Two for Sorrow

Highland air.’

Celia laughed. ‘Take a seat, then, and I’ll have something brought up to you. Large brandies all round?’

‘Lovely. And thank you for letting us take over your hall downstairs. I honestly don’t know what else we’d have done.’

‘Nonsense. It’s me that should be thanking you for all you’re doing for the club—especially after what’s happened. It must be terrible for you. I know what it’s like to feel responsible for your staff, and Marjorie seemed to fit in so well at Motley.’

‘Yes, she’ll be very hard to replace,’ Lettice said. ‘But we’re determined to make the gala a success, if only to do her justice.’

She and Ronnie chose some chairs by the window, but Josephine lingered at the door for a moment. ‘I’m so sorry about what happened earlier,’ she said. ‘I can’t help feeling responsible for stirring things up with Geraldine. Are you all right?’

‘Of course I am,’ Celia sounded more convinced than she was. ‘Please, Josephine—think nothing more of it. Go and enjoy the rest of your evening. I might join you for a nightcap later.’

Thank God the lift didn’t let them down very often, Celia thought when she got back to the staircase and saw Lucy on her way up with a large pan of cocoa, concentrating hard to make sure that none of the liquid spilled out over her feet as she climbed: this might be a common enough sight in prison, but it was hardly appropriate in the Cowdray Club. The container was heavy and awkward, and Celia smiled encouragingly down at her. ‘Be careful, dear. Don’t burn yourself.’ She waited until Lucy was just a few steps from the top, then added: ‘By the way, I forgot to tell you. That little bitch Marjorie is dead.’

The shock and confusion in Lucy’s eyes told Celia that she had the advantage she needed. While the girl was caught off guard, Celia put her foot against the side of the pan and pushed with all the strength she had. She had judged the angle correctly. Lucy lost her balance and tumbled backwards down the stairs, and the scalding contents of the pan poured all over her upper body. The cocoa spilled everywhere—two, three times as much, surely, as could possibly have been held by one vessel—and the sugar in the liquid made it stick to Lucy’s face and neck like a deadly second skin, scorching her flesh and splashing back into her eyes. She came to rest awkwardly on the middle landing, the pan at her side, but, to Celia’s dismay, she remained conscious, and there was something primitive— inhuman, even—about her screams; it was the sound of an animal begging for death, the physical expression of a torment which, until now, had only touched Lucy emotionally.

In a few seconds, the staircase would be full of people. Celia was by the girl’s side in an instant, trying to calm her down, but still she struggled and Celia was amazed and horrified by her strength, even as her body writhed in agony. Panic welled up in her as she realised that she only had a few seconds left to make sure of what she was doing. Her hands went automatically to Lucy’s throat, red and blistered already from the heat, but she stopped herself just in time; that would be suicide—this was supposed to look like an accident. Instead, she grabbed Lucy’s hair and banged her head hard against the stone wall of the staircase, desperate to subdue her cries. The force of the blow splattered hot liquid all over the delicate paintwork, but at last the girl was quiet and Celia looked for a pulse, feeling so sick with relief that she remained oblivious to the injuries on her own hands and lower arms where the cocoa had made contact with her skin. Lucy was alive, but only barely, and Celia knew enough about burns to be sure that the shock would kill her in a few hours, long before she regained consciousness. As the panic subsided, her head cleared and she reached down to pull one of Lucy’s shoelaces undone. Behind her, she could hear people hurrying up from the foyer and down from the drawing room; satisfied that it would do no good, she turned and screamed for someone to fetch help from the College of Nursing.

‘What happened after Amelia Sach’s execution?’ Penrose asked. ‘Where did you go?’

‘We moved around a lot at first—Kilburn, Stockwell, the East End, but somehow people always found out who we were, or at least who Jacob was. It seemed like there was no one who didn’t know about that trial, and they tormented him, as if he’d been behind it all. They threatened him in the streets, drove him out of any job he tried to hang on to. Sometimes they’d leave stuff at the house—kids’ clothes and old news-papers. Once we came back from the pub and found a baby doll with a rope round its neck on the doorstep. All because that bitch was never satisfied and couldn’t see what she had already. As the years went on, people forgot about us and moved on to some other poor bastard. It got easier for us then, but the damage was already done.’

‘How involved was Jacob in what was going on?’

‘He wasn’t,’ she said quickly. ‘Oh, he knew about it all right—he wasn’t stupid. But like I said, he loved her. When he couldn’t get her to stop, he just shut it out. Most men would have come down hard on her, forced her to do what she was told and remember her place, but not Jacob—he turned all that resentment in on himself instead. Sometimes I think that’s what I was to him—a punishment, a second-rate version of what he’d lost.’

‘So why did you stay with him?’

‘How many options do you think I had? I was nineteen and unmarried, with a bastard to bring up—the sort of fool who made the Amelia Sachs of this world possible. And it didn’t take him long to saddle me with more children and make sure I couldn’t go anywhere.’ Her tone was scornful, but she softened slightly when she added: ‘Anyway, it’s taken years for me to work out what was going on. You don’t realise when you’re young, do you? We were bound together by what happened in Finchley, for better or worse.’ She laughed bitterly to herself. ‘And in sickness rather than in health. I thought I loved him.’

‘Is that why you gave such damning evidence against his wife?’ She glared at him, but said nothing. ‘Surely what you said about Jacob also applies to you, Miss Edwards? You weren’t stupid. You must have known how Amelia Sach made her money.’

‘Which crime are you putting me on trial for, Inspector?’

It was a fair point, but Penrose was not about to admit that. ‘I’m not putting you on trial for anything, Miss Edwards. I’m just trying to establish what happened all those years ago and assess its relevance to this investigation. Marjorie discovered something that got her killed. We know from another witness that the information came from her father, and that she had checked it out herself and found it to be true. It’s reasonable to assume that the secret which made her vulnerable is connected to your family’s past history, and the only person I can think of who would care about protecting that secret now is you.’ He paused, and she stared at him defiantly. ‘You tell me you’re innocent, so now I have to go back over the facts to see who else might kill to keep the past in its place. Jacob’s daughter, Lizzie—she was adopted by a couple in service in Sussex, I believe.’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know who they were. It was all done in such a hurry, and Jacob wanted a clean start so he insisted on not being told the details. Some prison warder sorted it out.’

‘The same prison warder who came to see you during the war to tell you that Lizzie had died.’

‘Lizzie’s dead?’

She seemed genuinely shocked and saddened by this, and the contrast with her attitude to Marjorie threw Penrose for a second. ‘You know she is,’ he said, confused. ‘Celia Bannerman came to tell you when you were in Essex.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nobody told us anything about Lizzie from the moment she was taken away.’

‘Well, she told Jacob. He must have kept it from you.’

‘Why would he do that? I tell you, this Bannerman woman never came near us. Apart from anything else, we weren’t in Essex during the war.’

Thinking back, Penrose realised it was he who had said Essex, although Celia Bannerman hadn’t corrected him. Perhaps she hadn’t heard, or simply thought it insignificant. Even so, he couldn’t see what Nora Edwards stood to gain by lying about it. ‘When did you go to Essex?’ he asked.

‘January 1919, straight after Jacob came out of Pentonville. He did a four-year stretch for assault which conveniently coincided with the war. He was a bit old to fight, but they were getting desperate so he thought he’d make sure.’

Essex and Pentonville were difficult places to confuse, Penrose thought, but he couldn’t see why Bannerman would lie about it, either. Whether or not she had broken the news of Lizzie Sach’s death to her father made no difference to anything, except perhaps her own conscience. ‘Can you think of anyone else who knew your past history?’ he asked.

‘No. In my experience, when anyone found out about it, they couldn’t wait to throw it in your face, so I think I’d know.’

‘Your first child—what happened to her?’ he asked.