Nicola Upson - Two for Sorrow

‘I’ve often wondered what sort of man it takes to do a job that most of us would balk at. Justice is a luxury when you don’t have to carry it out yourself, and they can’t be unmoved by it—it’s quite noble, I suppose.’ Bill gave a dismissive snort, and Josephine looked at him. ‘Am I being naive?’

‘I shouldn’t speak out of turn, Miss, but they certainly weren’t saints. It’s a position of power, don’t forget, and I’ve heard that a lot of them turned the notoriety to their own advantage, although they were never supposed to brag about what they did. And they weren’t always on the right side of the law themselves, either. William spent a month in prison for refusing to keep his wife and two kids—they ended up in the workhouse—and Henry Pierrepoint turned up drunk to an execution once and had a punch-up with his assistant on the scaffold. The warder had to break it up. God knows what the poor sod on the gallows was thinking. Mr Churchill dropped Henry from the list after that.’

‘What happened to them? Are they still about?’

‘Henry’s long gone now. William was dropped a couple of years after Sach and Walters for refusing to attend the inquest after a hanging in Ireland—he’s still alive, though, I think. And John …’ He paused, and Josephine noticed a smile playing on his lips. ‘I shouldn’t laugh, really—it was a terrible accident and he can’t have been more than twenty-five, but it would take a better man than me not to see the funny side.’

‘Why? What on earth happened?’

‘He fell through his own trapdoor while he was rigging a drop up in Leeds. Recovered sufficiently to do the hanging, but died a couple of months later.’

Josephine tried not to laugh. ‘That’s awful,’ she said, but took a while to compose herself. ‘ Did it get to them, do you think?’ she continued more seriously.

‘Like you say, they can’t have been completely immune to it. James—that’s Billington senior—took to drink eventually. He had to execute a friend, apparently, and they say that finished him off.’

‘Surely that should never have been allowed? It must make a huge difference when it’s personal.’ They passed East Finchley tube station, and Josephine began to take a keener interest in her surroundings. ‘It’s funny—I wrote a whole play about how Mary, Queen of Scots must have felt in the days before her execution, but it never affected me like this. It’s because it’s in living memory, I suppose—it’s much more real. Thirty-odd years isn’t long, is it? Sach and Walters could still be walking these streets if things had been different.’ She looked ahead of her at the wide road, flanked with busy shops, and thought again about what Celia had said to her. ‘They weren’t noble or special, and the ordinariness of it makes a difference somehow. It could be any of us.’ They stopped in a long line of traffic at a crossroads, and she said: ‘Tell me, Bill—what was that day like? I’d like to be able to recreate it in the book. It would have been the day before the execution?’

He nodded. ‘They had to be at the prison by late afternoon, so we collected them from the station and took them on to Holloway. They weren’t carrying anything with them—the luggage had been sent on ahead, and I remember thinking it was like going on a bloody holiday except for the weather. It was bitterly cold—am I right in thinking it was just after Christmas?’

‘The beginning of February, yes. They were committed on Christmas Eve, of all days, and tried in January.’

‘That’s right. It was starting to get dark by the time we got down the Camden Road, but that hadn’t put the crowds off.’

‘Abolitionists or sensation-seekers?’

‘Oh, mostly sensation-seekers. There wasn’t the strength of feeling against it all that there is now. That didn’t really start until the trouble over Edith Thompson. No, most of this lot were in good spirits, laughing and joking with our lads at the gate—more like a state occasion or a football match than a wake. They might have missed out on watching the hanging itself by thirty years or so, but they were determined to get what they could out of it.’ The car moved forward a few feet but the lights turned red again before they got to the front of the queue and Fallowfield continued with his story. ‘It was the executioners they all wanted to see—they were the stars of the show, so there was quite a commotion when they saw us approaching. Greeted like heroes, they were, and it was a while before we had a clear path through—lots of banging on the car and cheering as we went in.’

‘The power of fame,’ Josephine said cynically.

‘To be fair, not all of them were there just for the spectacle. Baby farming caused quite a stir, you know, and there was a lot of strong feeling about it. Hundreds went to Newgate when Dyer was hanged. Sach and Walters didn’t pull in as many as that, but there were a fair few waiting, and a lot of them were women.’

‘I wonder if any of the mothers were there? It must have been terrible to read about the trial in the newspapers if you’d left Claymore House believing your child had found a good home.’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised but, if not, there were plenty of others around to be outraged on their behalf.’

‘It’s funny, isn’t it? If you wanted to be cold about it, you could argue that they were only doing what women have done for hundreds of years—getting rid of children whom society couldn’t afford to care for or even acknowledge. They probably told themselves they were providing a service. I suppose it’s the professional aspect of it that frightened people, though. It’s one thing to manage the population quietly within your own family, but quite another to undermine the social set-up by turning it into a business.’

‘In my experience, for all the talk of justice and compassion, people react to crime by how threatened it makes them feel—and none of us want to believe that women can kill children. It unsettles everything we take for granted.’ The lights were changing again, but this time Fallowfield scraped through on amber. ‘Hertford Road’s just up here on the right,’ he said, and Josephine felt a rush of excitement and curiosity: as much as she loved fiction, there was nothing quite like delving into the lives of real people, and imagining them in their everyday surroundings helped her understand them better than anything. A couple of minutes later, they turned into a side-street and parked in front of a gate. ‘That’s it,’ he said, pointing to one of the terraced houses on the other side of the street. ‘Claymore House.’

Josephine had not known quite what to expect, but the grandeur of the name had led her to imagine something more individual and imposing than this unassuming, red-brick building, the mirror image of its neighbour and indistinguishable from most of the houses along the row. From the outside, Claymore House looked moderate in size, but the number of chimney pots suggested that appearances were deceptive; certainly, from what she had read in the newspapers, Sach’s nursing home had housed several occupants at a time as well as her own family; it would have to be quite spacious inside and, she noticed, looking more closely, there was a basement and possibly an attic to provide additional accommodation if necessary. A tiny front garden separated the house from the street, and a couple of steps led up to an open porch and solid front door, where stained-glass panels offered one of the building’s few unique features. As her gaze moved upwards towards a turreted bay window—presumably the master bedroom—she noticed that the plaque which should have held a name was blank; after the notoriety, it was perhaps not surprising that subsequent occupants would be reluctant to acknowledge the existence of Claymore House. ‘I don’t know why, but I expected it to be detached,’ she said to Fallowfield as they got out of the car. ‘It’s very overlooked, isn’t it? You’d be hard pushed to hide any comings and goings.’