by Tessa Harris
“Donovan? The Irishman found hanged?” Hawkins breaks in.
“Yes,” confirms Constance. “Mick Donovan was making deliveries and drove past Clarke’s Yard. He saw you leave”—she’s looking at Braithwaite—“but he saw Cath stay, so he thought he’d try his luck with her. He stopped his cart and went to ask her if she was willing, but just as he did, a man came up to him and threatened him with a knife if he didn’t make himself scarce.”
“I told you, it must’ve been Will,” groans Braithwaite.
“It wasn’t. Mick Donovan didn’t get a good look at his face, but he did see his hand. He saw it was bandaged.”
Sergeant’s Hawkins’s eyes widen. “The haberdasher.”
“Yes,” says Constance. “Albert Cosgrove. He came to get his money back. He’d been out looking for her and was sure he’d find her on the streets. He knew she was a regular at Clarke’s Yard. He didn’t intend to kill her, but he lost his temper. He took her by the collar—a collar lined with binding to stiffen it.”
“Dr. Brownfield’s four-thread cord,” mutters Sergeant Hawkins.
Constance nods. “Cosgrove didn’t intend to silence Cath for good, and he may even have left her alive, but he wanted his money back. And he got it.”
Hawkins follows through. “He traced Donovan to Greenland’s by way of the cart and made sure he was silenced, too. He hit him over the head, then strung him up to make it appear that he’d killed himself.”
“Exactly,” confirms Constance. Earlier, when she was recounting the baby farmers’ grisly deeds at home, Florence told her of her encounter with Albert Cosgrove at the poulterer’s shop. Constance deduced that he must have been on a mission to mark out his prey.
Despite such a convincing theory, the detective does not, however, appear entirely won over. “But where is the proof, Miss Piper? This sounds very plausible, but we need hard evidence.”
“You already have it, Sergeant,” she counters.
“We do?”
Constance takes a deep breath. “In an evidence box in your office, you’ll find a bloody handkerchief with a pink rose embroidered on it. As Cosgrave was attacking Cath, the stab wound she’d given him earlier began to bleed again, so he snatched her handkerchief from her. He wrapped it in the parcel with the dead babe that was left at the market the following day.”
Braithwaite winces as he lifts his head. “So what about Will?”
“Will came later,” Constance continues. “He found his sister lying dead, but when he saw the law coming, he panicked and fled the scene. He went into hiding, as you well know,” she tells Braithwaite pointedly.
Sergeant Hawkins is frowning. “But how have you ascertained this, Miss Piper?” His voice is low.
Constance is happy to reveal her sources. “A boy at the docks. He was helping to hide Will. I think you must’ve followed me.” She throws a scowl at Braithwaite again. “I led you to the nipper, who led you to Will. You killed him, then paid Mick Donovan to transport the body back to your forge, where you smashed his face, then tried to burn his head so everyone would think it was you who was attacked.”
“So Will Mylett was dead while you were in custody?” cuts in Sergeant Hawkins. “That explains the medical report that stated he might’ve been dead for up to three days,” he mutters with a nod.
“Yes,” replies Constance. “But, meanwhile, Mick Donovan was getting nervous. He was already fearful for his own life after Cosgrove tracked him down to the shop, and then when the body was found at the forge, he was terrified he might be accused of murder.” She switches her gaze to Fanny. “He tracked you down to Pelham Street. He’d no idea the man who hired him to transport a dead body was in hiding upstairs.”
From the bed, there comes a sob. Adam Braithwaite is a broken man. He became a murderer because of a mistaken belief. He was convinced that Will Mylett had killed the woman he loved. Remorse is written on his face. He will die bitter, but contrite.
The nurse, who has been present throughout the proceedings, addresses Sergeant Hawkins. “I think he’s had enough, sir,” she says, watching tears flow from her patient’s only eye.
The detective nods and looks at Constance. “We are finished here.” He nods at Constable Barrett. “Charge him, will you?”
Together, he and Constance leave the room.
CHAPTER 46
Friday, March 1, 1889
EMILY
It was the last Constance and Detective Sergeant Hawkins saw of Adam Braithwaite. He lingered on in stinking agony for another three days, but at least his death from gangrene spared him a trial and the rope. His wife, Fanny, was given a ten-year prison sentence for perverting the course of justice and conspiracy to murder.
Mother Delaney, on the other hand, has not been so lucky. For the past few days, she has been furiously busy in Reedhampton Jail, writing letters to the authorities, proclaiming the innocence of both Philomena and Albert. They were briefly arrested, but freed before Detective Sergeant Hawkins could issue a warrant for their arrest. It seems they have now disappeared.
About her own fate, however, Bridget Delaney appears sanguine. When all hope of being declared insane was lost, she resigned herself to her execution. Now that the day is come, however, if she believes in the Almighty, she does not call on him at the hour of her death. As the hangman finally puts the rope around her neck and asks her if she has anything to say, she replies simply: “Nothing.”
On the final stroke of nine, the lever is pulled. It’s all over in a second. The short drop proved efficient and the woman, with surely the coldest heart in Christendom, has been dispatched straight into the fires of hell.
CONSTANCE
They’re calling Mother Delaney “the Angel Maker” in the newspapers. She’s sent more than twenty to heaven, so the latest reports say. And there’ll probably be more. Of course, it wasn’t just her. That evil son-in-law knew exactly what she was about. When I told Flo that it was him that killed Cath, she looked sad and said: “So he didn’t only make angels, but saints, too.”
There’s one thing for sure—there certainly won’t be any angels where Mother’s gone, and at least there’s a happy ending to the story of one of those little ones.
That’s why I’m in my best bib and tucker to meet Mr. and Mrs. Sampson, on Platform Twelve at Euston Station, to be precise. They’ve decided to start a new life in America and I want to wave them off as they board the train to Liverpool. The 10:53 will take them to the docks, where they’ll be first-class passengers on a ship of the Cunard Line and will sail to New York.
Little Bertie’s looking smart in his blue sailor suit and jaunty little hat, which he keeps pulling off. Miss Louisa—sorry, I ought to be used to saying Mrs. Sampson by now—is quite radiant. That gaunt, haunted look that etched itself on her face is nowhere to be seen. She’s holding Bertie in her arms, where he belongs. I doubt she’ll ever let him go again.
As for Mr. Sampson, I think he’s redeemed himself by his actions. It’s clear that he loves his wife and son very much. I suppose everyone should be given a second chance and this is his. He’ll probably never tell his new wife about the part he played in Miss Tindall’s death. He’ll have to live with his own guilt for the rest of his days, but perhaps it’ll make him less willing to see the faults in others and understand that we are all, after all, only frail humans.
As the whistle blows and the steam billows out across the platform, the locomotive chugs off. I’m standing by the Sampsons’ carriage and wave to them as it pulls away. A few moments later, when the clouds of steam are slowly clearing and the well-wishers are turning to leave, I spot what seems to be a familiar figure standing quite still, talking to a gentleman. For a second, I think it’s Miss Tindall, but then I tell myself not to be so stupid. I’ve been wrong so many times before. She’s not noticed me, and a second later, she’s gone. The strange thing is, the gentleman she was talking to is now walking toward me. Quite fast, he’s moving, tucking his fob watch into his waistcoat pock
et as he approaches. He’s wearing a bowler, which hides his eyes, and it’s not until he’s a few feet away from me that I realize who it is.
“Miss Piper!” he calls, whipping off his hat.
“Sergeant Hawkins! What . . . ?”
He draws near and seems agitated. “It’s my day off and I thought it would be fitting if I bid the Sampsons farewell. But I had trouble finding the right platform.”
“So you stopped to ask a lady.”
“Ah, yes.” He nods sheepishly. “You saw. Most curious.”
“Curious?”
“Yes. She told me I’d missed the Liverpool train, but that the person I sought was still on the platform.”
I try to stifle a smile. “Very curious,” I say.
“So . . . I have missed the Sampsons?”
“I’m afraid you have.”
“But I have found you.” His eyes are bright and full of promise. “And I am glad of it because I wanted to thank you.”
“Thank me?”
“I fear I doubted your”—he casts around for the appropriate word—“your intuition at times.” I know what he means. It can’t be easy for a man of his reasoned mind to believe that my gift means my visions can trump all the logic in the world. He pauses. “I saw a pleasant tearoom on my way in. I don’t suppose. . .”
There’s no doubt in my mind. “I’d like very much to join you,” I say.
EMILY
While Constance, Sergeant Hawkins, and, of course, the Sampsons can all take some comfort from a sense of closure to this whole terrible affair, more than a hundred miles away, at a railway terminus in Norfolk, another crime is about to be uncovered. On that very same morning, a railway examiner on the Great Eastern Line is passing a carriage, which had been shunted into sidings the previous evening. He hears a noise and stops to listen. Unless he’s very much mistaken, it sounds like a baby’s cry. Dropping to his knees, he is inspecting underneath the carriage, when he realizes that the noise is coming from within a compartment.
Alarmed and perplexed in equal measure, the examiner informs the foreman, who carries a master key, and together they open the locked carriage door. The cry persists and they follow it until, to their utter disbelief, they find a brown paper parcel tucked under one of the compartment seats. Inside lies a tiny baby, soiled and cold, but miraculously very much alive.
Further investigations will reveal that the carriage, where the baby was abandoned, had been occupied by a smartly-dressed young woman and a man with wispy sideburns and a billycock hat. Because of the important role he has played in bringing to justice the baby farmer Bridget Delaney, Detective Sergeant Thaddeus Hawkins is informed. Thanks to his diligence and good record-keeping (and, in part, to Constance’s assistance, although there is no official mention of this), it does not take long to trace those suspected of leaving the child to die. The male is also wanted in connection with the murders of Catherine Mylett and Michael Donovan. The suspects went by the names of Edith and Edmund Blunt. You, however, would know them better as Philomena and Albert Cosgrove.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
My first encounter with the real “angel maker” was ten years ago in a bookshop (now closed) not a mile from where, just over a century before, she used to live near Reading, and just a couple of miles away from my own children’s school. It was the photograph of her on the front cover that first attracted me. It was as if I was staring evil in the face; here was an image of a Victorian woman in her late fifties, slightly jowly and wearing a bonnet, but it was her eyes that I found so mesmerizingly frightening.
It was only when I began to read the blurb on the back of the book that I discovered I had every right to be disturbed by the way she looked. Her name was Amelia Dyer. She was a baby farmer—a person, usually a woman, who accepted custody of a child in exchange for payment. The difference between the usual Victorian baby farmer and Dyer was, however, that she murdered literally scores of children in her care, many in cold blood. There had been other women before her who had been hanged for allowing their charges to die, usually through willful neglect, but this baby farmer was in a league of her own.
When she was young, her own daughter, Polly, asked her mother where all the babies that she cared for went when they left their house. Dyer’s reply was that she was an “angel-maker.” When police dredged up babies’ corpses from the River Thames, she even admitted: “I used to like to watch them with the tape around their neck, but it was soon all over with them.”
One of the most troubling aspects of this case—and there are many—is that Dyer’s motivation was never discovered. True, she spent two short stays in asylums, but this was only when she was dangerously close to being arrested. The court rejected her plea of insanity and she was hanged at Newgate Prison on June 10, 1896. Although she made money from her evil exploits, she lived a very frugal lifestyle. While her daughter, Polly, and her husband, Arthur Palmer, were never charged as her accomplices, it’s fairly certain they should have been. Palmer was, however, given three months’ imprisonment with hard labor for abandoning a small girl the previous year.
The case of the governess in my novel is also based on fact, although the true identity of the young woman was never made public. She suffered unimaginable cruelty at Dyer’s hands, which I chronicle in my novel, although I do admit to changing the final outcome. Sadly, in real life, the story did not have a happy ending.
As for Catherine Mylett, more commonly referred to as Rose, there is much speculation as to whether she was yet another victim of Jack the Ripper’s. The general consensus among historians, however, is that she was not because of the modus operandi of her killer. There has been speculation, specifically by William D. Stewart in his 1939 book, Jack the Ripper: A New Theory, that it was Amelia Dyer who killed the Whitechapel prostitutes through botched abortions. In other words, she might have been Jack the Ripper. There is, however, no evidence to connect Dyer to the Ripper murders.
