A Death Left Hanging

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Aren’t I?’

  ‘No, you’re not. They’re good people round here, Charlie. The salt of the earth. But they’re down to earth as well. If they can’t see it or touch it, it doesn’t exist. You’re more sensitive. More subtle. I saw that right from the start – even back in the days when you were a nipper in short trousers, following your dad around the mill during the school holidays. That’s why, if I can’t be there myself, having you there is the next best thing.’

  Earnshaw had still not explained why he couldn’t be there, Charlie Woodend had thought, but you didn’t argue with bosses – even if they were your dad’s and not your own – which was why he had risen early that morning, caught the first train out of Whitebridge, and now found himself standing in front of the stark, imposing prison walls.

  ‘I don’t think they should ever hang women,’ said one of the two men just in front of him. ‘It’s not right.’

  ‘Not right?’ his friend repeated. ‘After what she’s done? She didn’t just kill her husband, you know. She kept at him with that hammer long after he was dead. They say she crushed his skull to a pulp. They say it looked like she’d spilt detergent all over the floor by the time she’d finished.’

  ‘Maybe she’d been mistreated herself,’ the first man suggested.

  ‘An’ that makes it acceptable, does it?’

  ‘No, not acceptable, exactly. But two wrongs don’t make a right, an’ anyway, nobody’s got any business hangin’ a woman.’

  Hadn’t they? The question echoed around young Charlie Woodend’s head. He’d been wondering for some time whether or not he should apply to the police force, and the question of capital punishment had been one of his biggest stumbling blocks.

  The plain truth was that he was still unsure whether it was ever right for the state to take a life. And until he was certain, how could he even contemplate putting himself in a position in which he might find himself investigating a murder? Because it simply wouldn’t be possible to make a proper job of an investigation when he disapproved of the inevitable end it was leading to.

  Woodend laughed, more in self-mockery than amusement.

  It’s a long step from joinin’ the police to bein’ involved in murder investigations, Charlie, he told himself. Chances are that even if you do become a bobby, the closest you’ll ever get to huntin’ down killers is chasin’ chicken thieves.

  He looked up at the clock again. Three minutes to eight. It would soon all be over.

  The three women in the cell had now been joined by two men. One of the men carried a book with a black leather cover, the other had a black leather bag in his hand.

  ‘Shall we pray together?’ the prison chaplain asked. ‘Or perhaps you would prefer me to read you something from the Bible.’

  Margaret smiled at him. ‘You’re very kind but . . .’

  ‘It’s the least I can do.’

  ‘. . . but God deserted me long ago.’

  ‘You should never think that, my child,’ the chaplain said. ‘He will never desert you.’

  ‘Then perhaps I’ve deserted him,’ Margaret replied. ‘In either case, your prayers won’t be necessary.’

  The doctor placed his leather bag on the table and unzipped it. He reached inside it and produced a bottle of brandy and a glass.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked. ‘You’re entitled to one, you know. Under the rules.’

  Margaret shook her head. Whatever else they might say about her – and they would say many things – they would never be able to claim that she went to her death with the stink of alcohol on her breath.

  ‘What time is it?’ she asked.

  ‘There’s plenty of time yet,’ the plump warden said.

  They kept offering her things she didn’t want, Margaret thought angrily.

  A prayer.

  A glass of brandy.

  But when she did want something – wanted to know the bloody time, the simple bloody time – they denied her.

  ‘It is not too late to change your mind about praying,’ the chaplain said.

  ‘It’s been too late for a long while,’ Margaret told him.

  The cell door opened, and the room was suddenly full of people.

  So it’s eight o’clock, Margaret thought. It’s finally eight o’clock.

  She recognized the governor, but the other three new arrivals were strangers to her. One of these strangers took her arms and placed them behind her back. Though she had not willed it, she found that her fingers were interlocking. And then she felt the leather strap binding her wrists together.

  The two wardresses had crossed the room and were moving the wardrobe. She wondered why they were doing that, then saw that it was in order to reveal a doorway she had never even suspected existed.

  If I’d known about that, I could have escaped, she thought, almost whimsically.

  She could not have been more wrong, she soon discovered, for when the wardresses each took an arm and led her through the doorway she saw that it did not lead to freedom at all, but a second empty cell. And beyond that was a third room – the execution chamber, which the governor had promised her was not far away.

  The gallows were not what she had been expecting. They looked more like a very thick set of goalposts than an instrument of death, and had it not been for the chain and rope hanging from the crossbeam, she might have thought that she still had further to go.

  There was a trapdoor just below the noose, and as her wardresses were manoeuvring her on to it, she noticed that a ‘T’ had been marked out in chalk.

  So that my feet are in the right place, she thought, marvelling at how calm she appeared to be.

  The man who had bound her wrists together now placed the white hood over her head, while a second man bent down and tied a leather strap around her ankles. Then she felt the noose being slipped over the hood and something pressing – not too severely – against the angle of her jaw.

  It had all been so quick, she thought. There had been no time for fear, no time for doubts – no time to change her mind her mind and tell all these people what had really happened to her husband.

  She was right about the speed of events. From the moment the executioner had entered the room until the point at which he removed the safety pin from the base of the operating lever and the trapdoors flew open, a mere seventeen seconds had passed.

  The prison doctor and the governor walked slowly down the stairs to the cell below the execution chamber. The doctor didn’t make a move to examine the hanging woman. There would have been no point. It was his job to confirm that she was dead, and he knew that for several minutes yet her heart would still be beating weakly.

  The doctor took out his packet of Players’ Navy Cut and offered it to the governor.

  ‘How many executions is this we’ve attended together?’ he asked, as he held a match under the other man’s cigarette.

  ‘Do you really need to ask me that?’ the governor replied, inhaling deeply.

  ‘No,’ the doctor admitted. ‘No, I don’t. This is our fourth. Do you think you’ll ever get used to it?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ the governor said. ‘Will you?’

  ‘Probably not,’ the doctor conceded.

  They smoked their Players in silence, and then the doctor placed his stethoscope against the woman’s chest and pronounced her dead. They left the room, locking it behind them. It would stay locked for an hour, then the executioner would return, remove the body and prepare it for the autopsy and inquest that were required by law following a hanging. He would also, at some point, measure the amount by which the neck had been stretched.

  Sometimes that elongation could be more than two inches.

  At nine fifteen a senior warder appeared at the gate of the prison and pinned to it a notice that announced that Margaret Dodds, in accordance with the law, had been executed at eight o’clock precisely. The waiting crowd pushed and strained to see the notice for themselves, though they must already have known exactly what i
t would say.

  Charlie Woodend did not join in the tussle. As far as he was concerned, he had done his duty by Mr Earnshaw, and was already walking back towards the railway station.

  He had reached an important conclusion while he had been standing there in the rain outside Strangeways. If hanging was to continue, he had decided – and there was no indication that it wouldn’t – then it was vital that those in charge of murder investigations should catch the right man or woman. For while it might be morally wrong to hang a guilty person, it would be nothing short of a human tragedy to hang an innocent one.

  Yes, what the English police forces needed, he thought, was to recruit men who were decent and honest, hardworking and imaginative. And, catching a glimpse of his own reflection in a shop window, he was fairly confident that he was looking at one such man.

  One

  As she walked briskly along the platform towards the waiting train, Jane Hartley was well aware that several pairs of men’s eyes were following her movements, and that most of those eyes were fixed on the swaying of her rump. She knew that most women of forty would have welcomed such attention – that, indeed, the knowledge would have resulted in an extra spring in their step – but as her colleagues and associates had long since learned, she was not most women. True, she had long since ceased whirling round and confronting her watchers – long since stopped taking pleasure in reducing them, through her carefully chosen words, to embarrassed, bumbling wrecks – but that had been due more to expedience than to inclination.

  It was nearly twenty years since she had been to the North, and had it not been for this one compelling reason, she would not have been there now. She was eager for the train to take her away from Manchester – far too many unhappy memories still lurked there – yet at the same time she dreaded it delivering her to Whitebridge. But there was no help for it – not if she were to achieve the goal she had set herself. And she always achieved her goals.

  She drew level with the first-class carriages and slowed down so that she could examine each one in turn. Ideally she hoped to find an empty carriage, but, failing that, she would settle for one occupied exclusively by women. If that proved not to be available, she would seek out a carriage containing both men and women. Her final fallback position would be to share a carriage with several men. If the only choices before her were either to sit opposite a lone man or stand in the corridor, then she would prefer the corridor.

  She was in luck and found a carriage that was completely – perfectly – empty. With eight seats all to herself, she could spread out her papers and get some work done on the hour-long journey.

  Once she had made herself comfortable in the carriage, she opened the expensive leather briefcase – a gift from the members of her chambers to mark her last, spectacular, victory in the Old Bailey. She ran her slim fingers over the brief that her clerk had handed to her just as she was leaving the office. It was an important case – a case which would benefit both her bank balance and her already considerable reputation – and she’d been hoping the instructing solicitor would pass it her way. Yet now she actually had it in her hands, she found she could not summon up her customary enthusiasm.

  She reached into the briefcase again and took out the copy of the Manchester Guardian that she had bought from the newsagent’s on the station.

  Much of the paper was devoted to the Profumo Affair, which was only to be expected, given that it was the biggest scandal to hit the English political establishment since the war. She had met John Profumo socially on several occasions and had been quite impressed with him at the time. Now, however, as more of the scandal leaked out every day, she was beginning to see what a bloody fool the ex-minister really was.

  He’d had everything a man could want – wealth, a beautiful wife, the important position of Secretary of War in the government. There had even been talk of him being the next Prime Minister. And he had destroyed it all by embarking on a torrid relationship with Christine Keeler, a young woman who even the most charitable of newspapers had called ‘a showgirl’.

  Had he bothered to check who else she was sleeping with, he would have discovered that another of her ‘friends’ was the Russian Naval Attache´. But he’d taken no such precautions. Instead, like most men, he had kept his brain firmly in his underwear.

  Even so, he might have survived the scandal if he had not lied to the House of Commons – had not told all the members of parliament gathered there that he did not even know Miss Keeler. Yet the lie had been told, and there was no going back on it. And now the government, which had been in power for twelve long years, looked to be in imminent danger of collapse.

  Jane Hartley quickly and impatiently scanned the paper. She had very little interest in the doings of John Profumo, but there was one name, connected only peripherally with the minister, that she was hoping to see.

  There it was – not in the lead story but in one of the articles related to it! Jane Hartley lit a cigarette, and began to read.

  MINISTER CALLS FOR ‘BUSINESS AS USUAL’

  The wheels of government could not be expected to grind to a halt simply because of press interest in the Profumo case, Eric Sharpe, Home Office Minister in the House of Lords said last night.

  Lord Sharpe, 63, who was first elected to parliament as MP for Whitebridge in 1935, went on to attack what he called ‘the less responsible elements of the press’ and added that any journalist hoping to uncover further scandals was ‘doing no more than whistling in the wind’.

  Our Parliamentary Correspondent writes: ‘It is clear from the statement that Lord Sharpe was speaking on behalf of a government walking a tightrope and only too well aware that one more unfortunate disclosure could cause it to lose its balance completely.’

  The picture that accompanied the article had the same grainy quality as most newspaper photographs, but it was still clear enough to give a fairly accurate impression of Sharpe. The noble lord was staring directly into the camera, as if to demonstrate that whatever others might wish to hide, he certainly had nothing to fear. He wore his years well, and his white hair (which he had allowed to grow unfashionably long) gave him the air of a patrician.

  ‘You fake!’ Jane Hartley said. ‘You complete bloody fake!’

  She drew heavily on her cigarette, and then, with almost surgical precision, placed the glowing tip of it against the photograph. The cigarette end all but obscured Sharpe’s face from her, but she still had the satisfaction of seeing the edge of the paper around it turn brown and then begin to glow red.

  She pressed harder, and the slim cigarette buckled. She could feel the heat beginning to scorch her fingertips, and could smell the acrid smoke as it snaked unpleasantly up her nostrils. She knew she should stop what she was doing, but she didn’t want to.

  She didn’t want to!

  There was the sound of the carriage door being opened, and then the paper was snatched violently out of her hands.

  She looked up. The man who had grabbed the newspaper from her was wearing a ticket collector’s uniform. He flung the paper to the floor and stamped on it several times.

  ‘What the hell do you think you were doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’m . . . I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I think I must have fallen asleep.’

  ‘You didn’t look to me as if you’d fallen asleep,’ the ticket collector said aggressively. ‘You looked to me as if you were deliberately setting fire to that newspaper.’

  ‘Now why should I have wanted to do that?’ Jane Hartley asked, regaining just enough control of herself to slip into her courtroom manner. ‘Do I look like a pyromaniac?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Would you mind opening the window a little?’ she asked, the tone of her voice making clear that it was not a request.

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘The window!’

  Almost as if he were surprised to find himself doing it, the guard stepped past her and opened the window.

  ‘That’s far enough!’ she said, w
hen he’d slid it about halfway down. ‘And now I expect you would like to see my ticket.’

  ‘I still want to know––’

  ‘Here it is,’ she said, holding the ticket out.

  The collector took the ticket off her, but barely gave it a glance. ‘I mean, from what I saw out in the corridor––’

  ‘Is it in order?’ she asked firmly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My ticket! Is it in order?’

  Reluctantly, the collector looked down at it again. ‘Yes, it seems all right,’ he admitted.

  Jane Hartley held out her hand. ‘In that case, you can give it back to me, can’t you?’

  The collector handed her ticket. ‘By rights, you know, I should make a repor––’ he began.

  ‘Thank you. You may go now,’ Jane Hartley interrupted him.

  ‘Look, missus . . .’ the ticket collector blustered.

  ‘Miss!’ she corrected him. ‘Miss Jane Hartley, Queen’s Counsel.’

  The words gave him pause for thought. ‘You’re a lawyer, are you?’ he said.

  She smiled suddenly – a courtroom trick she knew would throw him further off balance. ‘Yes, I’m a lawyer,’ she said. ‘Quite a famous one, as a matter of fact. But I like to keep quiet about that when I’m travelling.’ She paused for the two beats necessary for her words to have their required effect. ‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I would appreciate a little privacy.’

  ‘Uh . . . of course,’ the ticket collector said, leaving the carriage in the same dazed way that she had observed so many witnesses step down from the witness box.

  The smile stayed on her lips until she was sure he had gone, then quickly slipped away. It was a good thing that he had come in when he did, she thought, because she had almost certainly lost control. And she must not do that. If she were to succeed in her mission, she must learn to keep the same tight grip on herself in Whitebridge as she always achieved in the courtroom.

  She bent down, picked up the newspaper, and smoothed it out. The photograph of Eric Sharpe was now framed by the imprint of the ticket collector’s boot, but the only real damage had been done by her cigarette. She gazed down in satisfaction at the burn mark, which had once been his head. By the time she had finished with Lord Eric Sharpe, she promised herself, he would feel worse than he looked.