‘Is there such a thing? What makes you say that?’
He pointed at a picturesque gabled building with a walled garden, set back a little from the road. ‘What would you say if I told you that a young servant girl of dubious morals was found murdered in that house after a violent storm, stabbed several times in the chest and with her throat slashed from ear to ear?’
She laughed at the melodramatic note in his voice. ‘I’d say it was a nice house, and I hope they cleaned up well. Who killed her?’
‘Supposedly a man called William Gardiner. He’d got her pregnant, despite having a wife and two children.’
‘Good God, was that here?’
‘You know about it?’
‘I read about it recently. It was in the newspapers at the same time as Sach and Walters. Didn’t they have to have two trials or something?’
‘That’s right—the jury couldn’t agree. It was eleven to one guilty first time round, and eleven to one innocent when they tried again.’
‘Why was it so contentious?’
‘The evidence was confusing. They found a bottle by Rose Harsent’s body which contained paraffin that someone used to set light to her clothes, and it was labelled as medicine for Gardiner’s children. The prosecution said it was incontrovertible proof of his guilt; the defence claimed that only someone certifiably insane would have been stupid enough to leave a clue like that there, and they said it was a set-up.’
‘I’m inclined to agree with the defence, although I suppose it could have been an extremely audacious double bluff. What happened in the end? Did they have a third trial?’
‘No, the judge tried to force a conviction based on the evidence, but the jury wasn’t having any of it and Gardiner was released. He caught the first train to Liverpool Street and disappeared in London.’
‘I can’t decide if that makes him more likely to be innocent or guilty. How could he have just disappeared, though? Surely he was notorious all over the country.’
‘Disappearing off the face of the earth was easier than you think back then—it happened all the time. Newspapers didn’t carry photographs the way they do today, and people only had his word for what his name was. There were far fewer official records than we have. Look at what you told me about Annie Walters—she went from place to place with a different name each time and got away with it, and she only moved from street to street. Walters’s trouble started when she stayed in one place for too long, but Gardiner wasn’t as careless and London was a long way from Peasenhall.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It feels like a long way today, too.’
‘That must have been a terrible existence for him,’ Josephine said. ‘Surely he spent the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, never quite knowing if he’d got away with it? It must have been like that for Jacob Sach and Edwards, too, I suppose.’
‘Yes, and all happening at the same time. You should build it into the book.’
‘You’ve got to be joking. One real crime is more than enough at the moment, thank you. Don’t give me something else to worry about.’ She fumbled in her bag for a lighter and lit them both a cigarette, hoping that Archie hadn’t noticed Marta’s diary in amongst the clutter. ‘It’s interesting, though—Rose Harsent sounds like exactly the sort of girl who Sach took in. It makes you think, doesn’t it? These girls or their children—all given a death sentence because men couldn’t take the consequences of their actions. I don’t get any sense that the twelve men on Sach’s jury were quite so analytical of the evidence. If it had been Gardiner’s wife on trial for murder, they’d probably have hanged her first time.’ She had a point, Penrose thought; he had been surprised by what he had heard of the lack of evidence put up in Sach and Walters’s defence and, while he doubted they were innocent, he could see a number of loopholes in the prosecution which a good barrister would have used to save them from the gallows. They reached a junction and Josephine looked at the map, intrigued by the names of the villages. ‘Left here,’ she said, ‘then right in about five miles.’
They turned off the main road just as a magnificent church appeared in the distance, and the landscape changed once again. Closer to the sea, the rolling, arable countryside gave way to heathland covered with a patchwork of heather, scattered fir trees and gorse bushes. Miraculously, one or two of the gorse bushes were still in flower, and the flash of yellow, though tired and faded, made a refreshing change after the muted greys of the journey so far. At the edge of a small patch of woodland, a red deer moved shyly through the rhythms of light and shade created by the sun and the trees. ‘This must be stunning in summer,’ Josephine said, enchanted by the way in which such rich and varied scenery could exist in close proximity.
Walberswick itself was charming, too, perched on the Suffolk coast where the River Blyth joined the North Sea. The village obviously had a long history, Josephine thought, as they wound their way slowly into its heart: the variety of its architecture was fascinating, ranging from small cottages and converted fishing huts to large, rambling villas. Many of the houses had been built in the Arts and Crafts style which she loved and, by the time they passed the church, which sat defiantly in the ruins of an older, grander place of worship, she had identified at least three properties which she would have been very happy to own. ‘Not a bad place to retire to,’ she said.
‘Very nice,’ Archie agreed. ‘It’s hardly Holloway by the sea, is it? She lives on the green, so it must be quite central.’ The road offered no choices, and they found the heart of the village without difficulty. He drove a short distance further on, and parked outside the Bell Hotel, a welcoming, thatched building which looked out towards the estuary. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Have a look at the sea, I think—it’s a wonderful day for a walk. And we passed a tea shop opposite the green. I’ll wait for you there when I can’t stand the cold any longer, but don’t feel you have to hurry—I’ll pace myself with the scones.’
He smiled and watched her go, then headed back the way they had come. Ethel Stuke’s house was the last in a row of small, red-brick cottages on the left-hand side of the green, and he wondered whose sense of humour had named it after a famous siege. He closed the wooden gate softly behind him and knocked at the front door, although the fierce agitation of the downstairs curtains had already told him that he did not need to announce his presence. It was a minute or two before he heard the key turn in the lock, and he remembered that the former prison officer must be in her early seventies at least; when he saw her, though, he realised that it was not age but arthritis which had caused the delay. She was a tall woman, but bent low over two walking sticks, and her arms and legs were so thin that any sort of movement without injury seemed a small miracle in itself. ‘Miss Stuke?’ he said. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Archie Penrose from the Metropolitan Police. It’s very good of you to agree to see me at such short notice.’
She looked at him for a moment before speaking, and he tried to decide if hers was a hard face or if he had simply been influenced by what he knew of her style of pastoral care; in either case, Ethel Stuke was clearly not the type to indulge in social niceties. ‘Your colleagues weren’t very clear on what you wanted,’ she said, standing aside to let him into the sitting room. ‘I hope you’ve got a better idea of why you’re here.’ Her years on the Suffolk coast had done nothing to erode the harsh London edges of her speech. ‘Tea?’ she asked, with an economy born, he guessed, of years spent barking out monosyllabic orders; she managed to make the offer sound more like a challenge, and he was about to refuse when he noticed a tea tray in the corner of the room, carefully laid with cups and saucers and a selection of cakes. Perhaps Ethel Stuke’s bark was worse than her bite, or perhaps loneliness was too powerful an emotion these days for her reputation to matter. ‘That would be very nice,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
She went slowly through to the kitchen next door, and he took advantage of her absence to look around the room. It was fussier than he would have expected from someone who had spent most of her career in an institution like Holloway, but she could simply have been compensating in her later years for the trinkets and clutter which had been denied her until now. Most of the surfaces were covered in ornaments and pot plants—African violets, mostly, with a couple of aspidistras—but it was the bookshelves which interested him most. They were stacked with crime novels—Christie, Sayers and Allingham, interspersed with Freeman Wills Crofts and a Ngaio Marsh—and, although he couldn’t see a copy of Josephine’s book,
‘Have you been here long, Miss Stuke?’ he asked when she eventually came back into the room, her progress made even slower now by having swapped one of her sticks for the teapot. ‘It seems a lovely village.’ He resisted the temptation to help her, sensing that it would be looked upon as an insult; the last thing he needed to do was offend her before she had had a chance to tell him anything.
‘Sit down,’ she said, nodding to one of the armchairs by the fire. ‘I’ll bring your tea over.’ She added a slice of
