put your job here at risk?’

The girl shrugged. ‘It’s hard to explain, Miss. I don’t really know myself why I took them, but the little girl in that photograph—she looked so much like mine. I know it was wrong, but I just wanted something to remind me of her, something that I could keep.’ She looked up at Celia, desperate to make her understand. ‘These women—they’ve all got children to love, and someone out there’s got something of mine—I just wanted to take a little bit back for myself. The baby made me feel special, you see—she’s the only person who’s ever looked to me for help, who’s ever made me think that I might have something precious to give.’

She began to cry, and Celia moved over to sit beside her, angry with herself for having been too busy to notice Lucy’s distress before now. ‘Why did you give her up if you were so attached to her?’ she asked gently.

‘It didn’t feel like I had an option, Miss. Everyone said it was for the best, and I just got carried along with it. It sounds daft, I suppose, when I already had a prison record, but I was worried about what people would think of me and what that would do to the baby. Anyway,’ she added, as if trying to convince herself, ‘how could I ever have looked after a little girl?’

How, indeed, Celia thought. ‘What about the father? Couldn’t he have helped, at least financially?’

Lucy scoffed. ‘He denied she was his—the family told him to. They said it was my word against his, and no one would ever believe a con.’

‘And your own family?’

‘Oh, my mother believed me all right. She said I’d brought disgrace on the family twice, and there was nothing she could do about the prison sentence, but she’d bloody well do something about the kid. She wouldn’t tell my father, said the shame would finish him off if he ever found out—he still doesn’t know he’s got a granddaughter out there somewhere.’ She wiped her hand across her eyes. ‘It’s probably best—he doesn’t deserve to feel like this.’

‘And neither do you.’

‘Don’t I? That’s not what my mum says. She told me it was my own weakness that got me into this, and she was right, I suppose. You get used to doing what you’re told in prison, but that wasn’t new for me. I’ve been doing it all my life. That was what got me into trouble with the baby in the first place, and that was what made me give her up—I was too weak to argue. I used to dream that somebody would come in at the last minute and save us from being separated, but dreaming doesn’t get you anywhere, does it? The prison brought some woman in to arrange it all. She always seemed to be in a hurry, rushing it all through in case I changed my mind. I hated her, you know, for making a living out of taking my baby away from me.’

‘I expect she was trying to help, Lucy. She was just doing a job, like the rest of us—providing a service that she thought you needed. It’s easy to blame the messenger, but it wasn’t her fault.’

‘I know, I know—and it was myself I really wanted to punish. It sounds wicked, Miss, but I almost wished the baby was dead. It would have served me right.’

Celia knew that it was impossible for women to understand or even to imagine the disgrace of an unwanted pregnancy if they hadn’t been through it themselves; even so, she was shocked. ‘Surely you didn’t really think that it would have been better if she’d died, Lucy?’

‘At least then I’d know what had happened to her. As it is, I don’t know if she’s happy or sad, rich or poor, ill or healthy. I don’t know what she looks like, or what she’s been told about me—if she’s been told anything about me at all. She could be dead, Miss, for all I know.’

Uncertainty was, perhaps, the cruellest form of grief. During the war, Celia had known women who, having given boys up for adoption earlier in their lives, had scanned the newspapers every day, terrified that their son had been lost in the trenches: it was a hopeless task, with no familiar name to look for, but they scarcely seemed to care, so great was the suffering caused by ignorance. Lucy had lost her child, but the fact that the girl lived on with someone else had obviously added a bewildering twist to the grieving process; what she didn’t know, and what Celia could not bring herself to tell her, was that her feelings were likely to intensify with time, that the guilt and sense of self-blame would get worse rather than better. Instead, she just listened, sensing that Lucy had rarely had an opportunity to talk about how she felt. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for not saying more to her when I had the chance,’ the girl continued, ‘but it didn’t feel like she was my baby to say anything to. I should have insisted on knowing what sort of life she was going to have, at least. Anything could have happened to her. I read what that woman upstairs is writing—I know I shouldn’t have looked at it, but I couldn’t stop myself. What if something like that happened to my baby?’

There was a hysterical note in her voice now, and once again Celia cursed Josephine for her interference in the past. ‘It’s fiction, Lucy—she doesn’t understand what she’s writing about and anyway, it was a long time ago. Things like that don’t happen these days—there are laws and systems to make sure they don’t. You have to believe in your heart that what you did was for the best.’

‘You sound just like the rest of them,’ Lucy said scornfully. ‘Everyone told me to put it behind me and pretend it never happened, but they only did that so I wouldn’t embarrass them any more. No one would talk to me about it afterwards, not even Marjorie. You could almost hear the sighs of relief from everybody that life could go back to normal—they don’t seem to understand that mine never can.’

‘You’re still very angry, aren’t you, Lucy?’

‘I’m angry with all of them, yes. They made everything worse.’

‘In what way?’

‘By being so unkind. Sometimes I think I might never have grown attached to her if people had been more understanding, but it was just me and my baby against the world. In the end, I dreaded her being born because I knew I’d lose her; while she stayed inside me, we were together and nobody could do anything about it. If I hadn’t landed myself in prison, things might have been different.’

‘Oh, Lucy,’ Celia said, and put her arm round the girl, noticing that she trembled with grief and rage. ‘People think that cruel to be kind is the answer, and it’s not just because you were in prison—only someone who had experienced what you were going through would have been any use to you.’ She remembered thinking at the time that Amelia Sach’s weakness had been exactly that: she understood the pain of women who longed for children, but not the distress of those who were talked into giving them up; if she had, she could never have put the babies so callously into Walters’s hands. ‘You can’t torture yourself with what might have been.’

‘But it’s the unfairness of it all. When my sister had her little boy, my mum worked her fingers to the bone knitting shawls and boots. She was so excited, but she never even saw my baby—and would it really have hurt her to try to understand? Would it have hurt any of them? I wanted to scream at them, Miss, and worse. Because of them, that barren bitch had my child—I wanted them all to suffer like I have, teach them what pain really feels like.’

Celia looked down at her, surprised and unsettled by the strength of feeling. ‘Even Marjorie?’ she asked.

Lucy nodded. ‘Yes, even Marjorie, with her job and her prospects and a string of people after her. And what do I have? Nothing. Sometimes I hate her more than anyone, because she seems to have so many choices. Me, I was still trapped even after we got out of the nick—not by bars any more, but by what was going on in my head.’ Lucy’s grief had a desperate quality to it, and it occurred to Celia that this might drive the girl to go further than stealing trivial souvenirs of someone else’s life. She knew she would have to tell Penrose that he was right about the thefts, no matter how badly it reflected on the club, but should she also tell him what Lucy had just said about making people suffer? What would he read into that, and how would he treat her? Lucy would never have the wit to defend herself if the police suspected that she had killed Marjorie, and there was no guarantee that they would take into account her state of mind after the loss of her child. Could she really bring herself to set all that in motion? ‘It’s mean of me, I know,’ Lucy continued, embarrassed by her outburst and beginning to calm down a little. ‘It wasn’t Marjorie’s fault and she’s always been good to me. She took me for a day out last weekend, you know. Bought the train tickets for us both, and took me to the seaside to cheer me up.’

‘That sounds nice. Where did you go?’

‘Somewhere in Suffolk. I can’t remember what the place was called—it had a funny name. She wanted to talk to somebody who lived there, and I remember thinking how lucky they were. I’d never seen the sea before, except on postcards, and I walked along the beach, waiting for Marjorie to finish, and tried to imagine what it must be like to live there all the time and see it in summer as well as winter.’ She smiled to herself, thinking back to the day, and Celia let her talk, wanting her to make the most of the happy memories before she broached the subject of Marjorie’s murder. ‘We had tea before we came back, and it was like we’d left all the shit behind. We weren’t ex-cons or girls who couldn’t keep out of trouble or any of the other names they call us—we were just Lucy and Marjorie, out for a day by the sea. I even forgot about the baby for a bit—it seemed easier to do that when I was somewhere else.’

‘You should have more days like that, Lucy,’ Celia said gently. ‘Life’s very short. Just try to put the past behind you a little more each day. It will get easier—trust me.’ Lucy looked at her gratefully. ‘Now, why don’t you go downstairs and get the cocoa for the drawing room, and we can have a cup together and decide what to say to the police. There’s something else we need to talk about before you see them.’ The girl’s face clouded over. ‘Don’t worry—I’ll look after you. Go now, or Mrs Lawrence will haul me over the coals as well as you, but be as quick as you can. The lift’s broken again, I’m afraid, so use the main staircase—if you bring it up the back way, it’ll be cold by the time you’ve walked down all those corridors.’

Lucy smiled and Celia watched her leave. Then, with a heavy heart, she reached for the telephone.

Penrose was losing his patience with Maria Baker, as the woman sitting in front of him still insisted on being called. Like most people, she looked much less sure of herself now she was away from her home ground and in a police interview room but, since Waddingham and Merrifield had brought her in, she had steadfastly refused to speak other than to state her name; a flicker of surprise when he first mentioned the alternatives ‘Sach’ and ‘Edwards’ was the only indication she had given him so far that he was on the right track at all.

‘Mrs Baker—there are ways and means of proving your husband’s real identity and your own, but that will take days, perhaps weeks. By forcing us to go down those routes rather than helping us now, you are giving your daughter’s killer the advantage of time. Is that really what you want to do?’

Still, there was no answer. She stared down at the table between them as if oblivious to what he had said. Exasperated, Penrose glanced across at Fallowfield and decided to try a new tactic. So far, he had deliberately avoided going through all the horrific details of Marjorie’s death: if Mrs Baker had killed her daughter, she would reveal herself eventually and he liked to keep some things close to his chest; if she had had nothing to do with it, then it was information which no mother needed to hear. But reason and firmness had got him nowhere, and shock seemed to be the only route left to him. ‘Marjorie was choked to death with glass,’ he said bluntly. ‘Her killer incapacitated her with drugs, waited for her to come round, and then tortured her in the most horrific way possible. While Marjorie was still conscious, he or she took a needle four inches long and sewed her lips together so that the glass and the vomit went back down into her lungs.’ The woman covered her ears with her hands, but Penrose continued relentlessly, loathing what he was doing but determined not to lose the upper hand now that he had finally forced a reaction. ‘The needle tore through Marjorie’s skin and caused severe damage to her mouth, and the pain must have been more extreme than we can begin to imagine. As if that weren’t enough, Marjorie was made to look at herself in a mirror while all this was going on. It was a slow, ugly and humiliating death, and someone must be made to answer for that.’ He had used Marjorie’s name repeatedly in an effort to break down the extraordinary detachment which Maria Baker had managed to maintain since receiving news of her daughter’s death, and it seemed to have worked. She was crying now, and Penrose drove home his advantage. ‘I think your husband told Marjorie about his past, either deliberately or when he was drunk. I also believe that you discovered the secret was out, and were horrified to think that the shame which you’d been running from for years was about to catch up with you.’

‘No,’ she insisted angrily. ‘Marjorie knew nothing about all that. If she had, she would never have kept quiet.’

‘But that’s the trouble, isn’t it, Mrs Baker? Marjorie needed to be kept quiet, so you made sure that she was. And when your husband turned up, you saw the perfect opportunity to silence both of them.’

‘No,’ she screamed, standing up and slamming her hand down hard on the table in front of him. ‘That’s not what I meant. Marjorie didn’t know who we were.’

‘Shall I take that as an invitation to call you Mrs Sach?’

‘Call me what you fucking like, but I didn’t kill my daughter.’

She was so close to him now that Penrose could feel her breath on his face, but he resisted the temptation to sit back. ‘There was no love lost between you, though, was there?’

‘So? You try playing happy families with the sort of life we had. What sort of world do you live in, for Christ’s sake? Walk down a street like ours, and you can count the loving mother-and-daughter relationships on the fingers of one hand. But there’s a difference between that and what you’ve just told me. I could never do that to another human being, and I didn’t do it to Marjorie.’

‘What about your husband? Could you have pushed him down some stairs?’

‘He wasn’t my husband. I didn’t marry him. He never asked me. He always loved Amelia.’

Penrose was astonished that she would tolerate the life she had led for a man who didn’t love her, but he wasn’t going to give her another chance to point out his naivety by questioning her about it. Instead, he just said: ‘But you are Nora Edwards?’ She nodded. ‘Right, Miss Edwards—I’m going to give you a few minutes to compose yourself, and then I’d like you to answer my questions as honestly and as fully as you can. Let the constable outside know if you need anything.’

In truth, it was Penrose who needed the break. He closed the door to the interview room and leant against it. ‘Well done, Sir,’ Fallowfield said quietly. ‘I began to think she was never going to admit the connection.’

‘At what cost, though?’ Penrose asked. ‘You know, Bill, sometimes I hate this job. If she’s not guilty, she didn’t need to know all that.’

‘She left you no choice, Sir. Do you think she is guilty?’

‘I really don’t know. Somehow I doubt it, but that could just be because I don’t want to believe that a mother could do that to her child.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘It must be the sort of world I live in. We’ll give her five minutes, then go back in. Right now, I need some coffee.’

Fallowfield obliged, and returned with two mugs and a piece of paper. ‘A message for you at the desk, Sir. Miss Bannerman’s just telephoned—Lucy Peters is back at the club, and she’s keeping an eye on her.’

‘Then God help the poor kid,’ said Penrose. ‘But that’s good news—we’ll finish with Edwards first, and then go over there. Lucy won’t be disappearing again if she’s under that sort of surveillance.’

Celia stood at the top of the staircase and waited for Lucy to come back with the cocoa. The club was always quiet at this time of the evening, particularly on a Saturday, when most of the members had either gone out to the theatre or to dinner, and she enjoyed the peace of the old house as it must have been when it was a family residence. It wouldn’t last long, she knew: she had done her duty and left a message for Inspector Penrose, and he was bound to arrive soon to speak to Lucy. She only hoped that she was doing the right thing.

Voices drifted up from the bottom of the stairs, and Josephine appeared with the two Motley sisters. Celia greeted them warmly. ‘I hope you’ve had a peaceful evening after such a terrible day.’

‘Hardly peaceful,’ Josephine said wryly. ‘We’ve been all over the Highlands, and witnessed a shooting at the London Palladium.’

‘We went to see the new Hitchcock,’ Lettice explained. ‘It’s really terribly exciting.’

‘Although I’m not sure playing a sex-starved crofter’s wife counts as Peggy’s finest hour,’ Ronnie said, and continued in a dreadful Scottish accent. ‘ “You should see Sauchiehall Street, with all its fine shops.” Lydia will die laughing when she sees it.’

‘I thought she was rather good, didn’t you, Josephine?’

‘Not bad for someone who’s clearly never been north of Camden. But I think Lydia would happily play the croft if it meant getting a film role, so my advice is not to mention it.’

Celia walked with them along the corridor to the drawing room. ‘Make yourselves at home. The hot drinks are on their way up.’

‘Bugger the hot drinks,’ Ronnie said, grimacing. ‘I want something a bit stronger after all that bracing Highland air.’

Celia laughed. ‘Take a seat, then, and I’ll have something brought up to you. Large brandies all round?’

‘Lovely. And thank you for letting us take over your hall downstairs. I honestly don’t know what else we’d have done.’

‘Nonsense. It’s me that should be thanking you for all you’re doing for the club—especially after what’s happened. It must be terrible for you. I know what it’s like to feel responsible for your staff, and Marjorie seemed to fit in so well at Motley.’

‘Yes, she’ll be very hard to replace,’ Lettice said. ‘But we’re determined to make the gala a success, if only to do her justice.’

She and Ronnie chose some chairs by the window, but Josephine lingered at the door for a moment. ‘I’m so sorry about what happened earlier,’ she said. ‘I can’t help feeling responsible for stirring things up with Geraldine. Are you all right?’

‘Of course I am,’ Celia sounded more convinced than she was. ‘Please, Josephine—think nothing more of it. Go and enjoy the rest of your evening. I might join you for a nightcap later.’

Thank God the lift didn’t let them down very often, Celia thought when she got back to the staircase and saw Lucy on her way up with a large pan of cocoa, concentrating hard to make sure that none of the liquid spilled out over her feet as she climbed: this might be a common enough sight in prison, but it was hardly appropriate in the Cowdray Club. The container was heavy and awkward, and Celia smiled encouragingly down at her. ‘Be careful, dear. Don’t burn yourself.’ She waited until Lucy was just a few steps from the top, then added: ‘By the way, I forgot to tell you. That little bitch Marjorie is dead.’

The shock and confusion in Lucy’s eyes told Celia that she had the advantage she needed. While the girl was caught off guard, Celia put her foot against the side of the pan and pushed with all the strength she had. She had judged the angle correctly. Lucy lost her balance and tumbled backwards down the stairs, and the scalding contents of the pan poured all over her upper body. The cocoa spilled everywhere—two, three times as much, surely, as could possibly have been held by one vessel—and the sugar in the liquid made it stick to Lucy’s face and neck like a deadly second skin, scorching her flesh and splashing back into her eyes. She came to rest awkwardly on the middle landing, the pan at her side, but, to Celia’s dismay, she remained conscious, and there was something primitive—inhuman, even—about her screams; it was the sound of an animal begging for death, the physical expression of a torment which, until now, had only touched Lucy emotionally.

In a few seconds, the staircase would be full of people. Celia was by the girl’s side in an instant, trying to calm her down, but still she struggled and Celia was amazed and horrified by her strength, even as her body writhed in agony. Panic welled up in her as she realised that she only had a few seconds left to make sure of what she was doing. Her hands went automatically to Lucy’s throat, red and blistered already from the heat, but she stopped herself just in time; that would be suicide—this was supposed to look like an accident. Instead, she grabbed Lucy’s hair and banged her head hard against the stone wall of the staircase, desperate to subdue her cries. The force of the blow splattered hot liquid all over the delicate paintwork, but at last the girl was quiet and Celia looked for a pulse, feeling so sick with relief that she remained oblivious to the injuries on her own hands and lower arms where the cocoa had made contact with her skin. Lucy was alive, but only barely, and Celia knew enough about burns to be sure that the shock would kill her in a few hours, long before she regained consciousness. As the panic subsided, her head cleared and she reached down to pull one of Lucy’s shoelaces undone. Behind her, she could hear people hurrying up from the foyer and down from the drawing room; satisfied that it would do no good, she turned and screamed for someone to fetch help from the College of Nursing.

‘What happened after Amelia Sach’s execution?’ Penrose asked. ‘Where did you go?’

‘We moved around a lot at first—Kilburn, Stockwell, the East End, but somehow people always found out who we were, or at least who Jacob was. It seemed like there was no one who didn’t know about that trial, and they tormented him, as if he’d been behind it all. They threatened him in the streets, drove him out of any job he tried to hang on to. Sometimes they’d leave stuff at the house—kids’ clothes and old news-papers. Once we came back from the pub and found a baby doll with a rope round its neck on the doorstep. All because that bitch was never satisfied and couldn’t see what she had already. As the years went on, people forgot about us and moved on to some other poor bastard. It got easier for us then, but the damage was already done.’

‘How involved was Jacob in what was going on?’

‘He wasn’t,’ she said quickly. ‘Oh, he knew about it all right—he wasn’t stupid. But like I said, he loved her. When he couldn’t get her to stop, he just shut it out. Most men would have come down hard on her, forced her to do what she was told and remember her place, but not Jacob—he turned all that resentment in on himself instead. Sometimes I think that’s what I was to him—a punishment, a second-rate version of what he’d lost.’

‘So why did you stay with him?’

‘How many options do you think I had? I was nineteen and unmarried, with a bastard to bring up—the sort of fool who made the Amelia Sachs of this world possible. And it didn’t take him long to saddle me with more children and make sure I couldn’t go anywhere.’ Her tone was scornful, but she softened slightly when she added: ‘Anyway, it’s taken years for me to work out what was going on. You don’t realise when you’re young, do you? We were bound together by what happened in Finchley, for better or worse.’ She laughed bitterly to herself. ‘And in sickness rather than in health. I thought I loved him.’

‘Is that why you gave such damning evidence against his wife?’ She glared at him, but said nothing. ‘Surely what you said about Jacob also applies to you, Miss Edwards? You weren’t stupid. You must have known how Amelia Sach made her money.’

‘Which crime are you putting me on trial for, Inspector?’

It was a fair point, but Penrose was not about to admit that. ‘I’m not putting you on trial for anything, Miss Edwards. I’m just trying to establish what happened all those years ago and assess its relevance to this investigation. Marjorie discovered something that got her killed. We know from another witness that the information came from her father, and that she had checked it out herself and found it to be true. It’s reasonable to assume that the secret which made her vulnerable is connected to your family’s past history, and the only person I can think of who would care about protecting that secret now is you.’ He paused, and she stared at him defiantly. ‘You tell me you’re innocent, so now I have to go back over the facts to see who else might kill to keep the past in its place. Jacob’s daughter, Lizzie—she was adopted by a couple in service in Sussex, I believe.’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know who they were. It was all done in such a hurry, and Jacob wanted a clean start so he insisted on not being told the details. Some prison warder sorted it out.’

‘The same prison warder who came to see you during the war to tell you that Lizzie had died.’

‘Lizzie’s dead?’

She seemed genuinely shocked and saddened by this, and the contrast with her attitude to Marjorie threw Penrose for a second. ‘You know she is,’ he said, confused. ‘Celia Bannerman came to tell you when you were in Essex.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nobody told us anything about Lizzie from the moment she was taken away.’

‘Well, she told Jacob. He must have kept it from you.’

‘Why would he do that? I tell you, this Bannerman woman never came near us. Apart from anything else, we weren’t in Essex during the war.’

Thinking back, Penrose realised it was he who had said Essex, although Celia Bannerman hadn’t corrected him. Perhaps she hadn’t heard, or simply thought it insignificant. Even so, he couldn’t see what Nora Edwards stood to gain by lying about it. ‘When did you go to Essex?’ he asked.

‘January 1919, straight after Jacob came out of Pentonville. He did a four-year stretch for assault which conveniently coincided with the war. He was a bit old to fight, but they were getting desperate so he thought he’d make sure.’

Essex and Pentonville were difficult places to confuse, Penrose thought, but he couldn’t see why Bannerman would lie about it, either. Whether or not she had broken the news of Lizzie Sach’s death to her father made no difference to anything, except perhaps her own conscience. ‘Can you think of anyone else who knew your past history?’ he asked.

‘No. In my experience, when anyone found out about it, they couldn’t wait to throw it in your face, so I think I’d know.’

‘Your first child—what happened to her?’ he asked.

‘Him,’ she corrected, and Penrose reproached himself for forgetting that not everything in Josephine’s manuscript was fact. ‘I don’t know. Jacob made me give him up. When he said we’d make a clean start, he meant it.’

Whatever the truth of her life was, Penrose could see why Edwards was bitter. As he understood it, she had withstood a great deal of pressure from Sach and Walters to keep her baby, not to mention the social ostracism which she faced as an unmarried mother, only to lose her child to another man’s selfish guilt. Was that why her relationship with her other children had been so strained, he wondered? Because they reminded her of what she had given up and the man who had made her do it? Just as he was about to ask, there was a knock at the door. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Sir,’ Waddingham said nervously, ‘but there’s an urgent phone call for you at the desk. It’s about Lucy Peters.’

‘Hardly bloody urgent, Constable,’ Penrose said impatiently. ‘Sergeant Fallowfield gave me that message half an hour ago.’

‘No, Sir, this is a different one. The girl’s had an accident on the stairs, and they don’t know if she’ll pull through.’