A Coin for the Hangman

by Spurrier, Ralph

  The cinema had long gone, now converted into a Catholic church, but the sweeping staircases to the upper circle were still in place, elegantly framing the doorway. With some trepidation I approached what I assumed had been the sweet shop in Silver Street. It was an easy shop to spot as it was the only one that had a view both up and down the road. Nearing the corner I could see that the shop was now devoted to interior furnishings and the name board above the window was lettered in a fancy scroll work not immediately readable. As I passed the front window and approached the door I saw something that made my heart leap. I’m not sure what I hoped to find after all these years but to stand before the entrance and see the name Eastman etched out in mosaic on the step into the shop was something I hadn’t expected. All of a sudden the long road of research into a life and a tragedy that was now nearly sixty years’ distant was brought vividly and shockingly to life. I stepped onto the name and entered the shop. A bell attached to the jamb rang out as it was triggered by the opening of the door and I stood transfixed for a moment, wondering if this could be the very same bell that rang in Eastman’s all those years ago.

  A woman in her 30s came out from a back room. “Hello. Can I help or you happy to just browse?” She smiled sweetly as I said I’d be happy to browse for a few minutes. “That’s fine. Let me know if you want any help. I’ll just be back here.” She ducked back behind the counter divide.

  I took a cursory glance at the bijouterie, cloths and curtain samplers that bedecked most of the surfaces, but what I really wanted to see, of course, had been stripped away decades ago. I’d guessed that the shop had passed through a number of hands since the 50s and that, apart from the front step, all traces of its Eastman’s or Tanner’s façade had disappeared.

  I called out. “Thanks for letting me browse.”

  The woman popped out from the back. “Couldn’t find anything today?”

  I felt somewhat embarrassed. “Well, in truth, I came for a different reason.” She lifted a quizzical eyebrow but the smile remained. “I’ve been doing some research on a family that used to live here, in this shop. By the name of Eastman – and later Tanner. I notice you still have the mosaic name on the doorstep but was curious if you knew anything of their story?”

  “Oh, the doorstep. It’s lovely, isn’t it? We did think about replacing it when we moved in but in the end we thought it had a nice retro feel to it so we left it as it was. It causes some confusion because customers think that’s the name of the business.” She laughed. “We haven’t been here very long so don’t know the history of the shop beyond who owned it before us – and they weren’t the Eastmans or the Tanners.” She picked up a table runner and began folding it into a square so that the tassels at one end hung over the edge of the counter. “Should I know more about them?”

  It was the question that I had perhaps expected but hadn’t really thought through how to answer. And now standing here, in this woman’s shop and below where she lived, I suddenly realized that opening up the history of Henry, Mavis and George to a complete stranger could be seriously disconcerting for them. Even though the murder was committed elsewhere, no-one wants to think or know that a murderer once lived under the same roof they now occupy. I decided to prevaricate.

  “It’s a family history thing and the name cropped up on a branch of the tree that I hadn’t recognized before. I got as far as locating Bradford on Avon as the domicile town from the 30s to the 50s but that’s really as far as I’ve got.” I pointed back to the shop step on the other side of the door. “But this is a start. Would it be OK if I took a photo of it?”

  “Yes, no problem. You go ahead.” She began to retreat to the back realizing that she was unlikely to make a sale. “You could do worse than go down to the library and the museum – the museum’s above the library and they have a lot of stuff on the old shops of Bradford. They’ve even recreated an old chemist shop with all the coloured bottles and medicine drawers.”

  I thanked her and promised to come back if I had any further history of the shop for her. Taking a couple of photos of the shop step and the outside façade I retraced my steps down the hill. The library and museum were situated on the other side of the river in a newish building a little at odds with the much older properties nearby. As I entered by the glass swing doors I noticed a sign indicating the stairs to the museum on the first floor. I climbed the stairs and went through the double doors. Half of the space had been given over to recreating the inside of a chemist’s shop, apparently moved shelf by shelf, bottle by bottle from the original in the town. Prescription books, coloured bottles, all the paraphernalia of a 30s chemist shop were laid out in colourful profusion. In one corner, almost hidden from view, was an elderly man who immediately jumped up when I came through the door.

  “Good afternoon! Welcome to Bradford Museum.”

  I sensed that perhaps he had been waiting for quite some time for a visitor and it looked as if I was the only one in the museum at that moment.

  “Hello,” I said in greeting, “I don’t know if you can help me but I’m doing some research on a family who used to have a shop in the town. Went by the name of Eastman and then later, Tanner. It was a confectionery tobacconist shop in Silver Street.” I’d hoped that the age of the fellow might mean that he would remember more than the woman at the shop but he pursed his lips and shook his head.

  “No, I don’t recall anyone by that name. I’ve been here quite a long time – since 1960 – but I haven’t come across either of those names. Perhaps a perusal of the local newspaper on one of those “windey” things they have downstairs will help you out?” He indicated the hand movement of a microfiche reader. I was beginning to feel that the ends of the story were slipping from my grasp and that Jim Lees was right and we’d all be taken for fools. Perhaps too many years had passed and anyone who had any memory of the murder had been long dead and buried. I tried one last desperate tack.

  “You don’t remember a murder case here in Bradford some fifty years ago by any chance? A Bradford fellow was hanged for the murder but there was some doubt about whether he was guilty or not. The victim was found with her mouth stuffed…” I didn’t need to finish the sentence.

  “Oh yes, remember that very well. Nasty business.” He hesitated, pursing his lips. “But I don’t recall there being any doubt about the guilt of the murderer. Open and shut case it was. I remember because it happened just after I arrived here but I don’t recall the fellow being hanged.”

  1960, I thought to myself. This would be a different case altogether. We couldn’t be talking about the same people. The elderly man came from behind the counter, warming to the turn of the conversation.

  “Yes. Cinema usherette it was. I remember her because we – my late wife and I – had only seen the poor girl the week before. She’d shown us to our seats and I remarked to my wife that she was definitely a looker, that one. Perhaps it wasn’t the most diplomatic thing to say!” He laughed “I got it in the neck for the rest of the evening! Well, that very next week this poor lass is found in the lock on the disused canal – as it was then. Her stockings stuffed in her mouth. Choked to death. Terrible business. Terrible.”

  The cause of death passed through me like an electrical charge.

  “Can you remember the name?” I was half hoping that George Tanner’s name would surface once more. The old man looked into the distance for inspiration but eventually shook his head.

  “No, sorry, it’s gone. Ask me five years ago and I’d have rolled it straight out but my memory is getting worse with each passing day. No, definitely gone.” He turned back towards the counter and then hesitated. “But I can remember one thing. The fellow who murdered the poor girl was the cinema manager.”

  Downstairs in the library I whisked the flywheel of the microfiche reader through the pages of the local newspaper for 1960 in a hurried blur of pages, stopping at each front page to scan for what had to have been the headline news of a murder of a cinema usherette. All through that yea
r nothing of great consequence seemed to have happened in Bradford apart from the seasonal flooding of the river and the subsequent inundation of the properties bordering on the Avon. I started on 1961 and was beginning to wonder if my museum informant had had a lapse of memory when I came across the front page for September 23rd 1961.

  Cinema girl found in disused canal lock

  The search for Doreen Richards, twenty-five, a cinema usherette here in Bradford on Avon, was called off last night when the body of a girl matching her description was found in the disused canal lock behind the Great Tithe Barn. A couple out walking their dog along the towpath noticed what they first thought was “flowery curtain material” floating on the surface of the water. At first they thought that someone had just dumped their rubbish into the lock but on their return the material had shifted somewhat and they could see that the curtain was in fact a dress and that it covered a body. The police were called and it was quickly ascertained that the body was indeed that of Doreen Richards who had been missing from home for nearly a week. Prayers are to be said in the parish church this Sunday… (continued on p.2)

  I quickly scanned page 2 but no further information was given apart from the usual “police will be continuing with their enquiries”. The next week’s front page reverted to the usual and more mundane with just a lower quartile given over to rehashing last week’s news. I moved through the next three weeks with nothing more to add to the story until I hit the front page of October 28th 1961

  Cinema Manager charged with the murder of Doreen Richards

  Victor Watson, the manager of the cinema at Bradford on Avon, was today arrested and charged with the murder of Doreen Richards, an usherette who had worked at the cinema for some years. In a surprise turn of events Scotland Yard police arrested Watson as he opened the cinema for business yesterday afternoon. Mrs Patricia Fenney, who was passing the front door of the cinema at the time of the arrest, told this newspaper: “I was on my way to the station to visit my friend in Trowbridge when I saw this scuffling at the entrance to the cinema in Market Square. Normally Mr Watson is immaculately dressed in his black tie suit but this time he was all dishevelled and being dragged out of the cinema by two burly men. If the uniformed constable hadn’t been in attendance I don’t know what I’d have done.” Victor Watson will be appearing in the local magistrate’s court before being sent on to criminal court later this month.

  There was no mention of the modus operandi of the murder. I assumed the local paper had suppressed the details to avoid any accusation of titillation and to save the relative’s feelings – for the moment. As soon as the case hit the criminal court the gory details would be splashed all over the Fleet Street newspapers. And they were.

  Doreen Richards had worked at the cinema ever since she left school at the age of sixteen, so by the time of her murder in September 1961 she had worked with Watson for over nine years and would have, incidentally, known Henry Eastman who had begun as a projectionist more or less at the same time as Doreen started as an usherette. It emerged at the trial that Victor Watson had been “enjoying conjugal rights” with Doreen – as one of the more prissy reports had put it – for a number of years but that he had become jealous of a new boyfriend that Doreen had taken up with in the summer of 1961. The waning of Doreen’s affection for Watson had only served to fuel a jealous rage that would often spill out into the foyer of the cinema. A number of cinema patrons had been within earshot of frequent “dressings down” of Doreen for real or imagined breaches of work etiquette. Some of the patrons had gone as far as to berate Watson for his “bad-tongued” behaviour but had been rudely rebuffed. The disappearance of Doreen had fuelled the gossip among the cinema-goers and one had been bold enough to go to the police to express his suspicion. When the body had been found it was discovered that her mouth and throat had been stuffed with her own stockings and that she had probably been choked to death before being dumped in the disused canal. What had sunk Watson was the detailed forensic work that had been done on strands of hair found tightly gripped in Doreen’s fist, quite obviously wrenched from Watson’s head during her frantic fight for air and survival. Even though this was before DNA matching, the pathologist in court was able to establish a positive link between the hair in Doreen’s fist and that on Watson’s head. In addition, Doreen’s new boyfriend had testified that Doreen had become increasingly fearful of Watson’s behaviour. The jury had taken just eighty-five minutes to find Watson guilty and he was duly sentenced to death in March 1962. However, by this time, the death penalty was becoming more and more infrequent with death sentences being commuted to life imprisonment. Thus it was that Victor Watson had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment and he was duly incarcerated in Pentonville prison. If, by some remote chance, he had still been alive when I began my research it might have been possible to reopen the case of Mavis Tanner. Unfortunately, Watson was to die of lung cancer in 1975 having never been paroled, or, as far as I could tell, admitting or even alluding to any earlier murder.

  So what deduction – if any – can we make from this coincidence in modus operandi? Was it just chance that both Doreen and Mavis met their deaths by being throttled and suffocated? Could two murderers have been living in Bradford on Avon at the same time and dispatched their victims in the same way? The evidence of the Rillington Place murders in London not only supported this thesis but went even further in suggesting that two murderers, unbeknown to each other, used similar methods and lived under the same roof. Eventually this theory was to be disproved but it held sway for long enough for an innocent man to be hung for the murder of his wife and child. None of which really brings us any closer to the truth in the Bradford case. Did Henry Eastman really kill his own mother and in writing the diary he left a clever but imaginary “plot” that subtly accused George Tanner in a final turn of the screw? Henry certainly showed evidence of a deeply disturbed nature, an outsider who had been shunned by the only two women that he really loved. The diary bore all the trademarks of someone who had lost touch with the world and cared little if he lived or died. The journey of a young lad from the enjoyment of the open country around Bradford just before the war to the cramped and claustrophobic projection room at the cinema with the only small window being the one that looked out on to the make-believe world of flickering celluloid was, some would argue, one that was sadly symbolic of the closing down of his aspirations.

  And George Tanner? What became of him? I had gone back through the archives of the local paper, trawling each and every page to see if there was any mention of the sweetshop or George Tanner himself. I fully expected to discover that the shop had been sold at the time of Henry’s execution and that Tanner had moved away from the area. It couldn’t have been easy trying to run a business in a small town so rife in rumour and gossip, especially if the news had got out that the police had questioned him after Henry’s execution. The news of Mavis’s murder and the subsequent trial and execution of Henry had been sensational news at the time but I could find nothing about George Tanner or any repercussions. Until a small piece on the front page of an October 1955 issue caught my eye.

  Local man found dead near rail tracks at Avoncliff

  Police were called to the body of a man found beside the rail tracks at Avoncliff Halt last Friday. A fireman on the 7.15 pm train passing eastwards through Avoncliff at speed thought he saw a figure step out from beside the buttresses that carry the disused canal across the river and rail line at this point. It was only a fleeting impression, he said, but the train was halted at Bradford station so that any possible incident could be reported. Police who attended the scene later that evening found the remains of a man in his 40s beside the track. The man has since been identified as George Tanner, the proprietor of a shop on Silver Street.

  How is one to imagine those final two years of George Tanner’s life? There is no-one left to tell us the truth and anyone who might have known has long been dead themselves. For what it’s worth – and I might not be th
e most reliable source so don’t take this as gospel – I don’t think George had any part in the murder of his wife. What follows can only be guesswork on the part of this writer but, surely, faced with the nightmare of his life’s journey, George Tanner’s departure from this world deserves a poetic ending, does it not?

  Held and questioned by the police over a number of days, George Tanner maintained his innocence and in the absence of any incriminating evidence and a pretty watertight alibi was eventually released without charge. He returned to the shop, locking the front door behind him, even though it was still only mid-morning. The ting of the shop doorbell reverberating in the shop reminded him of the first time he had walked in and met the woman who shone through the dust motes of that beautiful sunny afternoon. Now the place felt desolate and empty even though the shelves were well stocked. How had it come to this? He had been a good husband, hadn’t he? OK, he’d go down to the pub in the evening but he was always back by 10 in time to make the cocoa. After all that had happened in the war years he had felt wonderfully content with Mavis and together they had begun to build a new life, pulling the shop back into profit. Mavis blossomed and many of the women who had come into the shop had said how well she looked. She had trusted him without question and he had come to love her despite his initial worries. She had protected him when the nightmares came, pulling him back into bed when he had woken up in a sweat, pushing against an imaginary weight that was threatening to roll over him. She would hold him in her arms and wait for the trembling and sweats to subside and stay with him until he fell back to sleep. And now she was gone, torn away. Her murder had brought back all the old fears – made him feel as if he were the Jonah. Had it been his fault?