and his wife Lena Wardle became part of the wider Pre-Raphaelite circle following their marriage in 1861, the year in which Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company was founded. Lena was notorious as the Scottish poisoner Madeleine Smith, who came to London after her acquittal in Glasgow for the murder of Pierre Emile L’Angelier in 1858. Her history was well known within the Pre-Raphaelite circle; at the time of her trial, Rossetti, upon seeing her portrait in a newspaper, declared that she would never be hanged as she was a stunner, their favourite term of approbation for an attractive young woman, potentially a model. Later, when she had moved to London and married Wardle, Rossetti wrote a satirical short play for the private amusement of Jane Morris, in which Lena Wardle poisons William Morris in order for her husband George to acquire the company.
Kathy stared at the words the Scottish poisoner, and had a feeling that she had discovered the identity of the unnamed woman on Marion’s board. A few minutes on the internet confirmed it. There were dozens of references to Madeleine Smith on the web, providing various photographs and drawings that had been made of her and recounting her story.
Madeleine Smith first met Emile L’Angelier in 1855 through a mutual friend in Glasgow. Madeleine was an attractive twenty-year-old, the granddaughter of one of Glasgow’s best-known architects. Emile was twelve years older, a French Channel Islander who had been travelling in Scotland on the lookout for an advantageous marriage to a well-connected young woman. He had already spent some time cultivating a lady in Fife, without success. He now focused on Madeleine, who was swept off her feet, entering into a secret affair with him which lasted for eighteen months. Eventually Madeleine began to cool. Realising that her family would never agree to a match with Emile, and being now pursued by a much more eligible man, she told Emile that she wanted to end the relationship, and asked for the return of the hundreds of love letters she had given him. He refused and said that he would never allow her to marry another man. Under Scottish law at that time, a woman who had sexual intercourse with a man, and who stated her intention to marry him, both of which Madeleine had confirmed in her letters, was technically regarded as already his wife. Madeleine begged him to be reasonable, and during the course of March 1857 they continued to have nocturnal meetings at the window of her house, during which she gave him cups of coffee and cocoa. He complained several times to his landlady of feeling ill after these meetings, and following their final meeting on the twenty-third of March he collapsed and died. The cause of death was established as arsenic poisoning. Madeleine was found to have bought several batches of the poison, and she was arrested and brought to trial.
The trial of Madeleine Smith was one of the great murder trials of Victorian Britain, Kathy learned, and continued to provoke debate. Some saw her as a rich, promiscuous psychopath, others as the victim of a ruthless predator. Her sympathisers speculated that Emile, when he finally realised that he was going to lose Madeleine as he had the lady in Fife, committed suicide by taking arsenic, leaving a trail of diary notes and conversations with his landlady to implicate his lover. Others suggested that he had indeed poisoned himself, but never intended death, hoping instead to move Madeleine to change her mind. They pointed to the fact that Madeleine was quite open about buying the poison, which was not uncommon in those days, and that Emile’s first diary entry alleging poisoning predated her earliest purchase.
Madeleine was defended by a brilliant and eloquent advocate, who nevertheless privately believed her guilty. The jury decided otherwise, bringing down the peculiar Scottish verdict of Not Proven, which one wit described as meaning ‘Not guilty, but don’t do it again’.
Well, it had happened again, or something rather similar. Kathy sat back, looking over the notes she’d made. The tale resonated so strikingly with Marion’s own that it was impossible to ignore, but what did it mean? That Marion had become obsessed by the Victorian woman and killed herself in some kind of macabre parody of Madeleine’s story? Or that someone else had killed Marion, in such a way that she would understand exactly what was happening to her? The thought was chilling: a coded murder that only Marion would have been able to interpret.
The buzzer of Kathy’s entry-phone sounded, the sudden noise making her jump.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Kathy?’ She thought she recognised the voice through the electric crackle, and her heart gave a little thump. ‘It’s me-Guy. Hi. I’ve got something for you. Is this a bad time?’
‘No, hello, Guy. You want to come up?’
‘If that’s okay. Twelfth floor?’
‘That’s it.’ She pressed the button to unlock the front door, cleared the remains of her dinner and went out to the lobby to meet him.
The lift sighed to a stop and he stepped through the doors with a big grin, clutching a bunch of daffodils. His cheek felt cool, his coat damp from a light drizzle.
‘Come in.’
‘Are you okay? I’ve been worrying about you, after that cat. Any developments?’
She didn’t tell him about the head on her pillow, and changed the subject. ‘Lovely flowers!’
‘I noticed you didn’t have any in your flat. Maybe you don’t like them?’
‘I love them. I’m just too lazy to buy any. Let me put them in water. Take off your coat and help yourself to a glass of wine. Have you eaten?’
‘I grabbed a sandwich at work. My time’s all mixed up at the moment, waiting for the word to go.’
She noticed that he was edgy, unable to keep still. ‘Still nothing?’
‘No, they keep delaying. How about you? We could go out to eat if you like.’
‘I had something too. I’ve just been doing some homework.’
‘I see that.’ He was twisting his head, looking down at the printouts about Madeleine Smith. ‘Um, 1857? Aren’t you a bit late to solve this one? Ah…’ He looked at the wall. ‘I see you’ve got some more pictures for your network. That’s what I came to give you.’
He pulled a disk from his pocket and offered it to her. ‘We can load it onto your laptop and set up a generic network for you to play with. You can scan in your images and make different kinds of linkages, groups, whatever you like. You want me to set something up?’
She didn’t really think she’d use it-she preferred being able to look up at the things on the wall whenever she was passing-but she liked that he wanted to do this for her. She stood behind him, watching, as he sat at the table and played with the machine, and then, when he’d got something working to his satisfaction, she pulled a seat up beside him and followed his instructions. As she got used to the system, she did have to admit that it was neat; however she didn’t have a scanner in the flat, and most of the images weren’t on her computer, so they came to a dead end.
‘I’ll get you a scanner,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘You can’t do that.’
‘They’re dirt cheap. Call it a birthday present.’
‘Bring me one back from the Gulf,’ she said, ‘and I’ll pay you back.’
He went over to the images on the wall. ‘But you have some flowers. What are they?’
‘Wild flowers from France, apparently, but what they mean, I don’t know.’
‘But you’ll find out, eh? Hot on the trail.’ He laughed, a nice warm laugh. It was a long time since she’d heard anyone laughing here, she thought.
He must have seen the frown on her face, for she suddenly realised he was staring at her. ‘You’re very self- possessed, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘Am I? You too, yes?’
‘Me? Oh, I don’t know…’ He came over and sat beside her on the sofa. ‘I sometimes feel I don’t know what I am any more.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, if you’re serious about your job-as you are, as I am-you have to let it shape you, don’t you think? I mean, you may start out with certain qualities and that’s why they pick you, but then the job develops them, exaggerates them, so you can perform. Like, I have to go onto a big project site, where thousands of guys are slaving away, twenty-four hours a day, to meet their deadlines, and I maybe have to go up to this bloody great concrete thing they’ve just finished and say, “No, that’s not good enough, you have to tear it down and do it again.” I know they’re going to argue and try to twist my arm, and I know I can’t step back, I can’t feel sorry for them, because that’s my job. They think I’m this hard bastard, but I’m not really. It’s just the person I have to be in that situation. Well, hell, it must be the same for you, right?’
