Nine Lessons
Page 17
At the enquiry desk, she sought advice on the variety of local papers published in the year before the war and chose The Cambridge Chronicle and University Journal as the title most likely to supply the college-related news that Archie had requested. The librarian offered to bring her two months at a time and she settled down at a nearby table to wait for the first batch, noticing that the smell of old books which she always looked forward to in a library was still secondary here to the less nostalgic smell of new carpets; otherwise, the reading room differed little from the others she had been in, and she was pleased to feel so at home in a place that would usually have excluded her.
The papers soon arrived, dwarfing the man who carried them, and Josephine began her search in October 1913 at the start of the academic term. She soon found two of the names she was looking for in the published list of freshmen for King’s College; the register of young men arriving in Cambridge for the very first time was poignantly similar to the lists of names which would appear in newspapers all over the country in less than a year’s time, but these were more innocent, more optimistic days, and both Robert Moorcroft and Simon Westbury were included among those just embarking upon their university education. An address was given next to each name, and Josephine was interested to learn that while some of the freshmen lived in college buildings, others had rooms in the streets nearby; when she saw how many ordinary houses were occupied by undergraduates, from King’s and from the many other colleges, she remembered what Marta had said and understood for the first time the toll that the war must have taken on the life of the town. Moorcroft lodged in St Botolph’s Lane and Westbury in St Edward’s Passage; she noted down the details and moved on, but, after a promising start, there were very few references to individual students and the only other time she found any of the names mentioned was in an account of a Varsity boxing match which Robert Moorcroft had won with a knock-out punch in the third round.
Towards the end of October, Dr Montague Rhodes James, Provost of King’s, was announced as the new Vice Chancellor of the university and sworn in at a service at the Senate House. There were very few details—obviously if you lived in Cambridge you were expected to understand the significance of the appointment—but a portrait photograph took up most of the page and Josephine looked with interest at the author she had known only by his last name and initials. The conventional nature of the photograph made it hard to guess how old James would have been at the time, but she guessed in his early fifties; he had a strong face, with finely cut features and straight dark hair which fell in a broad wave over his right temple; she imagined she could detect an appealing glint of humour behind the round spectacles which defied the formality of the gown and pose. Again, she wondered what this man—the writer or the scholar—could possibly have to do with the case that Archie was working on, but she made a note of the date and the name of the photographer before turning the page.
It took her three hours and four more batches to reach the end of the academic year, and in all that time she found only one general news story involving King’s. In April, a man doing building work at the college had died in Addenbrooke’s Hospital after drinking what he thought was rhubarb wine from the college buttery; the ‘wine’ turned out to be an irritant poison used as a wood preservative, and the builder had suffered some agonising final moments in spite of his colleague’s best efforts to help him. As tragic as the incident was, even Josephine’s more devious imaginings couldn’t turn it into something capable of inspiring three modern day murders, but she dutifully made sure of the details and took the name of the head porter who had attended the inquest just in case Archie wanted to pursue it. Most of the other university news seemed to consist of elections to obscure posts and winners of obscure prizes; the only specific reference to King’s Choir and chapel was at the beginning of December, when the college celebrated its Founder’s Day with a Holy Communion service in the morning and a feast at night; later in the month, the carol service—now so famous all over the world—was not even mentioned.
Although Archie hadn’t asked for anything that wasn’t related to King’s, Josephine made a note of events in the wider town that were potentially scandalous or crimes that had gone unsolved, as much for her interest as for his. She was always on the look-out for an interesting case which might spark ideas for a new book and enable her to build on the reputation of her first two crime novels, but the news simply confirmed her suspicions that, as a rule, real-life sudden deaths were far too absurd to stand up to the scrutiny and cynicism of most detective fiction fans; she could only picture the letters of complaint if she decided to feature the bride who had expired from ‘over-excitement’ three hours after her wedding, or the chaplain of St Edward’s Church who had quietly left the Magnificat during the Sunday evening service to lie down and die on the floor of his vestry. No, the deaths in the newspapers were either too bizarre or too depressingly symptomatic of the harsh social truths that readers turned to crime fiction to avoid: the child buried in a coppice with terrible signs of abuse; the surgeon found dead after appearing in court on libel charges; the man hanged at Cambridge Gaol for cutting his wife’s throat while she lay in bed next to him.
There were two exceptions in the stories that she read, both drownings in the River Cam and both involving young women: one had been missing for more than a month when her body was pulled from the water; the other was found by the riverbank near a place called Sheep’s Green on Christmas morning. Josephine could happily have spun a mystery from either tale, intrigued by the questions left unanswered in the newspaper accounts. Where had the first girl been in the weeks between her disappearance and the discovery of her body? Why had the second been walking alone in such a deserted part of town when she was supposed to be watching a film at the Empire? Or had she been alone? Josephine spent a pleasant few minutes speculating on the fate of these two women, but the rest of the court pages offered a depressingly mundane catalogue of minor assaults, petty theft and child neglect.
When she got to July, she returned the final batch of papers to the desk and started all over again with the Cambridge Daily News, but this only offered different accounts of the stories that were by now familiar to her, embellished with a tediously thorough roundup of events in nearby villages. Frustrated by having found nothing particularly tangible for Archie, she returned the pile of papers to the desk and caught the eye of the man who had been helping her. ‘Was there no paper specifically for the university before the war?’ she asked.
‘No, madam, I’m afraid not. We have Varsity today, but that didn’t publish its first issue until the Michaelmas term of 1931. There’s the Cambridge Reporter, of course . . .’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s the official journal of the university, but it really deals with the day-to-day business. Lectures, examinations, council decisions, new appointments—that sort of thing.’
‘But no news stories?’
He shook his head. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’
‘Actually there might be. Do you hold recent newspapers as well?’ He looked disappointed, as if something that could so easily be offered by the town library wasn’t really worthy of his time or hers, but reluctantly acknowledged that they were available. ‘Then I’ll have the Cambridge Daily News for the last three months,’ she said.
She sat down again and opened her notebook, keen to trace the history of the recent attacks in the city and plot the journey which had brought the rapist almost to her door. Press coverage of the crimes had begun modestly enough, with a small item on page two about a robbery which had escalated into a physical assault; after that, although still not extensive, the news reports gathered pace, including a series of often contradictory descriptions and a brief flurry of excitement about a scarf left at one of the scenes which later turned out to belong to a friend of the victim. She learned that one of the early victims had fought off her attacker, but that he had only moved on to a house in the next street and
raped another girl all the more brutally, presumably frustrated at being thwarted in his original plan; that was the first time he had used a knife, and suddenly Josephine noticed a marked change in the newspaper’s attitudes to the crimes.
During the lull between attacks, and whenever facts were in short supply, the paper found other ways to keep the story alive. There was plenty of advice to women on their personal safety—the locks and torches that she had mentioned to Archie, together with more imaginative tips like keeping a pepper pot beside the bed and lining the window sills with empty bottles; there was a particularly inflammatory piece headed ‘Keep an Eye on Next Door’, which asked readers to consider how well they knew their neighbours or the lodger next door, and played—dangerously, in Josephine’s view—on the suspicion of strangers which was already rife all over the country; and there was much discussion of the growing anger in the town at the police’s failure to catch the man responsible. She found this inevitable consequence of the rapes almost as disturbing as the crimes themselves; it was easy to see how the anger and fear might escalate, with vigilantes taking to the streets and outbreaks of mob violence that would only distract the police and leave women living alone more vulnerable than ever. People were getting desperate, that much was obvious; the police were relying on luck, and there was even talk of bringing in a clairvoyant. More practically, the Townswomen’s Guild was arranging self-defence classes.
Early in October, the suggestion that girls should ask their young men to stay the night had affronted everyone in equal measure: Christian organisations were outraged by the immorality of the idea, and the more ‘militant’ women’s groups were offended by the implication that their safety depended on the male sex. It was true, Josephine thought: this spate of crimes was effectively imprisoning women by fear, robbing them of the independence they had fought so hard to get. Only an hour before, she had been reading about the vibrant suffrage movement in 1913, with countless stories of women battling for all sorts of issues in the town—battling, and winning. It would take them years to claw back the precious freedom that this man—whoever he was—had destroyed in a matter of weeks, and she felt the constraints on her own life grow a little tighter every day that she remained in the town. It manifested itself in the simplest of things: normally she would have had no hesitation in walking the Cambridge streets after dark, enjoying the romanticism of night fall and the fleeting magic of the dusk that she had experienced so briefly with Marta, but this was denied her now because she was afraid—not of the streets, but of coming back to the house alone. She was afraid, and she resented it.
Perhaps it was this anger born of vulnerability that made her see a more sinister subtext in much of what she read. So many of the stories went beyond the useful function of warning women to be sensible, and as the attacks grew in number, so did the appeals to wives, mothers and landladies to think carefully about the men in their lives and report any suspicious behaviour. It was impossible to know what you would do if a man you loved was out at night when he shouldn’t be or jumped every time there was a knock at the door, but surely it was going too far to suggest that a woman who stayed silent in that position was morally responsible for any future attacks? It left a bitter taste in Josephine’s mouth to think that women could in any way be held to account for this, the most male of crimes.
When she had got a good sense of the events overall, she went back to the beginning and wrote down all the streets so far where an attack had taken place, unable to get the brutal image of Mary’s room out of her head. When she had what she needed to test her theory regarding the connection between the victims’ houses and a nearby church, she asked for directions to the rare books room and spent a pleasant couple of hours reading through the precious Culloden papers as research for her new play before hunger drove her home.
On the way, she stopped at the tobacconist’s by St John’s to buy the latest edition of the Cambridge Daily News. ‘Close to home this time,’ the tobacconist said gravely, tapping the front page as he pushed the paper across the counter.
Instantly suspicious, Josephine was about to ask how he knew where she lived when she realised that he was referring to his own shop, just a stone’s throw from St Clement’s Passage. ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ she said, hating her own paranoia. ‘It’s hard to imagine anyone stopping him at the moment.’
‘He must know this town like the back of his hand, otherwise he’d never be able to come and go so easily. And the police haven’t got a bloody clue, if you’ll pardon my French—you can tell that from the comments they’re making. This one was a nurse, apparently.’
‘Is a nurse,’ Josephine said before she could stop herself. ‘That man might come and go as he pleases, but he can’t take everything away from these girls. They’re stronger than that. She’ll pick up the pieces and get on with her life—and that’s the best way to deal with what he’s done to her.’ He passed her change over without another word, and Josephine thanked him and left the shop, embarrassed to have let her irritation get the better of her.
Back at home, she washed the stubborn smudges of newsprint off her hands and made a sandwich, then picked up the paper while she waited for the kettle to boil. Because she had been so close to it herself, the account of Mary’s rape seemed bland and uninformed. St Clement’s Passage was mentioned, of course, but no house number was given and, although it wasn’t a very big street, that at least offered some degree of anonymity. There was a comment from the police inspector who had come to the house which echoed what he had said to her on the night, but which seemed surprisingly outspoken in print: ‘The scars on the bodies of these girls will heal. The scars on their minds never will. They are good girls—hardworking and pleasant. Not one of them asked for this or provoked it. They were home alone, and thought they were safe. Whoever is doing this is a frightened little coward who must operate at night to give himself nerve.’ The last part seemed rather inflammatory to Josephine, but she suspected that it was a reaction to repeated questions about police inefficiency and she couldn’t blame him; if she was tempted to snap at anyone who made a crass remark, how much worse must it be if it was your responsibility to put an end to the crimes once and for all?
She took a tray upstairs to the study, then settled down with her notes and the map. It didn’t take her long to see that her wild speculation was exactly that. Of the six assaults so far, only three had taken place anywhere near a church: the two she knew about in St Peter’s Street and St Clement’s Passage, and another in St Botolph’s Lane—by coincidence, where Robert Moorcroft had had his first-year lodgings. The other victims had lived further out of town, and, as far as Josephine could see, there were no nearby parks, municipal gardens or other public amenities which might require the services of a nomadic gardener. She put down her pen, half-disappointed and half-relieved; if her theory had held water, she had no idea what she might have done about it. As she looked at the marked-up map, though, she was struck by the sheer audacity of the crimes. The tobacconist had been right: the man who was doing this did indeed seem able to come and go all over the town, gaining access wherever he liked and escaping without a single witness, growing into his own notoriety and living up to the various names attributed to him in the press: the phantom; the monster; the beast.
The doorbell rang and she went downstairs with hesitation, under permanent sentence now of a visit from Bridget. She opened the door to a neatly dressed woman in her thirties with a handbag over her arm and an envelope in her hand. ‘Miss Fox, I presume?’
‘No, I’m sorry. Miss Fox is away at the moment. Can I help?’
‘Oh, but that can’t be right,’ the woman insisted in an accent very similar to Josephine’s. ‘There must be some mistake.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Josephine said, instantly irritated at being told her own business by a stranger. ‘Miss Fox is in America and I think I’d have noticed by now if she hadn’t gone. Can I ask why you wanted her?’
‘I’m from the Domestic
Agency in Green Street, and my name is Mrs Thompson. Miss Fox put her name down for a lady twice a week.’
The phrasing was unfortunate but Josephine managed not to smile. ‘Oh, I see. Yes, that’s right. I registered with the agency on her behalf last week, but—’
‘And you are?’
‘A friend. I’m looking after the house while Miss Fox is away, but, as I was about to explain, the agency informed me that all its domestic staff were currently engaged and no one would be available for some time.’
‘Well, Miss . . .’ She tailed off and glanced at Josephine’s left hand. ‘It is Miss, is it?’
‘Yes. Miss Tey.’
‘Well, Miss Tey—there’s been a cancellation. You’re in luck.’
That was a matter of opinion, Josephine thought. ‘But Miss Fox won’t be needing anyone for at least another three weeks,’ she reiterated firmly. ‘She’s in America, and, as you can probably see, the house is being redecorated. Cleaning it would be a complete waste of time.’
She had gestured behind her to emphasise her point, but it proved to be a fatal error. Mrs Thompson took it as an invitation to come in and was over the threshold before Josephine could do anything to stop her. Wondering why any interview for domestic help invariably involved the employer adopting a subservient role, she followed her visitor meekly through to the kitchen. ‘Marta—Miss Fox—has only just taken the house on,’ she explained apologetically, seeing the shabby facilities through Mrs Thompson’s eyes and wishing now that she’d washed up from breakfast and last night’s dinner before leaving for the library. ‘She’ll be making some changes, obviously, but she hasn’t had a chance to settle in yet.’