Two for Sorrow (40 page)

‘Yes, she'll be very hard to replace,' Lettice said. ‘But we're
determined to make the gala a success, if only to do her justice.'

She and Ronnie chose some chairs by the window, but Josephine lingered at the door for a moment. ‘I'm so sorry about what happened earlier,' she said. ‘I can't help feeling responsible for stirring things up with Geraldine. Are you all right?'

‘Of course I am,' Celia sounded more convinced than she was. ‘Please, Josephine—think nothing more of it. Go and enjoy the rest of your evening. I might join you for a nightcap later.'

Thank God the lift didn't let them down very often, Celia thought when she got back to the staircase and saw Lucy on her way up with a large pan of cocoa, concentrating hard to make sure that none of the liquid spilled out over her feet as she climbed: this might be a common enough sight in prison, but it was hardly appropriate in the Cowdray Club. The container was heavy and awkward, and Celia smiled encouragingly down at her. ‘Be careful, dear. Don't burn yourself.' She waited until Lucy was just a few steps from the top, then added: ‘By the way, I forgot to tell you. That little bitch Marjorie is dead.'

The shock and confusion in Lucy's eyes told Celia that she had the advantage she needed. While the girl was caught off guard, Celia put her foot against the side of the pan and pushed with all the strength she had. She had judged the angle correctly. Lucy lost her balance and tumbled backwards down the stairs, and the scalding contents of the pan poured all over her upper body. The cocoa spilled everywhere—two, three times as much, surely, as could possibly have been held by one vessel—and the sugar in the liquid made it stick to Lucy's face and neck like a deadly second skin, scorching her flesh and
splashing back into her eyes. She came to rest awkwardly on the middle landing, the pan at her side, but, to Celia's dismay, she remained conscious, and there was something primitive—inhuman, even—about her screams; it was the sound of an animal begging for death, the physical expression of a torment which, until now, had only touched Lucy emotionally.

In a few seconds, the staircase would be full of people. Celia was by the girl's side in an instant, trying to calm her down, but still she struggled and Celia was amazed and horrified by her strength, even as her body writhed in agony. Panic welled up in her as she realised that she only had a few seconds left to make sure of what she was doing. Her hands went automatically to Lucy's throat, red and blistered already from the heat, but she stopped herself just in time; that would be suicide—this was supposed to look like an accident. Instead, she grabbed Lucy's hair and banged her head hard against the stone wall of the staircase, desperate to subdue her cries. The force of the blow splattered hot liquid all over the delicate paintwork, but at last the girl was quiet and Celia looked for a pulse, feeling so sick with relief that she remained oblivious to the injuries on her own hands and lower arms where the cocoa had made contact with her skin. Lucy was alive, but only barely, and Celia knew enough about burns to be sure that the shock would kill her in a few hours, long before she regained consciousness. As the panic subsided, her head cleared and she reached down to pull one of Lucy's shoelaces undone. Behind her, she could hear people hurrying up from the foyer and down from the drawing room; satisfied that it would do no good, she turned and screamed for someone to fetch help from the College of Nursing.

‘What happened after Amelia Sach's execution?' Penrose asked. ‘Where did you go?'

‘We moved around a lot at first—Kilburn, Stockwell, the East End, but somehow people always found out who we were, or at least who Jacob was. It seemed like there was no one who didn't know about that trial, and they tormented him, as if he'd been behind it all. They threatened him in the streets, drove him out of any job he tried to hang on to. Sometimes they'd leave stuff at the house—kids' clothes and old news-papers. Once we came back from the pub and found a baby doll with a rope round its neck on the doorstep. All because that bitch was never satisfied and couldn't see what she had already. As the years went on, people forgot about us and moved on to some other poor bastard. It got easier for us then, but the damage was already done.'

‘How involved
was
Jacob in what was going on?'

‘He wasn't,' she said quickly. ‘Oh, he knew about it all right—he wasn't stupid. But like I said, he loved her. When he couldn't get her to stop, he just shut it out. Most men would have come down hard on her, forced her to do what she was told and remember her place, but not Jacob—he turned all that resentment in on himself instead. Sometimes I think that's what I was to him—a punishment, a second-rate version of what he'd lost.'

‘So why did you stay with him?'

‘How many options do you think I had? I was nineteen and unmarried, with a bastard to bring up—the sort of fool who made the Amelia Sachs of this world possible. And it didn't take him long to saddle me with more children and make sure I couldn't go anywhere.' Her tone was scornful, but she softened slightly when she added: ‘Anyway, it's taken years for
me to work out what was going on. You don't realise when you're young, do you? We were bound together by what happened in Finchley, for better or worse.' She laughed bitterly to herself. ‘And in sickness rather than in health. I thought I loved him.'

‘Is that why you gave such damning evidence against his wife?' She glared at him, but said nothing. ‘Surely what you said about Jacob also applies to you, Miss Edwards? You weren't stupid. You must have known how Amelia Sach made her money.'

‘Which crime are you putting me on trial for, Inspector?'

It was a fair point, but Penrose was not about to admit that. ‘I'm not putting you on trial for anything, Miss Edwards. I'm just trying to establish what happened all those years ago and assess its relevance to this investigation. Marjorie discovered something that got her killed. We know from another witness that the information came from her father, and that she had checked it out herself and found it to be true. It's reasonable to assume that the secret which made her vulnerable is connected to your family's past history, and the only person I can think of who would care about protecting that secret now is you.' He paused, and she stared at him defiantly. ‘You tell me you're innocent, so now I have to go back over the facts to see who else might kill to keep the past in its place. Jacob's daughter, Lizzie—she was adopted by a couple in service in Sussex, I believe.'

She shrugged. ‘I don't know who they were. It was all done in such a hurry, and Jacob wanted a clean start so he insisted on not being told the details. Some prison warder sorted it out.'

‘The same prison warder who came to see you during the war to tell you that Lizzie had died.'

‘Lizzie's dead?'

She seemed genuinely shocked and saddened by this, and the contrast with her attitude to Marjorie threw Penrose for a second. ‘You know she is,' he said, confused. ‘Celia Bannerman came to tell you when you were in Essex.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about. Nobody told us anything about Lizzie from the moment she was taken away.'

‘Well, she told Jacob. He must have kept it from you.'

‘Why would he do that? I tell you, this Bannerman woman never came near us. Apart from anything else, we weren't in Essex during the war.'

Thinking back, Penrose realised it was he who had said Essex, although Celia Bannerman hadn't corrected him. Perhaps she hadn't heard, or simply thought it insignificant. Even so, he couldn't see what Nora Edwards stood to gain by lying about it. ‘When did you go to Essex?' he asked.

‘January 1919, straight after Jacob came out of Pentonville. He did a four-year stretch for assault which conveniently coincided with the war. He was a bit old to fight, but they were getting desperate so he thought he'd make sure.'

Essex and Pentonville were difficult places to confuse, Penrose thought, but he couldn't see why Bannerman would lie about it, either. Whether or not she had broken the news of Lizzie Sach's death to her father made no difference to anything, except perhaps her own conscience. ‘Can you think of anyone else who knew your past history?' he asked.

‘No. In my experience, when anyone found out about it, they couldn't wait to throw it in your face, so I think I'd know.'

‘Your first child—what happened to her?' he asked.

‘Him,' she corrected, and Penrose reproached himself for
forgetting that not everything in Josephine's manuscript was fact. ‘I don't know. Jacob made me give him up. When he said we'd make a clean start, he meant it.'

Whatever the truth of her life was, Penrose could see why Edwards was bitter. As he understood it, she had withstood a great deal of pressure from Sach and Walters to keep her baby, not to mention the social ostracism which she faced as an unmarried mother, only to lose her child to another man's selfish guilt. Was that why her relationship with her other children had been so strained, he wondered? Because they reminded her of what she had given up and the man who had made her do it? Just as he was about to ask, there was a knock at the door. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Sir,' Waddingham said nervously, ‘but there's an urgent phone call for you at the desk. It's about Lucy Peters.'

‘Hardly bloody urgent, Constable,' Penrose said impatiently. ‘Sergeant Fallowfield gave me that message half an hour ago.'

‘No, Sir, this is a different one. The girl's had an accident on the stairs, and they don't know if she'll pull through.'

By the time Penrose and Fallowfield arrived at the Cowdray Club, Lucy Peters had been moved to one of the treatment rooms on the second floor. Without waiting for an invitation, they went through the foyer into the separate staircase hall. Two maids were hard at work on the stairs, trying in vain to remove the mess caused by Lucy's accident, but there were still enough traces left for Penrose to guess at the extent of her burns.

‘Get them to stop that until we've established exactly what happened here,' he said quietly to Fallowfield, ‘and have Peters's room locked. Then get statements from anyone who was close by when she fell. I'm going to find out how she is.' He turned to go back to reception, then added: ‘And if my cousins and Miss Tey are here, make sure they're all right, will you, Bill? The last thing Ronnie and Lettice needed tonight was another shock.'

A nurse was waiting at reception to show him through to the college. ‘Shouldn't Miss Peters have been taken straight to hospital?' he asked, as he followed her down a short corridor past the dining room and up another staircase, less ostentatious than its Cowdray Club equivalent but just as graceful. The newer building which housed the college had, he noticed, been carefully designed to conform to the type of the older one with which it was connected; it was a great architectural
feat, achieved without a hint of awkwardness, and a visitor might easily pass from one house into the other without realising it.

His guide smiled at him reassuringly, as if he were a concerned relative. ‘She really won't get better treatment than we can give her here,' she said. ‘With injuries like hers, it's best to be moved as little as possible, and the faster those burns can be treated, the more chance she stands of making a reasonable recovery.'

‘And you have the facilities to do that?'

‘Oh yes. Not on any great scale, of course, but the college is superbly equipped and you won't find a greater concentration of knowledge anywhere in the country. Good, practical nursing knowledge, I mean, and that's what's needed here. We wouldn't perform major surgery, but cleaning wounds and preventing infection, monitoring her blood levels and managing the pain as best we can—that's all second nature to everyone here, and we have excellent contacts with the local hospitals. A doctor will check on her at regular intervals and oversee the treatment. Please don't think I'm making light of what's happened, Inspector, but if I were going to scald myself, I'd rather do it here than anywhere else.'

‘How serious is it?'

‘Extremely serious, but Miss Sharpe will explain everything to you. Wait outside, please. I'll let her know you're here.'

Left alone in a long, barrel-vaulted corridor, Penrose glanced through the glass in the door and saw Lucy Peters lying on a hospital bed; her injuries were hidden by a bed-cradle which had been placed over her upper body, preventing the sheets and blanket from touching her skin and ensuring that her wounds were protected but remained exposed to the air. Three
nurses stood at her bedside, including one in a matron's uniform whom he presumed was Miriam Sharpe. There was no sign of Celia Bannerman.

He watched, impressed, as Miss Sharpe calmly lifted the sheet to examine the girl's body, then whispered some instructions to one of the other women. When she came out to greet him, she said nothing at first but gestured to a narrow space at the end of the corridor which had been furnished as a sitting room, with upholstered chairs and a Sheraton bookcase. When she spoke, her words held the same composed economy as her actions. ‘How can I help you, Inspector?' she asked, and he detected a lingering note of Yorkshire in her voice.

‘I was intending to come here later tonight to question Lucy Peters in connection with the death of Marjorie Baker,' Penrose said, pleased to see that their conversation was unlikely to be punctuated with time-consuming formalities. ‘Obviously, events have overtaken me. How is Miss Peters?'