Two for Sorrow

Chapter Four

Josephine emerged from the newspaper room at the British Museum with her hands as covered in ink as her notebook, her mind full of the varying press accounts of the trial: the verbatim witness testimonies found in The Times; the lively opinions put forward by the Echo; and the Telegraph’s lengthy descriptive commentaries. Before leaving the building, she couldn’t resist straying for a moment into the Museum’s great domed Reading Room. She sat down at one of the leather-covered reading desks which extended like spokes from the circles of bookcases in the middle of the room and, while the reports were still fresh in her mind, summarised the most interesting aspects of the Sach and Walters case. She had no idea yet how the story would be told but, when she had finished, she was pleased to see that there was a compelling series of scenes to recreate. To a mind untrained in law, the trial and lack of evidence for the defence threw up a number of questions which she looked forward to talking through with Archie. Having read more about the case, though, it seemed that her original instinct had been a good one: it was the balance of power between the two women which would drive the novel, and the effect it had on those around them. The social circumstances of the time were interesting, too: she had been astonished at how many other accounts of child neglect, cruelty and abandonment she had found in the pages of the press without looking very hard for them. Celia had been right: Sach and Walters were certainly not unique in their crimes; she had identified at least four other baby farmers operating during the same period.

She walked out into a pleasant haze of winter sunshine and headed back to the Cowdray Club for lunch, her spirits lifted after the misery of the morning by the brisk freshness of the day. In fact, if the last week was anything to go by, November in London certainly didn’t deserve its bad press. It was cold, certainly, but the trees in Cavendish Square were still in leaf and, although the drift of gold that ran through the branches was a muted, poignant affair, there was no doubt that this month of scarlets and yellows held its own beauty.

‘Miss Tey! What a lovely surprise!’

Josephine glanced across the street and was astonished to see Archie’s detective sergeant, Bill Fallowfield, standing at the entrance to the club. Celia was with him and, judging by the impatient look on her face, he had broken off an important conversation to greet her.

‘The surprise is mutual, Bill,’ she said, smiling warmly. She had a soft spot for the sergeant, and admired the loyalty and good humour that—by Archie’s own admission—saw them both through the most difficult of times. ‘What brings you to this side of town? A spot of early Christmas shopping?’

‘I should be so lucky, Miss,’ he said. ‘No, I do all mine on Christmas Eve, I’m afraid.’

He stopped discreetly short of revealing his business at the club, and Josephine was careful to hide how much she knew. ‘The stealing?’ she asked, turning pointedly to Celia, who nodded. ‘Is it really that serious?’

‘I’m afraid so. Nothing very valuable has been taken, as I said, but that’s not the point. We can’t be seen to be lax about security, not if we want to maintain the reputation of the club. If word gets out about this, the membership is bound to suffer.’

‘We’ll do all we can to put a stop to it before it gets out of hand, Miss Bannerman, and what you’ve told me today has been very helpful.’ He turned to Josephine. ‘Inspector Penrose didn’t even tell me you were in London,’ he said, feigning indignation. ‘I’ll have to have a word with him when I get back to the Yard.’

Josephine looked guilty. ‘He didn’t know himself until last night, Bill. I had the chance to come down a day or two earlier than planned,’ she explained, hoping that she could rely on Celia not to be more specific, ‘and I’ve had a lot of work to catch up with.’

‘A book or a play?’ he asked cautiously.

‘A book,’ she said, knowing that this would please him. Fallowfield was a great fan of her novels and an avid reader of detective fiction in general, but he didn’t ‘hold’ with plays and privately considered that she was wasting her talents in writing them. ‘Actually, Bill,’ she added, looking at him thoughtfully, ‘you might be able to help me.’ Fallowfield was in his fifties, although he looked younger, and would know from experience what policing was like at the time she was investigating. ‘Do you know anything about the Finchley Baby Farmers?’

He looked intrigued. ‘Sach and Walters, you mean? Blimey, that takes me back. I haven’t heard their names mentioned in years.’

‘Takes you back?’ Josephine prompted, scarcely daring to hope.

‘Yes, Miss,’ he said. ‘It’s funny you should ask about them—I was in the car that took the Billingtons into Holloway the day before they hanged them.’

‘You drove the executioners into the prison?’ she asked, resisting the impulse to hug him.

‘Yes, with my sergeant at the time. There were always two of us on a job like that in case of any trouble. Thirty years ago or more, that must have been.’ He shook his head, as if he couldn’t imagine where the time had gone. ‘I hadn’t been in the force long, and it was one of the first jobs I was given—certainly the first job like that. I’ll never forget it.’

His words echoed Celia’s, and Josephine was struck by how many people—young, impressionable and just starting out in their careers—had been affected by the crimes of these two women. ‘Would you tell me about it when you’ve got time?’

‘Of course, Miss. I’d be glad to help, and I might be able to find you a few more people to talk to, as well—I’ve kept in touch with some of the lads from back then.’

Celia cleared her throat. ‘As long as the sergeant has some time left to concentrate on crimes that haven’t been solved yet,’ she said archly. ‘Petty theft isn’t as glamorous as baby farming, I know, but it seems a little more pressing to those whose belongings are at risk.’

Having delivered such a satisfactory parting shot, she went back into the club with a purposefulness that suggested others might also do well to get on with their work. Josephine and Bill looked at each other, and Bill raised an eyebrow. ‘Now why do I feel like I’m back at school?’ he asked.

‘Imagine how I feel,’ Josephine confided. ‘She really did teach me.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes, and she was Sach’s wardress in Holloway. In fact, it was her that got me started on all this. She was there at the execution.’

‘Crikey,’ Bill said, looking after Celia with a new respect. ‘That’ll teach me to assume that people who run posh clubs don’t know about the real world. It takes some guts, looking after someone in the condemned cell. Makes our part of the job look easy.’ He smiled at Josephine. ‘Have you been to Claymore House yet?’

‘Sach’s nursing home? No, not yet. It’s still there, then?’

‘Yes, although the area’s changed a fair bit. Listen, I’ve got a bit of business near Finchley, as it happens, and there’d be no harm in doing it this afternoon. How about I show you and we can talk on the way?’

Josephine could only imagine what Archie would say when he found out that she’d been sightseeing with his sergeant at a time when they were so busy, but it was too good a chance to miss. ‘On one condition,’ she said. ‘Lunch is on me.’

From the drawing-room window, Lucy watched as the policeman drove off with the woman who had walked in on her last night, and wondered how long it would be before they came for her. It was kind of Marjorie to look out for her, but nothing would ever come of it: Marjorie’s schemes always petered out, and Lucy didn’t much care what happened to her now anyway.

Every time she thought about her own child, a knife twisted, reopening old wounds. She could hardly remember anything about the day she had said goodbye—the weather, who else had been there, what she had said as she looked down at the little girl for the last time. The only thing she had to convince her that it really had happened was the pain, which refused to lessen with time. Everyone had said it was for the best, and her own voice had been lost amid a clamour of good intentions; she supposed they meant well, but they could never know how the knot of anger and resentment grew inside her, replacing what was lost, or how it moved and kicked and screamed every time she remembered.

‘What were the Billingtons like?’ Josephine asked as they drove through Kentish Town. ‘They were brothers, weren’t they?’

‘Yes, William and John—John was the youngster of the family, and there was another brother who was in the trade as well, but I never met him.’

‘It’s a real family business, isn’t it? Aren’t there several Pierrepoints doing it at the moment?’

‘Yes. Now you mention it, Henry Pierrepoint was the assistant for Sach and Walters. But it’s natural to keep it in the family, I suppose. Hanging’s a competitive business, although I’ve never understood that myself, and they all want to be number one: if you bring your sons in, you hold on to the top spot for as long as you want it. All the Billington boys were taught by their father. He was a bit before my time, but he was a rum character by all accounts—a barber originally, but they say he wanted the job so badly that he built a miniature scaffold in his own back yard to practise on.’ Fallowfield shook his head at the vagaries of human nature. ‘It was a bit more organised by the time that interests you. In fact, I think William was the first hangman to be properly trained.’

Josephine was horrified. ‘You mean they let people near a rope without any formal training before that?’

He nodded. ‘I suppose it was like any other profession. People observed the craft and learned on the job.’

‘You wouldn’t want to get an amateur when it was your turn, though, would you? And it must have been a terrifying thing to do for the first time—it’s not as if you could take another run at it if you got it wrong.’

‘No, and I dare say there were a few more accidents than anyone would like us to know about. But the Billington boys seemed to know what they were doing. Earnest chaps, they were—I can see them now: two pale-faced young men in dark suits with bowler hats, sitting quietly in the back of the car. They hardly said a word during the whole journey, but there was something calm and composed about them—you’d never have guessed what they were on their way to do.’ He paused for a moment to negotiate a busy junction at the head of Archway Road, then swung boldly into the traffic between two oncoming cars, raising his hand to thank the second driver for a courtesy which had not been his choice. ‘I remember looking at the two of them in my rear-view mirror and thinking how young they were to take a life—in peacetime, at any rate. They weren’t much older than I was, and I found it unnerving enough just to drive them into the prison.’

‘I’ve often wondered what sort of man it takes to do a job that most of us would balk at. Justice is a luxury when you don’t have to carry it out yourself, and they can’t be unmoved by it—it’s quite noble, I suppose.’ Bill gave a dismissive snort, and Josephine looked at him. ‘Am I being naive?’

‘I shouldn’t speak out of turn, Miss, but they certainly weren’t saints. It’s a position of power, don’t forget, and I’ve heard that a lot of them turned the notoriety to their own advantage, although they were never supposed to brag about what they did. And they weren’t always on the right side of the law themselves, either. William spent a month in prison for refusing to keep his wife and two kids—they ended up in the workhouse—and Henry Pierrepoint turned up drunk to an execution once and had a punch-up with his assistant on the scaffold. The warder had to break it up. God knows what the poor sod on the gallows was thinking. Mr Churchill dropped Henry from the list after that.’

‘What happened to them? Are they still about?’

‘Henry’s long gone now. William was dropped a couple of years after Sach and Walters for refusing to attend the inquest after a hanging in Ireland—he’s still alive, though, I think. And John …’ He paused, and Josephine noticed a smile playing on his lips. ‘I shouldn’t laugh, really—it was a terrible accident and he can’t have been more than twenty-five, but it would take a better man than me not to see the funny side.’

‘Why? What on earth happened?’

‘He fell through his own trapdoor while he was rigging a drop up in Leeds. Recovered sufficiently to do the hanging, but died a couple of months later.’

Josephine tried not to laugh. ‘That’s awful,’ she said, but took a while to compose herself. ‘Did it get to them, do you think?’ she continued more seriously.

‘Like you say, they can’t have been completely immune to it. James—that’s Billington senior—took to drink eventually. He had to execute a friend, apparently, and they say that finished him off.’

‘Surely that should never have been allowed? It must make a huge difference when it’s personal.’ They passed East Finchley tube station, and Josephine began to take a keener interest in her surroundings. ‘It’s funny—I wrote a whole play about how Mary, Queen of Scots must have felt in the days before her execution, but it never affected me like this. It’s because it’s in living memory, I suppose—it’s much more real. Thirty-odd years isn’t long, is it? Sach and Walters could still be walking these streets if things had been different.’ She looked ahead of her at the wide road, flanked with busy shops, and thought again about what Celia had said to her. ‘They weren’t noble or special, and the ordinariness of it makes a difference somehow. It could be any of us.’ They stopped in a long line of traffic at a crossroads, and she said: ‘Tell me, Bill—what was that day like? I’d like to be able to recreate it in the book. It would have been the day before the execution?’

He nodded. ‘They had to be at the prison by late afternoon, so we collected them from the station and took them on to Holloway. They weren’t carrying anything with them—the luggage had been sent on ahead, and I remember thinking it was like going on a bloody holiday except for the weather. It was bitterly cold—am I right in thinking it was just after Christmas?’

‘The beginning of February, yes. They were committed on Christmas Eve, of all days, and tried in January.’

‘That’s right. It was starting to get dark by the time we got down the Camden Road, but that hadn’t put the crowds off.’

‘Abolitionists or sensation-seekers?’

‘Oh, mostly sensation-seekers. There wasn’t the strength of feeling against it all that there is now. That didn’t really start until the trouble over Edith Thompson. No, most of this lot were in good spirits, laughing and joking with our lads at the gate—more like a state occasion or a football match than a wake. They might have missed out on watching the hanging itself by thirty years or so, but they were determined to get what they could out of it.’ The car moved forward a few feet but the lights turned red again before they got to the front of the queue and Fallowfield continued with his story. ‘It was the executioners they all wanted to see—they were the stars of the show, so there was quite a commotion when they saw us approaching. Greeted like heroes, they were, and it was a while before we had a clear path through—lots of banging on the car and cheering as we went in.’

‘The power of fame,’ Josephine said cynically.

‘To be fair, not all of them were there just for the spectacle. Baby farming caused quite a stir, you know, and there was a lot of strong feeling about it. Hundreds went to Newgate when Dyer was hanged. Sach and Walters didn’t pull in as many as that, but there were a fair few waiting, and a lot of them were women.’

‘I wonder if any of the mothers were there? It must have been terrible to read about the trial in the newspapers if you’d left Claymore House believing your child had found a good home.’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised but, if not, there were plenty of others around to be outraged on their behalf.’

‘It’s funny, isn’t it? If you wanted to be cold about it, you could argue that they were only doing what women have done for hundreds of years—getting rid of children whom society couldn’t afford to care for or even acknowledge. They probably told themselves they were providing a service. I suppose it’s the professional aspect of it that frightened people, though. It’s one thing to manage the population quietly within your own family, but quite another to undermine the social set-up by turning it into a business.’

‘In my experience, for all the talk of justice and compassion, people react to crime by how threatened it makes them feel—and none of us want to believe that women can kill children. It unsettles everything we take for granted.’ The lights were changing again, but this time Fallowfield scraped through on amber. ‘Hertford Road’s just up here on the right,’ he said, and Josephine felt a rush of excitement and curiosity: as much as she loved fiction, there was nothing quite like delving into the lives of real people, and imagining them in their everyday surroundings helped her understand them better than anything. A couple of minutes later, they turned into a side-street and parked in front of a gate. ‘That’s it,’ he said, pointing to one of the terraced houses on the other side of the street. ‘Claymore House.’

Josephine had not known quite what to expect, but the grandeur of the name had led her to imagine something more individual and imposing than this unassuming, red-brick building, the mirror image of its neighbour and indistinguishable from most of the houses along the row. From the outside, Claymore House looked moderate in size, but the number of chimney pots suggested that appearances were deceptive; certainly, from what she had read in the newspapers, Sach’s nursing home had housed several occupants at a time as well as her own family; it would have to be quite spacious inside and, she noticed, looking more closely, there was a basement and possibly an attic to provide additional accommodation if necessary. A tiny front garden separated the house from the street, and a couple of steps led up to an open porch and solid front door, where stained-glass panels offered one of the building’s few unique features. As her gaze moved upwards towards a turreted bay window—presumably the master bedroom—she noticed that the plaque which should have held a name was blank; after the notoriety, it was perhaps not surprising that subsequent occupants would be reluctant to acknowledge the existence of Claymore House. ‘I don’t know why, but I expected it to be detached,’ she said to Fallowfield as they got out of the car. ‘It’s very overlooked, isn’t it? You’d be hard pushed to hide any comings and goings.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What other evidence was there?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Like Dyer, you mean.’

‘Is that what she did?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That would be wonderful. And what about a barrister? It doesn’t have to be the men involved in the trial—that’s too much to hope for, I suppose—but it would be really helpful to get a legal opinion on the case. There’s so much that seems odd to me, but that’s probably just because I don’t understand the system.’

‘Inspector Penrose will help you there, Miss,’ Fallowfield said, opening the car door for her. ‘It’s way before his time, obviously, but he’ll be able to fix you up with the top brass.’ He looked at his watch. ‘He should be back at the Yard by now—do you want to come and talk to him?’

‘Oh no, I don’t want to bother him while he’s at work.’

The sergeant smiled as he started the engine. ‘You know as well as I do that he won’t mind. You don’t have to stay long—just let him know what you need and arrange …’

The rest of his sentence was lost as the police wireless crackled into life and a familiar voice barked angrily down the line. ‘Fallowfield? Where the bloody hell are you?’

Josephine looked at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Perhaps now isn’t the best time after all,’ she suggested as Fallowfield hurriedly put the car into gear.

‘Perhaps you’re right, Miss,’ he said, fumbling for the radio as he drove. ‘All right if I drop you at Holborn?’