A Coin for the Hangman

by Spurrier, Ralph

  Henry. He had wondered about Henry and why he would do such a thing as to kill his own mother and then leave that diary, pointing the finger at him. What was all that about? The court evidence had been pretty damning, but still, he couldn’t quite make the connection. Then came the arrival of the police in the shop just as he was serving a regular customer. They hauled George away to question him about the revelations in the diary Henry had kept in prison. They showed him the pages in which Henry explained how the murder was done and then went on and on about how it was only he, George, who knew Mavis would be on that train. How he had scooted off down to Avoncliff as soon as Mavis had left the house and arranged to get on the train the stop before. All that guff! Pure detective story drivel dreamt up by someone who had read too many novels and believed that real life mirrored fiction. In the end even the police realized that they were barking up the wrong tree and anyway they weren’t that keen to reopen the Eastman case with the possibility that they had arrested, convicted and hanged the wrong man.

  But that photograph of Steffi the police had shoved in front of him had come out of the blue. “Who’s this then? One of your Kraut floozies you kept secret from your wife? Found out about her, did she, and you did her in because she got arsey about it and wouldn’t stop nagging? Got a little secret over there in Germany that you left behind? A little Heidi or a little Klaus?” The accusations went on and on, always dragging him back into Germany. Of course he had the perfect alibi having been in the open shop all day and being seen by any number of customers from eight in the morning until six in the evening. In the end they had no choice but to give up on the accusations and let him go. The leading detective handed back the photograph of Steffi, although he refused to let him have Henry’s diary.

  “That’ll be going back to the hangman. Henry’s parting gift.” There had been a guffaw from one of the other detectives. “Although news is that Reg Manley won’t be using his skills again. Fucked up the hanging, didn’t he?” No further explanations were forthcoming and George was unceremoniously ushered out of the police station and into the police car before being dumped back at the shop.

  He just couldn’t understand it all. If Henry hadn’t committed the murder and he knew that he hadn’t, then who on earth had it been? None of it made any sense. Now, all he had left was the shop and the suspicions of the locals. No smoke without fire – the gossip would be round the town like a spreading typhus. The emptiness of the shop and the back kitchen area with its sink littered with dirty pans and dishes added to George’s sense of loss.

  He had struggled on for another two years, trading in a shop that held no pleasure for him and looked at askance by many of the townspeople. The sense of despair and loneliness culminated one wet afternoon in October 1955. George Tanner put on his overcoat, checked the windows and doors, straightened one of the jars of sweets on the front desk and went out the door of the shop, locking it behind him. Standing in the porch in the fading light he recalled the first night he and Mavis had embraced in the same spot, standing on the mosaic “Eastman” laid into the shop step, the memory of the excitement of the closeness of each other’s bodies now too painful to bear. George posted the shop key back through the letterbox and walked off down Silver Street towards the old canal and the footpath to Avoncliff. People passed him in the street but he said nothing and purposely avoided looking at anyone. He could only guess at what they might be thinking. He was relieved to get on to the towpath by the overgrown canal and away from the town. Hardly anyone came to this stretch of the canal now and he made his way due west towards the viaduct that carried the redundant waterway across the river at Avoncliff.

  George crossed the viaduct and walked down the cobbled slope to the short platform of Avoncliff Halt. He stepped off the platform and on to the tracks, tucking himself up by the bridge. It was now evening and the single oil lamp on the platform had only recently been lit, casting a faint glow that lit up a small area close to the name board. The curtains on the little house that sat adjacent to the platform were already drawn and a continuous thread of smoke from the chimney gave some indication that it was occupied. But no-one came and no-one went and the only sound was that of the river as it tumbled over the mill weir before it flowed, frothing and angry, through the archways of the viaduct that carried the empty canal above. He knew he wouldn’t have to wait long. Stepping on to the track he placed his foot against the metal rail that curved away through the bridge and back down towards Bath.

  It was five minutes before he felt the faintest of tremors through the sole of his foot. At first he thought that he had mistaken the impression and perhaps that it was just the cold of the evening that had caused some reflex in his foot. But no, there it was again, a little stronger this time. Counting to ten just to make sure, George stood off the track and moved up against the rough stone buttress that divided the tracks under the bridge, his ear attuned to every sound. Along the valley a skein of geese passed overhead, following the silvery thread of the river as it wound eastwards. George watched dispassionately as the birds, communicating to each other with short honks in their V formation, headed towards Bradford and were lost to sight behind the tall oaks that bordered the length of the river.

  Voices from his past welled up. “We’ve got to get off this fucking beach, Sarge. We’re sitting ducks here.”

  Pansy. Dead Pansy. The blood spurting through George’s fingers as he tries to clamp the hole in his corporal’s neck, watching the blackness creep into the boy’s eyes as the red stream flowed away over his hand and into the Normandy earth.

  “Let me count the ways. Let me count the ways.” Daffin! Daphne! “I saw it too. I saw the whale in that barn.” The echoes of Daffin’s voice reverberated in the arch of the railway bridge.

  He wasn’t frightened. Now he was sure that all the tracks of his life were meant to meet here, at this point, at this time. As the train rounded the bend and the roar of the engine filled the arch of the bridge and swept the voices of his life away in its roar, George stepped forward to meet his beast.

  Steffi

  There had been no-one there to see George’s left hand slowly unfurl as the nerves of his body, traumatized by the impact of the express train, slowly ceased to function, running through their final automatic responses to signals that blinked, faltered and finally stopped. There was no-one to see the little picture with its message in beautiful Gothic script flutter from his palm, tumble in the slipstream of the disappearing train and be caught deep in the hedgerow that lined the tracks. By the time George’s body was found by the police the little picture had disappeared from sight. In the coming weeks and months it would become, in turn, soaked and dried and warmed and frozen and little by little, season after season, among the wild flowers, the sage grass and the myosotis, beneath the overhanging branches and the singing birds, by the trembling of the rails and the passing of the trains shrouded and veiled by smoke from the engines, the photograph of the pretty young German girl with the forget-me-not flower entwined in her braid and the message in tidy Gothic script faded and eventually disappeared, dissolving into the earth.

  Vergissmeinicht.

  Afterword

  It is the author’s job to create a world in which the reader can believe, a world that is recognizable and a story that will, hopefully, carry them through to the end where they can turn the last page and be satisfied that they have been entertained, moved or intrigued enough to follow up on historical references. It is not the author’s job to explain all the nuances, subtle or overt, that have been drawn upon to create the story you have just read. Some readers will recognize references just like the bookseller did in Henry’s diary, some may not spot many – or indeed any – but one hopes they have still been drawn along by the narrative.

  However – and I hesitate even as I type these words, feeling that I may be overstaying my welcome on these pages – there are some historical facts attached to the story that may help illuminate some of the darker corners. First
and foremost I have to make this statement: all characters – bar two – are fictitious and bear no resemblance to anyone living or dead. The two real-life characters included are Albert Pierrepoint, the renowned hangman from whose memoirs I have gleaned much of the art of the hangman, and Keith Douglas, a poet of the Second World War, who makes an off-stage appearance in the latrines with George Tanner. Douglas was to be killed in Normandy by a mortar bomb shortly after D-Day.

  Early drafts of the novel sent readers scurrying to the internet to search out the name of the hangman Reg Manley, the murder of a Bradford on Avon sweet shop owner and the names of those executed in 1953. Unsurprisingly they could not find anything which tied in with the details of the story. Thirty years ago I could have passed this off as a real story for quite some time before a determined researcher would have begun to pick holes in the veracity of the events. These days it takes just a few clicks of a mouse to reveal that this was all a fiction.

  But let’s pause there for a moment. In the course of creating this story I have come to appreciate that “real life” can be more unexpected, more coincidental and infinitely more upsetting than anything that has been created on the pages of this book. I was born just after the Second World War but my parents and grandparents lived through it, my father as a sergeant in the British army away from home for nearly all of those six years, my mother married and with a young child (my sister), sharing a job with my aunt whose own husband was also away at the war. For long periods, especially after D-Day, the sisters would hear nothing from their husbands. The modern conveniences which we take for granted such as Skype and email were still to be invented, telephones were mostly unavailable and letters, extremely haphazard in their delivery, became the only means of communication. The sense of loneliness during the war, especially for the women, and the difficulties for both the men and women in picking up on relationships after the war have, I would argue, been partly overlooked and underestimated by historians. As a young boy I did see such characters as the fur-bedecked Saul Martin and that anonymous pilot always looking around for enemy attack walking the streets of my home town (which was not Bradford on Avon by the way). These real lives and the world that they came back to in 1945 form the background to the book you have just read. For many, including my fictional Henry, it was a world, as H.G. Wells who was suffering from terminal cancer at the time and who describes in his final and despairing book written in 1945 – the one which Henry finds in the Bath second-hand bookshop – where “a frightful queerness has come into life.” For someone as sensitive and receptive as Henry, the post-war world would indeed have been alien. Even George Tanner, a survivor in every sense, cannot escape the horrors of his war-time experiences and when fate deals him that one last horrific trump card he, too, must bow to the inevitable.

  And, finally, I must explain some strange coincidences that occurred while I was writing and researching the book and which I found were quite unnerving but proof that real life can often be much stranger than the fiction that any active imagination could devise.

  Steffi first makes her appearance at Chiemsee in Southern Bavaria. (I tell a lie. She makes her very first appearance in the Keith Douglas poem, Vergissmeinicht, and that is why the last stanza of that poem appears at the very start of the novel. The Steffi photograph is, as Alfred Hitchcock might say, the “MacGuffiin”. If you read the whole poem you will understand how it fits neatly into the story – and subtly becomes part of the narrative. I chose Chiemsee very early on in the writing because I needed a German country railway station from where to launch the little photograph. I had always intended for the photo to finish its life on the verges of the railway line just by Avoncliff in Wiltshire. Railways, the reader will notice, are one of the motifs in the book either overtly described or hidden away in incidental events such as George and Mavis going to see Brief Encounter at the Bradford cinema on their first date. (Parenthetically, I should add that birds are another motif and the eagle-eyed reader will notice their appearance at crucial moments in the text.) A little research brought me to the railway spur that runs from the lake at Chiemsee up to the main line. I even managed to find a photo of the station as it was in 1939 and the way that the rails curve away behind the trees lining one edge of the tracks. What I was unaware of at the time that I wrote those opening chapters was that Baden Endorf (or Bad Endorf as it is now called), the camp in which SS officers were incarcerated after the war, is the next town up the road from Chiemsee. I had seen a television documentary about the Bad Endorf camp and the disturbing (and disputed) events that occurred there after the war and I had made the decision to put George Tanner, already traumatized from his experiences at Belsen, into this camp. The discovery that Bad Endorf and Chiemsee were neighbouring towns hit me like an electric shock. Bringing George into Chiemsee, letting him see the abandoned railway station and his breakdown on the steps of the same station just seemed so natural, so right. And can we make any guess as to who the woman he sees standing by the lake’s edge could possibly be?

  Belsen. Nothing I have written could even come close to the horrors that were awaiting the British army when they entered the camp in April 1945 but everything I have written here about this is true, including, and especially, the cartons of lipsticks which were to reinvigorate many lives of the women who survived. A fictional writer wouldn’t dare to imagine or create the scene where George and Daffin enter the wards and hand out the lipsticks, but that is precisely what did happen. It was, as I came to discover time and again in writing this work, a case of real life outstripping any fictional imaginings that any author could devise.

  Bradford on Avon. All the landmarks are there to be seen today and such historical events as the Halifax bomber crash in which one of the airmen falls into a shed on the Tory escarpment are logged in the many local history books of the area. The Shambles is as described and the “lock-up” on the bridge over the river which intrigues Henry is a prominent feature at the heart of the town. The railway stations of Bradford on Avon and Avoncliff are still more or less as they are described in the story although Bradford has lost its sidings to the extensive car park running alongside the track. The poster describing an Alpine rail journey that Henry sees through the window of one of the offices may still be seen today. Avoncliff is still a “request” stop – one of the few that remain on the rail network, but Limpley Stoke station where Henry sees the windhover bird is now closed although the building and platform can be seen as the Bradford to Bath train speeds past. The branch line (now closed) that ran off south at that point and which was the cause of Henry’s train being halted at Limpley Stoke was the branch line used for the Ealing comedy The Titfield Thunderbolt which was being filmed the year Henry was executed. The only “fake” I have inserted into the story was the placement of the cinema. The imposing building on Market Square, originally a town hall and also, intriguingly at one time, housing a police station, is now home to the Catholic church. At one time it had indeed been a cinema but only in the very early days of movie pictures and by the time the story opens it had long gone to another venue but, if you should find yourself in the town, do take a peek through the main doors and you will see the attractive twin sweeping stairs up to the “circle” level and perhaps you may imagine Mavis Eastman coming down them in her flight from the groping Victor Watson. And Henry and Madeleine’s “Mandalay” camp can still be seen if you should walk beyond the Great Tithe Barn and follow the fields adjoining the now revivified canal. And there’s the pool that swirls off the river where Madeleine and Henry paddled in that glorious summer of 1939 when their world was clean and fresh and they knew nothing of the dirty devices which would bring it all to an end.

  and that’s all there is –

  there isn’t any more.

  Acknowledgements

  The quote from the Keith Douglas poem, “Vergissmeinicht” (also entitled in some early volumes as Elegy for an 88 Gunner), is of central importance to this story. I came across the poem some years ago and
it is no exaggeration to say that it was the catalyst which got this novel off the ground. The final stanza extract appears at the start of this book for a very good reason and I’d urge readers to locate a copy of the full poem (or indeed the Collected Poems of Keith Douglas, one of the finest of our WW2 poets) for an insight into the mind of George Tanner and why the little photo was of so much importance to him.

  Acknowledgement and thanks are made to Scholastic Books Ltd for allowing me to quote from Ludwig Bemelmans: Madeline.

  To the Wilfred Owen Association for permission to quote from ‘Strange Meeting’ taken from Wilfred Owen: The War Poems, (Chatto & Windus, 1994), edited by Jon Stallworthy.

  I must thank Julia Adams, the proprietor of Bay Tree Interiors of 15 Silver Street for allowing me to use her shop as the site of the war-time Eastman’s shop and for bringing her unbidden into the story – albeit anonymously.

  For the background history of demobbed soldiers in 1945/6 I am grateful to Alan Allport’s Demobbed (Yale University Press 2009), and for the description of Belsen I gratefully acknowledge Ben Shephard’s After Daybreak, The Liberation of Belsen, 1945 (Jonathan Cape 2005).

  Every effort has been made to trace owners of what might be copyright material, and should any item be reproduced herein for which copyright permission should have been obtained then I apologise and acknowledge now.