The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  Without warning, a black cloud passed across her vision, too close. Someone had walked in front of the keyhole. The floorboards groaned.

  ‘What is it?’ Milly whispered.

  Light returned and Frankie saw sitting at eye level on a plain stool the back of a slim woman chatting quietly to a maid who stood above her. She lifted a leg and rolled on a sheer stocking, pulling a sheaf of pale green petticoats out of the way. When she tucked them back down and stood up, Frankie saw the full length of her outfit; frothing underskirts, a white camisole covered at the arm with a black band, and a long dark green corset. The maid was decked out in a black smock under a white pinny, with the same mourning band.

  The woman in green stretched her arms until they cracked lightly. Gently, her maid eased her down until she was prone on the dusty floor. Frankie heard a short sniff, then what she saw sent her heart up into her throat.

  The maid lifted the woman’s underskirts to the side, and with the flat of her foot, stamped on her back, pressing the small of it so hard that her own face contorted. She reached for the corset laces and pulled them up, using her weight to lever them as tight as the flesh would allow. The woman let out a long moan then blew out her breath. She took a few moments before standing up.

  Frankie felt a creeping sickness at the memory of Ebony hanging on the trapeze, the light and her corset so black she looked split in two, at the vision of Smythe’s flesh rupturing out of his stays. But underlying it there was something else, a thick channel of fascination, for what on God’s earth were they doing, violently lacing themselves in at this time of night in a room above the shop?

  She was so puzzled by it all that she didn’t feel the first blow. Suddenly she was astonished to find herself on the floor looking up at the ceiling, without pain but with a cloying fuzziness in her vision. Someone was screaming. Milly. She heard a second blow. Her head bounced to one side. Then she felt the third blow and the lights went clean out.

  Twenty-Eight

  ‘Visitors?’ the enormous pink-faced matron in the grey smock said. ‘At this hour? They compromise the dignity of the patient at the best of times.’ She glowered at Primrose as if he had come up with the very concept of visiting patients in lunatic asylums himself. It was true it was late. The paperboys by the side of the road had been strapped into their sandwich boards, peddling the first edition of tomorrow’s news as he hurried off his tram in sleek black rain and up the great driveway of Colney Hatch Asylum. But then he had also been made to wait for almost two hours in the asylum lobby. He wondered whether it would be prudent to point this out to the matron and decided against it.

  They were standing in the entrance, a high airy hall with a faint institutional smell and a floor that conducted bright echoes of every noise that came into contact with it: footsteps, dropped pencils, the lick of a mop. It was a gloomy night and beyond the front door a wide sprawl of clipped hedges and gardens were soaking up the fierce rain. Weather and time of night aside, Colney Hatch seemed a peaceful place, more docile than its forbidding name; and more docile than its Matron, Miss Large, who was now chewing the flesh of her lips as if she couldn’t quite make up her mind whether to sedate Primrose or not. He noticed with a flash of discomfort that she carried a thin metal syringe in her breast pocket.

  He held out the Judge’s order. Travelling back and forth between Bow Street, Pentonville Prison and the Embankment had creased it somewhat.

  ‘Let me see that.’ She unfolded it and scrutinized the print with marble-hard eyes. Primrose felt his chest wilt looking at her, memories stirring of schoolteachers and formidable dairy-farming aunts. She passed it back.

  ‘You won’t get anything out of him. He’s been doped with opium and hyoscine. Can barely talk.’

  ‘Do you know why he was moved here?’

  ‘The report that came in to us said there had been an incident at Pentonville.’

  Primrose flushed. ‘Well yes, I saw that they were force-feeding him.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, no. It was following a visit from his wife earlier today.’ She looked at him to emphasise her point again about visitors.

  ‘Do you think I could speak to him?’ Primrose tried to relax and not show fear.

  The matron rolled her sleeves further up her salmon-pink arms. ‘It’s very late and it doesn’t do to cause a patient stress.’

  ‘It’s a murder investigation.’

  ‘Besides you can’t always be certain that what is coming out of their mouths is true.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s a viewing flap?’

  She hesitated, then sighed noisily through loose nostrils. ‘The first sign of distress and I’ll have you escorted from the premises, CID or not.’

  Primrose acquiesced politely. He looked around him as they passed through the corridor and thought that perhaps Matron Large might be right. If he ever had the misfortune to be locked in such a place, he probably wouldn’t want visitors.

  The layout was so vast he could have been walking through a small village, different streets leading off from junctions and crossroads, all painted a bright detergent-scented white. In the parlour near the lobby a few patients idled with late-night needlework and packs of cards. They turned through another corridor and passed through a wing of eighty or more beds, all filled. Matron Large watched Primrose from the corner of her eye. He tried not to stare.

  ‘I shouldn’t really be taking you through here,’ she said to him as if it were his fault she had brought him this way. ‘It’s the women’s wing.’

  His face coloured and he tried his best to look straight ahead.

  They rounded a few more corners, passing through empty corridors with secure doors lining them.

  ‘He’s a suffragette, you know,’ Primrose offered by way of conversation.

  The matron looked startled as if she couldn’t think to whom he was referring, then curtly said, ‘Yes, I know. I’m not trying to protect him.’

  It was Primrose’s turn to feel uncomfortable. Their exchange of words felt like a particularly nasty game of chess, although he didn’t mean it to be so. He decided to keep his mouth shut until they reached Reynolds. But the matron had been piqued. ‘I have no truck with them you know. It’s not an organisation for working women. We don’t have time for the At Homes; can’t afford to spend time in prison either. Fat lot of good it will do us, fighting for property owners to win the vote. Do you think I own property, Inspector, what was your name?’

  ‘Primrose.’

  ‘Primrose.’

  ‘It’s not my job to say . . .’

  ‘Do you think I will be any better off with the voices of ten thousand Tory-voting well-to-do women representing my opinions than I am with the voices of men? No one is trying to win me a vote, Inspector. I do my job. That’s my only concern – my patient.’

  Primrose had it on the tip of his tongue to contradict her, he wanted to spit out something about Sylvia Pankhurst’s new East London Federation for working women that some of his colleagues were monitoring closely, or the Lancashire mill girls. But the words stuck and he reflected that it was not his job to go recruiting extra suffragettes.

  They passed a small dispensary where men and women in laboratory coats were measuring out powders and tinctures. His eyes fell on the breast-pocket syringe again.

  ‘Has he had any other visitors?’

  ‘His wife.’ She stopped for a fraction of a second, and it came again, the flash of something, words unsaid, put back on the shelf. Graciously, with gritted jaw, Primrose held open the door for her.

  ‘His wife visited him here already?’

  ‘As far as she could. He had to be sedated.’ She stopped fully now. They were in a corridor of secure metal doors. ‘We’re not sure but we think there might have been a bereavement. Something he didn’t know about before his wife visited him in prison, that caused him to break down.’ She sighed again and touched her chin. ‘He seems to not even want the sight of her now. He became very agitated when she came here
to visit. But then, Inspector, that’s visitors.’

  At that moment a bell rang out, high and clear, carrying on the corridor’s arched ceiling. ‘Excuse me,’ the matron said and ran at a trot down the corridor to a room in the far corner where the door had already been flung back. Primrose could just make out a dim wailing from within, hollow, like the cry of a fox. There was an attendant in blue overalls in the doorway already; a straggle of others quickly joined. As the door opened wider, the sound of punches and knocks echoed into the corridor.

  ‘Wet sheets. Cold wrap,’ an attendant was ordering.

  The matron’s voice replied. ‘No, I’m giving him extra opium; there now, let’s have your arm.’ Her feet echoed an irregular tattoo inside the cell as she moved about, scurrying for purchase on a flitting body. ‘Keep him in a lock.’ The patient uttered something and the nurse replied, ‘No one’s coming for you.’

  Primrose, with a shudder to his nerves suddenly recognised the timbre of the voice, the enunciated vowels. He dared to step closer to the cell’s open door. Reynolds was lying prone, dribbling onto a cotton pillow, an attendant holding him by the wrists while Matron Large bent over him and inserted a needle into his already track-marked arm.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ he was saying. ‘They killed her.’

  ‘There, there.’ The matron dabbed at the sweat on his head.

  ‘They killed her and they’ll kill again.’

  ‘No one’s killing anyone. Not while you’re safe in here. You have to learn to talk back to those voices or we’ll never get anywhere.’

  ‘Who did they kill?’ Primrose took a step forward then froze as the matron locked him in cold admonishment. The attendants fell silent.

  Reynolds twisted his head enough to see Primrose. A blur of recognition floated in his eyes, then disappeared again, replaced by sedative.

  ‘Who’s been killed?’

  The matron stood forward. ‘I told you, you weren’t to stress my patient.’

  ‘Annie,’ Primrose said, ‘Annie Evans, is that who?’ He took a step closer, dropping to his knees so he was eye level with Reynolds.

  ‘Patients feel very unsettled when they come in here, voices, paranoid notions. Now if you put ideas in there . . .’

  ‘It was Annie, wasn’t it? You knew Annie Evans, didn’t you? Who killed Annie?’

  The matron began backing Primrose out of the room with her powerful frame. He resisted but was loath to lay a finger on her. Reynolds’s smeary face looked up from his pillow. Lucidity swam into his eyes again and he looked helpless as a boy for a few seconds. He nodded.

  ‘Who killed Annie?’ Primrose repeated, feeling his arms now being yanked back by spare attendants, dragging him from the room into the corridor. He ground them away, startling the men with his strength. They had not banked on a man who had learned the craft of cow-wrestling at a young age. By the time he fought his way back into the cell, Reynolds’s eyes were gone again. He dropped his neck, gave up the fight. Tears collected in his pinked eyes. He murmured two words into his pillow. ‘Remember. Remember.’

  Back in the corridor the matron pinched Primrose’s arm into a medical grip. ‘You didn’t tell me it was that murder investigation. I could have saved you the hassle and my patient the abuse.’

  Primrose looked confused.

  She marched him over to a side table and directed his gaze down to a newspaper. The date was printed at the top, one of the very early editions of tomorrow’s. ‘Don’t your men communicate?’

  ‘What?’ Primrose reached for the paper. ‘Who?’

  She puffed her breath out again, tucking the syringe back into her pocket. Primrose continued to rifle through the paper, then realised it was on the front page.

  ‘Suffragette Murder: Unexpected turn! Police Raid WSPU HQ.’

  Twenty-Nine

  Frankie felt the world turn a fast somersault before it came back to her. First in her ears, a clattering like dogs’ feet on flagstones. Then water on her face, cold on the ground. She realised it was raining and she was flat on her back. Next to her Milly moaned. Frankie felt sick to her gut. The back of her head throbbed. She opened her eyes and saw the silhouette of a figure peering over her, a cloth cap on oily hair that glowed red in the streetlamp.

  ‘Still happy I’m just the look-out boy?’ Liam spat. Frankie wriggled her shoulder, and spat out a bad taste of her own: blood. She coughed a couple of times and tried to focus. Whether it was the dark or her dizziness he looked a little blurred.

  ‘You could be a gentleman.’ She stuck out her hand.

  Liam looked both amused and affronted by the suggestion. He grabbed her by the forearm and yanked her to her feet. Milly rolled to sit up, picking up her silk dress where it had clung to the ground. ‘What just happened?’

  Liam ran his eyes over her filthy blue cloak and smeared make-up. He put a finger to his lips and pointed up at the first floor window of the corset shop. The curtains twitched, then the slice of marmalade light was gone.

  ‘See, they’re watching you,’ he whispered. ‘Come away and we’ll go down there.’ He pointed to Haunch of Venison Yard, helped Milly up and led the way.

  The yard was sheathed in tar-coloured mist but Frankie could just make out a ruby graze on Milly’s temple. The back of her neck felt like it had snapped. She rubbed it, trying to squeeze out the pain. Liam found some shelter underneath an awning for them.

  ‘Yous hadn’t been in there five minutes when I heard a scream.’ He looked at Milly.

  ‘Someone hit us from behind.’ She blushed.

  ‘Well, I didn’t hear none of that,’ Liam went on, ‘but they brought you downstairs over one of their shoulders. Took two of them to carry you,’ he nodded at Frankie.

  ‘Who’s they?’ Frankie asked.

  Liam’s eyes were blank hollows. ‘I don’t know. They were dressed like maids. Three lassies wearing black. White bonnets,’ he drew a ring round his head. A memory rippled across Frankie’s mind. She had knelt down, peeped through the keyhole, and she had seen . . .

  Liam turned to the mouth of the yard as a noise echoed towards them. It was a couple out strolling, hurrying under the gentleman’s coat, loud footsteps and laughter carrying behind them. He shook his head. ‘They put something in your pocket.’

  ‘Mine?’ Frankie’s hands began to root around her trouser pockets.

  ‘Top pocket.’

  Gingerly she raised her arm, wincing at a pain in her shoulder that extended from her neck muscles. Her fingers dipped carefully into the fabric, as if what lurked in there might be laced with poison or razor-sharp. Instead she found a card, a heavy embossed card with eggshell finish on it and a pearly sheen. It looked blank on both sides, but someone had scrawled a note in an uncertain, jerky hand. ‘Invitation only.’

  Frankie turned it over in her palms, seeing nothing but the scribble, when she began to detect underneath her fingers a slight denting of the paper in parts, a textured valley under her thumbs. She moved towards the mouth of the yard.

  ‘Be careful,’ Milly croaked.

  In the weak streetlight, misted with rain, she could just make out the outline of an imprint, deep in the card, pressed by the heavy metal hand of a machine: an hourglass.

  There was nothing else on it, no address, no post office box, not even a telephone number. The scribbled ink began to run, smearing the finish to a charcoal grey. Milly’s voice came from the pitch dark of the alley. ‘Frankie? You saw something through the keyhole. I heard you gasp.’

  Frankie tried to snatch back the memory. It was bent out of shape, the edges blurred, the way dreams were when she woke up. She remembered a woman rolling on a stocking, and that steel thing braced on the wooden dummy. A woman lying on the floor while another pulled in her laces. But she wasn’t quite sure she hadn’t dreamt it while she was unconscious. The only real things she had were the card in her hand and the pain. She sniffed; her nose was threatening to run in the cold. ‘That old witch fobbed me off twice, and what have w
e got to show for it but boiled eggs on the back of our heads? Come on, last time I promise.’

  Milly and Liam both looked at her. ‘Where now?’ Liam asked.

  ‘Twinkle’s.’

  The rain kept up its assault all the way. Milly huddled close under Frankie’s jacket for shelter, their feet trotting in quickstep. Once or twice a cab passed them, spewing fountains of water from the street onto their ankles.

  Twinkle’s new maid answered the door with a finger on her lips. Frankie pushed past her, sliding the coat off her head and squeezing water from the soaked edges onto the doormat. Milly tossed her hair, shedding drips onto the wall.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Liam said gently, fixing the maid in his gaze and removing his hat.

  Frankie knocked once then smartly opened the boudoir doors.

  From the chaise longue Twinkle sprang up straight-backed at the waist, as if rising from the dead. In her hands she held open the pink pages of an evening newspaper. When she saw who it was she released her breath and her expression darkened for a second, then the gauze went back up like a stage curtain and she beamed enthusiastically.

  ‘What opportune timing. I was just reading about a mistress who stabbed her secretary with a pair of curling irons. Can you believe it? How did you fare with the old insufferables? Finger a murderess yet? Any newspaper headlines imminent? Hmm?’

  Frankie reached into her pocket and flicked the card across the room. Twinkle held her gaze as it spun through the air then floated down onto the chaise. It sat for a second before she bent to pick it up. She held it delicately in her stiff hand and her smile vanished. After a few seconds she rubbed her lips together. The room grew chilly; Liam’s and Alice’s voices drifting in from the parlour died away.

  Twinkle sat back. ‘Pleased with yourself?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’ Frankie scanned the furs on the bed then took a tentative seat on the edge. Milly hovered by the door.

  ‘They’re not what you think.’

  ‘And what is it I think?’