while before we had a clear path through—lots of banging on the car and cheering as we went in.’
‘The power of fame,’ Josephine said cynically.
‘To be fair, not all of them were there just for the spectacle. Baby farming caused quite a stir, you know, and there was a lot of strong feeling about it. Hundreds went to Newgate when Dyer was hanged. Sach and Walters didn’t pull in as many as that, but there were a fair few waiting, and a lot of them were women.’
‘I wonder if any of the mothers were there? It must have been terrible to read about the trial in the newspapers if you’d left Claymore House believing your child had found a good home.’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised but, if not, there were plenty of others around to be outraged on their behalf.’
‘It’s funny, isn’t it? If you wanted to be cold about it, you could argue that they were only doing what women have done for hundreds of years—getting rid of children whom society couldn’t afford to care for or even acknowledge. They probably told themselves they were providing a service. I suppose it’s the professional aspect of it that frightened people, though. It’s one thing to manage the population quietly within your own family, but quite another to undermine the social set-up by turning it into a business.’
‘In my experience, for all the talk of justice and compassion, people react to crime by how threatened it makes them feel—and none of us want to believe that women can kill children. It unsettles everything we take for granted.’ The lights were changing again, but this time Fallowfield scraped through on amber. ‘Hertford Road’s just up here on the right,’ he said, and Josephine felt a rush of excitement and curiosity: as much as she loved fiction, there was nothing quite like delving into the lives of real people, and imagining them in their everyday surroundings helped her understand them better than anything. A couple of minutes later, they turned into a side-street and parked in front of a gate. ‘That’s it,’ he said, pointing to one of the terraced houses on the other side of the street. ‘Claymore House.’
Josephine had not known quite what to expect, but the grandeur of the name had led her to imagine something more individual and imposing than this unassuming, red-brick building, the mirror image of its neighbour and indistinguishable from most of the houses along the row. From the outside, Claymore House looked moderate in size, but the number of chimney pots suggested that appearances were deceptive; certainly, from what she had read in the newspapers, Sach’s nursing home had housed several occupants at a time as well as her own family; it would have to be quite spacious inside and, she noticed, looking more closely, there was a basement and possibly an attic to provide additional accommodation if necessary. A tiny front garden separated the house from the street, and a couple of steps led up to an open porch and solid front door, where stained-glass panels offered one of the building’s few unique features. As her gaze moved upwards towards a turreted bay window—presumably the master bedroom—she noticed that the plaque which should have held a name was blank; after the notoriety, it was perhaps not surprising that subsequent occupants would be reluctant to acknowledge the existence of Claymore House. ‘I don’t know why, but I expected it to be detached,’ she said to Fallowfield as they got out of the car. ‘It’s very overlooked, isn’t it? You’d be hard pushed to hide any comings and goings.’
‘But in a respectable street like this, you wouldn’t expect to see anything out of the ordinary. That’s what was clever about it.’
Josephine nodded. ‘And I suppose all there was to see was exactly what you’d expect from a nursing home. Listen—why don’t you leave me here for a bit and do what you need to do? I’d like to walk up and down the street and try to get a feel for what it was like back then.’
Fallowfield looked doubtful. ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right on your own?’
‘Of course I will. As you said—it’s the height of respectability. Come back and fetch me when you’re ready.’
‘All right, but I’ll be half an hour at the most.’
She watched him turn the car round and force his way back into the busy traffic on the High Street, then crossed over to get as close a look at Claymore House as she could manage without drawing attention to herself. The terrace was late Victorian and must have been almost brand new when the Sach family took it. Where had the money come from? she wondered. Was it Amelia’s growing business that had made the move possible, or did the family have other means, either through her husband’s earnings or some sort of private income? She looked long and hard at the house, which was an enviable residence even by today’s standards. Having read widely about the times, she was mindful of the conditions that drove women to kill, but this wasn’t poverty—this was climbing your way up the social scale in a calculated manner, and she was even more convinced that Sach’s guilt was the greater of the two, bloodless as it was. Sach had trained as a nurse and midwife—why was an honest living not enough for her? Josephine thought about all the hard-working young nurses she nodded to each day at the Cowdray Club, and all the dedication she had witnessed in her own life; admittedly, great advances had been made in the status of nurses as professionals over the last thirty years but they were still very poorly rewarded in comparison with other working women—materially, at least. Yet how many of them would countenance putting their training to illicit ends purely for money, taking advantage of vulnerable people who had no choice but to depend on them? She could think of no profession which was easier to abuse, and no line that would be harder to cross.
Peering through a gap in the terrace, Josephine could just about see to the rear of the houses, and tried to imagine what Sach had thought as she watched her daughter playing in one of those yards. Could she really have believed that she was building a secure future for Lizzie? Or—and this was a terrible thing to think—was her own child merely a smokescreen for her crimes, the perfect alibi in a world where, as Fallowfield said, women bore children but did not kill them? She walked to the other end of the road so as not to appear too ghoulish, then took out her notebook and jotted down her first impressions of the house and neighbourhood, mentally revising the few details that had already been sketched out in the draft she had written the night before. As she was doing so, a man came out from the house opposite and looked at her curiously. ‘Taking an interest in Hertford Road?’ he asked, smiling at her. ‘You must be after the child killers. A journalist, perhaps?’
‘No, nothing quite that sensational,’ she said, then added vaguely: ‘I’m just doing a bit of research for a book.’ He looked interested, but was too polite to question her further. ‘I don’t suppose you were here at the time?’ she asked hopefully.
He shook his head. ‘No, sorry. My wife and I moved in just after the war and I don’t know anyone who’s been here longer. But we’ve all heard about the woman who ran the nursing home and killed babies.’ Josephine didn’t put him right, but she was interested to see how stories were corrupted in the telling: Sach would be mortified to know that, after all her careful work to distance herself from the actual bloodshed, history had her down as the murderer. The man shuddered. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?’ he said, walking on.
By the time she had finished making notes, her chauffeur was back in place at the end of the street and she walked over to meet him. ‘Have you seen all you need to?’ he called through the window, and Josephine nodded. ‘Then how about a quick trip over to Islington to see Walters’s lodgings? If we go straight there, it’ll still be daylight.’
‘Have you honestly got time to take me all the way to Islington? I know how busy you are—Archie said things were frantic at the moment.’
‘It’s amazing how long you can wait to talk to a witness, you know, and the traffic in Finchley can be shocking at this time of the day.’ He winked at her. ‘Anyway, what Inspector Penrose doesn’t know can’t hurt him.’
She got in, and the aroma of bacon rose up from a parcel on the dashboard. ‘It’s way past lunchtime and I thought you might be hungry,’ he said. ‘There’s a good cafe round the corner, but if we stop there we won’t get to Danbury Street before dark.’
Touched, she unwrapped the greaseproof paper. ‘I said lunch was on me, Bill. You’re doing me enough favours as it is.’
‘It’s a pleasure, Miss. Your treat next time.’
They set out again, driving back the way they had come for a while, then striking off to the left. As the sergeant negotiated a network of smaller streets off the Caledonian Road, Josephine admired the unhesitating way in which he chose his route; not a Londoner by birth, Fallowfield nevertheless belonged to the city in the way that incomers often do, held there by a bond which was all the stronger for its element of choice. It was hard to imagine him as the new boy which he must have been during the time of Sach and Walters. ‘Do you remember much about the case?’ she asked, finishing her sandwich and, as directed, dropping the bag by her feet, where it joined the remnants of a week’s worth of lunches eaten on the move.
‘Not really, I’m afraid,’ Fallowfield said. ‘To be honest, you’re so busy during those early years trying to keep on top of the cases you
