Two for Sorrow

fruit cake to the saucer and put it down on the table next to him. ‘I came here to live with my sister when I retired eight years ago. It’s not so bad, I suppose. Full of people with too much time on their hands, and nothing better to do than worry about other people’s business, but I’ve met enough like that in the past to know how to deal with them, and they’ve not found quite such a warm welcome here recently. Mabel died in January, you see.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Don’t be. We weren’t close. She never liked what I did for a living. Having to tell people that her sister was in Holloway created the wrong impression, if you know what I mean.’

It was impossible to tell if she meant the comment as a joke or a simple statement of fact. ‘It’s your time at Holloway that I’d like to talk to you about,’ Penrose said, ‘and some of the prisoners you looked after and the officers you worked with.’ She seemed to brighten at the prospect of talking about the prison, and he understood for the first time that she had lived for her job in exactly the same way as Celia Bannerman, Mary Size or Miriam Sharpe; no wonder she was bitter about the other villagers; to her, a retirement home by the sea must seem like a cruel parody of the institution she had reluctantly left behind. ‘But first I want to check—have two girls come here recently asking about the same thing?’

‘No,’ she said, and Penrose’s heart sank; had he really come all this way to learn nothing except that he was wrong? ‘There was only one girl. She came last week.’

‘Was her name Marjorie Baker?’

She smiled. ‘I knew she was a wrong ’un as soon as I clapped eyes on her. Far too sure of herself—she’ll be in and out of that place all her life.’ Penrose noticed that the force of nature to which Mary Size had referred was much more evident when the former warder was sitting down and the physical frailty of her body was less noticeable. ‘What’s she done this time? Must be serious for someone like you to be interested.’

‘She hasn’t done anything, Miss Stuke, but I would like to know why she came to see you.’

‘She wanted to know about a warder I worked with at Holloway, a woman called Bannerman. She’s gone on to far loftier things since, of course.’ There was a note of resentment in her voice which she made no effort to hide, but Penrose was too satisfied to pay it much heed. ‘The Baker girl was interested in the early days, though, just after the prison had been turned over to women.’

‘What did she want to know?’

‘What Bannerman was like, what sort of prison officer she made—I got the impression that she didn’t really know herself what she was looking for. She didn’t ask anything specific—just let me talk.’

‘Would you mind if I did the same?’ She shrugged. ‘Start by telling me when you first met Miss Bannerman.’

‘1902. She found it hard to fit in, right from the start. Most of us at that stage had gone into the profession because it was in the family—it was just like going into domestic service in that respect—but Bannerman had chosen it. She came from nursing, which is what she eventually went back to, because she’d heard some lecture on the terrible medical conditions for women in prison and she thought she could make a difference.’

‘And she was wrong?’

‘Of course she was. She might get away with that nonsense now—there’s no such thing as discipline these days, as far as I can see—but she was fighting a losing battle back then. She was soft on the prisoners, and far too kind to them—most of us start that way, but it soon rubs off. No, Bannerman was too good for us—I don’t mean she looked down her nose like she does now, by all accounts; I mean she was genuinely a good person.’ She said it in the incredulous tone which most people reserved for extraordinary feats that were beyond the capabilities of an average human being. ‘There was no place for sensitivity in Holloway, and it was only a matter of time before she got herself into trouble.’

‘In what way?’

‘She got too close to the women—didn’t report them when they broke the rules, tried to interfere in their lives outside.’

‘Are you talking about Sach and Walters?’

‘Sach could twist Bannerman round her little finger, but then she was a manipulative bitch at the best of times—that’s why she was in there. Got someone else to do her dirty work and thought she’d get away with it. Smarmed her way round the chaplain and the prison doctor, and had Bannerman eating out of her hand. She honestly thought she’d get off, too—right until we took her to the execution shed. That soon wiped the smile off her face.’

It was the first indication of an attitude which went beyond duty and discipline, and it sickened Penrose; Mary Size’s efforts at reform became all the more admirable when he saw what she was up against. ‘I understand that Miss Bannerman found their execution difficult to deal with,’ he said.

‘She didn’t understand like we do, Inspector. She was like all these abolitionists who wouldn’t dirty their hands by talking to a real criminal; she couldn’t see that some crimes are so abhorrent to decent people that there’s only one answer.’

She assumed his complicity because he was a policeman, and he didn’t correct her. Rarely did Penrose allow himself to think about the morality of taking a human life in the name of justice—he would never be able to do his job if he did—but there was a more practical reason why he questioned the sense of the death penalty: the reluctance of witnesses to appear in a hanging case, and of juries to convict, meant that there were far fewer guilty verdicts in the courts than there should have been. Privately, he believed that justice and the families of the victims would often be better served by an alternative—but this was not the time for a debate on abolition. ‘Did Marjorie ask you anything about Sach and Walters?’

‘No. I might have mentioned their names in passing, but she didn’t recognise them and she certainly wasn’t interested in finding out more about them.’

‘So what did interest her?’

‘Bannerman’s relationship with Eleanor Vale. That’s what I was saying—she was soft on the women, then wondered why they threw it back in her face.’

The name was familiar to Penrose from Josephine’s work. ‘Eleanor Vale was another baby farmer, wasn’t she? But she wasn’t condemned.’

Ethel Stuke nodded. ‘That’s right.’

‘What do you mean by their relationship?’

‘It started shortly after Sach and Walters’s execution. That caused a lot of trouble amongst the other prisoners, and some of them took against Vale—taunted her, told her she should have gone to the gallows as well. Some of them said she was even worse than Walters, leaving babies to die rather than finishing them off quickly. You have to understand—most of the women in Holloway then were just drunks or prostitutes. They stuck together, and they didn’t look too kindly on people who took advantage of girls like themselves. They set out to make Vale wish she had been hanged, and they did a bloody good job of it. One night, she couldn’t put up with it any more and she started to smash her cell up. Bannerman was one of the warders on duty, but officers don’t carry cell keys—they have to be fetched from the chief officer, and that takes time.’ God help any woman with a genuine medical emergency, Penrose thought, but he didn’t interrupt. ‘By the time they got there, Vale had managed to break her windows with one of the planks from her bed. Bannerman was first inside to stop her and Vale cut her with a piece of glass, right down here.’ She made a slash from her left shoulder down across her breast. ‘A couple of inches higher, and she’d have cut her throat. As it was, she nearly bled to death.’

Penrose looked doubtful. ‘Nothing like that appears on Celia Bannerman’s prison record.’

She gave his naivety the expression of contempt it deserved. ‘Record is a contradiction in terms. Things like that tend to be omitted—they don’t look good at the Home Office.’

‘Is that why Celia Bannerman left the prison service?’

‘Partly, yes, but let’s not forget who we’re talking about. Most of us would have hated the woman for something like that, but Bannerman took her animosity on as a personal challenge. She forgot that a prison officer’s weapon is power, not reason, and she just redoubled her efforts at kindness. She was religious, I think, brought up in a convent or something—but whatever went on in her head, she went out of her way to forgive the woman. Set out on her own private rehabilitation scheme, she did; looked out for Vale in prison, and even took her into her own home when she got out. That’s the other reason she left, I suppose; officers weren’t supposed to associate with ex-prisoners.’

Penrose didn’t quite see why this would have satisfied Marjorie’s curiosity; kindness and naivety were hardly crimes to be kept quiet, and the shame of the incident was not Celia Bannerman’s. An affair with a baby farmer,