Two for Sorrow

Chapter Fifteen

Penrose glanced through the small window of the interview room where Celia Bannerman was waiting for him. She seemed calm now, with no trace of the frenzied anger that had prompted her attack on Wyles, and, when he opened the door, she simply lifted her face and gave him a steady, faintly scornful stare. He sat down opposite her, Fallowfield next to him, and took two pieces of paper from the file in front of him.

‘Before we start, Miss Bannerman, I understand that you’ve chosen not to have any legal representation present during this questioning. It’s my duty to advise you against that, and to ask you to reconsider.’

‘I’m my own counsel, Inspector. I’ve never relied on anyone else for help, and I have no intention of starting now.’

‘Very well. You have already been charged with the attempted murder of a police officer. This interview relates to the murders of Marjorie Baker and Jacob Sach—also known as Joseph Baker—on Friday 22 November at 66 St Martin’s Lane.’

Before he could continue, Bannerman interrupted him, showing no more sign of agitation now than when he had sat down at the Cowdray Club to question her as a witness. ‘I imagine you have no proof of my involvement with those murders, Inspector, or that little stunt with your policewoman wouldn’t have been necessary.’

She was absolutely right, of course: there was no evidence as yet to place her in St Martin’s Lane on Friday night, or to prove that Lucy’s fall had been anything other than an accident. A meticulous search of her living accommodation had revealed nothing of any significance, but Penrose never expected it to: one look around her office had told him that she was not the sort of woman who left her life lying around for others to read. He had one more gamble up his sleeve, though, and he chose his next words cautiously, careful to avoid a lie: ‘That may have been true last night, Miss Bannerman, but I’m pleased to say that things are very different this morning. Perhaps you’ve forgotten Lucy Peters? She’s only a servant, I know, and probably not very important in the scheme of things as you see it, but she was close to Marjorie Baker and the two of them shared some very interesting information.’

She laughed, but he was encouraged by the first flicker of doubt in her eyes. ‘You’re bluffing, of course. People with mouths as badly scalded as Lucy’s are incapable of talking, no matter how interesting the information they have.’

‘Indeed. But they can write things down.’ He let the suggestion sink in, then pushed the two letters across the table towards her. ‘These notes, one written by Miss Baker and found in your desk, and one by WPC Wyles, refer to a secret in your past which you would prefer to forget. Would you care to tell me what that is, Miss Bannerman?’

She stared at him for a long time. ‘You’re talking to a dead woman, Inspector,’ she said eventually.

Her voice was soft, but the calm acceptance of something too horrific for most people to contemplate unnerved him. ‘I’m glad you can look at your fate so stoically,’ he said, ‘particularly as you have such an intimate understanding of what the process of justice involves.’

Bannerman smiled, and settled back in her chair. ‘That wasn’t quite what I meant, but do go on. Why don’t you tell me what you think you know about my life?’

Refusing to let her condescension frustrate him this time, Penrose said: ‘With pleasure. Let’s start thirty years ago, when you left Holloway and moved on to your new job in Leeds. By that time, you were involved with a former prisoner called Eleanor Vale. Vale had attacked you in Holloway, but you were young and dedicated to your work, and you genuinely believed that you could rehabilitate her and turn her life around. You meant well, but your efforts were misguided,’ he continued, satisfied to see that his condescension was beginning to irritate her. ‘Not content with forgiveness, you took her into your home, and by the time you realised your mistake, Vale had become so dependent on you that it was impossible to free yourself of her. The only way out, as far as you could see, was to leave her behind once and for all, so you accepted a position in Yorkshire and made sure that she was unable to follow you. Eleanor Vale made the ultimate sacrifice for your career. She died for it.’

When he had finished, she began to applaud. ‘You tell a good story, Inspector, and a far more accurate one than your friend. Accurate, except for one important detail: Eleanor Vale isn’t dead.’

Her words threw Penrose for a moment: if Vale was still alive, the whole foundation of his case was destroyed. Why would Bannerman start to kill so suddenly if not to hide a past crime? As he struggled to make sense of what she was saying, she stared at him impatiently, incensed by his confusion. ‘Someone like Celia Bannerman could never have killed Eleanor Vale. Do you understand that?’ She slammed her hand hard down on the table, making him flinch. The force of the blow must have damaged skin which was already burnt and sore from Saturday, and he saw a trickle of blood seep out from beneath the bandage, but she seemed oblivious to the pain. ‘Do you understand that, Inspector, or do I have to spell it out for you? Celia Bannerman did not kill Eleanor Vale. Eleanor Vale killed Celia Bannerman. She pushed her under a tube train, to be precise, and walked away with her life.’

Penrose heard Fallowfield draw his breath in sharply, and suddenly he understood exactly why he had found it so difficult to reconcile the compassionate prison warder whom Ethel Stuke had described with the woman he was convinced was a killer. ‘You’re Eleanor Vale, aren’t you?’ he said, shaking his head in disbelief, ‘and you’ve lived as Celia Bannerman for thirty years. How the hell have you managed it? She was a respected prison officer and a qualified nurse with a great future ahead of her.’

‘And Eleanor Vale was just a convict? A baby farmer with no right to any other identity, branded with one mistake for life? I was a qualified nurse, too, Inspector. I had a future, and those thirty years were only the life that I would have had if circumstances had been different.’

‘You mean if you hadn’t served two years’ hard labour for leaving babies to die in railway carriages.’

‘Don’t even begin to talk about things you don’t understand. I did what was necessary to survive. All my life, I’ve done that. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less.’

‘And why was it so necessary to kill the woman who tried to help you?’

‘Help me? She picked me up and dropped me. How do you think it feels to be taken on as a project until something better comes along? To spend your life being grateful, only to find out that it’s all been for nothing? Yes, I was dependent on her, as you put it, but only because she made me that way. And if I was that disposable to her, why should she be any different to me?’

‘So you planned to kill her.’

‘No, not at all. It had never occurred to me that I was capable of killing anybody. I begged her to change her mind and either stay or take me with her, but she said it was impossible. On the morning she was due to leave, I watched her pack her whole life into two suitcases and stow away all her private papers and precious letters of reference, and I walked her to the underground station. It was the middle of August, and so hot in those tunnels. The platform was busier than usual because London was full of summer visitors, and I remember feeling more and more desperate as we waited. Even then, I don’t think I’d have done anything about it, but when we heard the train coming and she turned to kiss me goodbye, she looked at me and she said: “However will you manage without me?” ’ She rubbed a hand across her eyes, and Penrose could see that she was making an effort to suppress a thirty-year-old rage. ‘I’m afraid that was more than I could tolerate, Inspector—not just the smug, self-righteous arrogance of it all, but her complete inability to understand what she’d done. I must have pushed her, because the next thing I knew, she was under the train and people were screaming, but I have absolutely no recollection of that moment. I was eaten up with anger and resentment, and I just wanted to be rid of her. Please don’t misunderstand me—I’m not trying to make excuses, and I’m not sorry for what I did. She played with my life, then taunted me with my own weakness, and I killed her for it. But if she’s looking down now, she’ll see exactly how I’ve managed without her.’

Penrose stared doubtfully at her; in his heart, he believed what she was saying to be true, but it was an enormous risk to take, and he said so.

‘What did I have to lose? I picked up those cases automatically and walked away, half expecting someone to come after me, but it was too crowded for anyone to have noticed what happened. I suppose I was in shock, because I walked around for ages before it occurred to me that I had a chance, that I was holding the possibility of another life in my hands. I went back to that house one last time to pack up Eleanor Vale’s things, and I sent them to a charity—Celia would have approved of that, and most of the clothes were her cast-offs anyway. Then I went north.’

‘And what about the death you left behind?’ Penrose had been involved in enough clear-up operations on the underground to know that the usual identification of a body might not have been possible; during the last few years, the country’s dire economic situation had led thirty or forty people a year to view the trains as a way out of their despair, and many of the stations had begun to install deep pits between the tracks to minimise their chances of success and to keep those still alive safe while the train was being moved. Even so, something tangible was usually found at the scene. ‘Were you really so confident that there was nothing on the body which would expose the lie?’ he asked.

‘Everything that testified to Celia Bannerman was with me, in her luggage. The one thing she was wearing that was remotely personal was a locket I’d given her when she first took me in; it was the only thing of any value I had to give at the time. She didn’t wear it very often, but she made a big thing of putting it on that day—asked me to fasten it for her, as if I’d feel better about being abandoned if she left me wearing my jewellery.’

‘Your family—didn’t they wonder what had happened to you?’

‘They disowned me as soon as I was arrested. I went to them when I got out of prison, but they turned me away. Celia was all I had, God help me.’

‘But surely someone must have missed her?’

‘The only people she associated with were connected to her work,’ she said, echoing what Ethel Stuke had told him. ‘Even I was a mission, as it turned out. And nobody who knew her professionally had time to realise she wasn’t there any more; as far as they were concerned, Celia Bannerman left one job and reported when she was supposed to for the next. No one in Leeds knew what she looked like. If someone from Holloway or the hospitals we were in before had turned up, that would have been it, but they didn’t; Leeds was a long way from London in those days, and it worked in my favour that she’d tried to get as far away from me as possible. Of course, I made sure I kept a low profile for the first few years,’ she added, smiling. ‘Very self-effacing was our Celia—she never wanted the limelight, and she always refused any public recognition for what she did. A living saint, you might say.’

‘Until now. That was a very stupid slip, Miss Vale—allowing yourself to be photographed in that way. No wonder you were so angry with Marjorie. I suppose she paid for your arrogance.’ She said nothing, but the look in her eyes and the tight clenching of her hands told him that he was right, and he guessed that the rage which had led to such a spiteful murder had remained with her in the days since Marjorie’s death. ‘I can see how you killed Celia Bannerman and got away with it,’ he said quietly. ‘What I still find astonishing is that you managed to live as her.’

‘I had all I needed to be Celia Bannerman in those two cases and in here,’ she said, tapping the side of her head. ‘She may have had the references, but I certainly had the qualities to live up to them, and in all my life I’ve never let anyone down the way she did. What I start, I finish.’

‘As Marjorie Baker learned to her cost. She and her father knew all this, I suppose.’

‘Good God, no. Don’t be ridiculous—you give them far too much credit. I doubt that either of them had ever heard of Eleanor Vale. They knew enough, though. Marjorie’s father saw the photograph in the Tatler she took home, and he told her I wasn’t Celia Bannerman.’

‘Because he remembered the woman he’d given his child to?’ She nodded. ‘And that’s why you lied about going to see him during the war—to give yourself some sort of continuity with the person you were pretending to be. But Marjorie didn’t trust her father’s word—she had a lot to lose, and she wanted to make sure that what he said was true.’

‘Yes. I’m afraid Ethel Stuke sealed Marjorie’s fate as effectively as if she’d hanged her.’

At last, Penrose understood what Stuke had said that seemed so conclusive to Marjorie. ‘She knew you’d never been attacked, didn’t she? She’d handled your fittings at Motley, and she knew there was no scar.’ It was a simple, feminine thing, but irrefutable, and Marjorie could have had no idea of the danger she was putting herself in by using her knowledge. Her death, he realised now, was a vicious, sadistic parody of the means by which she had gained that fatal piece of information. The peculiarly female intimacy of the dress fitting had come back to haunt her.

Vale nodded approvingly at him. ‘Yes. She was measuring me for silk and piercing me with steel. The letter came just before the final fitting.’

‘She wanted money?’

‘Of course. Nothing more imaginative than that. All the women I’ve taught and nurtured, all the people I’ve fought for to ensure they get a decent working life—and that stupid little bitch wanted everything handed to her on a plate. When I went to Motley on Friday afternoon, I promised her she’d have what she asked for later that night. I kept my word.’

‘And you got her to make sure that her father was there as well?’

‘No. I knew nothing about her father until he turned up drunk at Motley. Marjorie hadn’t mentioned him or how she’d come by her information in the first place, and I certainly had no idea who was in her family. He was waiting for her outside, and he caught me leaving the building. He slurred something about seeing me in that photograph, and that’s when he told me how he knew the real Celia Bannerman.’

‘Did he find out what you’d done to his daughter before you pushed him down the stairs?’

‘Does that really matter?’

Penrose looked at her for a long time before speaking again, astonished at how little remorse she seemed capable of. ‘Don’t you regret any of it?’ he asked eventually. ‘If you could go back to that underground platform, would you really do it all again?’

‘Yes, if it enabled everything that I’ve achieved during the years in between. People aren’t good or bad, Inspector—their actions are, and everyone is capable of both. Take Amelia Sach—a good mother, by all accounts, yet capable of destroying that sacred bond in others to advance her own position. And Celia Bannerman, of course—such an asset to society, so selfless in her efforts to help people, and yet she dropped her little rehabilitation project like a stone the minute a better offer came along. Ambition—that’s what it was about. That’s what it’s always about. Everyone in public life says it’s the work that counts, and what does it matter who does it—but deep down we all want the credit for our little piece of progress.’

‘Even when those achievements are undermined by the very violence on which they’re built? What about the people whose lives you’ve destroyed?’

‘A convict who would have been in and out of jail for the rest of her life? A drunk who made no contribution to society and couldn’t even keep his wife from the gallows?’

‘A police officer?’

‘Who was herself involved in an act of deception.’

‘You’re surely not comparing that with the lie you’ve lived for thirty years?’

‘I’m not the one making any judgements. I’m saying that we all fool ourselves and others to get by. Some of us even making a living out of it.’

The barbed reference to Josephine wasn’t lost on Penrose, but he refused to be drawn by it. ‘Let’s talk about Lucy Peters,’ he said, confident now that they were far enough along with the questioning for his own deception not to matter. ‘Did she know that killing Marjorie wasn’t enough for you? That you had to torture and humiliate her first?’

Vale looked at him warily. ‘Surely you know what I said to Lucy if you’ve been exchanging letters at her bedside?’

Penrose just smiled. ‘Eleanor Vale, you will now be formally charged with the murders of Celia Bannerman, Marjorie Baker, Jacob Sach and Lucy Peters, and taken to a …’

‘You bastard,’ Vale shrieked, standing up and shoving the table hard into his stomach. She lashed out at his face, but Fallowfield was too quick for her, catching her by the wrist as her arm came down. She screamed in agony as the sergeant’s fingers tightened around the blistered skin, but somehow she still managed to pull away, her rage exploding in a stream of abuse as she grabbed hold of a chair and went for them again. This time, though, Penrose was expecting the attack: he moved to one side, and the chair crashed harmlessly into the door while he held Vale’s arms behind her back, pinning her against the wall for long enough to give Fallowfield time to get the handcuffs on. Later, he would regret showing any emotion at all, but as he walked her into the corridor and gave instructions for her to be taken downstairs, his anger was the mirror image of hers: ‘I hope you rot in hell for what you’ve done,’ he said.

Josephine sat at the front desk of New Scotland Yard, wondering what Archie wanted. She had been surprised to get his message, but relieved to have any excuse to get out of the Cowdray Club for an hour or two. The atmosphere there was unbearable: crime reporters given a tip-off by their society-page colleagues were the latest addition to Cavendish Square, and the arrival of the mortuary van to remove Lucy’s body was an image that no one was likely to forget, but the sadness ran deeper even than that. Everywhere she looked, Josephine saw her own sense of betrayal reflected in the faces of the other members; a professional mourning ran throughout the building, a feeling amongst the women that they had battled governments and legislation for so many years, only to see what they had worked for tarnished from within. They had been let down by one of their own, and it left them all feeling angry and foolish and guilty; personally, Josephine couldn’t remember a time when her trust had been more comprehensively destroyed.

When Archie came down to fetch her, he looked pale and exhausted. ‘I won’t bother to ask how you are,’ she said. ‘You’ll only lie, and anyway, I can see it in your face.’

‘Let’s just say it’s been an eventful night.’

‘How’s your policewoman?’

She saw him smile at her phrasing of the question. ‘She’ll be fine. She’s shaken, obviously, and she took a nasty cut to the chest, but thank God for the College of Nursing. Miriam Sharpe was wonderful.’

There was so much she wanted to ask him about what had gone on overnight, but she knew it would put him in an impossible position. ‘So why have I been summoned to the Yard?’

‘Come with me a minute.’ He led her out on to Victoria Embankment and pointed across the road.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘Do you see the woman on the bench over there?’ She nodded. ‘That’s Nora Edwards.’

Josephine stared in astonishment. ‘What’s she doing there?’

‘We released her straight away last night and took her home, but she was back a few hours later. I noticed her when it started to get light, but God knows how long she’d already been sitting there. I can only suppose it’s because she knows we’ve got her daughter’s killer here.’

‘I thought you said she didn’t care about Marjorie?’

‘Either I was wrong or she was. And going back to that place on her own with everything that’s happened can’t be easy. She’s had enough gossip and prejudice in her life, and now people are going to start on her all over again.’ Josephine knew exactly what he was going to say, and she tried not to look as horrified as she felt. ‘Anyway, I thought you might want to talk to her. I can’t arrange it—it wouldn’t be right now—but there’s nothing to stop you going over there and striking up a conversation.’

Josephine was torn between grabbing the only chance she would ever have to speak to someone who had been at Claymore House, and a cowardly reluctance to put herself through what was bound to be an ordeal. ‘I’m sure she’s been through enough without an interrogation from me,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Anyway, I was going to drop the whole thing. It’s too painful now; too many people have been hurt.’

‘Have you told your publisher that?’ he asked cynically. ‘You’ve got the story of the decade. It’s up to you, though: if you don’t think it’s appropriate, that’s fine, but I didn’t want you to miss the chance to satisfy your own curiosity, whether you go ahead with the book or not.’ As she hesitated, he added: ‘Just don’t tell her that I sent you. She’s hardly likely to be open with you if she knows you’re a friend of the person who’s spent the last two days accusing her of killing her daughter and her husband.’

‘So how will I explain who I am?’

‘You’ll think of something.’ He smiled, recognising that she had made her decision. ‘Come and see me before you go, and let me know how you get on. I’ll tell the chap on the desk to expect you.’

Josephine crossed the road, and played for time by buying two cups of coffee from Westminster Pier. She went towards the bench, but lost courage and walked straight past, then realised how ridiculous her behaviour would seem if she finally did announce herself. Before she could change her mind again, she retraced her footsteps and stopped in front of Edwards. ‘This is going to sound very odd coming from a complete stranger,’ she said quietly, ‘but I’m so sorry about Marjorie.’

The woman looked up at her in astonishment. ‘What do you know about it?’

She must have been in her fifties, and it took Josephine a second or two to remove herself from the moment in which she had been so absorbed and add thirty-odd years to the Nora Edwards of her story. Feeling self-conscious as Edwards continued to stare at her, she held out the coffee. ‘Marjorie worked for some friends of mine,’ she said. It sounded feeble, even to her, but it was the best that she could do. ‘Can I sit down for a minute?’ Edwards shrugged, and took the cup. ‘I never met your daughter, but I gather she was very talented.’

‘Was she? You know more than I do. Everyone seems to be talking about someone I don’t recognise.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘And no one talks about Joe at all, as if his life counted for nothing.’ Josephine was silent: it was true, she thought—Marjorie’s father had hardly been mentioned over the last few days, except with regard to his true identity. They had all been happy to condemn Celia’s valuing of one life above another, but everyone betrayed their own innate prejudices at a time of grief. ‘Who are you, anyway?’ Edwards asked.

‘My name’s Josephine, and I realise how this may look, but I’m writing a book about Amelia Sach and Annie Walters.’ Edwards put the coffee down and started to get up, but Josephine caught her arm. ‘I knew Lizzie,’ she said. ‘We were at a school in Birmingham together, and I was there when she died. It seemed to me that she was another victim of Amelia’s crimes and all the publicity that followed, but there were plenty of other people whose lives were ruined by what happened—you and your husband more than most, I imagine. That’s what the book’s about. If you don’t want to talk to me, I understand and I’ll leave you alone—but let me be the one to go, not you. Please, sit down.’

‘Just passing, were you?’ Edwards asked sarcastically, glancing back towards Scotland Yard, but some of the suspicion had gone from her face and Josephine sensed that she’d chosen the right approach.

‘Something like that. Look, Mrs Baker, I don’t presume to know anything about your life or your relationship with your husband, but it must feel very lonely to be the only one left who knows what it was like to live through that time. I imagine an experience like that creates a bond which is difficult to break, for good or bad.’

‘It’s broken now, that’s for sure.’ Her tone was still aggressive, but she sat down again and looked at Josephine with a new interest. ‘It was a relief at first, but I was stupid to think that it could ever be over. You’re obviously clever enough to say the right things, but I suppose it’s Amelia you really want to know about, rather than Joe.’

‘Is it possible to know about one without the other?’ Josephine asked. ‘Surely she made him whatever he became. You must have felt as if she were still in the room with you all these years.’

‘It was finding out what happened to her that really destroyed him,’ she said, so softly that Josephine could hardly hear her. ‘We might have been all right eventually if it hadn’t been for that, but he always blamed himself for allowing Amelia to carry on with what she was doing until it was too late. When he heard about the hanging, it was as if she’d come back to torture him herself. He never got rid of that image once he knew about it, awake or asleep.’ That was understandable, Josephine thought, remembering how she had felt as she stared at Holloway’s brand new execution shed: there could be few things more horrific than imagining those last terrible moments for someone you loved. ‘I suppose you’ve been told the official version,’ Edwards continued bitterly. ‘Everything mercifully quick, Amelia calm and dignified until the last—an efficient job all round, in other words.’ She laughed scornfully. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘How do you know?’

‘One of the hangmen got himself into a lot of trouble after the execution, drinking and brawling and shooting his mouth off. They say that hanging Sach and Walters was the start of it all, but I don’t know how true that is. Anyway, Joe got to hear the rumours that were going round. Of all the ways that people found to taunt us after what had happened, that was the most damaging. Like I said, he never got over it.’

‘And what were the rumours?’

‘The whole thing was a bloody mess. None of the officials at the prison were used to executions, and they had no idea how to cope. Amelia collapsed screaming as soon as the hangman and a couple of warders dragged her up and told her to pull herself together. Then they brought Walters through her cell to get her to the ropes, and that set her off again.’ Edwards shook her head, and Josephine wondered how she had lived with this knowledge herself, knowing that it was her evidence which had effectively sent Sach to the gallows in the first place. ‘Mad with fear, she was, and Walters couldn’t have been calmer.’

‘I can’t help feeling that a calm woman going to the gallows is the insane one.’

Edwards nodded in agreement. ‘Amelia couldn’t even walk the few paces to the scaffold,’ she said. ‘She was helpless and barely conscious, and the warders had to drag her there. There was no last-minute peace before she died, no standing calmly on the trapdoor waiting for someone to pull a lever. They virtually had to throw her down the hole.’

How could anyone ever say that death was instantaneous, Josephine thought, trying to imagine the terror that Amelia Sach must have felt, the humiliation of dying so close to the woman she had grown to hate, knowing that—at the last moment—their roles had been reversed and she was now the weak one. ‘They must have been the longest few minutes of her life,’ she said. Glancing to her right, she saw how deeply the story had affected Edwards, despite the effort she had made not to show it; God knows what it had done to Jacob Sach’s mental state. ‘And you knew all this at the time?’ she asked gently.

‘Soon afterwards. Everyone made sure we did. I suppose the hangman was only trying to ease his own conscience by talking about it, but people should think about how it will affect those left behind before they open their mouth. Amelia might have been dead, but we weren’t.’

Josephine couldn’t decide whether this last comment was directed at her or not. ‘No wonder there was such a backlash against hanging women,’ she said.

‘Some women, perhaps. No one worried when it was just drunks and prostitutes who got desperate, but the minute that middle-class women started getting convicted for murder, people started to say that hanging was wrong.’ She shrugged. ‘I didn’t notice any clamour of indignation on Walters’s behalf, not that I’m defending her.’

‘Was Jacob—Joe—the reason you stayed in that house, even after Amelia tried to get you to give up your own child?’

‘I wasn’t exactly flooded with offers,’ she said, and there was a trace of the old sarcasm back in her voice. ‘I had nowhere else to go. But yes, I would have been sorry to leave him, not that I could compete with her in his eyes.’

‘Did he ever ask you to lie to save her?’ The fact that Jacob Sach had spent the rest of his life with the woman who testified so convincingly against the wife he supposedly loved was one of the many things which Josephine had never understood about the case. ‘And would you have done it if he had?’

‘I offered to, but he said no. He said he didn’t know how else to stop her doing what she was doing.’ She noticed Josephine’s expression, and added quickly: ‘I don’t mean he wanted her to hang—of course he didn’t. But neither of them ever believed it would come to that, and Joe thought that if she had to go to prison for a bit, it would frighten her so much that she’d knock it all on the head and they could go back to the way they were, just the three of them. I’m not trying to make excuses for him: he was a bastard to me and a bastard to his kids, and if he hadn’t been such a waste of space, then perhaps Marjorie would still be alive. But nothing would ever convince him that he hadn’t put the noose around her neck himself.’

Josephine hesitated, wanting to move the conversation from Jacob Sach to his wife, but reluctant to aggravate Edwards. ‘You must have got to know Amelia very well,’ she began cautiously.

‘I was her servant, not her friend.’

Precisely, Josephine thought: if someone ever wanted an accurate picture of her, they’d be much better off talking to her maid in Inverness than to Lydia or even Archie. ‘Even so, you lived under her roof. What was she like?’

She realised that it was a simplistic question, but there was no point in trying to dress it up: Edwards would simply see straight through her. It seemed to take her a long time to decide how to answer, or even whether to answer at all, but eventually she said: ‘You could say that she was kindness itself. When I turned up on her doorstep, I was seven months pregnant and desperate. There was nobody I could turn to, and I knew nothing about having a baby. Have you got kids?’ Josephine shook her head. ‘Then you won’t understand what it’s like to feel trapped by your own body. She took me in and looked after me, she explained what was going to happen when the baby’s time came, and she made sure that I wasn’t frightened any more. When I think about Amelia Sach, I think about giving birth to my first child. She was so gentle, so caring, and so in control—it’s the only time in my life that I’ve ever felt truly safe. And she was a devoted mother. Lizzie adored her. So did my son. Nothing was too much trouble for her where they were concerned.’

Josephine had expected to hear that Sach was a good mother, but she had never dreamt that Edwards might regard the woman as some kind of sanctuary. She barely had time to consider the information before Edwards continued: ‘Or you could say that she was an obsessive, manipulative bitch who set out to destroy innocent lives and made a half-decent job of it. I watched her with those other girls, you know, and she was so protective until the moment the baby was born; after that, there was no warmth, no compassion—just a cold, detached process until the kid was safely out of the house. She held those babies as though they were already dead.’

Edwards must have seen the confusion in Josephine’s eyes, because she added: ‘There’s no sense in trying to work out the truth from what I’ve just told you. The point is, you can never know what Amelia Sach was like because you weren’t there. Just ask yourself—how would you feel if someone wrote a book about you in fifty years’ time? Would that be an accurate picture? Would I know what you were really like if I read it?’ She finished her coffee and put the cup down. ‘Don’t think I’m trying to put you off what you’re doing—it makes no odds to me, because things can’t get any worse. But if I were you, I’d forget all about it. It’ll only ever be half a story.’

Josephine looked at the woman she had cast as the pivotal figure in the Sach and Walters story, and saw only another casualty. ‘What will you do now?’ she asked.

‘Bury them and move on. Find somewhere else to hide and live the lie again until someone else finds out.’

Josephine stood to leave, but this time it was her turn to be held back. ‘You said you knew Lizzie,’ Edwards said, and there was an uncomplicated affection in her voice which hadn’t been there when she spoke of anyone else. ‘I didn’t know anything about her death until the police told me. What happened?’

Josephine hesitated, then chose the half of the story which was likely to give Edwards peace rather than further torment. ‘She had an accident in a gym. It was a physical training college, and she was practising on one of the ropes.’

‘But she was happy? I’ve never really forgiven myself for letting her or my son go just because Joe wanted a new start.’

‘Yes, she was very happy. From what I understand, she’d had a fabulous childhood and a lot of love. As hard as it must have been for you to give her up, she never suffered because of it. I’m sure it was the same for your son.’

Uneasy with the lie, she left Nora Edwards to her thoughts and headed back towards Scotland Yard. Archie must have been watching them, because he was already waiting for her on the steps. They walked in the other direction along the Embankment, and found a bench overlooking the river. ‘How did you get on?’ he asked.

‘I think I learned more than I ever wanted to know,’ she admitted, and told him about Amelia Sach’s execution. ‘I’m not sure I want to live in a world where that can happen.’

‘I know what you mean, but if you try to take responsibility for something like that, you’ll go insane. Believe me, I’ve lost enough sleep over it in my time.’

‘We’re all responsible, though, aren’t we? We’ve just come through a general election, for God’s sake, and we’re supposed to live in a democracy.’ She waved a hand in the direction of parliament. ‘If that lot can’t sort out a more humane way of punishing people, isn’t that my problem? Shouldn’t there be basic rights for everyone?’

‘And Marjorie? What about her rights?’

Josephine sighed. ‘I know what you’re saying, and I don’t have any arguments to that one.’ She waited for a pause in the traffic over Westminster Bridge, and then asked: ‘Has Celia admitted everything?’

‘Yes and no. I’m afraid it’s rather more complicated than that. This is strictly confidential, but the woman we have in custody isn’t Celia Bannerman.’

‘What?’ Josephine looked at him as though he’d lost his mind. ‘Of course she’s Celia Bannerman. I should know—I spent enough time with the woman at Anstey.’

‘With the woman, yes, but not with Celia Bannerman.’

She listened, incredulous, as Archie explained. ‘So you’re telling me that half her life has been a lie?’

‘In the fundamental sense of her identity, yes; the personality and the achievements aren’t an act, though—they’re who she really is, as she went to great lengths to point out to me. We’re waiting for Ethel Stuke to get here from Suffolk to confirm what she’s saying, but I’ve no doubt that she’s Eleanor Vale.’

‘But what about the information she gave me for the book? How could she have known all that?’

‘She’d spent enough time in Holloway to know how prison worked, and she lived with Celia Bannerman—they must have talked. I had another look at what you’d written, though; if you analyse it very carefully, there’s not much there that isn’t generally available, and as you’ve just found out yourself, a lot of it isn’t even true.’ He accepted a cigarette gratefully. ‘It’s that speech I can’t get out of my head, you know. All that talk about the nation’s children, and she ends up being a bloody baby farmer.’

Josephine stared out across the river to the crescent-shaped façade of County Hall. ‘Do you think she had anything to do with Lizzie Sach’s death?’ she asked quietly. The thought that Lizzie might somehow have discovered the truth about her mother’s execution as well as her crimes had haunted her from the moment Edwards described it to her.

‘I don’t know. The police were satisfied at the time that it was a straightforward suicide, if you can ever have such a thing.’

‘I’m not saying that Celia killed her—well, not Celia, but you know who I mean. I can’t think of her as anybody else. I just wondered if she might have had good reason to want Lizzie dead—she was a link with the past, after all. She might have seen the real Celia Bannerman.’

‘She was four years old, Josephine. I doubt she’d have remembered anything that could threaten Vale’s lie.’

‘I was thinking about what you said on the way to Suffolk, though, and you were right: the natural thing for Lizzie to do when she first heard about her mother was to seek confirmation from the woman who had shown such an interest in her life—not take every detail on trust and hang herself in the gym. Wouldn’t you ask questions before you did something like that? What if Celia knew what she was going to do and didn’t try to stop her?’ He said nothing, but Josephine could see that he agreed. ‘Archie, Gerry’s life will never be settled as long as she believes that it was her fault, and only her fault, that Lizzie died. If there’s the slightest chance that Celia was in some way responsible, couldn’t you at least question her about it?’

‘I can’t guarantee I’ll be questioning her about anything else with the state she’s in at the moment,’ he admitted. ‘And the three recent deaths have to be my priority. I’m not even sure that I can get her for the murder of Celia Bannerman after all this time.’

‘I thought you said she’d confessed?’

‘She has, but we still need corroborative evidence if we’re to get a conviction, and she knows that.’

‘So what you’re trying to tell me, in the nicest possible way, is that you can only hang her once.’ She was quiet for a moment, trying to make sense of everything in her life that had been thrown into doubt over the last few days. ‘How far would she have gone, do you think?’

‘She’d have done whatever was necessary to protect the lie,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of that, at least.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go. Can I get Bill to drop you back at the club?’

‘No, I’d rather walk. I’ll be stuck on a train for long enough later.’

Archie looked surprised. ‘I thought you were staying until the weekend?’

‘Not any more—I’ve managed to get a sleeper for tonight.’ She stood up, hoping to avoid a long explanation. ‘London’s lost some of its loveliness for a bit, and I need to get away.’

He knew better than to try to change her mind. ‘Do you know when you’ll be back?’

‘Not at the moment.’

‘But you’ll call me when you do?’

‘Of course.’ She smiled, and bent to kiss him. ‘Perhaps you’ll have got those bloody boxes unpacked by then.’ She was almost at Westminster Bridge when she heard him call after her. ‘What did you say?’ she asked, shouting to make herself heard over the traffic.

‘I told you to think about yourself.’ He threw his cigarette stub on the ground and stood up. ‘Not me. Not Lydia. Not even your family. Just you.’