The Hangman's Secret

by Laura Joh Rowland

  Now the touch of his lips on mine, the clean taste of his mouth, are thrilling yet familiar. So is the catch of his breath as I press myself against him. Then we’re tearing at each other’s clothes and our own, hastening to undress. Barrett throws off the blankets, but I pull them back up, not ready to see him entirely nude or for him to see me. The warmth of our bare skin against skin is a shock—an intimacy I’ve never experienced. I’ve never asked him whether he has done this before, and I’m too intent on exploring his body to care about women in his past. Beneath silky hairs and smooth skin, the muscles of his chest, arms, and thighs are hard and strong. He caresses my breasts, lowers his mouth to them, and his tongue describes circles around my nipples. I’ve always wished he would do this, but we’ve always been in a hurry to finish before we were interrupted. Gasping, I touch his hardness, but he pushes my hand away.

  “I’m too excited,” he says, his voice hoarse with arousal.

  I want us to take our time, to enjoy the luxury of a whole night to experience all the possibilities of lovemaking, but our habit of haste is too strong to break. When his fingers slide between my legs, I already feel myself climbing toward the pleasure I crave. Our bodies act against our wills, our better judgment. He climbs on top of me; I spread myself. Instinct tells me what to do: I reach down to guide him into me. The mere feel of him thrusting at me sets off my crisis. As the ecstasy of release takes me, I clutch his back and yell. His thrusts plunge through my inner resistance, and tearing pain invades my pleasure. I yell again, in agony, fright, and triumph. Barrett groans and shudders with his own release. I hold him tight, as though we’re fighting a battle for our lives and we’ll both die if I let go.

  Later, as we lie side by side, exhausted, Barrett turns to me and whispers, “I love you.”

  The fire in the hearth has burned out, and I can’t see his expression, but his voice is so tender that it takes away the breath that I’ve just managed to catch. Moments pass before I can whisper, “I love you.”

  Barrett doesn’t respond; he didn’t hear me; he’s asleep. I lie awake, listening to his quiet, steady breathing, and wonder, What have I done?

  CHAPTER 26

  At breakfast in the hotel dining room, I watch Barrett and the people at the other tables eat their eggs and bacon. I marvel that the world seems so unchanged although I’m no longer a virgin.

  Barrett smiles at me with a new, proud possessiveness in his eyes. The carnal union supposedly joins a man and woman in a spiritual bond, making them one, but I hadn’t expected to feel as if I’m not quite separate from him anymore. I dwell upon the potential consequences of last night. I don’t think I could have gotten with child, but I’m not sure. Barrett loves me, but we’ve not discussed marriage recently, and how can he feel as if he’s given as much of himself to me as I’ve given of myself to him? It was my blood, not his, that stained my nightdress. Our future seems more insecure than ever.

  “That hit the spot.” Barrett sets down his coffee cup and surveys our empty plates. I somehow managed to clean mine while I was musing. “Are you ready to go?”

  * * *

  We’d asked Frank, the driver, to pick us up at the hotel at nine o’clock, and he’s waiting outside right on time. This Monday morning is cold, the air so dense with fog and acrid smoke that the street lamps are still lit. Carriages, wagons, and omnibuses rattle past us as we ride in his cab. People throng the shops. A display of fresh fish glistens outside a fishmonger’s; sausages hang under the butcher’s awning; and signs advertise boots, tea, oatmeal, and hair pomade. The cab draws up to Dr. William Friday’s surgery. Barrett asks Frank to wait for us while we go inside.

  The waiting room is full of women, some holding babies; children play with dolls and blocks at a little table. Beside a door that leads to the back of the building, a window cut in the wall gives a view of a stern elderly woman in a nurse’s gray uniform and white cap.

  “Good morning,” I say. “We’d like to see Dr. Friday.”

  The nurse eyes us with suspicion; we’re obviously not the doctor’s usual patients. “He’s booked up today. I can give you an appointment for tomorrow.”

  “I’m with the London police,” Barrett says. “We need to speak with Dr. Friday about some people who may have been patients of his years ago. Maria Kemp and her mother.”

  The nurse’s face shows recognition, surprise, and then grave concern. “Oh. Maria and Violet Kemp. I’ll tell Dr. Friday,” and goes into the back room.

  “ ‘Violet Kemp’ ” must be Amelia Carlisle,” I say to Barrett. “She changed her name and Jane’s when they moved to London.”

  Soon the nurse ushers us into the back office and seats us in chairs by the desk. The office is very full, the desk’s cubbyholes crammed with papers, the walls hidden under anatomical charts and shelves of books. A glass-fronted cabinet contains medicine in bottles and tins. Galoshes and a medical bag stand beneath a coatrack draped with mackintoshes and hats. Dr. Friday comes in, his step brisk even though his bushy hair is pure white, his shoulders stooped, and he must be in his seventies. After we introduce ourselves, he sits at his desk and scrutinizes us through his spectacles.

  “Must say, I’m surprised the London police are interested in Violet Kemp.” His voice is dry, rough with age, but strong. “The Leeds police didn’t take enough interest.”

  Barrett and I exchange glances, intrigued by this hint that Amelia Carlisle had been up to no good in Leeds. I say, “Just to make sure we’re talking about the same people: Was Violet Kemp’s daughter mentally abnormal?”

  “Yes. I met Mrs. Kemp for the first time in 1873, when she brought Maria to see me.” Dr. Friday apparently has excellent recall for dates. “Maria was five years old, and Mrs. Kemp was worried because she hadn’t started talking yet.” Pity softens his shrewd gaze. “Unfortunately, there’s naught that a physician can do for children like that. I didn’t charge Mrs. Kemp for the consultation because she was in a bad way. She was a widow; her husband had left her and Maria penniless when he died. The next time I saw her and Maria was a few months later. She’d set herself up as a baby farmer.”

  We frown, surprised that Amelia Carlisle’s career as a baby farmer began longer ago than anyone in London thought, dismayed because we think we know what’s coming next.

  “She called me to her house because a baby she’d taken in had died. She needed a death certificate. I examined the baby and signed a certificate that said he’d died of natural causes. Nothing unusual about that—too many diseases with no cure; children die. I didn’t get suspicious until after she’d asked me to certify three more deaths in less than two months. The last time, the baby’s body was emaciated. There were three other babies in the house, all fast asleep and none too plump. I asked her if she was drugging them with laudanum to keep them quiet and not feeding them. She denied it, but I had my doubts. I told her I would have to write, ‘Cause of death, possible foul play’ on the certificate and report her to the police.”

  I’m horrified because my hunch was correct: Amelia Carlisle had murdered babies years before her arrest, before the hundreds of murders she’d committed in London.

  “Oh, God.” Barrett shakes his head. I can tell that he’s distressed because his initiative led us to the discovery that the past that Amelia had tried to outrun was darker than we had imagined.

  “Didn’t the police investigate?” I say.

  “Never heard from them,” Dr. Friday says. “But Mrs. Kemp never asked me for another death certificate, so I figured that if she’d been killing babies, I’d scared her into quitting. A few weeks later, I went to her house in Powell Street to check on her, and she and Maria were gone.” Apprehension clouds his face. “Is she in trouble with the law now?”

  Barrett and I exchange another look, not wanting to break the news that he’s afraid to hear, but better if we tell him now than he reads it in the papers later. Barrett says, “Have you heard of Amelia Carlisle?”

  Dr. Friday’s eyes widen wi
th horrified realization. “But she and Violet Kemp can’t be the same person. I’ve seen Amelia Carlisle’s picture. She looked nothing like Violet Kemp.”

  “It’s been seventeen years since you saw her.” I open my satchel and remove the photo I took of Jane. She smiles from the black-and-white print, her arms curved around her imaginary friends. “This is Amelia’s daughter Jane. She’s an inmate at the Imbeciles Asylum in Leavesden. Does she look familiar?”

  Dr. Friday stares at lovely Jane with her black hair and porcelain-doll face. As stunned as if he’s seeing a ghost, he whispers, “Dear Lord. Maria Kemp. She’s the image of her mother.”

  I remember his nurse’s expression when I mentioned Maria Kemp. Dr. Friday must have told her of his suspicions about Violet. Now the lines in his face deepen. “Starving the babies to death must have taken too long, and a proper burial requires a death certificate. It was safer and cheaper for her to strangle them and throw their bodies in the river.”

  “She got what was coming to her,” Barrett says, trying to ease the doctor’s distress.

  “But too late. How many babies has she murdered since?” Bitter with self-reproach, Dr. Friday says, “I should have kept after the police to arrest her before she skipped town.”

  “You couldn’t have known what she would do.” I think of Jack the Ripper’s victims and Ernie Leach. I’ll always believe that they died in part because I didn’t do enough. There’s nothing I can say that will relieve Dr. Friday’s guilt. My camera is in the cab, but I haven’t the heart to ask if I can take his picture; he won’t want this occasion memorialized.

  * * *

  Outside the surgery, while Frank and his cab wait for us, Barrett and I exclaim over what’s happened. “This is what we came here to find,” Barrett says.

  “Hugh was right—there’s more to the story of Amelia Carlisle than anyone knew,” I say. The murders that Amelia had been hanged for and suspected of in London were only the tip of the iceberg, and we’re the first people to connect her with Violet Kemp.

  “We should go back to London right now, so you can tell Sir Gerald,” Barrett says. “It’ll be a big story for the Daily World.”

  But he sounds as reluctant to go home as I am. I know we’re both thinking about our rooms waiting for us at the Swan Hotel. I come up with a reason to stay. “I don’t think our story is enough to get me back in Sir Gerald’s good graces. It doesn’t prove that Jacob Aarons didn’t kill Harry Warbrick—or that Ernie Leach’s death was murder.”

  Barrett seizes on my excuse. “And it doesn’t solve either murder. We can’t leave yet.”

  If we stay another night, I’ll tempt fate again. Backpedaling, I say, “What more can we hope to discover? Where else can we look?”

  “I can think of one more place,” Barrett says.

  As we ride in the cab along the main street, he explains, “I want to know whether the Leeds police investigated Dr. Friday’s complaint about Violet Kemp.”

  The idea of visiting a police station plunges me into my old fear of the law.

  “I also think we should tell them that Violet Kemp was Amelia Carlisle,” Barrett says. “I don’t want them to be blindsided when the news comes out.”

  It’s the last thing I would have thought of—warning the Leeds police, giving them a chance to prepare for bad publicity. It’s an unwelcome reminder that despite last night, Barrett is still a police officer, and I’m the daughter of a fugitive.

  The Leeds police station, constructed of dirty red brick, occupies a plot of land shaped like an arrowhead, where several busy streets lined with factories and houses converge. At the point is a clock turret with a conical roof. As Barrett and I walk toward the entrance, a group of constables comes out. One holds the door open for me. Even with Barrett to protect me, my heart thuds as we enter the lobby. Its smell of mildew and stale tobacco smoke and sweat makes me feel sick. I remind myself that the Leeds police don’t know me or what I’ve done.

  Confident despite the fact that he’s a stranger in town with no official standing, Barrett strides up to the constable who’s posted behind a desk. “I’m Thomas Barrett from the London Metropolitan Police.”

  The constable is raw-boned, with bad posture and a sandy mustache. “Really?” He seems glad of a novelty to enliven a dull day, impressed by his big-city counterpart. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m investigating a case that has a connection with Leeds,” Barrett says. “May I speak with the officer in charge?”

  “He’ll want to know what case,” the constable says, fishing for information.

  “Amelia Carlisle,” Barrett says.

  “The Baby Butcher? But wasn’t she already hanged?”

  “Yes, but we’re tying up loose ends,” Barrett says.

  “What kinda loose ends?”

  Barrett stifles a sigh of impatience. “We had a tip that she once lived in Leeds.”

  “Criminy!”

  Three constables walk in through the door, and the man at the desk calls to them, “Hey! This copper from London says the Baby Butcher was from Leeds.”

  They exclaim, flock to Barrett, and fire questions at him. “Did she kill babies here?” “How many?”

  Caught unprepared for the attention, Barrett says, “We don’t know for sure that she—”

  “When was this?”

  “I really should discuss it with—”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “—the officer in charge. Could you please tell him I’m—”

  A door at the back of the room opens. The man who emerges is some fifty years old; his paunch strains the brass buttons on the coat of his blue uniform. Medals decorate its front. His head is small for his size, his face pudgy, with a neat gray beard and mustache. “What’s all this commotion?” His voice is like a large dog’s bark.

  The constables stand at attention. The one behind the desk points at Barrett. “He’s from the London Police, Inspector Driscoll. He says Amelia Carlisle was from Leeds, and this is where she started killing babies.”

  Inspector Driscoll scrutinizes Barrett and me with sharp, narrow eyes. He beckons to us, saying, “We’ll discuss this in my office,” and points his thick finger at the constables. “Not a word about this to anyone.”

  “Yes, guv,” they chorus.

  He marches us down a passage. We’re not under arrest, but when he shows us into his office and shuts the door, my anxiety spikes. I calm myself by focusing on my surroundings. The desk holds a brass nameplate, pipes in a rack, an ashtray, and stacks of neatly aligned papers. A shelf on the wall displays trophies—gilded miniature statues of men shooting rifles.

  Inspector Driscoll points to two plain wooden chairs. “Please be seated.” It sounds like an order rather than a courtesy.

  We obey. The chairs are unusually low, as if two inches have been sawed off their legs. When Inspector Driscoll sits in the tall, leather-upholstered chair behind his desk, he towers over us. “Now.” He addresses Barrett. “Who are you?”

  “Police Constable Thomas Barrett, London Metropolitan police, H Division, sir.”

  Inspector Driscoll looks askance at him. “May I see your credentials?”

  Barrett reaches in his pocket, pulls out the badge from his helmet, and slides it across the desk. Inspector Driscoll studies it for a long moment, as if to determine whether it’s genuine, before passing it back. He ignores me.

  “Who’s your superior?” he asks.

  “Inspector Edmund Reid,” Barrett says. I admire his poise, enjoy the novel experience of watching him in action in a place where I’m ill-equipped to cope.

  “Are you here on his orders?”

  “Yes,” Barrett answers without missing a beat or shifting his gaze.

  “Suppose I telegraph Inspector Reid and ask him to confirm that he sent you.”

  Panic jolts me, but Barrett, unfazed, says, “Go ahead.”

  I pray that Reid is away from the station and beyond reach of telegraph messages.
<
br />   “I’m surprised that London would send a man up here. It doesn’t happen very often,” Inspector Driscoll says.

  I breathe easier; Barrett’s passed muster.

  “So.” Inspector Driscoll pulls a notepad toward him and takes up a pen. “How did you trace Amelia Carlisle to Leeds?”

  I don’t like his making a written record that may wind up in Reid’s hands, but Barrett remains calm as he says, “I questioned Amelia’s daughter. She indicated that she and her mother had once lived here.”

  Inspector Driscoll jots on his pad. “What’s the daughter’s name and address?”

  “Jane Carlisle.” Barrett hesitates. “The Imbeciles Asylum in Leavesden.”

  I resist the urge to wince; Barrett has just diminished his credibility. Driscoll looks up, surprised and amused. “So you followed a tip from an imbecile.” His manner suggests that Barrett is an imbecile himself. “What else did she tell you?”

  “She said her real name is Maria Kemp.” Defensiveness tinges Barrett’s polite tone.

  Inspector Driscoll makes a show of writing down the information. “And you believed her. Is that what passes for detective work in London?”

  Barrett flushes, shifting in his low chair, angry because the inspector has insulted the Metropolitan Police. “I found a witness in Leeds who confirmed that it’s true.”

  Driscoll frowns, displeased because Barrett has scored a point. “Who might your so-called witness be?”

  “Dr. William Friday. Maria Kemp was his patient. Her mother was Violet Kemp.”

  “I know Dr. Friday. When did he last see Violet and Maria Kemp?”

  “1873.”

  Inspector Driscoll smirks while he writes. “That was a long time ago. Dr. Friday is almost eighty. Supposing his memory’s not flown the coop, how did he identify Violet and Maria Kemp as Amelia and Jane Carlisle?”

  I muster my nerve, pull Jane’s photograph out of my satchel, and slide it across the desk. “I showed him this. It’s Jane Carlisle, Amelia’s daughter. Dr. Friday said Violet Kemp looked just like her.”