by Nicola Upson
Marjorie wrenched her hand away, accidentally catching the glass as she did so and knocking it to the floor. Blinded by anger and terrified that her father spoke the truth, she picked up one of the broken pieces and thrust it towards him. As he held his hands up to protect his face, Marjorie—for the first time in her life—felt stronger than he was. The balance of power in their relationship had suddenly shifted. How could she not have noticed that he had become an old man? The realisation seemed to shock her father as much as it did her: he made no attempt to speak to her as she placed the glass gently back on the table and left the pub.
Chapter Four
Josephine emerged from the newspaper room at the British Museum with her hands as covered in ink as her notebook, her mind full of the varying press accounts of the trial: the verbatim witness testimonies found in The Times; the lively opinions put forward by the Echo; and the Telegraph’s lengthy descriptive commentaries. Before leaving the building, she couldn’t resist straying for a moment into the Museum’s great domed Reading Room. She sat down at one of the leather-covered reading desks which extended like spokes from the circles of bookcases in the middle of the room and, while the reports were still fresh in her mind, summarised the most interesting aspects of the Sach and Walters case. She had no idea yet how the story would be told but, when she had finished, she was pleased to see that there was a compelling series of scenes to recreate. To a mind untrained in law, the trial and lack of evidence for the defence threw up a number of questions which she looked forward to talking through with Archie. Having read more about the case, though, it seemed that her original instinct had been a good one: it was the balance of power between the two women which would drive the novel, and the effect it had on those around them. The social circumstances of the time were interesting, too: she had been astonished at how many other accounts of child neglect, cruelty and abandonment she had found in the pages of the press without looking very hard for them. Celia had been right: Sach and Walters were certainly not unique in their crimes; she had identified at least four other baby farmers operating during the same period.
She walked out into a pleasant haze of winter sunshine and headed back to the Cowdray Club for lunch, her spirits lifted after the misery of the morning by the brisk freshness of the day. In fact, if the last week was anything to go by, November in London certainly didn’t deserve its bad press. It was cold, certainly, but the trees in Cavendish Square were still in leaf and, although the drift of gold that ran through the branches was a muted, poignant affair, there was no doubt that this month of scarlets and yellows held its own beauty.
‘Miss Tey! What a lovely surprise!’
Josephine glanced across the street and was astonished to see Archie’s detective sergeant, Bill Fallowfield, standing at the entrance to the club. Celia was with him and, judging by the impatient look on her face, he had broken off an important conversation to greet her.
‘The surprise is mutual, Bill,’ she said, smiling warmly. She had a soft spot for the sergeant, and admired the loyalty and good humour that—by Archie’s own admission—saw them both through the most difficult of times. ‘What brings you to this side of town? A spot of early Christmas shopping?’
‘I should be so lucky, Miss,’ he said. ‘No, I do all mine on Christmas Eve, I’m afraid.’
He stopped discreetly short of revealing his business at the club, and Josephine was careful to hide how much she knew. ‘The stealing?’ she asked, turning pointedly to Celia, who nodded. ‘Is it really that serious?’
‘I’m afraid so. Nothing very valuable has been taken, as I said, but that’s not the point. We can’t be seen to be lax about security, not if we want to maintain the reputation of the club. If word gets out about this, the membership is bound to suffer.’
‘We’ll do all we can to put a stop to it before it gets out of hand, Miss Bannerman, and what you’ve told me today has been very helpful.’ He turned to Josephine. ‘Inspector Penrose didn’t even tell me you were in London,’ he said, feigning indignation. ‘I’ll have to have a word with him when I get back to the Yard.’
Josephine looked guilty. ‘He didn’t know himself until last night, Bill. I had the chance to come down a day or two earlier than planned,’ she explained, hoping that she could rely on Celia not to be more specific, ‘and I’ve had a lot of work to catch up with.’
‘A book or a play?’ he asked cautiously.
‘A book,’ she said, knowing that this would please him. Fallowfield was a great fan of her novels and an avid reader of detective fiction in general, but he didn’t ‘hold’ with plays and privately considered that she was wasting her talents in writing them. ‘Actually, Bill,’ she added, looking at him thoughtfully, ‘you might be able to help me.’ Fallowfield was in his fifties, although he looked younger, and would know from experience what policing was like at the time she was investigating. ‘Do you know anything about the Finchley Baby Farmers?’
He looked intrigued. ‘Sach and Walters, you mean? Blimey, that takes me back. I haven’t heard their names mentioned in years.’
‘Takes you back?’ Josephine prompted, scarcely daring to hope.
‘Yes, Miss,’ he said. ‘It’s funny you should ask about them—I was in the car that took the Billingtons into Holloway the day before they hanged them.’
‘You drove the executioners into the prison?’ she asked, resisting the impulse to hug him.
‘Yes, with my sergeant at the time. There were always two of us on a job like that in case of any trouble. Thirty years ago or more, that must have been.’ He shook his head, as if he couldn’t imagine where the time had gone. ‘I hadn’t been in the force long, and it was one of the first jobs I was given—certainly the first job like that. I’ll never forget it.’
His words echoed Celia’s, and Josephine was struck by how many people—young, impressionable and just starting out in their careers—had been affected by the crimes of these two women. ‘Would you tell me about it when you’ve got time?’
‘Of course, Miss. I’d be glad to help, and I might be able to find you a few more people to talk to, as well—I’ve kept in touch with some of the lads from back then.’
Celia cleared her throat. ‘As long as the sergeant has some time left to concentrate on crimes that haven’t been solved yet,’ she said archly. ‘Petty theft isn’t as glamorous as baby farming, I know, but it seems a little more pressing to those whose belongings are at risk.’
Having delivered such a satisfactory parting shot, she went back into the club with a purposefulness that suggested others might also do well to get on with their work. Josephine and Bill looked at each other, and Bill raised an eyebrow. ‘Now why do I feel like I’m back at school?’ he asked.
‘Imagine how I feel,’ Josephine confided. ‘She really did teach me.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, and she was Sach’s wardress in Holloway. In fact, it was her that got me started on all this. She was there at the execution.’
‘Crikey,’ Bill said, looking after Celia with a new respect. ‘That’ll teach me to assume that people who run posh clubs don’t know about the real world. It takes some guts, looking after someone in the condemned cell. Makes our part of the job look easy.’ He smiled at Josephine. ‘Have you been to Claymore House yet?’
‘Sach’s nursing home? No, not yet. It’s still there, then?’
‘Yes, although the area’s changed a fair bit. Listen, I’ve got a bit of business near Finchley, as it happens, and there’d be no harm in doing it this afternoon. How about I show you and we can talk on the way?’
Josephine could only imagine what Archie would say when he found out that she’d been sightseeing with his sergeant at a time when they were so busy, but it was too good a chance to miss. ‘On one condition,’ she said. ‘Lunch is on me.’
From the drawing-room window, Lucy watched as the policeman drove off with the woman who had walked in on her last night, and wondered how long it would be before they ca
me for her. It was kind of Marjorie to look out for her, but nothing would ever come of it: Marjorie’s schemes always petered out, and Lucy didn’t much care what happened to her now anyway.
Every time she thought about her own child, a knife twisted, reopening old wounds. She could hardly remember anything about the day she had said goodbye—the weather, who else had been there, what she had said as she looked down at the little girl for the last time. The only thing she had to convince her that it really had happened was the pain, which refused to lessen with time. Everyone had said it was for the best, and her own voice had been lost amid a clamour of good intentions; she supposed they meant well, but they could never know how the knot of anger and resentment grew inside her, replacing what was lost, or how it moved and kicked and screamed every time she remembered.
‘What were the Billingtons like?’ Josephine asked as they drove through Kentish Town. ‘They were brothers, weren’t they?’
‘Yes, William and John—John was the youngster of the family, and there was another brother who was in the trade as well, but I never met him.’
‘It’s a real family business, isn’t it? Aren’t there several Pierrepoints doing it at the moment?’
‘Yes. Now you mention it, Henry Pierrepoint was the assistant for Sach and Walters. But it’s natural to keep it in the family, I suppose. Hanging’s a competitive business, although I’ve never understood that myself, and they all want to be number one: if you bring your sons in, you hold on to the top spot for as long as you want it. All the Billington boys were taught by their father. He was a bit before my time, but he was a rum character by all accounts—a barber originally, but they say he wanted the job so badly that he built a miniature scaffold in his own back yard to practise on.’ Fallowfield shook his head at the vagaries of human nature. ‘It was a bit more organised by the time that interests you. In fact, I think William was the first hangman to be properly trained.’
Josephine was horrified. ‘You mean they let people near a rope without any formal training before that?’
He nodded. ‘I suppose it was like any other profession. People observed the craft and learned on the job.’
‘You wouldn’t want to get an amateur when it was your turn, though, would you? And it must have been a terrifying thing to do for the first time—it’s not as if you could take another run at it if you got it wrong.’
‘No, and I dare say there were a few more accidents than anyone would like us to know about. But the Billington boys seemed to know what they were doing. Earnest chaps, they were—I can see them now: two pale-faced young men in dark suits with bowler hats, sitting quietly in the back of the car. They hardly said a word during the whole journey, but there was something calm and composed about them—you’d never have guessed what they were on their way to do.’ He paused for a moment to negotiate a busy junction at the head of Archway Road, then swung boldly into the traffic between two oncoming cars, raising his hand to thank the second driver for a courtesy which had not been his choice. ‘I remember looking at the two of them in my rear-view mirror and thinking how young they were to take a life—in peacetime, at any rate. They weren’t much older than I was, and I found it unnerving enough just to drive them into the prison.’
‘I’ve often wondered what sort of man it takes to do a job that most of us would balk at. Justice is a luxury when you don’t have to carry it out yourself, and they can’t be unmoved by it—it’s quite noble, I suppose.’ Bill gave a dismissive snort, and Josephine looked at him. ‘Am I being naive?’
‘I shouldn’t speak out of turn, Miss, but they certainly weren’t saints. It’s a position of power, don’t forget, and I’ve heard that a lot of them turned the notoriety to their own advantage, although they were never supposed to brag about what they did. And they weren’t always on the right side of the law themselves, either. William spent a month in prison for refusing to keep his wife and two kids—they ended up in the workhouse—and Henry Pierrepoint turned up drunk to an execution once and had a punch-up with his assistant on the scaffold. The warder had to break it up. God knows what the poor sod on the gallows was thinking. Mr Churchill dropped Henry from the list after that.’
‘What happened to them? Are they still about?’
‘Henry’s long gone now. William was dropped a couple of years after Sach and Walters for refusing to attend the inquest after a hanging in Ireland—he’s still alive, though, I think. And John …’ He paused, and Josephine noticed a smile playing on his lips. ‘I shouldn’t laugh, really—it was a terrible accident and he can’t have been more than twenty-five, but it would take a better man than me not to see the funny side.’
‘Why? What on earth happened?’
‘He fell through his own trapdoor while he was rigging a drop up in Leeds. Recovered sufficiently to do the hanging, but died a couple of months later.’
Josephine tried not to laugh. ‘That’s awful,’ she said, but took a while to compose herself. ‘Did it get to them, do you think?’ she continued more seriously.
‘Like you say, they can’t have been completely immune to it. James—that’s Billington senior—took to drink eventually. He had to execute a friend, apparently, and they say that finished him off.’
‘Surely that should never have been allowed? It must make a huge difference when it’s personal.’ They passed East Finchley tube station, and Josephine began to take a keener interest in her surroundings. ‘It’s funny—I wrote a whole play about how Mary, Queen of Scots must have felt in the days before her execution, but it never affected me like this. It’s because it’s in living memory, I suppose—it’s much more real. Thirty-odd years isn’t long, is it? Sach and Walters could still be walking these streets if things had been different.’ She looked ahead of her at the wide road, flanked with busy shops, and thought again about what Celia had said to her. ‘They weren’t noble or special, and the ordinariness of it makes a difference somehow. It could be any of us.’ They stopped in a long line of traffic at a crossroads, and she said: ‘Tell me, Bill—what was that day like? I’d like to be able to recreate it in the book. It would have been the day before the execution?’
He nodded. ‘They had to be at the prison by late afternoon, so we collected them from the station and took them on to Holloway. They weren’t carrying anything with them—the luggage had been sent on ahead, and I remember thinking it was like going on a bloody holiday except for the weather. It was bitterly cold—am I right in thinking it was just after Christmas?’
‘The beginning of February, yes. They were committed on Christmas Eve, of all days, and tried in January.’
‘That’s right. It was starting to get dark by the time we got down the Camden Road, but that hadn’t put the crowds off.’
‘Abolitionists or sensation-seekers?’
‘Oh, mostly sensation-seekers. There wasn’t the strength of feeling against it all that there is now. That didn’t really start until the trouble over Edith Thompson. No, most of this lot were in good spirits, laughing and joking with our lads at the gate—more like a state occasion or a football match than a wake. They might have missed out on watching the hanging itself by thirty years or so, but they were determined to get what they could out of it.’ The car moved forward a few feet but the lights turned red again before they got to the front of the queue and Fallowfield continued with his story. ‘It was the executioners they all wanted to see—they were the stars of the show, so there was quite a commotion when they saw us approaching. Greeted like heroes, they were, and it was a while before we had a clear path through—lots of banging on the car and cheering as we went in.’
‘The power of fame,’ Josephine said cynically.
‘To be fair, not all of them were there just for the spectacle. Baby farming caused quite a stir, you know, and there was a lot of strong feeling about it. Hundreds went to Newgate when Dyer was hanged. Sach and Walters didn’t pull in as many as that, but there were a fair few waiting, and a lot of them were women.’
>
‘I wonder if any of the mothers were there? It must have been terrible to read about the trial in the newspapers if you’d left Claymore House believing your child had found a good home.’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised but, if not, there were plenty of others around to be outraged on their behalf.’
‘It’s funny, isn’t it? If you wanted to be cold about it, you could argue that they were only doing what women have done for hundreds of years—getting rid of children whom society couldn’t afford to care for or even acknowledge. They probably told themselves they were providing a service. I suppose it’s the professional aspect of it that frightened people, though. It’s one thing to manage the population quietly within your own family, but quite another to undermine the social set-up by turning it into a business.’
‘In my experience, for all the talk of justice and compassion, people react to crime by how threatened it makes them feel—and none of us want to believe that women can kill children. It unsettles everything we take for granted.’ The lights were changing again, but this time Fallowfield scraped through on amber. ‘Hertford Road’s just up here on the right,’ he said, and Josephine felt a rush of excitement and curiosity: as much as she loved fiction, there was nothing quite like delving into the lives of real people, and imagining them in their everyday surroundings helped her understand them better than anything. A couple of minutes later, they turned into a side-street and parked in front of a gate. ‘That’s it,’ he said, pointing to one of the terraced houses on the other side of the street. ‘Claymore House.’
Josephine had not known quite what to expect, but the grandeur of the name had led her to imagine something more individual and imposing than this unassuming, red-brick building, the mirror image of its neighbour and indistinguishable from most of the houses along the row. From the outside, Claymore House looked moderate in size, but the number of chimney pots suggested that appearances were deceptive; certainly, from what she had read in the newspapers, Sach’s nursing home had housed several occupants at a time as well as her own family; it would have to be quite spacious inside and, she noticed, looking more closely, there was a basement and possibly an attic to provide additional accommodation if necessary. A tiny front garden separated the house from the street, and a couple of steps led up to an open porch and solid front door, where stained-glass panels offered one of the building’s few unique features. As her gaze moved upwards towards a turreted bay window—presumably the master bedroom—she noticed that the plaque which should have held a name was blank; after the notoriety, it was perhaps not surprising that subsequent occupants would be reluctant to acknowledge the existence of Claymore House. ‘I don’t know why, but I expected it to be detached,’ she said to Fallowfield as they got out of the car. ‘It’s very overlooked, isn’t it? You’d be hard pushed to hide any comings and goings.’
