The police also found the question interesting. More so, when they had examined the contents of the suitcases carefully and seen that nearly everything in them was of American make. Larceny, housebreaking, burglary, all forms of theft and robbery were such a commonplace to the Camden Town division of the Metropolitan police that they did not at once connect the initials G.H. on the bags with Genevieve Hamilton, the missing American woman. They then inquired about Mrs. Sailor’s lodger, late-departed. She told her story with practiced fluency, her eye, like an oyster in its rough grey shell, peering out at them ginnily, coldly. She identified cautiously the photograph they showed her. “Could be, on’y he looks darker. Dyed, I daresay,” and she mentioned the suntan on the mantelpiece.
The police net spread. All lodging houses in the district were notified.
...Edmund left Bayham Street after that one ghastly night. His money was getting very low. His mind was beginning to go over the edge: he imagined he heard people calling after him in the dark street; the little pasty-faced girls, so like mildewed cinquecento angels, in the feebly illumined bakers’ shops where he bought buns, seemed to stare at him with a special knowledge; or if he stayed in his room, the downstairs wireless seeping through the floor kept muttering: “Edmund Campion... Wanted for Murder... Last seen...”
The landlady of the Belmont Road room, in Chalk Farm, wanted to see his Identity Card. She said it was a new order, watching him primly between her lowered lids. For a moment he stood on the stairs, one hand in his bosom, like Napoleon; then he remembered and said wearily that it must be at the station with his luggage.
Hour after hour he sat upstairs hunched in his raincoat, deadly cold but lacking a shilling for the gas fire. He stared wryly at the oleograph of “The Stag at Bay,” till it grew too dark to see; but all the time he was listening. And presently he heard the front door quietly close. He felt sure that she suspected him; yes, she had gone to the police.
In a fever of impatience to be out of the house, he hurried down stairs...
The landlady had gone to the police, guiltily, miserably enough; but no one wants to be murdered in their beds.
He scurried from them this way and that through the dark slippery streets. They caught him finally among the warehouses in Kentish Town. The sound of the police whistles was like knives piercing him. He stumbled. There were torches everywhere, shining right in his eyes. Someone, not near him, recited monotonously: “…Campion, alias George Hallam, alias Hill…a warrant to arrest you for the murder of Linda Campion…”
He missed the bit about anything you say being taken down and used in evidence because of his laughter. It was less hysteria than sheer relief. Because he hadn’t killed Linda; so what was there to worry about?
*
The day Edmund Campion was hanged for the murder of his wife, the body of an unknown woman was found in an Emergency Water Supply tank that was being removed to make a site for pre-fabs. The body was in a trunk so rotted with the action of the water that it broke away as it moved. After some careful reconstruction the letters A. C. were just discernible on the front.
The dead woman had sustained a blow on the back of the head which had fractured her skull and also snapped the vertebrae at the base of the neck. She had good teeth, was a little above medium height, and fair-haired. She wore a platinum wedding ring, inscribed P. H. to G. S., 1932. That would make her between thirty and forty years old. Dressed at the time of her death in a navy rayon-linen dress with white buttons down the front, crêpe de chine underwear, American nylon stockings, and no shoes. She was in the third month of pregnancy.
The Campion Case being closed, there was no reason to connect her with it. She never was identified. Just one more nameless victim to swell the statistics of pregnant women found murdered every year in London (that sort of murder speaks for itself). If she could have had her choice she would have preferred it to be like that, anyway. She would not have cared to have that thing identified as the beautiful Genevieve Hamilton: she was always so particular about her appearance.
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Sting of Death Page 15
