A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

the others have written about you. I want you to tell me every single detail, all the way through. That’s the book I want to write.” She took a deep breath, and forced a smile. “And in exchange, I’ll keep your identity and whereabouts a secret, the way Ursula Bloom did when she interviewed Crippen’s mistress in the fifties.”

Erma Bradley shrugged. “I don’t read crime stories,” she said.

The light had faded from the big window facing the moors. On the scarred pine table a tape recorder was running, and in the deepening shadows, Erma Bradley’s voice rose and fell with weary resignation, punctuated by Jackie’s eager questions.

“I don’t know,” she said again.

“Come on. Think about it. Have a biscuit while you think. Sean didn’t have sex with the Allen girl, but did he make love to you afterwards? Do you think he got an erection while he was doing the strangling?”

A pause. “I didn’t look.”

“But you made love after he killed her?”

“Yes.”

“On the same bed?”

“But later. A few hours later. After we had taken away the body.

It was Sean’s bedroom, you see. It’s where we always slept.”

“Did you picture the child’s ghost watching you do it?”

“I was twenty-two. He said — He used to get me drunk — and I—”

“Oh, come on, Erma. There’s no bloody jury here. Just tell me if it turned you on to watch Sean throttling kids. When he did it, were both of you naked or just him?”

“Please, I — Please!”

“All right, Erma. I can have the BBC here in time for the wake-up news.”

“Just him.”

An hour later. “Do stop snivelling, Erma. You lived through it once, didn’t you? What’s the harm in talking about it? They can’t try you again. Now come on, dear, answer the question.”

“Yes. The little boy — Brian Doyle — he was quite brave, really.

Kept saying he had to take care of his mum, because she was divorced now, and asking us to let him go. He was only eight, and quite small. He even offered to fight us if we’d untie him. When Sean was getting the masking tape out of the cupboard, I went up to him, and I whispered to him to let the boy go, but he…”

“There you go again, Erma. Now, I’ve got to shut the machine off again while you get hold of yourself.”

She was alone now. At last, the reporter woman was gone. Just before eleven, she had scooped up her notes and her tape recorder, and the photos of the dead children she had brought from the photo archives, and she’d gone away, promising to return in a few days to “put the finishing touches on the interview.” The dates and places and forensic details she could get from the other sources, she’d said.

The reporter had gone, and the room was empty, but Miss Emily Kay wasn’t alone anymore. Now Erma Bradley had got in as well.

She knew, though, that no other journalists would come. This one, Jackie, would keep her secret well enough, but only to ensure the exclusivity of her own book. Other than that, Miss Emily Kay would be allowed to enjoy her freedom in the shabby little room overlooking the moors. But it wasn’t a pleasant retreat any longer, now that she wasn’t alone. Erma had brought the ghosts back with her.

Somehow the events of twenty-five years ago had become more real when she told them than when she lived them. It had been so confused back then. Sean drank a lot, and he liked her to keep him company in that. And it happened so quickly the first time, and then there was no turning back. But she never let herself think about it.

It was Sean’s doing, she would tell herself, and then part of her mind would close right down, and she would turn her attention to something else. At the trial, she had thought about the hatred that she could almost touch, flaring at her from nearly everyone in the courtroom. She couldn’t think then, for if she broke down, they would win. They never put her on the stand. She answered no questions, except to say when a microphone was thrust in her face, I didn’t do it. And then later in prison there were adjustments to make, and bad times with the other inmates to be faced. She didn’t need a lot of sentiment dragging her down as well. I didn’t do it came to have a truth for her: it meant, I am no longer the somebody who did that. I am small, and thin, and well-spoken. The ugly, ungainly monster is gone.

But now she had testified. Her own voice had conjured up the images of Sarah Allen calling out for her mother, and of Brian Doyle, offering to sell his bike to ransom himself, for his mum’s sake. The hatchet-faced blonde, who had told them to shut up, who had held them down…she was here. And she was going to live here, too, with the sounds of weeping, and the screams. And every tread on the stair would be Sean, bringing home another little lad for a wee visit.

I didn’t do it, she whispered. And it had come to have another meaning. I didn’t do it. Stop Sean Hardie from hurting them. Go to the police. Apologize to the parents during the years in prison. Kill myself from the shame of it. I didn’t do it, she whispered again. But I should have.

Ernie Sleaford was more deferential to her now. When he heard about the new book, and the size of her advance, he realized that she was a player, and he had begun to treat her with a new deference.

He had even offered her a rise in case she was thinking of quitting.

But she wasn’t going to quit. She quite enjoyed her work. Besides, it was so amusing now to see him stand up for her when she came into his grubby little office.

“We’ll need a picture for the front page, love,” he said in his most civil tones. “Would you mind if Denny took your picture, or is there one you’d rather use?”

Jackie shrugged. “Let him take one. I just had my hair done. So I make the front page as well?”

“Oh yes. We’re devoting the whole page to Erma Bradley’s suicide, and we want a sidebar of your piece. “I Was the Last to See the Monster Alive.” It will make a nice contrast. Your picture beside pudding-faced Erma.”

“I thought she looked all right for forty-seven. Didn’t the picture I got turn out all right?”

Ernie looked shocked. “We’re not using that one, Jackie. We want to remember her the way she was. A vicious ugly beastie in contrast to a pure young thing like yourself. Sort of a moral statement, like.”

Jack Be Quick BARBARA PAUL

Barbara Paul (b. 1931) was born in Maysville, Kentucky, and educated at Bowling Green State University, University of Redlands, and the University of Pittsburgh, where she received her Ph.D. in Theater in 1969. Before becoming a full-time novelist, she worked as a college professor and drama director. Her first novel, An Exercise for Madmen (1978) was science fiction, but beginning with The Fourth Wall (1979), she would devote most of her energies to mysteries, often with a theatrical background. Among her works are a series of opera-related historical mysteries in which Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar figure as amateur sleuths (Farrar is the smart one, Caruso the Watson), beginning with A Cadenza for Caruso (1984), and a contemporary police procedural series about homicide detective Marian Larch, beginning with The Renewable Virgin (1984).

Paul’s work in the field shows an unusual variety and versatility, reflected in her gift for striking titles like Liars and Tyrants and People Who Turn Blue (1980), Your Eyelids Are Growing Heavy (1981), He Huffed and He Puffed (1989), Good King Sauerkraut (1990), and Inlaws and Outlaws (1990). The whimsically titled But He Was Already Dead When I Got There (1986) suggests her pleasure in playing with genre conventions.

In “Jack Be Quick,” Paul suggests a solution to one of the most notorious unsolved cases in criminal history.