Asta's Book (24 page)

Florence appealed to Maria Hyde, who knew nothing of any of this. She in turn spoke to her daughter who expressed a corresponding ignorance. Why Florence was so determined to stay in what was hardly a sinecure, where she was ill-paid and overworked, is unclear. Her accommodation was cramped, dirty and insanitary. She was at this time a strong stout young woman of twenty-two, could certainly have found another situation and there is no doubt Alfred would have given her a good reference. Perhaps she did not wish to enter service elsewhere for what would necessarily be a short time with the marriage she still expected to take place arranged for the following spring.

Whatever the reason, she was determined to stay at Devon Villa and Roper appears to have said nothing further about her leaving. On the afternoon of July 27th Mrs Hyde told Florence she was feeling unwell with pains down her left arm and in her chest. It was her heart ‘playing up’, she said, and she must lie down. Then Alfred appeared, told her he and Edward were departing ‘shortly’ for Cambridge and added that Mrs Roper and Edith would be coming up to join him ‘very soon’. Florence did not see him leave the house but supposed that he had done so.

Three-quarters of an hour later he was back, ringing the front doorbell and declaring that he had left his sovereign case behind. This was of silver and had belonged to his father. Florence offered to help him look for it but this offer he refused, told her to get on with her own work and opened the door for her to go into the dining room where she had linen to collect for the wash. She heard him go upstairs where his wife, Edith and Maria Hyde were.

Some half-hour prior to Roper’s return Maria Hyde had come down to the kitchen, saying she was better and asking Florence to make tea and prepare a light supper to be taken upstairs. Her daughter was ill, she said, and lying down in bed. This Florence did and Maria took the tray upstairs herself. On it, as well as tinned salmon and bread and butter, was a pot of tea, the sugar basin and milk for Edith. This sugar basin with its contents was to become an important exhibit at Roper’s trial three months later. Roper himself did not take sugar in tea or prepared drinks and nor did his mother-in-law or Florence Fisher.

Roper was upstairs a long time, no doubt hunting for his sovereign case. According to his own evidence at his trial, he said he finally found it on the dining-room mantelpiece. With the case in his pocket, he walked to the cab rank in Kingsland High Street, a considerable distance, and on the way claimed to have tripped over a loose kerbstone and fallen, grazing his right hand. One person at least said he had seen blood on Roper’s hand and on his coat sleeve but was later unable to identify him.

He reached Liverpool Street Station at last, where he had left his small son and his luggage in the care of the porter. Originally, he had intended to catch the 5.15 train for Cambridge and would have been in ample time to have done so if he had not returned to Navarino Road. However, the time was now almost 6.30 and though there was a train which ran as far as Bishops Stortford, the 7.32, none went all the way to Cambridge until the 8.20. Roper and his son had almost two hours to wait.

One of the mysteries in this case is why Roper deferred his journey to Cambridge until so late in the day. He had resigned from his employment in Bethnal Green, he had no work to go to and no particular duties in the house. According to the Great Eastern Railway’s timetable for July 1905, there were many trains running to Cambridge throughout the day. He could, for instance, have caught the twelve noon, or, if he had wanted a non-stopping train, gone to St Pancras instead and caught the 12.20, reaching Cambridge at 1.31. He could have aimed for the 2.30, which stopped only twice before reaching its destination at just before ten to four.

He had a small child with him, a child whose normal bedtime was 6.30 p.m., yet he chose a train which was not scheduled to reach its destination until four minutes after that time, and in the event caught one two hours later, necessitating an arrival in Cambridge at twenty to ten. No doubt he had his reasons.

In the morning the child Edith came downstairs at eight and Florence gave her breakfast. This was not at all an unusual proceeding, though one which was not particularly pleasing to Florence who had the work of the house and the shopping to do. The non-appearance of Mrs Roper and Mrs Hyde caused her no great surprise as it was often their habit to lie in bed until noon, but after she had washed Edith and dressed her she sent her upstairs. The little fair-haired girl clambering up the first flight of stairs at Devon Villa, Navarino Road, Hackney, was the last sight Florence Fisher ever had of Edith Roper. Indeed, it was the last known sighting of her in this world.

Florence went out shopping at about ten. It was warm and close, though less hot than it had been. However, such heat as there was seems to have affected her adversely, for when after about two hours she returned, no doubt laden with groceries, she had begun to feel ill.

There appeared to be no one in the house. She dragged herself upstairs to the first-floor bedroom in which was the cot where Edith slept. She found the room in some disarray—again a not unusual event. Doubtless wearily, she stripped the cot of sheets and blankets soaked in urine. It was perhaps natural to assume that in her absence Mrs Roper and Edith had left for Cambridge. If she had not been ill herself at this time, Florence might have been more curious about the whereabouts of Maria Hyde and suspicious of circumstances in which Lizzie Roper and her daughter had gone away, not for a holiday but permanently, without taking any of Edith’s clothes with them. But she was ill. Possibly she was suffering from a form of heatstroke. Whatever it was, she was obliged to take to her bed in the basement at Devon Villa and to remain there for the next two days.

Then followed a period of more than a week in which Florence Fisher was alone in Navarino Road. During that time she continued to suppose that Mr and Mrs Roper and the children were in Cambridge. If she worried at all, it would not have been about them but her own future. Would one of them return to pay her wages? Or was she expected to have left their employment and therefore to receive no further wages? Then there was the question of the absence of Mrs Hyde. In all the ten years Florence had been in this house Mrs Hyde had never spent a night away from it. On the other hand, since she and her daughter had always lived together, so far as Florence knew, the likeliest explanation was that she too had gone to Cambridge and was even now there with her daughter and son-in-law.

Florence went about her business. She was soon recovered and returned to her duties. July 28th was a Friday and it is known, from the agency’s records, that on the following Thursday, August 3rd, she called at Miss Elizabeth Newman’s Servants’ Agency in Mare Street in quest of another situation. Probably she had some contact with the man to whom she was engaged. Tradesmen called. The knife grinder was due and no doubt he came. The baker made his daily delivery.

It was months since Florence had been up to the top floor at Devon Villa, but she was in the habit of giving a sweep and dust to the one below it every week. Mounting the first flight of stairs on the morning of Friday, August 4th with mop and duster, the first time she had been up there since two days before Roper’s departure, she smelt a powerful and terrible odour she had never smelt before. She went up the second flight. She paused on the landing, no doubt considerably daunted. The smell here was ten times worse than on the stairs. Florence tied her clean duster over her mouth and nose before she opened the door of the first bedroom.

This was the bedroom Lizzie Roper had shared with her husband. However, it was the body of Mrs Hyde which lay spread out face-downwards on the floor between the bed and the door. It was fully clothed but the hair was partly in curl papers. Clad only in a thin white cotton nightgown, the body of Lizzie Roper lay on, rather than in, the bed, which was covered with a whitish counterpane. Both bodies, the bed and bedclothes and the women’s night-clothes, the carpet and to some extent the walls, were splashed or soaked with blood. Lizzie Roper’s throat had been cut from ear to ear.

On a table was the tray with the two cups that had contained tea as well as the half-empty sugar basin, a three-quarters-empty bottle of gin and two glasses. A week had passed and the remains of the salmon had rotted. The curtains were closed, the air thick and fetid and the room full of flies which wheeled and buzzed about the bodies and the rancid food.

Florence touched nothing beyond closing the door she had opened. She went downstairs, put on her hat and walked to the police station in Kingsland Road where she saw Sub-Divisional Inspector Samuel Parlett and told him of her discovery. Two police officers accompanied her back to Navarino Road.

An account of Alfred Roper’s trial appears in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that at the inquest a verdict was returned of murder with malice aforethought and that on the following day Alfred Roper was arrested in Fen Ditton, Cambridgeshire, and charged with his wife’s murder. He appeared on the following morning at the North London Police Court before the magistrate Edward Snow Fordham where he was committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court.

Astonishingly, no violence had been done to Maria Hyde. Cause of death was cardiac arrest, brought on by natural causes. Maria Hyde had for years complained of having a bad heart which might at any moment carry her off, and it seems she was right. The assumption was made—and it is difficult to find an alternative solution—that she was either a witness to her daughter’s death or that she discovered the body and the effect on her was to stop her heart.

But had Maria Hyde also witnessed the killing of fourteen-month-old Edith? The child had disappeared. A search was mounted, residents of every house in an area bounded by Graham Road, Queensbridge Road, Richmond Road and Mare Street were questioned, the boating lake in Victoria Park was dragged and part of the Grand Union Canal. Although there was no sign of disturbance of the soil, the garden at Devon Villa was dug over to a depth of four feet. Local people joined in the search of London Fields and Hackney Downs and the hunt for Edith spread to Hackney Marshes.

It was all in vain. Edith Roper had disappeared and was never to be found, alive or dead.

13

THE PROMISED SUCCEEDING CHAPTER
may have been written but it wasn’t enclosed in Cary’s package. Still, I was not to be obliged to forgo the trial. It had been written about, perhaps because Roper’s acquittal was one of the early triumphs of the K C, Howard de Filippis, in the Penguin
Famous Trials
series. The green paperback, which also contained accounts of the cases of Crippen, Oscar Slater, George Lamson, Madeleine Smith and Buck Ruxton, had no illustrations. But its cover was a collage of photographic images of the subjects, and there, hovering like a medium’s fabricated ghost between Crippen in his high stiff collar and pretty, relentless Madeleine, was Alfred Roper, dark and cadaverous, resembling more than anyone Abraham Lincoln. The book and Arthur Roper’s memoir I put aside, not even sure if I ever intended reading them. I had my own work to do as well as answering all those letters of condolence.

Paul Sellway’s was the first I replied to. It wasn’t a long letter I wrote him but I did mention the diaries and, for something to say, that I now wished my mother had spoken Danish to me as a child so that I had some grasp of it and I added a question I intended as rhetorical: was it the same for him or had he been luckier and had either Hansine or his mother ensured he was bilingual? This letter was to have interesting consequences.

Gordon Westerby, my first cousin once removed, took no more than a week before following up our conversation outside Hampstead Heath Station. He didn’t phone, he wrote.

It was a beautifully executed formal letter, more the product of desk-top publishing than a typewriter, and he signed himself ‘yours sincerely’. He had read the diaries and much enjoyed them. They had convinced him, if he needed convincing, that all that was lacking was a family tree to be set among the endpapers. Did I think this idea would find favour (his words) with the publishers of the diaries?

Could I tell him the Christian names of Morfar’s parents? Would it be too much to ask for their dates? Was Tante Frederikke Asta’s mother’s sister or her father’s? Who was Onkel Holger? Would I come to dinner with him and Aubrey in Roderick Road? On the 5th, 6th, 7th, 12th, 14th or 15th?

He could have asked Swanny these questions and I wondered why he hadn’t. She had been ignorant about the Westerby history while Mormor was alive but after she was dead and the diaries came into her hands she set out to solve puzzles herself, looked up records while she was in Denmark and met the pastor of the church where Asta and Rasmus had been married.

These were not matters which found their way into the diaries. Mormor had never been interested in her forebears. She hadn’t bothered to label the photographs in the albums with names or dates. If she knew who Rasmus’s grandmother was or why the members of her own family were scattered across Sweden as well as Denmark, she had forgotten. In her extreme old age she had forgotten almost everything.

For the last year of her life Mormor lived alone with Swanny in Willow Road. She was ninety-three and she seemed to have all her faculties. She still wore glasses only for reading, had no hearing difficulties and was as agile as ever. But she had lost her memory.

What often happens to very old people is that they have no memory of recent events but almost perfect recall of things that happened sixty or seventy years in the past. This wasn’t true of Asta. In her mind the past was either lost or terribly distorted, so that she would confuse the stories she told, mixing up the one about going to the orphanage with the one about mushroom poisoning. The result was a garbled tale of her cousin going to the orphanage on her own and returning home to find her husband dead of fungus toxins.

Of course, Torben had been saying she was senile for years. It hadn’t been true but it came true once he was dead. Asta talked nonsense and almost nothing but nonsense. This would have been less painful to watch and listen to if she had been physically decrepit. But she looked no more than seventy, she could still walk a mile without hardship and climb the stairs without stopping. She still read her Dickens, did her fine sewing, her drawn thread work and
petit point
and the task she had not long embarked on of embroidering Swanny’s monogram on every piece of linen she possessed. From this work she would look up and come out with an anecdote that was a fabrication but in the heart of which was a tiny thread of fact. For example, the polar bear story which forms the first lines of the first diary had become fact to her and she would recount how she and her mother, while walking in Østerbrogade on a bitter winter’s day, had seen one of these animals gazing in at the window of a butcher’s shop.