Two for Sorrow

years ago, when you left Holloway and moved on to your new job in Leeds. By that time, you were involved with a former prisoner called Eleanor Vale. Vale had attacked you in Holloway, but you were young and dedicated to your work, and you genuinely believed that you could rehabilitate her and turn her life around. You meant well, but your efforts were misguided,’ he continued, satisfied to see that his condescension was beginning to irritate her. ‘Not content with forgiveness, you took her into your home, and by the time you realised your mistake, Vale had become so dependent on you that it was impossible to free yourself of her. The only way out, as far as you could see, was to leave her behind once and for all, so you accepted a position in Yorkshire and made sure that she was unable to follow you. Eleanor Vale made the ultimate sacrifice for your career. She died for it.’

When he had finished, she began to applaud. ‘You tell a good story, Inspector, and a far more accurate one than your friend. Accurate, except for one important detail: Eleanor Vale isn’t dead.’

Her words threw Penrose for a moment: if Vale was still alive, the whole foundation of his case was destroyed. Why would Bannerman start to kill so suddenly if not to hide a past crime? As he struggled to make sense of what she was saying, she stared at him impatiently, incensed by his confusion. ‘Someone like Celia Bannerman could never have killed Eleanor Vale. Do you understand that?’ She slammed her hand hard down on the table, making him flinch. The force of the blow must have damaged skin which was already burnt and sore from Saturday, and he saw a trickle of blood seep out from beneath the bandage, but she seemed oblivious to the pain. ‘Do you understand that, Inspector, or do I have to spell it out for you? Celia Bannerman did not kill Eleanor Vale. Eleanor Vale killed Celia Bannerman. She pushed her under a tube train, to be precise, and walked away with her life.’

Penrose heard Fallowfield draw his breath in sharply, and suddenly he understood exactly why he had found it so difficult to reconcile the compassionate prison warder whom Ethel Stuke had described with the woman he was convinced was a killer. ‘You’re Eleanor Vale, aren’t you?’ he said, shaking his head in disbelief, ‘and you’ve lived as Celia Bannerman for thirty years. How the hell have you managed it? She was a respected prison officer and a qualified nurse with a great future ahead of her.’

‘And Eleanor Vale was just a convict? A baby farmer with no right to any other identity, branded with one mistake for life? I was a qualified nurse, too, Inspector. I had a future, and those thirty years were only the life that I would have had if circumstances had been different.’

‘You mean if you hadn’t served two years’ hard labour for leaving babies to die in railway carriages.’

‘Don’t even begin to talk about things you don’t understand. I did what was necessary to survive. All my life, I’ve done that. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less.’

‘And why was it so necessary to kill the woman who tried to help you?’

‘Help me? She picked me up and dropped me. How do you think it feels to be taken on as a project until something better comes along? To spend your life being grateful, only to find out that it’s all been for nothing? Yes, I was dependent on her, as you put it, but only because she made me that way. And if I was that disposable to her, why should she be any different to me?’

‘So you planned to kill her.’

‘No, not at all. It had never occurred to me that I was capable of killing anybody. I begged her to change her mind and either stay or take me with her, but she said it was impossible. On the morning she was due to leave, I watched her pack her whole life into two suitcases and stow away all her private papers and precious letters of reference, and I walked her to the underground station. It was the middle of August, and so hot in those tunnels. The platform was busier than usual because London was full of summer visitors, and I remember feeling more and more desperate as we waited. Even then, I don’t think I’d have done anything about it, but when we heard the train coming and she turned to kiss me goodbye, she looked at me and she said: “However will you manage without me?” ’ She rubbed a hand across her eyes, and Penrose could see that she was making an effort to suppress a thirty-year-old rage. ‘I’m afraid that was more than I could tolerate, Inspector—not just the smug, self-righteous arrogance of it all, but her complete inability to understand what she’d done. I must have pushed her, because the next thing I knew, she was under the train and people were screaming, but I have absolutely no recollection of that moment. I was eaten up with anger and resentment, and I just wanted to be rid of her. Please don’t misunderstand me—I’m not trying to make excuses, and I’m not sorry for what I did. She played with my life, then taunted me with my own weakness, and I killed her for it. But if she’s looking down now, she’ll see exactly how I’ve managed without her.’

Penrose stared doubtfully at her; in his heart, he believed what she was saying to be true, but it was an enormous risk to take, and he said so.

‘What did I have to lose? I picked up those cases automatically and walked away, half expecting someone to come after me, but it was too crowded for anyone to have noticed what happened. I suppose I was in shock, because I walked around for ages before it occurred to me that I had a chance, that I was holding the possibility of another life in my hands. I went back to that house one last time to pack up Eleanor Vale’s things, and I sent them to a charity—Celia would have approved of that, and most of the clothes were her cast-offs anyway. Then I went north.’

‘And what about the death you left behind?’ Penrose had been involved in enough clear-up operations on the underground to know that the usual identification of a body might not have been possible; during the last few years, the country’s dire economic situation had led thirty or forty people a year to view the trains as a way out of their despair, and many of the stations had begun to install deep pits between the tracks to minimise their chances of success and to keep those still alive safe while the train was being moved. Even so, something tangible was usually found at the scene. ‘Were you really so confident that there was nothing on the body which would expose the lie?’ he asked.

‘Everything that testified to Celia Bannerman was with me, in her luggage. The one thing she was wearing that was remotely personal was a locket I’d given her when she first took me in; it was the only thing of any value I had to give at the time. She didn’t wear it very often, but she made a big thing of putting it on that day—asked me to fasten it for her, as if I’d feel better about being abandoned if she left me wearing my jewellery.’

‘Your family—didn’t they wonder what had happened to you?’

‘They disowned me as soon as I was arrested. I went to them when I got out of prison, but they turned me away. Celia was all I had, God help me.’

‘But surely someone must have missed her?’

‘The only people she associated with were connected to her work,’ she said, echoing what Ethel Stuke had told him. ‘Even I was a mission, as it turned out. And nobody who knew her professionally had time to realise she wasn’t there any more; as far as they were concerned, Celia Bannerman left one job and reported when she was supposed to for the next. No one in Leeds knew what she looked like. If someone from Holloway or the hospitals we were in before had turned up, that would have been it, but they didn’t; Leeds was a long way from London in those days, and it worked in my favour that she’d tried to get as far away from me as possible. Of course, I made sure I kept a low profile for the first few years,’ she added, smiling. ‘Very self-effacing was our Celia—she never wanted the limelight, and she always refused any public recognition for what she did. A living saint, you might say.’

‘Until now. That was a very stupid slip, Miss Vale—allowing yourself to be photographed in that way. No wonder you were so angry with Marjorie. I suppose she paid for your arrogance.’ She said nothing, but the look in her eyes and the tight clenching of her hands told him that he was right, and he guessed that the rage which had led to such a spiteful murder had remained with her in the days since Marjorie’s death. ‘I can see how you killed Celia Bannerman and got away with it,’ he said quietly. ‘What I still find astonishing is that you managed to live as her.’

‘I had all I needed to be Celia Bannerman in those two cases and in here,’ she said, tapping the side of her head. ‘She may have had the references, but I certainly had the qualities to live up to them, and in all my life I’ve never let anyone down the way she did. What I start, I finish.’

‘As Marjorie Baker learned to her cost. She and her father knew all this, I suppose.’

‘Good God, no. Don’t be ridiculous—you give them far too much credit. I doubt that either of them had ever heard of Eleanor Vale. They knew enough, though. Marjorie’s father saw the photograph in the Tatler she took home, and he told her I wasn’t Celia Bannerman.’

‘Because he remembered the woman he’d given his child to?’ She nodded. ‘And that’s why you lied about going to see him during the war—to give yourself some sort of continuity with the person you were pretending to be. But Marjorie didn’t trust her father’s word—she had a lot to lose, and she wanted to make sure that what he