by Nicola Upson
It didn’t take her long to realise that the bookshop was devoted exclusively to the history of crime. Even the more general subject areas – literature, theatre, cinema – consisted of Victorian novels that centred on a murder or mystery, and films and plays that brought notorious killers to life. The largest section by far, though, dealt with true crimes, and Josephine was astonished by how much time had been spent in chronicling the misery of others; there were hundreds and hundreds of individual volumes, many covering cases she had never even heard of, and the collection as a whole would have put any police library to shame. The books were organised by the particular murder they described rather than by author, and she cast her eye along the shelves: Burke and Hare, Crippen, Florence Maybrick, Madeleine Smith, John Thurtell and Henry Wainwright were just a few of the more familiar names whose deeds seemed to have been widely celebrated in print, and those not famous enough to warrant their own section had been charmingly gathered together under headings like ‘Poison’, ‘Railway Murders’ and ‘Infanticide’.
The Red Barn murder had a shelf to itself, packed for the most part with different editions of Curtis and one or two of the anonymous fictional accounts that had been published shortly after the crime. Josephine recognised many of the spines from Hester’s bookcase, but she picked up something she hadn’t seen before – a pamphlet called Maria Marten’s Dream Book. She looked at the date and was interested to see that it had been published as recently as the year before: more than a hundred years on, there was obviously still an appetite for new insights into the crime, and she had no doubt that Hester’s book – if she could get it published – would be widely read. On closer inspection, the pamphlet she had found was only tenuously connected to what had happened in Polstead: the author – whoever he or she was – had simply used Mrs Marten’s visions of her stepdaughter’s body as a justification for a book on the interpretation of dreams. Amused, Josephine looked up those that had troubled her recently and learned that seeing a fire meant luck, but being burned was a warning of trouble, and that dreaming of a burial was generally the sign of a birth. It was hardly Freud, but she decided to buy it anyway.
She wandered further down the aisle, in time to see John Moore leave his desk and disappear into a room marked ‘private’. Daylight seemed to want nothing to do with the back of the shop, and the walls here were lit with lamps whose warmth belied the nature of the material. The final rows of books were interspersed with artwork, if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms for such a morbid display. There were framed front pages from the Illustrated Police News and a few original examples of the broadsheets printed by James Catnach, but Josephine’s eyes were drawn instantly to a hangman’s noose, mounted in a wooden case shaped like an upside-down coffin; there was a label underneath the rope to tell her which poor devil it had dispatched, but she could not bring herself to go anywhere near it. Most startling of all, a life-size wax model of a woman dressed in black silk stood in the corner of the room, so realistic that it would have been easy to believe she was a customer left over from another age. Josephine walked over to her, intrigued and repelled at the same time. The woman was staged and carefully lit, and had a peculiarly sinister face, with dark, slightly oblique eyes and a sullen mouth; even if she had not been given pride of place in a room such as this, Josephine would have said that her expression was secretive and threatening, malevolent even. There was something about the waxen face, the stillness of the glance, that made Josephine feel as if she were actually staring at a corpse and she wanted to turn away, but the bookseller had returned and she was reluctant to show her distaste. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him hand over an odd-shaped parcel which clearly did not contain a book. The other man left the shop with his purchase – although purchase was perhaps the wrong word because no money seemed to have changed hands – and Josephine was conscious that she now had the bookseller’s full attention.
‘Kate Webster,’ he said, nodding to the waxwork. ‘Irish maidservant. Bludgeoned her mistress to death in Richmond in 1879, and was immortalised by Madame Tussaud a few months later.’ His accent was pure East End, his voice light and surprisingly young. ‘Are you familiar with the Webster case?’
Josephine shook her head. ‘No, I’ve never heard of her. Looking at this, though, it’s the maidservant part that surprises me, not the bludgeoning.’
‘Quite. I’m not sure she was constitutionally suited to the profession.’ He smiled, and she could not resist the temptation to look for a resemblance to William Corder in his face, but his age made it impossible; in any case, all the images of Corder she had seen had been drawn after the news of his arrest, when people were more interested in seeing the face of a murderer than a true likeness. ‘She’d been given notice, and on the day before she was due to leave, she waited for her mistress to come back from church and set about her,’ Moore explained with relish. ‘Actually, I said bludgeoned to death but it’s not certain that Mrs Thomas was dead when Webster started to mutilate and dismember her. She left her boiling in the copper while she went to the pub. The next day, she went round the neighbours offering best dripping for sale.’
The case was so extreme and so sensational that Josephine was surprised she had never heard of it. It made shooting or strangling someone in a barn seem lacklustre by comparison. ‘Is that how Webster was caught?’ she asked.
‘Not immediately, no. Mrs Thomas was something of a recluse and wasn’t much missed. Then Webster made some mistakes – dumped the rest of the body in a box in the Thames, dressed in Thomas’s clothes and told people she had inherited a cottage from an aunt, even passed herself off as the victim to sell furniture and other bits and pieces from the house. She fled to Ireland, but the police soon caught up with her. The middle classes were much more careful in their choice of servant after that.’
‘I’m sure they were.’ The story struck a chord with Josephine’s concerns about Hester’s missing treasures, and she wondered what else John Moore might sell that was not so readily on display. ‘How on earth do you get hold of things like this?’ she asked.
‘Oh, the Chamber of Horrors is never short of new recruits, and the old guard like Kate here eventually outstay their welcome.’
That told her nothing, but it was the only answer she was going to get. ‘And there are people who actually want to live with something like this?’
‘Some of my clients have, shall we say, a more rounded interest in crime. But most of them stick to books and illustrations.’
‘And paintings, I see.’ She gestured to the enormous canvas behind the desk. ‘I know Napoleon gets a bad press, but I’m not entirely sure he’s earned his place in here.’
He laughed. ‘Ah – that’s not for sale. It belongs to the building, and I’m sentimentally attached to it. It was painted by a chap called Jack Kelley who used to lodge in a room upstairs.’
Josephine remembered the name from Moyse’s Hall. ‘The artist who painted for the peepshows?’
‘That’s right.’ Moore looked at her with a new respect. ‘He’d be amused to hear himself dignified with the term artist, though. In reality, he was a drunk who was handy with a paintbrush, and could turn his hand to anything if the price was right. Three and six for an ordinary picture, seven and six for a battle scene like this.’
‘I don’t suppose you have any of the backdrops he did for the Red Barn murder, do you?’
‘I’m afraid not. I’ve read a lot about them, but I’ve never actually seen one.’ He looked at the book in her hand. ‘Is Maria Marten your main interest?’
‘Yes, in a manner of speaking.’ She held out her hand and introduced herself. ‘You are John Moore?’ He nodded, curious now. ‘At the risk of sounding suspiciously like an Irish maidservant, I’ve recently inherited a cottage from one of your clients. Hester Larkspur was my godmother. You wrote to her recently, and I wanted to let you know that she had died.’
‘Miss Larkspur? I had no idea.’ To his credit, he looked genuinely sad.
‘I’m so sorry to hear that. Miss Larkspur was one of my most knowledgeable customers, and one of the most colourful.’
‘How long had she been coming to you?’
‘Oh, for many years now.’ He sat down at his desk and offered her the seat opposite. ‘I thought it was strange that I hadn’t heard from her. She was always so excited when she received a new book, and I’d invariably get a letter from her within a few days. I’d expected an instant reaction to The Old English Baron. She’d been hoping for something like that for years.’
‘Why? What was so special about it?’
‘It once belonged to Maria Marten.’ He must have seen the look on her face, because he added: ‘Yes, I know it’s hard to believe. Miss Larkspur had similar reservations, but I was able to confirm its authenticity, I’m happy to say.’
‘How?’
‘When her mother died, Maria was sent to work for a parson in Layham and it’s his inscription on the flyleaf. That’s the first clue. Then, if you look very closely, there are little notes in the margins at various points in the book. They match the samples we have of Maria Marten’s handwriting. It was those that Miss Larkspur asked me to check.’
‘When was that?’
‘Months ago now. I was busy abroad earlier this year, and I couldn’t deal with it until I got back. I wish now that I’d done it sooner.’
‘I must pay you for it.’
‘Only if you’re sure. I’m very happy to take it back – there’s always a market for anything to do with the Red Barn.’ He paused, as if wondering how to phrase an indelicate question. ‘In fact, when you told me who you were, I thought that might be why you were here – to sell Hester’s collection.’
His efforts to keep a note of hope out of his voice were not entirely successful, and Josephine felt naive for believing that his sadness over Hester’s death was anything but financial. ‘No, not at the moment,’ she said. On her way here, she had rehearsed stories of her closeness to Hester, guessing that it would not serve her well to admit that they had been strangers, and borrowing from other people’s anecdotes to make her story authentic. Now, she realised she would need to offer John Moore a greater incentive than sentiment to get what she wanted. ‘This is all very new to me and there’s still a lot to sort out,’ she said, ‘but I can’t possibly keep everything. It’s quite a collection, as I’m sure you know. I’ll be in touch.’ She got her chequebook out of her bag to pay for the book. ‘In the mean time, you said you had something else for her.’
‘Yes. It’s a great shame. I would have liked her to see it, but it will have to go to another buyer.’
He obviously had no intention of telling her more, and Josephine wondered if that was because he assumed she wouldn’t want it or because he did not want to sell it to her. Either way, she couldn’t bear to leave without at least finding out what all the fuss was about. ‘What is it?’ she asked, her voice warm but casual.
Moore’s eyes went from the chequebook to her clothes and her bag, and she knew he was calculating that money would not be an issue. ‘You’re interested in adding to Miss Larkspur’s collection?’
‘I’m interested in buying the right things at the right price, and theatre and crime are my two biggest passions. My godmother and I were very alike in that respect.’ It was truth of a sort, and she saw that she had John Moore’s interest. ‘Hester got me interested in Maria Marten, but I’ve always been fascinated by Burke and Hare, too. Native loyalty, I suppose.’ She had deliberately chosen the largest section in the shop, and it worked: a new world of opportunity opened up in John Moore’s eyes. ‘I understand that you have a loyalty to your existing clients,’ she added, deciding that it was time to play him at his own game, ‘but I’ll consider anything that’s genuinely unique. If it’s authenticated, of course.’
‘Of course.’ He smiled cautiously and stood up. ‘There’s no harm in showing you, I don’t suppose, as you’ve been kind enough to come all this way.’
She waited while he went into the back room and returned a few minutes later with a small suitcase. ‘This is it,’ he said, opening the catches one by one and turning the case round to face her. ‘It’s quite the most original discovery to have come to light in years, certainly in all the time I’ve been dealing with the Red Barn murder.’ He allowed her the pleasure of opening the lid for herself. The case was filled with tiny booklets, made from individual sheets of paper folded and cut. The pages were held together with pieces of ribbon or neatly stitched along the spine, and every inch of paper was covered in ink. ‘It’s a diary, obviously,’ Moore said. ‘It starts in 1821, and belonged to a servant girl who worked for the Corders. She was also a friend of Maria’s, and that’s what makes it special. An insider’s view of the Red Barn murder is, as I’m sure you’ll agree, a very desirable commodity.’
Too astonished to speak, Josephine picked one of the bunches from the top of the pile and stared in fascination at the meticulous handwriting, straight out of a copy book, and the scratchy ink marks and blotches that spoke of the effort involved in what seemed such a simple task. There was no order to the makeshift diaries and the one she had selected was from 1823, dated only once on the front page. She sifted carefully through the rest until she found 1826, aware that Moore was staring at her, keen for a reaction. The entries were longer, the words abbreviated, and there was no hint of the standardised spelling and punctuation that marked the version she had read, but she recognised enough of the text to know that what Hester had been working on was not a fiction but an edited transcript of a real diary. No wonder she had been so excited about it; the feeling was infectious, and Josephine started to speak without thinking. ‘But this was Hester’s . . .’ She stopped herself just in time. There was no proof here of any wrongdoing, and she could not even begin to work out in her own mind what it might mean; the important thing was to get the diary safely off the premises, and she would not achieve that by causing trouble.
‘Yes?’ Moore said, watching her face intently.
‘This was Hester’s dream,’ she said instead. ‘Something so ordinary, and yet so revealing. Where did you get it?’
He shook his head, as though she had disappointed him. ‘I’m sure you understand I can’t break a confidence of that sort.’
She knew instantly that it had been the wrong question. One glance at the library-bound newspapers and official documents on the shelves had told her that much of the shop’s stock was stolen or at least of dubious origin. She didn’t think for a moment that Moore was the thief, and he certainly wasn’t stupid enough to sell something back to Hester that in all probability she had owned already, but she doubted that he would care about legality or ask questions about provenance, and he survived by demanding the same moral ambivalence from his customers. ‘Of course,’ she said, her tone suggesting that his had been the derisory comment. ‘What I meant was – are you sure it’s genuine?’
‘Oh yes. Or to be more accurate, I’m sure it’s genuinely from that period. The materials are easily datable, and so is the language. It could be a fabrication from the time, of course. Novelists fell on the Red Barn murder like bees to a honeypot, but nothing like this has ever appeared in print and it has the ring of truth about it.’
‘Have you read it all?’
‘No. I haven’t had time, and anyway, it adds something to the purchase for the buyer to feel that he is the only person to read this other than the girl who wrote it. There’s nothing like that sense of being first to discover something.’
What it added to the purchase was likely to be a zero, Josephine thought, and decided to take the initiative. ‘How much is it?’ she asked.
‘My price to Miss Larkspur was fifty pounds . . .’
‘That sounds fair,’ Josephine said, unscrewing the top from her pen.
‘. . . but that was based on the long relationship that we shared. I have other, less valued, clients who would happily pay double that . . .’
‘All right, a hundred pounds.’<
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‘. . . perhaps more. It might be best if we said . . .’
‘Mr Moore, I will give you one hundred and fifty pounds for the diary, The Old English Baron and this book on Maria Marten. Next time I’m in London, I will bring you a list of items that I’m happy to sell from Hester’s collection, and you will have first refusal on them all. Do we have a deal?’
