Peter Lovesey - Waxwork

‘Miriam-’

‘Please listen to me, Simon,’ she said quickly. ‘There is not much more. I believe even now I would be ready to face a life with Howard if he had been as honest with me as he was kind.’

‘What do you mean?’

She hesitated. ‘That he concealed from me the truth about Judith Honeycutt.’

Allingham’s features creased into a look of bewilderment. ‘But, my dear, you knew about Judith.’

She looked at him with a gaze that seemed to penetrate his words and show them to be hollow.

‘There was the inquest,’ he said, trying to fill the space. ‘You knew about the tragedy. We all did. God knows, it was catastrophic for Howard. If he had stayed in Hampstead, it would have ruined him. I don’t mean to be callous about poor Judith, rest her soul, but she did not pause to think-’

She cut through his words with a bare statement. ‘Simon, I know how Judith died.’

He blinked and put his hand to his face. ‘Miriam, what are you saying?’

She said with deliberation, ‘He told me himself. He confessed it to me as he lay beside me in our marriage-bed’-she spoke the word with bitterness-‘at a moment when he felt constrained to reassure me that he was capable of loving a woman. What consolation I was to derive from it, I cannot imagine, because he confided to me, his wife, that he and Judith … that he was responsible for her condition at the time of her death. Whether it was true I doubt, knowing Judith as I did, but that is of no account. Howard believed it. When she told him, it threw him into a state of panic. You know how exercised he becomes about the smallest things. Imagine this! She threatened a scandal unless he married her. To Howard, the suggestion was unthinkable. Whatever had happened between them was a furtive, foolish thing, no basis for matrimony. In his mental anguish he decided there was only one escape: to do away with her.’

Allingham said, ‘Miriam, for God’s sake. This can’t be true!’

Her colour was high. She began speaking more rapidly, unsubdued by his protest. ‘You can be frank with me. You were a true friend to Howard. You saved him, told him what to say at the inquest-’

‘No, no!’ Allingham agitatedly said. ‘Nothing of the kind.’

‘Simon, he told me the truth himself. Too late. By then I had married him. Can you imagine how I felt being the wife of a … ’ She smothered the word with an inrush of breath. ‘If there had ever been any prospect of our marriage succeeding, it ended that night he told me this.’

Allingham was white. In a voice just audible, he said, ‘Miriam, I knew nothing of this. Nothing.’

‘I wanted you to know.’

As words stopped between them, the sound of his breathing filled the cell. The prisoner appeared calmer, her hands resting loosely on her lap while she waited for him to absorb what she had said.

In a lower key she resumed. ‘Perhaps you can understand what it does to a woman to be told such a thing. The last vestiges of those girlish dreams of mine vanished in a second. My husband was a stranger to me. He has been ever since. You are not blind, Simon. You must have seen for yourself.’

‘Yes,’ he answered in a whisper. ‘I could not fail to notice.’

‘You had seen me go wilfully into marriage with Howard. You knew it was madness, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘You foresaw the frustrations I would visit on myself. Tell me I detected from you the suggestion that I should think again. I mean those times you glanced at me in your special way or brushed your hand against mine.’

The young man flushed with embarrassment.

‘I like to think you were trying to tell me in your own way about your secret sentiments. Simon, I would not speak like this if I could avoid it. Perhaps I am deceiving myself again, but I thought-I like to believe-’

He responded. ‘You are right. If I could have spoken to you … I knew it would make no difference.’

‘Yes.’ A tear slid from her eye. She let it move slowly down her cheek.

They said nothing for what seemed a long interval.

The prisoner ended it. ‘Simon, if there were a chance to begin again, as we were in the Hampstead days, before I married Howard, do you think it possible that you and I-knowing all you did about the kind of person I am-’

‘I can think of nothing I would rather wish for,’ he gently interposed.

She smiled, and sniffed to keep back tears, bowing her head.

‘It is better to forget such thoughts,’ he said.

Her eyes came up slowly to meet his and fix them with a look of extraordinary intensity. ‘There is a way.’

He appeared not to understand.

She said, ‘If they find Howard, they will arrest him.’

‘They would be obliged to pardon you before any magistrate would issue a warrant,’ he said.

‘Howard will be brought to trial, as I was, unless he can convince them he is innocent and they drop the charge.’

Allingham still wore a frown. ‘That is true, but-’

She hesitated, watching him. ‘If it … happened … that he was unable to convince them-’

‘Miriam, what are you saying?’

‘That I should be free in the real meaning of the word.’

He shook his head. ‘Not that way.’ His hand went to the nape of his neck and clutched it. ‘No, I could never bring myself-’

‘Simon, he is guilty. Judith died in agony. Whatever view the law might take of the present case … ’

Articulating each word as if it caused pain, he said, ‘I could not do that to Howard.’

‘Not for my sake?’ she asked, her voice rising challengingly.

‘He is your husband.’

‘In name only.’ She closed her eyes and said, ‘Simon, you are a man!’

He sat staring at her.

Bell, no less than he, was stunned. Emotional scenes were usual in the condemned cell. Until today, the prisoner had been unexampled in her self-control. Cold-blooded, she had seemed. Whatever was going on between these two-and it was not easy to divine-the meaning of what the prisoner had just said could not be plainer. Or bolder.

‘Simon,’ she said, ‘I would not ask you to say anything that was not true. Only to keep silent if the moment comes.’ She looked steadily into his eyes. ‘Will you do that for me?’

In a dazed voice he answered, ‘I do not know that I have your strength, Miriam.’

‘You are a man!’ she said again. ‘For me, you will be strong.’

He continued to look at her without saying anything.

‘Go now,’ she told him gently.

He nodded.

The prisoner’s face resumed its look of passivity, as if nothing more needed to be said.

Bell felt for the keys on her belt.

The governor cleared his throat. ‘You are, em, keeping well?’

‘Fit for work, sir,’ James Berry answered.

‘Very good. Let me see. When was it we last-’

‘April, sir. Mason, the Stepney murderer.’

‘So it was,’ confirmed the governor with a sigh. Small talk with the hangman was a cheerless business. ‘Is, em, everything in order for Monday?’

Berry confirmed that it was. ‘I spent an hour in the execution shed this morning. Everything’s greased, sir. The traps drop nice and clean.’

The governor nodded indulgently. Berry liked it to be known that he had checked the mechanism of the gallows. An unhappy episode in Exeter Gaol three years before, when the trap-doors had three times failed to operate, had left him sensitive to criticism. ‘You have the prisoner’s weight and height from the records, I am sure. Has there been an opportunity …?’

‘Watched her at exercise this morning, sir. I see no problem. I take it the wardresses will see that the hair is pinned up. No reason to cut it.’

‘That will be attended to.’

‘Thank you, sir. And I assume I may visit the prisoner on Sunday evening, according to custom?’