by Unknown
‘If you don’t mind him shitting on the car seat say so and I’ll leave some of it behind.’
‘Miran–’
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing.’
Oh, Fran thinks, I see. Either Barbara managed things better or Miranda was the first baby to be born with a miraculous self-wiping arse. ‘Pass the nappy liners, will you?’
Nick hands them over in silence, then goes into the hall to hurry Miranda and Gareth along. Miranda appears at the top of the stairs wearing the same long skirt and T-shirt she’s been wearing since she arrived. He wishes she’d make more effort, but he doesn’t know how to say so; anyway, she has enough to cope with. There’s no sign of Gareth.
‘What’s Gareth doing?’
‘Cleaning his teeth.’
Oh, God. ‘Bang on the bathroom door, will you? Tell him we’ll go without him.’
Nick goes back into the living room to find Fran struggling with the toggles on another plastic bag. ‘Is that it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Dink,’ says Jasper.
‘You can’t have one,’ says Nick.
‘Oh, give him one. He’ll only scream.’
Nick unpacks the bag, pours orange juice into a beaker and watches as Jasper raises it unsteadily to his lips. He manages without spilling any. ‘Good boy,’ Nick says, stroking his hair. ‘Do you know the fontanel’s completely closed now?’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I think so.’
He investigates Jasper’s scalp, pressing gently here and there. Fran comes to look too, and they stare in joint fascination at the small blond head they’ve produced between them.
‘Mum… ‘ Gareth says.
They look up guiltily, as if they’ve been caught in an illicit threesome, to find the two older children staring at them accusingly from the door.
‘OK,’ Fran says. ‘Get in the car.’
Nick looks at her, at the stained T-shirt and straggly hair, and says, ‘You’re not going like that?’
Abruptly, she starts to cry. ‘It’s all very well for you. By the time I’ve got everything ready there’s no time for me.’
The children gawp at her.
‘Get in the car!’ Nick shouts.
Miranda darts him a reproachful look, then stalks out without a word. Gareth bangs the door.
They’re left alone. Nick sits in one of the armchairs and listens to Fran cry, which she does very thoroughly, giving herself up to the sobs. Jasper stares at her, tries an experimental whimper, then moves closer to his father, resting one pudgy fist on his knee.
‘What’s wrong, Fran? What is it?’ Nick asks as a gap in the sobs seems to be approaching.
‘I don’t know.’ She wipes the tears away angrily. ‘It’s nothing, I’m just tired.’
‘Would you like to stay here and get some sleep? I’ll cope with them.’
‘No, it’s all right.’ She looks down at herself, at the outstretched, abandoned, puppet legs. ‘I just don’t like what I’ve turned into, that’s all.’
‘It’s not for ever.’
She wipes her nose on the back of her hand. ‘Feels like it.’
‘Be better when we’ve got the house straight.’
She looks at the wall painting. ‘They’d have had servants, wouldn’t they? The Fanshawes.’
‘I suppose so. No birth control, though, or nothing reliable anyway.’
Ours wasn’t, Fran thinks.
‘Not that ours was,’ Nick says, with an apologetic laugh. ‘Still, the Great Snip will be.’
Great snip, she thinks scornfully. You don’t know you’re born. But she feels friendlier towards him than she has all morning, and by the time she’s combed her hair and changed her T-shirt she’s able to look out of the window at the milky blue of the sky and think, with some anticipation of pleasure, It’s going to be a real scorcher.
‘Christ, it’s fucking hot,’ says Paddington Bear. He’s standing on a patch of grass outside a circus tent, and the remark’s addressed to nobody in particular.
‘Look, Jasper,’ Nick says. ‘Paddington’s waving. Are you going to wave back?’
He half expects Jasper to be frightened of a six-foot-tall bear in a sou’wester, duffel coat and red wellies, but Jasper takes one look, pulls his hand free of Nick’s, and hurls himself on to the wellies with all the abandonment of a rubber fetishist. Paddington bends down, rather clumsily because of the wadding round his middle, and pats Jasper on the head before straightening up and saying, ‘Hello, Prof. How you doing?’
‘Fine,’ Nick replies, trying to place the voice.
‘Buddle,’ says Paddington in muffled tones. Losing patience, he takes off his head. ‘Buddle,’ he says again, running his fingers through his sweaty hair.
‘Hello,’ Nick says.
‘Can’t get a job,’ says Buddle, answering the unspoken question.
‘But you got a First.’
‘I think that’s part of the trouble.’
Buddle notices a family with three children approaching and starts to replace his head. At that moment Jasper looks up, sees a headless bear and screams. Nick picks him up and tries to console him as Buddle lumbers off, shouting loudly, ‘Marmalade sandwiches!’, ‘Luggage labels!’ and ‘Peru!’
That’s what a First in psychology does for you, Nick thinks, hoisting Jasper on to his shoulders and setting off in search of Fran. The position does his neck no good at all, but Jasper loves it, twining his fingers painfully round chunks of hair. Wonder he’s not bald. ‘Ow, Jasper.’ Jasper laughs.
Gareth’s walking on stilts, Miranda’s juggling with leather balls, kids all round them are skipping and playing skittles. Fran’s sitting on the grass watching them, looking a bit better, Nick thinks. ‘Come on, let’s go to the house. They’ll be all right here.’
A steep slope leads to the house. ‘Do you think it’s the same Fanshawes?’ Fran asks.
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘He must have gone up in the world.’ She nods to the house that towers over them, against a landscape of wooded hills.
‘Yes, well, he did. Made his money in the First World War, munitions. 1919 – ’ Nick spreads his arms to indicate the grandeur before them.
The question’s settled for them as soon as they enter the house, for there, in the hall, is a portrait of Sir William Fanshawe, older, but unmistakably the man on the wall, same keen gaze, same voracious intelligence. Sadder, perhaps. But then we all get sadder, Nick thinks.
‘I feel quite embarrassed for him, don’t you?’ Fran says.
‘No – oh, you mean his dick?’ Nick’s pulling money out of his back pocket. ‘No, green with envy, actually.’
The staircase leads to a long gallery, lined with Victorian paintings of no great merit. Wounded animals, blood on their paws, crying children, glistening tears on rounded cheeks, obsessively lingered over.
‘I don’t like his taste,’ Fran says, pausing in front of a dog that’s lying in the snow next to its dead master. ‘It’s very old-fashioned, isn’t it? I mean it’s old-fashioned for the twenties. You’d think the war had never happened, it’s –’
‘1898.’
It’s not just the war that’s missing either. They’ve passed several portraits of William Fanshawe, one of his first wife, Henrietta, two of his second wife, Isobel, three of the nephew who inherited the estate. But, as they know from the painting in Lob’s Hill, Fanshawe had a daughter and two sons. So far there’s not been a trace of any of them.
Where are the children?
Fran stops to look into one of the bedrooms. Huge four-poster bed with heavy curtains in a dull green-gold. Chaise longue, writing desk, cheval glass, windows full of sunlight.
‘All that and nursery maids and nannies to look after the kids,’ Fran says. ‘Marvellous.’
‘And the husband slept next door.’
‘Even better.’
‘Only you’d wake up and he’d be standing at the foot of the bed in his
nightshirt demanding his conjugal rights.’
‘Oh, yeah? What’s changed?’
Ouch. ‘Fran, I –’
‘It’s all right.’
It isn’t – the cursory brush of her mouth over his tells him so – but she’s trying. They both are.
Three ornate rooms further on and Jasper’s thoroughly fed up, grizzling and stamping his feet. Fran kneels to comfort him and he hits her in the eye.
‘Hey!’ Nick says, shaking his arm. ‘You don’t do that.’
‘I’d better take him out.’
‘Do you mind if I stay a bit?’
‘No, go on. I’ll be at the tent.’
‘I won’t be long. Five minutes.’
As soon as he’s left alone Nick plunges into the maze of corridors, scanning the walls, peering into bedrooms, at paintings, at clusters of photographs on dressing tables, looking for a clue, any clue, to the secret of the house.
There’s nothing on the first floor, nothing in the bedrooms, where intimate family snapshots might be displayed, nothing on the staircase or in the main hall, where large-scale portraits of Fanshawe, his wives and other members of his family line the walls. Then, near the main entrance, opening off to the left, Nick comes across Fanshawe’s study. A printed notice by the door says that his desk is exactly as he left it when he went upstairs on the night of his death. Nick leans across the rope that closes off the room from visitors. It’s very quiet. A guided tour has just gone past and left the hall empty. Too quickly to feel any surprise at his own action, though normally he’s the most law-abiding of men, Nick unhooks the rope and goes into the room.
Tall windows behind the desk open on to a vista of wooded hills. Touching the back of Fanshawe’s chair, Nick sees Fanshawe’s signature in mirror writing on the blotter. A clock, stamps, stacks of paper, envelopes – no photographs.
But Nick’s already lost interest in the desk, for he can see from his new position that the room’s L-shaped, though the horizontal bar of the L is so short it’s hardly more than an alcove. Nick slips into it, with relief, because now he can’t be seen from the door.
He turns. There, hanging on the wall where nobody in the house can see it, is not a portrait, but the portrait, the photograph on which the wall painting in Lob’s Hill was unmistakably based. The boy, who here seems merely sullen and rebellious, rests his hand on his father’s shoulder. The girl looks unhappy, perhaps, but Isobel’s obviously proud of her small son, and Fanshawe – Fanshawe’s simply himself, alert, energetic, avid.
A fine family. That’s what anybody, on the evidence of this photograph, would think, so why put it here where almost nobody would ever see it? Even Fanshawe, if he wanted to look at it, would have had to get up from his desk and go into the alcove. He could never glance up from his desk and be surprised by this. Why? Because the sight of his children was, for some reason, painful? Because he needed to brace himself to look at them? Nick’s gaze tracks from one young face to the next, and a gust of despair sweeps over him. Not his own – Fanshawe’s.
Quickly and cautiously, Nick leaves the room, hooks the rope back across the door, and goes out through the main entrance on to the lawn, lifting his face to the warmth of the sun, as if the chill that lingers on his skin could be so easily dispelled.
The inside of the tent glows yellow with sunlight, and there’s a smell of hot grass under canvas, a smell that recalls some childhood excitement, though Nick can’t place the memory.
Adults on chairs at the back, kids cross-legged at the front. Two men in orange overalls stagger in carrying mops and buckets. Much hitting of each other’s bums with broom handles follows, greeted by gales of laughter from the younger children. The shorter of the two, blubbing loudly, climbs on to the knee of the youngest and prettiest mother and demands to have his bottom kissed better. It’s all very well done. Howls of pain to please the kids, just enough innuendo to stop Dad nodding off to sleep. Though this particular Dad’s badly in need of a cigarette. He touches Fran’s arm and points to the door.
Outside he decides to see if he can buy a guidebook. Fran likes them: if Jasper’s playing up she sometimes sees more of a place later in the guidebook than she does when she’s there. He goes across to the converted stables and finds the shop almost empty. Everybody’s either in the circus tent or sitting outside the restaurant at tables in the sun. Nick asks for the official guide, but finds they’ve sold out. Disappointed, he makes do with postcards, and then goes across to the books section and searches for something on the Fanshawes.
He’s given up and is just about to leave when he sees a book called Mary Ann Cotton’s Teapot and Other Notable Northern Murders, by Veronica Laidlaw. He knows Veronica slightly, having met her once or twice at college dinners. She’s a rather prolific historical novelist, but he had no idea she was interested in crime. This had been published in 1995 by the Vindolanda Press. The cover has a picture of Mary Ann carrying the infamous teapot, which contained, or so she always claimed, right up to the steps of the gallows, nothing but fortifying herbal infusions. Lying on a bed in the background of the picture, about to be fortified, was one or other of her various husbands.
If everybody connected to Mary Ann Cotton who died suddenly from gastrointestinal upsets was actually murdered, she is easily the most deadly of British killers. But of course we don’t know that. Many of her children, according to their death certificates, died of ‘teething’; and some of these deaths may have been natural. Nick knows about her through Geordie, who remembers his sister Mary and the other little lasses singing a skipping rhyme.
Mary Ann Cotton, she’s dead and she’s rotten.
She lies in the grave with her eyes wide oppen.
Sing! Sing! Oh what shall I sing?
Mary Ann Cotton is hung up with string.
Where? Where?
Up in the air.
Selling black puddings a penny a pair.
He also remembers being put in a dark cupboard under the stairs when he was naughty and being told that Mary Ann Cotton would get him.
It’s worth buying, Nick thinks, for that reason alone. The garish cover’s misleading. Veronica’s treatment of her selected crimes is anything but sensational.
Mary Ann Cotton is dealt with in the second chapter, the first being devoted to the gibbeting of William Jobling at Jarrow Slake. The last chapter is on Mary Bell, an eleven-year-old girl who, in 1968, killed two small boys, one of them on the Tin Lizzie, a stretch of waste land less than a mile from Lob’s Hill. Nick remembers the case: the air of gloom that spread throughout the city, though by contemporary standards media attention had been restrained.
Nick wanders out into the sunshine to read it. He can’t think of any other ‘notable northern murders’, and flicks through the intervening pages until his attention is caught by the name: Fanshawe. With a slight drying of the mouth, he turns to the beginning of the chapter – Chapter Five – and reads: ‘The Murder of James Fanshawe at Lob’s Hill’.
James Fanshawe was two years old at the time of his death, the only child of the second marriage of William Fanshawe, a local armaments manufacturer. By his first marriage, William had another son, Robert, aged eleven at the time of the murder, and a daughter Muriel, who was aged thirteen. Neither of the children of the first marriage liked their stepmother, and both seem to have been jealous of their half-brother, James.
On the morning of 5 November 1904 Jessie Baines, the nursery maid, went into the nursery and found James’s bed empty. Normally she would have been sleeping in the nursery with him, but she had a bad cough, and his sister Muriel had slept in his room instead. James was a nervous child, frightened of the dark, and still more frightened of the shadows cast by his night-light. His first word, pointing at the shadows, had been ‘sadda’. Jessie shook Muriel awake, but she was difficult to rouse and seemed unaware of her surroundings. James was nowhere to be found and the police were called to the house.
At almost the same time as James’s bed was found empty,
a boy from Tidmarsh Street, playing truant from school in order to guard the street bonfire from rival gangs who might steal from it or set it alight, crawled inside the open space at the heart of the fire, and found himself confronted by the body of a fair-haired toddler. The Guy’s mask had been placed over his face, perhaps to hide the terrible injuries underneath, but blood had seeped through.
The Fanshawes were immediately informed of the discovery, and shortly afterwards William Fanshawe identified the dead boy as James. There were no signs of a forced entry to the house, though the front door, which William Fanshawe distinctly remembered locking, was open.
William and Isobel Fanshawe slept together. The two maids shared a bedroom in the attic. That left Robert, sleeping by himself, and Muriel, sleeping in James’s room. She had taken cough medicine, she said, thinking that her cough was keeping James awake. She had seen and heard nothing. Robert’s story was even simpler. He had gone to bed and gone to sleep. The next thing he knew Jessie was screaming. He had, however, noticed a tramp hanging about in the lane behind the house several days previously, though he had not thought to mention it to anybody at the time. Muriel had seen him too, or so she said. They described a scruffy villainous-looking man with a scar down one cheek, the sort of figure who could not possibly have passed unnoticed. Nobody else had seen him.
The Fanshawes were well known, and news of the murder spread quickly. William Fanshawe was the largest of the local employers, and almost everybody in the neighbourhood either worked in his factories or was dependent upon somebody who did.
The day following the discovery of the body, one Jeremiah Cookson came forward and said that on his way home on the night of 4 November he had seen two children pushing what he took to be a Guy on a wheeled trolley. He had noticed them particularly because they were smartly dressed, and it seemed strange that two such children should be out alone at that time of night. It was well past midnight. So strange did it seem that he made a point of following them. They became aware of his footsteps behind them, and paused under a street lamp to look back. It was Robert and Muriel Fanshawe.
