‘You’ll think of something.’ He smiled, recognising that she had made her decision. ‘Come and see me before you go, and let me know how you get on. I’ll tell the chap on the desk to expect you.’
Josephine crossed the road, and played for time by buying two cups of coffee from Westminster Pier. She went towards the bench, but lost courage and walked straight past, then realised how ridiculous her behaviour would seem if she finally did announce herself. Before she could change her mind again, she retraced her footsteps and stopped in front of Edwards. ‘This is going to sound very odd coming from a complete stranger,’ she said quietly, ‘but I’m so sorry about Marjorie.’
The woman looked up at her in astonishment. ‘What do you know about it?’
She must have been in her fifties, and it took Josephine a second or two to remove herself from the moment in which she had been so absorbed and add thirty-odd years to the Nora Edwards of her story. Feeling self- conscious as Edwards continued to stare at her, she held out the coffee. ‘Marjorie worked for some friends of mine,’ she said. It sounded feeble, even to her, but it was the best that she could do. ‘Can I sit down for a minute?’ Edwards shrugged, and took the cup. ‘I never met your daughter, but I gather she was very talented.’
‘Was she? You know more than I do. Everyone seems to be talking about someone I don’t recognise.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘And no one talks about Joe at all, as if his life counted for nothing.’ Josephine was silent: it was true, she thought—Marjorie’s father had hardly been mentioned over the last few days, except with regard to his true identity. They had all been happy to condemn Celia’s valuing of one life above another, but everyone betrayed their own innate prejudices at a time of grief. ‘Who are you, anyway?’ Edwards asked.
‘My name’s Josephine, and I realise how this may look, but I’m writing a book about Amelia Sach and Annie Walters.’ Edwards put the coffee down and started to get up, but Josephine caught her arm. ‘I knew Lizzie,’ she said. ‘We were at a school in Birmingham together, and I was there when she died. It seemed to me that she was another victim of Amelia’s crimes and all the publicity that followed, but there were plenty of other people whose lives were ruined by what happened—you and your husband more than most, I imagine. That’s what the book’s about. If you don’t want to talk to me, I understand and I’ll leave you alone—but let me be the one to go, not you. Please, sit down.’
‘Just passing, were you?’ Edwards asked sarcastically, glancing back towards Scotland Yard, but some of the suspicion had gone from her face and Josephine sensed that she’d chosen the right approach.
‘Something like that. Look, Mrs Baker, I don’t presume to know anything about your life or your relationship with your husband, but it must feel very lonely to be the only one left who knows what it was like to live through that time. I imagine an experience like that creates a bond which is difficult to break, for good or bad.’
‘It’s broken now, that’s for sure.’ Her tone was still aggressive, but she sat down again and looked at Josephine with a new interest. ‘It was a relief at first, but I was stupid to think that it could ever be over. You’re obviously clever enough to say the right things, but I suppose it’s Amelia you really want to know about, rather than Joe.’
‘Is it possible to know about one without the other?’ Josephine asked. ‘Surely she made him whatever he became. You must have felt as if she were still in the room with you all these years.’
‘It was finding out what happened to her that really destroyed him,’ she said, so softly that Josephine could hardly hear her. ‘We might have been all right eventually if it hadn’t been for that, but he always blamed himself for allowing Amelia to carry on with what she was doing until it was too late. When he heard about the hanging, it was as if she’d come back to torture him herself. He never got rid of that image once he knew about it, awake or asleep.’ That was understandable, Josephine thought, remembering how she had felt as she stared at Holloway’s brand new execution shed: there could be few things more horrific than imagining those last terrible moments for someone you loved. ‘I suppose you’ve been told the official version,’ Edwards continued bitterly. ‘Everything mercifully quick, Amelia calm and dignified until the last—an efficient job all round, in other words.’ She laughed scornfully. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘How do you know?’
‘One of the hangmen got himself into a lot of trouble after the execution, drinking and brawling and shooting his mouth off. They say that hanging Sach and Walters was the start of it all, but I don’t know how true that is. Anyway, Joe got to hear the rumours that were going round. Of all the ways that people found to taunt us after what had happened, that was the most damaging. Like I said, he never got over it.’
‘And what were the rumours?’
‘The whole thing was a bloody mess. None of the officials at the prison were used to executions, and they had no idea how to cope. Amelia collapsed screaming as soon as the hangman and a couple of warders dragged her up and told her to pull herself together. Then they brought Walters through her cell to get her to the ropes, and that set her off again.’ Edwards shook her head, and Josephine wondered how she had lived with this knowledge herself, knowing that it was her evidence which had effectively sent Sach to the gallows in the first place. ‘Mad with fear, she was, and Walters couldn’t have been calmer.’
‘I can’t help feeling that a calm woman going to the gallows is the insane one.’
Edwards nodded in agreement. ‘Amelia couldn’t even walk the few paces to the scaffold,’ she said. ‘She was helpless and barely conscious, and the warders had to drag her there. There was no last-minute peace before she died, no standing calmly on the trapdoor waiting for someone to pull a lever. They virtually had to throw her down the hole.’
How could anyone ever say that death was instantaneous, Josephine thought, trying to imagine the terror that Amelia Sach must have felt, the humiliation of dying so close to the woman she had grown to hate, knowing that—at the last moment—their roles had been reversed and she was now the weak one. ‘They must have been the longest few minutes of her life,’ she said. Glancing to her right, she saw how deeply the story had affected Edwards, despite the effort she had made not to show it; God knows what it had done to Jacob Sach’s mental state. ‘And you knew all this at the time?’ she asked gently.
‘Soon afterwards. Everyone made sure we did. I suppose the hangman was only trying to ease his own conscience by talking about it, but people should think about how it will affect those left behind before they open their mouth. Amelia might have been dead, but we weren’t.’
Josephine couldn’t decide whether this last comment was directed at her or not. ‘No wonder there was such a backlash against hanging women,’ she said.
‘Some women, perhaps. No one worried when it was just drunks and prostitutes who got desperate, but the minute that middle-class women started getting convicted for murder, people started to say that hanging was wrong.’ She shrugged. ‘I didn’t notice any clamour of indignation on Walters’s behalf, not that I’m defending her.’
‘Was Jacob—Joe—the reason you stayed in that house, even after Amelia tried to get you to give up your own child?’
‘I wasn’t exactly flooded with offers,’ she said, and there was a trace of the old sarcasm back in her voice. ‘I had nowhere else to go. But yes, I would have been sorry to leave him, not that I could compete with her in his eyes.’
‘Did he ever ask you to lie to save her?’ The fact that Jacob Sach had spent the rest of his life with the woman who testified so convincingly against the wife he supposedly loved was one of the many things which Josephine had never understood about the case. ‘And would you have done it if he had?’
‘I offered to, but he said no. He said he didn’t know how else to stop her doing what she was doing.’ She noticed Josephine’s expression, and added quickly: ‘I don’t mean he wanted her to hang—of course he didn’t. But neither of them ever believed it would come to that, and Joe thought that if she had to go to prison for a bit, it would frighten her so much that she’d knock it all on the head and they could go back to the way they were, just the three of them. I’m not trying to make excuses for him: he was a bastard to me and a bastard to his kids, and if he hadn’t been such a waste of space, then perhaps Marjorie would still be alive. But nothing would ever convince him that he hadn’t put the noose around her neck himself.’
Josephine hesitated, wanting to move the conversation from Jacob Sach to his wife, but reluctant to aggravate Edwards. ‘You must have got to know Amelia very well,’ she began cautiously.
‘I was her servant, not her friend.’
Precisely, Josephine thought: if someone ever wanted an accurate picture of her, they’d be much better off talking to her maid in Inverness than to Lydia or even Archie. ‘Even so, you lived under her roof. What was she like?’
She realised that it was a simplistic question, but there was no point in trying to dress it up: Edwards would
