Edward Marston - The excursion train

The contrast could not have been greater. The tiny, cramped room was the complete antithesis of the other parts of the house. Where they had been spick and span, Jacob Guttridge's den was in total disarray. In place of the odour of sanctity there was a lingering smell of decay. Instead of looking up to heaven, the hangman preferred to stare down into the mouth of hell. The only pieces of furniture in the room were a long table and a single bed, both littered with newspapers, pieces of rope, advertisements for executions and other grim mementos of his craft. Most ghoulish of all were items of clothing that had been worn by condemned men and, more particularly, by women, their names written on scraps of paper that had been pinned to the material.

The walls, too, were covered in drawings, warrants, newspaper articles and curling advertisements, haphazardly arranged but all the more striking as a result. Amid the hideous catalogue of death, Colbeck noticed prints of prizefighters – one of them was the Bargeman – but the overwhelming impression was of a black museum in which Jacob Guttridge had gloried with almost necrophiliac pleasure. Had the law permitted it, the detective mused, the hangman would have parboiled the heads of his victims and had them dangling from the ceiling like so many Chinese lanterns. Guttridge had relished his work.

Below in the front room, Louise Guttridge was being distracted by Madeleine, sublimely unaware of the essential character of the man with whom she had slept for so many years in the shadow of a crucifix. The house that bore her clear imprint was really a facade behind which she could hide as Mrs Bransby. It was the back bedroom that told the truth about the building and its owner. Colbeck resolved that the wife should not be subjected to the discovery that he had just made. Even with the aid of Father Cleary, he was not sure that she would survive the ordeal.

He began a slow, methodical search, first stripping the walls and sorting the various items into piles. Some of the fading newspaper cuttings referred to executions that he had carried out years before. Any periodical in which Guttridge had been mentioned had been saved, even if the comments about him were unfavourable. Under a collection of death warrants on the table, Colbeck found the hangman's invoice book. Each page was neatly printed in italics with spaces left for him to fill in the date, his current address and details of the execution that he was agreeing to undertake. Sent to the High Sheriff of the relevant county, it was signed: 'Your obedient Servant, Jacob Guttridge.'

The hangman had been ubiquitous. Colbeck found a record of his work in places as far apart as Aberdeen, Bodmin, Lancaster, Cambridge, Taunton, Glasgow, Swansea, Bury St Edmunds and Ireland. A tattered account book listed his various fees, copied out laboriously in a spidery hand. There was also a series of squiggly notes about the technique of hanging, complete with rough sketches that showed comparative lengths of the drop, relative to the weight of the condemned person. But it was the last discovery that excited Colbeck the most and made his search worthwhile. Concealed under a ballad about the execution of a man in Devizes was something that Guttridge had not put on display. It was a note, scribbled on a piece of brown paper in bold capitals.

The warning message was unsigned.

'What took you so long up there, Robert?' asked Madeleine Andrews.

'There was a lot to see in that room.'

'You seem to have brought most of it with you.'

She indicated the bundle that lay between his feet. The two of them were in a cab, on their way back to Camden via the local police station, and they had taken some cargo on board. With the permission of Louise Guttridge, Colbeck had gathered up everything that he felt would distress her and wrapped it all in a cloak that had once belonged to a certain Eleanor Fawcett, hanged at Ipswich the previous summer for poisoning both her husband and her lover. Colbeck could only guess at the impulse that had made the hangman keep it as a treasured souvenir. He was grateful that the widow would never know just how depraved her husband had been. When the two of them had knelt before their Maker, they were sending their supplications in opposite directions.

'What exactly is in there?' said Madeleine.

'Evidence.'

'Of what sort?'

'That's confidential,' he said, not wishing to upset her with details of what he had found upstairs. 'But I haven't thanked you properly yet, Madeleine,' he continued, touching her arm. 'Because of you, I have some vital new information. I'm deeply grateful.'

'I was only too glad to help.'

'I'm sorry to have placed such a burden on you.'

'That was not how I saw it, Robert.'

'Good. What did you make of Mrs Guttridge?'

'I felt sorry for her,' said Madeleine with a sigh. 'She's in such desperate straits. Yet you would hardly have known it from the way that she was bearing up. When my mother died, I was helpless with grief for weeks and Father was even worse. We walked around in a complete daze. That's not what Mrs Guttridge is doing and her husband didn't die of natural causes, as Mother did. He was murdered only a few days ago.'

'She's a very unusual woman.'

'I've never met anyone like her, Robert. Somehow, she's managing to keep everything bottled up inside her.'

'Mrs Guttridge has been doing that since her husband first took on the job as a public hangman. She convinced herself that she should support his choice of occupation yet it cost her both her identity and her peace of mind. It also meant that she had no real friends.'

'Her life was snatched away from her.'

'Yes, Madeleine,' he noted, sadly. 'In a sense, she was another of his victims. That rope of his effectively destroyed Louise Guttridge by turning her into someone she did not really wish to be.'

'Perhaps that's why she's unable to mourn him properly.'

'It was a strange marriage, that much is apparent.'

'What will happen to her?'

'Who knows? All that I can do is to offer her some protection by making sure that her street is patrolled regularly. The one thing that will be of real benefit for her, of course, is the arrest and conviction of the man who committed this crime.'

'And you say that you found new evidence?'

'Yes, Madeleine.'

'So my visit was not a waste of time.'

'I could not have achieved any progress without you.'

'Does that mean you'll ask your Superintendent to take me on?'

Colbeck grinned. 'Even I would not be brave enough to do that,' he confessed. 'No, your sterling assistance must go unreported but by no means unappreciated.' He squeezed her hand. 'Thank you again.'

'Call on me any time, Robert. It was exciting.'

'It's one of the reasons that I became a policeman. There's nothing quite as stimulating as taking a giant step forward in an investigation,' he said, smiling, 'and that's what I feel we did this morning.'

Still smarting from the rebuke he had received on his arrival, Victor Leeming spent the whole morning at Scotland Yard trying to finish the work that Colbeck had started and assimilate the mass of material that had been assembled. As well as a list of executions carried out by Guttridge over the past two years, Leeming had also found descriptions of the man's career in back copies of various London newspapers. One even contained an artist's impression of the execution of a woman in Chelmsford who, too weak to stand, had been strapped into a chair before being hanged. Leeming felt his stomach lurch. He moved quickly on to the next case he had listed.

Brisk footsteps could be heard in the corridor outside and he steeled himself for yet another abrasive encounter with Superintendent Tallis. Instead, it was Inspector Colbeck who came in through the door with a large bundle under his arm. Leeming got to his feet with relief.