Peter Lovesey: Waxwork

‘So callous!’ Jowett exclaimed. He shook his head. ‘And such a fine-looking woman. A picture.’

‘A picture,’ Cribb repeated, thinking his own thoughts.

The cab turned left in Great Scotland Yard. ‘Sergeant, I salute you!’ Jowett said in a fit of generosity. ‘Between us, by Jove, we have saved the law from a contemptible plot. I shall put you down here. You may be sure that everything you have told me will be conveyed to the Commissioner. In my own words. Depend upon it, I shall omit nothing of importance.’

Cribb got out of the cab, touched his hat and made his way unimportantly home.

Towards midnight, James Berry turned the latchkey and let himself into his house in Bilton Place, Bradford. He was quiet about it. Upstairs the three youngsters and his mother-in-law would be asleep.

His wife came along the passage with a candle. He put down his leather bag and kissed her. ‘You’re later than usual,’ she said. ‘Nothing went wrong?’

He shook his head.

‘It were a woman, weren’t it?’

‘Aye.’

‘She deserved to go, didn’t she?’

‘It were never in doubt,’ said Berry.

‘What kept you in London, Jim?’

‘Business.’ He had finished his work in Newgate by ten; it had taken almost an hour to penetrate the crowd outside Tussaud’s. One of the police had told him ten thousand were massed in the Marylebone Road. ‘Average in my experience,’ the constable had said. ‘Funny old world, isn’t it, when ten thousand turn up to see one more sinner installed in the Chamber of Horrors? I know they are the actual clothes she wore in the dock, but it’s still only a waxwork. That’s all they’ve come to see-one figure in wax.’ Berry had murmured, ‘Two,’ and modestly moved on.

‘I kept some stew,’ his wife said. ‘I hope you’re hungry.’

‘Put it on table and see.’ He hung his coat on the hallstand.

‘Jim! That’s a new suit!’

‘Aye.’

‘You do look nobby! Grand! But where’s the other?’

‘I left it behind.’

She frowned. ‘There was some wear in it yet.’

‘Ay.’ He went to the mantelpiece and picked up the letters from behind the clock. ‘Anything in this lot?’

‘Only that large one. Postman had to knock for that. Came Saturday.’

Berry examined it, a large white envelope, too stiff to bend, his address inscribed in a fastidious hand. It was postmarked ‘Kew’.

‘You can open it, love,’ he said.