The Hourglass Factory (26 page)

Frankie sighed and tried to keep focus. ‘So what about Ebony?’

Milly’s eyes darkened and she looked up slowly. ‘She hadn’t attended a meeting there for nearly a month. No one had seen her after her last time in Holloway. And do you want to
know something else? No one missed her.’ She shook her head.

Frankie sat forward, nearly toppling her teacup as she caught the edge of the tablecloth. ‘What?’

‘Not a soul. I’d say if she hadn’t abandoned them, she’d have been kicked out before too long. Funny thing was, this girl, this boyish little Roberta, Miss Jenkins, she
wanted to know all about it too. Like she was some kind of crazed fanatic who’d gone along just to find out about her.’

‘She might have thought the same about you.’

Milly nodded thoughtfully. ‘She might.’

‘So who told you this, about Ebony?’

‘Well, like I said, at four o’clock we broke for tea. There’s a kitchen at the back of the house and some of the older women, by that I mean the ones who had been there for a
while, went to prepare bread and dripping, and pots of tea. So naturally I offered to help. So did Roberta Jenkins. She was the one who first asked about Ebony.’

‘Did you ask how she knew Ebony?’

‘She didn’t. She said she had read about her. She was there at the Albert Hall that night, so she said. And Mrs Dale stopped stirring the jam pot, cold, and she said, “I
wouldn’t go bandying that name about here if you want to stay on folks’ good sides.” She was perfectly serious. Her face was as sour as I saw it that day, because she really was a
very nice amiable woman. But the mention of Ebony . . .’

Milly took some of her tea and kept the warm cup in her hands. ‘And so I pretended I knew very little about her. And I asked what it was she had done. Frankie, it was like a fisherman
opening a bag of maggots and watching them spill out all over the table. The things Ebony wanted them to do, the plans she made. July this year, you remember Mrs Barclay-Evans said they called a
truce. Ebony had grown very agitated at this, according to Mrs Dale and had begun making all sorts of schemes. Instead of flying a hot air balloon over parliament and throwing pamphlets overboard
she wanted to throw pebbles. She didn’t understand until one of the women who has a bachelor of science degree explained to her that from that height a pebble could kill someone. She wanted
to ambush the Prime Minister at his country home, to take him hostage. She wanted to throw him tied to a trapeze off Big Ben. And this one you’ll like.’ Milly dropped her voice.
‘She wanted to release the tigers from London Zoo and set them loose on the streets with a note round their neck saying “Deeds Not Words”.’

Frankie swallowed uncomfortably. Suddenly all the cream and tea in her stomach was making her feel sick. Could it be that the woman she had seen at the corset shop, on stage that night, had not
been frightened at all, she had simply been unhinged? Was her agitation the twitchings of a woman who belonged in the Bedlam? ‘It’s all talk though.’

‘She said they had drawings on file, no written plans, Ebony could barely write her own name, let alone spell. They wanted rid of her. Her stunts, they said, were getting out of
hand.’

‘But what about the militancy? The arson, what the Barclay-Evanses said about the split? They said militancy was on the up anyway.’

‘Not like this. They’re very strict about not harming anyone.’

‘And you think she’s a liability? That someone wants rid of her for good?’

‘I don’t know what to think. Mrs Dale swore blind that she hadn’t seen her since the last time in Holloway. She was in for window-smashing I think, or she might have thrown a
stone at a cabinet minister’s car.’

‘And was it universal? I mean did everyone hate her or was anyone behind her?’

‘She had one friend in the movement. A girl she met when she first joined. They were thick as thieves, Mrs Dale said. She helped her rig the trapeze at the Albert Hall and they’d
been in Holloway together a couple of times. She was working as a parlourmaid but she lost her job for some reason a few weeks before the last time they ended up in prison. Ebony helped her find a
new job, somewhere, and then after they came out of Holloway they left the WSPU. That is to say, no one saw either of them again.’

‘And her name?’ Frankie asked softly.

‘It was Annie. Annie Evans. It was her. The girl in the papers, the one that was killed on Tottenham Court Road. I saw a photograph of them both at a rally.’

Frankie put her face in her hands and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘One down, one to go. Maybe they weren’t after Ebony that night after all, they wanted both of
them.’

Milly nodded gently. ‘I couldn’t write anything down, of course, I was trying to take it all in.’ She took a long blink. ‘I don’t know what to think of Ebony now.
What was she thinking? Could she have gone through with her plans? I just don’t want to think.’

Frankie watched her carefully. Without her hat, her hair looked scruffy and wild and in the plain brown suit she could from a distance have passed for any ordinary governess or working woman.
But there was still something in her face, the way the muscles round her mouth moved when she talked, something in her lips and vowels. After a while her shoulders fell back in the chair,
exhausted. ‘Anyway, how did you get on at the morgue?’

Frankie filled her in quickly. The poison in the corset; the brooch found on Smythe; the woman who had come for his clothes. She took out her notebook and passed the rubbing across to Milly.
‘Did you ever see Ebony with that?’

Milly looked at the sketch for a long time. Her eyes roamed its rough lines from the top to the point at the base. After a while she looked away and rubbed at her eyelids. ‘It’s hard
to make out what it is.’

‘Looks like a family crest.’

‘I’ve never seen it before.’

‘Did she have a lover? An admirer who came to the club? You know Jojo talked about cabinet ministers.’

Milly was looking sceptically at her. ‘I’ve never seen any cabinet ministers. He talks himself big, Jojo.’ She sighed. ‘If Ebony had a lover she was as clandestine with
him as she was with everything else. Like where she was going for the past month when we thought she was at suffragette meetings.’

Frankie thought for a moment or two then looked Milly in the eye as she took back her notebook. ‘I have a hunch about that. But we won’t find out about it until tonight.’

Milly cast her eyes down at the scrappy remnants of their tea. Her brow became creased with rows of little lines. ‘I’m tired, Frankie. And I have to work tonight. Club’s open
again.’

‘So we go afterwards.’

‘Go where?’

‘Smythe’s. The corset shop.’

Annie Evans. The name sat on the tip of Primrose’s tongue as he strode down the mucky road the omnibus had deposited him on, back towards Pentonville Prison. Robert
Jenkins had telegraphed the office with the information that afternoon, and now Primrose had in his pocket a Judge’s order for William Reynolds’s discharge, if, and only if, he could be
of reasonable use to a police investigation. It had been procured during Mr Justice Curtis Watkins’s medicinal nap, taken after Sunday lunch and, as Stuttlegate continued to remind him, at
great inconvenience. But as the prisoner was male, and therefore more likely to make rational decisions when issuing blackmail threats, Stuttlegate did not have a problem signing off the
telegram.

There had been no dental records to verify the identity, but a strong-stomached suffragette had agreed to view the body. Photographs were sourced from the Holloway files. Doubt was erased. The
methods they had set Jenkins up with for gathering his information may have been unorthodox, but the facts were correct. It was Annie Evans.

Primrose’s nerves jangled in his great skeleton as he walked, still dizzy-headed from his own interrupted afternoon nap that he had managed to snatch in his office, his clothes creased and
pulled from their usual shape, his limbs warm in some places, cold in others.

A guard pulled open the front entrance gate. The yard was empty of horses now; the shells of Black Marias lay shining in the crisp cold sunlight. Reception was busy: visiting afternoon. Primrose
wedged past the crowds of wives, brothers, sons and mothers, scrubbed, combed and in their Sunday best, and approached the front desk.

There was a different officer on, who all but sneered as Primrose displayed his warrant card.

‘CID? It’s Sunday.’

‘It’s extremely urgent. I have a court order, and I need to speak to the Senior Medical Officer.’

‘You’re having a laugh.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

The man bared a set of rusty old teeth in a frosty smile. ‘He’s at afternoon tea.’

‘Afternoon tea? In Pentonville?’

The officer gestured to the crowd. ‘Stand aside please, we’re very busy.’

Primrose turned to see a woman behind him, dabbing at her eyes with a threadbare handkerchief, and a creep of dread swam over him, not anchored to anything in particular. He turned back to the
officer. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to need to be dealt with before these people.’

The officer scratched his freckled chin and ran his finger down the ledger book, humming a ditty. ‘What’s the prisoner’s name you’re after?’

‘Reynolds. You’ll know him, he’s the suffrage man.’

The officer looked puzzled for a second, then nodded. ‘Yeah, I do.’ He didn’t offer any more, just continued to peruse his italic scribblings in the ledger. Just as Primrose
felt a jostle in his back, the officer snapped his head up. ‘He ain’t here.’

‘What? That’s preposterous, I visited him this morning, he’s here.’

‘Well, he ain’t.’ The man shrugged. ‘You’re the second person come looking for him just now.’

‘Well what do you mean ain’t’?

‘Isn’t.’

Primrose stemmed a well of vitriol. He looked into the man’s blue eyes and slowly clawed back his temper. ‘Men don’t just disappear from prison.’

‘No, they don’t,’ the man said, enjoying himself. ‘He was discharged.’

Primrose reached a heavy hand across the desk. ‘Let me see that ledger.’

The man stiffened but let him take it, aware of the boundaries he could push. CID men were the bane of his existence, swanning in with their thick coats and fancy hats, flapping their warrant
cards.

‘Can I speak with the Governor?’

‘Governor’s at afternoon tea,’ the man said levelly.

Primrose scanned down the slick pattern of handwriting until he found the name. In the ‘admitted’ column the date was 2 November, two days ago. The convictions were vandalism of
property and contempt of court. Then in the discharge column, beside the governor’s signature, a set of initials had been scrawled. ‘CH.’

‘Who’s CH?’ Primrose demanded.

The man was chewing the flesh of his cheek. ‘Yeah, his wife was in again just half an hour ago. She come in earlier today as well, but they hadn’t told her neither. Not that
there’s any reason they would but for a transfer of this kind . . . Of this nature, I mean.’

‘Dammit, what do you mean?’

The officer looked shocked, then affronted, then reproachful. Primrose looked around to see that the people beside him had fallen silent. Blood swam to his cheeks. He leant towards the officer,
close enough to smell the man’s soap. ‘Tell me where the prisoner has been taken. I have a murder investigation dependent on it and a warrant for his release.’

‘Release?’ the man snorted. ‘That’s a laugh. You’ll have a fine time trying to get him out of there.’

‘Out of where?’

The man squared Primrose in the eye. ‘Colney Hatch. Lunatic Asylum. Governor signed the warrant just after lunch. Should have seen his wife’s face, she was almost as hysterical as
you, Inspector.’ He coughed quietly.

Primrose said nothing but as his hand slammed into the officer’s desk he startled even himself.

Jojo’s was dark and cavernous, the only light coming from candles shielded in hurricane lamps or jugs, giving off a warm oily smell and a glow like dirty moonlight.
Frankie had spent the last few hours in a Turkish coffee shop round the corner, drinking a thick brew that Milly had ordered for her, and trying to separate in her heavily caffeinated mind each of
the facts she had learned.

Someone had attacked and killed Annie Evans on Thursday night. The same evening, a black corset was laced with poison ivy, and Olivier Smythe had tried it on. Ebony Diamond’s equipment had
been booby-trapped at the Coliseum on Friday and she had second-guessed it and escaped. She knew that Ebony was afraid Annie had been mistaken for her, but could it be possible that Ebony was the
only target for both deaths? That phrase she had used, sitting outside on the pavement, ‘nine lives’. Did she already know that two were gone?

Then there were the poisons. Cocaine drops could be easily sourced from a druggists, but poison ivy, John Bridewell had said, was a rare botanical. So that meant someone with a hothouse or
access to an exotic garden. But the murderer would also have needed access to Olivier’s corset shop and the Coliseum. And she couldn’t for the life of her see how a cabinet minister
could have either. A suffragette on the other hand . . .

And then the brooch. One image had been permeating Frankie’s thoughts for the past while. Ebony holding up a brooch in the gaslight before hurling it at Smythe. She had yelled something
too, but Frankie couldn’t remember what. There were too many open questions, and she was certain now of where the answers had to lie.

She was grateful to Milly when a waiter came over and slapped a plate of chops down in front of her. They were grizzled little things, more fat than meat, but they soaked up the gravy and she
hadn’t had a proper meal for two days. She bent her head and tucked in. Halfway through, she felt eyes on her, looked up and jumped. Liam had silently taken the other seat at the table and
looked like he had been staring at her for some time.

‘Can I have one of those?’ He pointed to the remaining chop.

An emptiness tugged at Frankie’s stomach but she looked into his pasty freckled face and nodded. He pulled the plate towards him and picked the chop up by the bone, rubbing it in the
leftover gravy, concentrating on peeling every fibre of meat off with his front teeth. She was about to open her mouth to ask where he had been, when a compère in a top hat and tailcoat
threw back the turquoise curtains with his cane and the audience began to applaud.