comes.’ She looked steadily into his eyes. ‘Will you do that for me?’
In a dazed voice he answered, ‘I do not know that I have your strength, Miriam.’
‘You are a man!’ she said again. ‘For me, you will be strong.’
He continued to look at her without saying anything.
‘Go now,’ she told him gently.
He nodded.
The prisoner’s face resumed its look of passivity, as if nothing more needed to be said.
Bell felt for the keys on her belt.
The governor cleared his throat. ‘You are, em, keeping well?’
‘Fit for work, sir,’ James Berry answered.
‘Very good. Let me see. When was it we last-’
‘April, sir. Mason, the Stepney murderer.’
‘So it was,’ confirmed the governor with a sigh. Small talk with the hangman was a cheerless business. ‘Is, em, everything in order for Monday?’
Berry confirmed that it was. ‘I spent an hour in the execution shed this morning. Everything’s greased, sir. The traps drop nice and clean.’
The governor nodded indulgently. Berry liked it to be known that he had checked the mechanism of the gallows. An unhappy episode in Exeter Gaol three years before, when the trap-doors had three times failed to operate, had left him sensitive to criticism. ‘You have the prisoner’s weight and height from the records, I am sure. Has there been an opportunity …?’
‘Watched her at exercise this morning, sir. I see no problem. I take it the wardresses will see that the hair is pinned up. No reason to cut it.’
‘That will be attended to.’
‘Thank you, sir. And I assume I may visit the prisoner on Sunday evening, according to custom?’
‘If you wish. The husband will be asked to take his leave of her by seven. I suggest you choose a moment half an hour after that. There are other visitors to be fitted in-the clerk of St Sepulchre’s, the chaplain and myself, but you will not take long, I imagine.’
‘Fifteen minutes at most, sir. I like to give the prisoner some verses of a religious character to read, as you may recollect.
‘Yes, yes. Admirable sentiments,’ said the governor. ‘You were good enough to provide me with a copy on a previous occasion. Berry, I think I should explain that this woman has already fully and freely confessed her guilt. It will not be necessary, or indeed appropriate, for you to inquire whether she wishes to make any statement about her crime. That is not to say, of course, that your exhortations to intransigent prisoners on previous occasions are unappreciated.’
‘Only two in my experience have gone without confessing,’ Berry remarked with a trace of pride.
‘Quite. And concerning the arrangements for Monday …?’
‘I should like breakfast at half past six, sir. My usual, if it can be arranged. I shall be in the shed until I hear the bell begin to toll at a quarter to eight. Then I shall walk up the passage and wait with the other parties who will form the procession. Punctually at three minutes to the hour I shall enter the cell and pinion the prisoner’s arms. From what I am told she is unlikely to resist.’
‘There will be seven male warders in attendance in case of difficulties,’ said the governor. ‘Two females will escort the prisoner in the procession, but at the scaffold steps they will step aside and allow two men to support her while you fasten the cap and the leg-strap.’
Berry gave a nod. ‘May I inquire who else will be present, sir?’
‘The chaplain, of course, the Under Sheriff and his two wandbearers, the surgeon and his assistant and two gentlemen from the press, making seventeen persons in all, apart from ourselves and the prisoner.’
‘Very good, sir. Just as long as they step out, I’ll have the job done as St Sepulchre’s strikes the hour.’
A four-wheeler drawn by a large grey threaded through the Strand in the direction of Ludgate Hill, its destination Newgate Prison. Chief Inspector Jowett, seated opposite Sergeant Cribb inside, had the strained look of a man who had slept fitfully, if at all. The evening before, he had seen the Commissioner to request an interview with Mrs Cromer in the condemned cell. Cribb had waited in the corridor outside, in case he was called in. He was not. After forty minutes Jowett had emerged looking ashen. His lips had been moving as if he was talking to himself. Ignoring Cribb, he had returned to his office and closed the door. Twenty minutes later a clerk had come out of Jowett’s office and told Cribb that the meeting in Newgate would take place next morning. Cribb was to report to the Yard at half past nine.
This morning Jowett was no more communicative. He had signalled Cribb’s arrival with no more than a grunt, then picked up his hat and walking-stick and headed for the street. It was Cribb who had told the cabman where to take them.
Cribb did not need telling what had passed between Jowett and the Commissioner. The suggestion that Howard Cromer could be the real murderer of Josiah Perceval would not have been well received. Jowett had gone to the Commissioner convinced that Cromer should be arrested. Far from praising Jowett’s detective work, Sir Charles Warren must have erupted. That peppery old campaigner must have seen the consequences bearing down like the Dervishes in full cry: the need to inform the Home Office that the woman was innocent; the law made a laughing-stock; the Queen obliged to sign a Royal Pardon with unseemly haste; questions in the House; cries of police ineptitude; calls for a resignation.
But he could not prevent them now from talking to Miriam Cromer. She alone could confirm what had really happened.
Cribb had got what he wanted.
Privately still some way short of an explanation of the murder, he had seen the necessity of convincing Jowett that Howard Cromer’s disappearance was as good as an admission of guilt. A hesitant Jowett would not have survived two minutes with Warren.
From the start, Cribb had known he would need to talk to Miriam Cromer himself. He needed to form an opinion of his own. Other people’s assessments had supplied only contradictions.
Understand the woman, see her, hear her, and he would get to the truth. He would discover why she had confessed.
His thoughts returned to the starting-point of this inquiry: the picture showing Howard Cromer at Brighton wearing the key to the poison cabinet on his chain. Its purpose was plain: to raise a serious doubt about the confession. The question nobody had asked was who had sent it. Who of the people connected with the case could have realised the significance of the picture? Miriam herself? She was in prison, and could not have sent it. Howard? If he had sent it, he was deliberately implicating himself in the murder. Allingham? What motive could their solicitor and confidant have had for sending it?
Howard Cromer or Simon Allingham?
If Cromer had sent it in a fit of conscience, why had he waited till now to flee from justice?
His thoughts were interrupted by Jowett, who had recovered the power of speech. ‘Where are we?’
Cribb looked out. ‘The Old Bailey is coming up, sir.’
‘Sergeant, I have decided to entrust the interrogation of Mrs Cromer to you. Your acquaintance with the more trivial details of the case is necessarily fresher than mine. I shall be present and you may defer to me on matters of procedure, but I fancy this will resolve itself quite easily now that we know the truth.’
‘As you say, sir.’
The two detectives and the governor of Newgate walked stiffly through a low-roofed passage, the antipathy between them unconcealed.
‘I may say that this is unprecedented in my experience,’ Jowett remarked. ‘I have never spoken to a prisoner under sentence of death. Tell me, Governor, what is her state of mind? How is she bearing up?’
‘No better for this infliction, I assure you,’ the governor answered, signalling to a turnkey to unlock the oak
