Waxwork

He blinked in surprise. ‘But-’

‘I shall not expect to see you,’ she repeated, spacing the words. ‘Do you understand?’

He dipped his head quickly.

‘Howard … ’

‘My dear?’

‘I am grateful.’

Hawkins unlocked the door to let him out. When it had closed again, the prisoner let her breath out slowly as if a crisis was past. She turned her book over and started to read.

Sleep had not subdued Cribb’s anger. This morning in the front room the linnet was chirping and sunlight glistened on the brasses, but Jowett’s words hung in the air. ‘It is not for you to speculate on a matter that I made quite clear is not within police jurisdiction.’ Cribb stood motionless at the window, his mouth set in a tight line, eyes seeing nothing. The anger had turned inwards.

For a week he had been occupied in a sterile exercise. Used by politicians. Yet from the start he had realised that any outcome challenging the verdict of the court would embarrass Whitehall. They had wanted him to paper over a small crack, not bring the whole edifice crashing down. Trained as he was to work on investigative principles, he had preferred to keep an open mind about the murder. Establish the facts, root out the truth and let the politicians deal with the consequences. Greenhorn!

The wound went deeper. He had believed this case might transform his career. It hurt him to admit that now. He had supposed that seventeen years as sergeant had left him with few illusions about the future. If Millie still fondly believed someone at the Yard would soon recognise his ability, he was not so deluded. Ten years had passed since that day they had created the Criminal Investigation Department. Inspectors had been appointed to fourteen of the sixteen divisions. Of the two to which sergeants were nominated, his own was one. Why? No one had given him a straight answer. ‘Keep your defaulter sheet clean, Cribb, and who knows?’ He had kept it clean for ten years, managed one of the toughest divisions in the Met, and he was still a detective sergeant. Who knows? If he didn’t know by now, he was no detective at all.

Millie would go on hoping for a miracle: he faced facts. To the high-ups he was a natural sergeant. ‘One of your door-to-door detectives, fly to everything. Not a man to waste behind a desk.’

He had put promotion out of his mind. Yet what had happened a week ago? It had only wanted Jowett to let slip the name of Sir Charles Warren to set his pulse racing. A secret inquiry on the personal orders of the Commissioner!

The prospect of working for Warren had given him nightmares, but he had jumped at it like any pink and scrubbed probationer given his first incident to investigate. Impress Sir Charles with a few inspired deductions and promotion was in the bag. For that he was ready to face the perils of working for the Commissioner without the sanction of the Director of the C.I.D. The real politics-the politics of Whitehall-he had not paused to consider. He deserved to stay a sergeant.

He sighed, shook his head and turned from the window. There was nothing to be gained from self-pity. He crossed the room and opened the sideboard drawer. Pen and ink. He would write the report for Jowett and put this whole thing out of his mind. Three sheets of Millie’s notepaper.

Report of an Inquiry into the Confession of Mrs Miriam Cromer to the Murder of Josiah Perceval at Park Lodge, Kew, on the 12th March, 1888.

When this was done he would take it to the Yard and afterwards cross Trafalgar Square to the Haymarket to try and get tickets for that comic opera Millie had been talking about.

How should he begin? It hardly mattered. Whatever he wrote, Jowett would revise it before it reached the Commissioner’s desk.

Keep strictly to the facts.

‘1. The death by poisoning of Josiah Perceval took place at Park Lodge, Kew, on the 12th March, 1888. At the Old Bailey on the 8th June, 1888, Mrs Miriam Cromer pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to death.

‘2. Subsequent to the trial a photo-engraving cut from a photographic journal was received at the Home Office. It showed the husband of the prisoner at Brighton on the day of the murder wearing a key on his watch-chain which was established as being one of two keys to the poison cabinet. The other was found on the body of the deceased. The question arose as to how the prisoner had unlocked the poison cabinet on the day of the crime, as she had stated in her confession. An inquiry was ordered into the events described by the prisoner in her confession, Chief Inspector Jowett of the Criminal Investigation Department leading, assisted by A. Cribb, Detective Sergeant, First Class, M Division.’

Cribb paused, absently touching his lips with the end of the pen. The easy bit was done. The correct procedure now was to take the confession point by point. He got up from the table and went to the shelf where he kept his papers, weighted by the black-bound Metropolitan Police Acts. Something fluttered to the floor. Millie would put her scrapbook cuttings among his things. He picked it up, a picture of some actor clipped from the Penny Illustrated Paper, and slipped it under the cover of her book. He found his copy of the confession and put it on the table. Would he require anything else? Nuttall’s Standard Dictionary, for certain.

At the table again, his eyes ran through the first paragraph of Miriam Cromer’s confession. A general statement of her guilt. No comment necessary on that. Second paragraph.

‘Some time in 1882, when I was twenty years of age and lived at my family home in Hampstead, I injudiciously agreed to take part with two friends in a group photograph … ’

Two friends. Judith Honeycutt, now dead, and Miss C. Piper.

The newspaper report of the inquest on Judith Honeycutt had given Miss Piper’s address at Kidderpore Avenue. It was a long street in West Hampstead, off the Finchley Road. Cribb had gone there on Wednesday evening after making his inquiries about Ducane. No family by the name of Piper was known in Kidderpore Avenue. Somebody had suggested Miss Piper might have been the young lady who had lodged at old Miss Marchant’s for a few months. She had been about twenty and had come there after a disagreement of some sort with her family. She had not stayed long. By 1885 she he moved out of London. And Miss Marchant had died soon after. The house was now occupied by a family of Russian immigrants. They had no forwarding address for Miss Piper. Cribb had abandoned the search. There were scores of people with that name in London, hundreds throughout the provinces. He remembered a C.S.M. Piper from his army days, and a pet shop in Islington called Piper and Son. Hopeless, trying to locate one girl with that name in the short time left to him. He did not even know her Christian name. She could be married by now.

Wherever she was, soon after eight on Monday morning she would be the sole survivor of the three young girls who had light-heartedly agreed to pose for a photographer six years before. If the episode had ever occurred.

He felt in his pocket and took out the photograph of Miriam Cromer. He would need it presently for the spelling of Brodski’s name on the reverse. He put it face upwards on the table in front of him. He remembered first seeing it, enlarged, in the drawing room at Park Lodge, and trying to read her character in it: an unlikely achievement. For the camera, people put on their best expressions like Sunday clothes. Hers, to be sure, was less rigid a look than photographs generally captured. That was why he had asked for a copy of this print. It conveyed something more than the stilted studio pose. But was the conflict written on her features any guide to the way she thought and behaved?

Looking at the picture now, he could not be objective. He saw it in terms of what he had learned. There were dangers, he knew, in speculating, but he saw the face of a young woman trapped. She was married to a man in love with her image. He prized her, treated and cosseted her not as his wife, but a subject for his camera. His bedroom was filled with her photographs. His adulation and excessive kindnesses only fomented her frustration, for how was she to express her resentment towards a husband who was infinitely kind?

When Perceval had added to her torment, she had found a focus for her bitterness. In murdering him, had she also been destroying her husband?

Theories. He would never know.

Truthfully, he could not tell if it was the face of a murderess.

He turned back to the report. Three girls: Miriam Kilpatrick, Judith Honeycutt and Miss C. Piper. So many