‘I’ll take my chances,’ Archie said, winking at his colleague. ‘We’d better go.’
‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ Ronnie asked, pointing accusingly at Josephine. ‘You’re supposed to be having a fitting around now.’
‘Sorry, it’ll have to wait,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an appointment with some blue serge. Can I come and find you later?’
Lettice nodded. ‘Of course you can. You won’t want to rush it—I think you’ll find we’ve surpassed ourselves.’
‘Is it a surprise, then?’ Wyles asked innocently, and Lettice whispered something in her ear. ‘Oh, you’ll look fabulous.’
‘Yes,’ said Josephine pleasantly, ignoring Ronnie’s smirk. ‘I’m sure I will.’
‘Putting double agents into the Cowdray Club is a bit extreme, isn’t it?’ she said when they were in the car. ‘It’s more like something out of John Buchan than an English police investigation.’
Archie smiled, and his obvious amusement at her irritation did nothing to improve Josephine’s mood. ‘You sound just like Bill,’ he said. ‘Actually, he went as far as suggesting that you might be up for the job. I suppose you’re right—it
It was good-humoured sparring on his part, something which they often lapsed into, but Josephine couldn’t be bothered to keep up with it. Unsettled by her conversation with Geraldine, shocked at the events which had suddenly overtaken her interest in the Sach and Walters case, and furious with herself for behaving like a guilty schoolgirl caught with Marta’s diary, she knew it was unfair of her to take her ill humour out on Archie but couldn’t seem to help herself, if only because he was there. ‘Good,’ she muttered, looking out of the window, ‘because I’ve got enough to think about without your sergeant finding work for idle hands.’
She was grateful that he knew her well enough to take the hint without questioning it, and neither of them spoke again until they were close to their destination. ‘There it is,’ he said, pointing over to the left, and Josephine had her first glimpse of Holloway, seen through the line of trees marking the junction of Parkhurst and Camden Roads. For reasons best known to the architect, the prison had been designed to resemble Warwick Castle, complete with high wall, imposing gateway and crenellated towers; it dominated the immediate skyline like a parody of its medieval prototype, built to keep people in rather than out. Archie parked the Daimler outside the main entrance and rang the bell in the huge studded gate. They waited, listening to a jangle of keys on the other side, and eventually a small wooden door within the larger gate was opened to admit them. Two rooms lay beyond, one cosy and oddly domestic, the other more functional and office-like; straight ahead, Josephine could see a steel-barred gate which presumably led into the prison yard and through to the main building. The gate officer took their names and glanced down the pages of an enormous book, then telephoned through to announce them. ‘Male officers aren’t allowed any further than this,’ he explained with a smile, ‘but someone will be across to take you over in a minute.’
‘Do you know Mary Size?’ Josephine asked Archie while they waited.
‘No, we’ve never met but I’ve heard a lot about her. Civil servants are notoriously parsimonious with their praise, but they have nothing but good things to say about what she’s achieved here.’
‘Celia’s the same. I don’t know quite what to expect, though—it must take a very singular sort of mind to want to spend your life in a place like this, and a formidable resilience to manage it so successfully.’
But the woman who arrived at the gatehouse a few minutes later was neither single-minded nor formidable, at least in appearance, and Josephine—who had expected to be fetched by a minion—took a moment to realise that this was in fact the deputy governor of Holloway. Mary Size must have been in her early fifties; she resembled every school teacher that Josephine had ever had, with a smart but anonymous suit, a no-nonsense attitude, and a face which defaulted to strict but was transformed easily to kindness with a smile. The gate officer wasn’t the slightest bit surprised by her arrival—clearly, Miss Size often came to meet her visitors—and the genuine pleasure in his greeting told Josephine more about the woman’s achievements here than a thousand civil servants could have done.
She smiled at Josephine, but dealt with the formality first. ‘Welcome to Holloway isn’t a phrase I often use, Inspector Penrose, and you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I don’t say it now. I’m very sorry that you’ve come here today. Marjorie Baker was a girl with real spirit, and she’d just begun to blossom. I suppose I should know better, but it’s hard to believe that a personality like that can be so easily destroyed.’ Her voice held a soft Irish inflection which added to the warmth of her words, and Josephine got her first real sense of the girl whose death had brought them to the prison. ‘But I’m delighted to meet you at last, Miss Tey,’ she continued. ‘I can’t think why our paths have never crossed at the club, but Celia’s told me a lot about you, and of course I loved
‘Good grief—perhaps it’s you who should be locked up,’ Josephine said without thinking, but Mary Size only laughed heartily.
‘You’re not the first person to say that, and I doubt you’ll be the last.’
‘Seriously, though—it really is very good of you to let me look round. I can imagine how busy you and your staff are, and writers digging up the past must be a nuisance.’
‘Nonsense—I hope you’ll find it valuable. As I said in my note, there’s no one left to my knowledge who was here during the period that interests you, but parts of the building itself have changed very little and I’ve dug out some old suffragette accounts of prison life for you—they’re later, obviously, but things won’t have changed much. Ah, this is Cicely McCall,’ she added, introducing a young woman dressed in a blue prison warder’s uniform who had just arrived. ‘She’s writing a book about the prison, so you couldn’t be in more knowledgeable hands. And it really is no trouble.’
‘Even so, I appreciate it. This isn’t a museum, after all—you must be more concerned about the future than former prisoners who are beyond your help.’
Mary Size looked at her, pleased, and Josephine sensed that she had just walked willingly into the subtlest of traps. ‘It’s funny you should say that,’ the deputy governor said, ‘but I do have an ulterior motive in inviting you here. I’m always keen that people in the public eye should see what we’re up to, and there’s still such a long way to go. We’ve got a good band of people on board now, many of them writers; Vera Brittain, of course, and Elizabeth Dashwood—E. M. Delafield, you know—has agreed to write a foreword to Cicely’s book. I hope you might be persuaded to join us.’ There was a twinkle in her eye, and Josephine could easily understand how people were persuaded to do anything she asked, but she had never seen herself as a campaigner and just smiled non- committally. Even so, she was impressed; harnessing the Provincial Lady herself to prison reform was quite a coup; it was certainly a far cry from the mannequin in Selfridge’s window.
Miss Size led them over to the administrative block and up a stone staircase to the first floor. ‘We’ll talk in my sitting room, Inspector,’ she said. ‘If we stay in my office, we’ll be interrupted every two minutes. Miss Tey—I hope you’ll find your tour interesting and please feel free to ask Cicely anything at all. We’ll see you in about three quarters of an hour.’
She disappeared with Archie, and Josephine noticed how efficiently the two visits had been managed to ensure him the discretion he needed without offending her. Left alone with Miss McCall, she felt a little uncomfortable: normally, she was too lazy or too shy to go this far in the name of research, and the bravado of her prison visit had much to do with resisting Celia Bannerman’s dismissal of her work as popular entertainment. She had no idea why she was suddenly so concerned about authenticity—to be entertaining and popular had always been enough for her in the past—but she was honest enough to admit that there was a more personal reason for coming to Holloway which had nothing to do with proving anything to her former teacher. Bracing herself, she smiled over-confidently at her guide and walked through the glass door which was held open for her, feeling a little like Dante following Virgil.
Holloway had been built on the radiating principle, with four glass-roofed wings diverging from one centre like the spokes of a wheel. From where Josephine stood on the first floor, she could look down to the cells on the ground floor and up to the two galleries overhead, and her first impression was unexpectedly one of light. The afternoon sun was hazy but valiant in its efforts, and it shone through the glass on to fresh white paintwork, providing a refreshing contrast to the darkness of the office corridors.
‘It’s a bit of a shock, isn’t it?’ the prison officer said, noticing her expression. ‘Apparently, the first thing Miss Size did when she got here was change the colour. This all used to be orange and brown—can you imagine how drab and depressing that must have been?’
