Two for Sorrow (58 page)

Before she could hear the rest of the sentence, Lizzie stormed out of Bannerman's office. Fighting back tears, she ran down the corridor, past the notice board where she had collected the letter that morning, and back to her own room. On the landing outside, a group of third-year girls paused in their conversation to look at her, but no one said anything and Lizzie shut the door behind her, relieved for once to have made herself too unpopular to bother with. She tore open the top drawer of her desk and rifled through it, desperate to find the only thing which could convince her that her past and her future were more tangible than she now believed them to be. The pile of letters and photographs was tucked right at the back, and her instinctive decision to hide them as if they were something to be ashamed of seemed to Lizzie to underline the truth of Bannerman's words.

When she left the room again an hour later, she thought only of Gerry. In all the years she had known her, Lizzie had
never questioned their love; now, by analysing what it meant to her, she had let it slip through her fingers, and the loss of innocence was more painful and more final than any revelation about her mother could have been. Since coming to Anstey, she had understood what it was to miss someone: Gerry's absence was like a constant fog over her life; it was there when she went to bed and when she opened her eyes again in the morning, and it lifted only when she saw the handwriting on an envelope. To miss someone with hope was bearable, but to have that dark ribbon of grief stretching endlessly ahead of her with no prospect of a reprieve was more than she could bear. As she opened the door to the gymnasium and walked quietly across the floor, she hoped that Gerry would forgive her.

It would take a lifetime to do justice to the creative contribution which Mandy Morton makes to this series: her ideas, research and suggestions along the way have made each book—and the joy of writing it—far richer than it would otherwise have been. And a lifetime's fine.

Many people have been generous with their time and knowledge, and I owe particular thanks to: Jenny Elliott from the Royal College of Nursing for helping to recreate the Cowdray Club as it would have been in 1935, and Susan McGann, Archives Manager, Royal College of Nursing, and staff at the London Metropolitan Archives for further information; Birmingham Archives & Heritage Service, and all who have given information on Anstey Physical Training College; staff at Cambridge University Library for tracking down so many accounts of the Sach and Walters case; Peter Cox for taking us in off the street in Finchley and helping with the history of Hertford Road and the Sach family; Fiona and Catherine Cameron, Pat Wythe, Julia Reisz, Richard Stirling and Sally Morgan for supplying details of Inverness, pre-war Walberswick and other locations in the book; and to Sir John Gielgud, who was kind enough to talk to me at length about Josephine Tey and, in so doing, created one of the mysteries on which this book is based.

The history of crime and execution in the first half of the
twentieth century is widely documented, but nowhere more vividly than in Albert Pierrepoint's
Diary of an Executioner
, and I'm especially grateful to Stewart P. Evans for his extensive work on the subject. Books by Judith Knelman, Jerry White, Cicely McCall, Lilian Wyles, Sheridan Morley, Michael Mullin, Harriet Devine and Virginia Nicholson have all provided invaluable research for various aspects of the novel and, once again, I'm indebted to help and advice from Dr Peter Fordyce, Margaret Westwood, Dr Helen Grime, the staff at The Highland Council, and to John Stachiewicz and The National Trust for continued permission to quote from Elizabeth Mackintosh's work and correspondence.

Love and thanks to everyone who continues to care so much about these books: Walter Donohue and everyone at Faber; PD James; and, of course, my family, whose support and encouragement now is as important as it has always been.

And to Gordon Daviot and Marda Vanne, whose correspondence and friendship are at the heart of
Two for Sorrow
, and who continue to inspire the series; some of the author's proceeds from this series will go to the Daviot Fund to support the work of The National Trust in England.

N
ICOLA
U
PSON
is the author of
An Expert in Murder
, her first mystery featuring Josephine Tey, and two works of nonfiction. She has worked in theater and as a freelance journalist. She is the recipient of an Escalator Award from Arts Council England, and she splits her time between Cambridge and Cornwall.

www.nicolaupson.com

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Two for Sorrow
is a work of fiction, inspired by real lives and events.

Amelia Sach and Annie Walters were hanged at Holloway Gaol in London on 3 February, 1903, having been sentenced to death by Mr Justice Darling at the Old Bailey, despite a recommendation of mercy from the jury. Theirs was the first execution at Holloway since its conversion to a women's prison the year before, and the last double female hanging in Britain. The bodies of both women were removed from the prison grounds in 1971 and taken to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, where they are buried together.

Most of the material included in Josephine's untitled novel is reported in or suggested by the various newspaper accounts of the arrest and trial. When she died, Amelia Sach left behind a husband and young daughter, but their names were not Jacob and Lizzie, and their fates as depicted in
Two for Sorrow
are entirely fictional.

In 1927, Mary Size became the first female deputy governor of Holloway Prison. Although her improvements fell short of her own ideals, the reforms she introduced—mirrors and photographs in cells, a system for prisoners to earn their own money and a prison shop, financial aid to help with debt and the provision of clothing on release—brought a new humanity to the incarceration of women and did much to bring the
standard of women's prisons more in line with those for men. Her story is told in an autobiography,
Prisons I Have Known
. Cicely McCall's book on Holloway,
They Always Come Back
, was published in 1938, and I am indebted to her for providing the details of Josephine's guided tour.

Josephine Tey was one of two pseudonyms created by Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1952) in a successful career as playwright and novelist; it first appeared in 1936, paying tribute to her late mother and her Suffolk great-great-grandmother, and it is the name by which we know her best today. As Josephine Tey, although her output was small, Mackintosh wrote some of the most original and modern crime novels of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, including
The Franchise Affair, The Daughter of Time
(both re-workings of historical crimes) and
Brat Farrar
. One of her finest books,
Miss Pym Disposes
, takes its setting and some of its characters from Anstey Physical Training College near Birmingham, where Mackintosh studied during the First World War. The other alias, Gordon Daviot, was reserved mainly for plays and historical fiction, and was the name most widely used by her friends.

For most of her life, Elizabeth Mackintosh lived in her hometown, Inverness, where she kept house for her father, but she loved England and spent a good part of each year south of the border or, occasionally, in Europe. Her time in London was usually spent at the Cowdray Club, a club for nurses and professional women where she was a member from 1925 until her death in 1952. As well as providing a convenient and comfortable base in town, the club gave Tey the names of many of her characters; look through the membership lists for those years, and you will find a Grant, an Ashby, a Blair, a Farrar and a Marion Sharpe. The club no longer exists (not
because of murder or scandal, which are all my invention), but the building in Cavendish Square is still the headquarters of The Royal College of Nursing.

Mackintosh is widely believed to have lost a lover at the Somme in 1916; although her early work supports this, her lifelong friend from Inverness, who was with her at Anstey during the war, knew of no such relationship, and Mackintosh shied away from close emotional entanglements. The most significant attachments of her later life were almost exclusively with women, many of whom she had met during the West End run of her phenomenally successful play,
Richard of Bordeaux
. From April 1935 to March 1936, one of those women—the actress, Marda Vanne—kept a diary, a year-long love letter written to Gordon Daviot. The words which Marta asks Josephine to read here are Marda's, an eloquent expression of a real and lasting love.

T
hey were the most horrific crimes of a new century: the murders of newborn innocents for which two British women were hanged at Holloway Prison in 1903. Decades later, mystery writer Josephine Tey has decided to write a novel based on Amelia Sach and Annie Walters, the notorious “Finchley baby farmers,” unaware that her research will entangle her in the desperate hunt for a modern-day killer.

A young seamstress—an ex-convict determined to reform—has been found brutally slain in the studio of Tey's friends, the Motley sisters, amid preparations for a star-studded charity gala. Despite initial appearances, Inspector Archie Penrose is not convinced this murder is the result of a long-standing domestic feud—and a horrific accident involving a second young woman soon after supports his convictions. Now he and his friend Josephine must unmask a sadistic killer before more blood flows—as the repercussions of unthinkable crimes of the past reach out to destroy those left behind long after justice has been served.

Other Works

AN EXPERT IN MURDER

A Josephine Tey Mystery

ISBN 978-0-06-145155-3 (paperback)

“Upson clearly knows her way around pre-World War II London and the grimy backstages of Covent Garden, and delivers an ending shot through with palpable surprise and emotion.”

—
Los Angeles Times

ANGEL WITH TWO FACES

A New Mystery Featuring Josephine Tey

ISBN 978-0-06-145157-7 (paperback)

“No classic detective fiction aficionado will want to miss Upson's compelling sequel…. The subtle prose succeeds both at evoking the quiet splendor of the Cornish landscape and in capturing the tragedy and torment that plague many of the characters.”

—
Publishers Weekly

TWO FOR SORROW