Waxwork (21 page)

‘Are they pursuing him?'

‘I understand there are men looking for him at all the ports.'

‘And if they find him?'

Allingham shrugged. ‘If they propose to detain him, they must charge him with something.'

Bell exchanged a glance with Hawkins. From the prisoner's composure, you would think she was indifferent to her husband's predicament.

She said a curious thing. ‘Then it's nearly over, Simon.'

His face lit with encouragement. ‘You have been marvellous. So brave! Yes, nearly over. No doubt they will come to pester you with more questions while they have you in this place, but you must refuse to say one word unless I am present. That is your right.'

She let out a small breath, as if his words had fortified her. A tinge of colour had come back to her cheeks. Exactly why Howard Cromer's disappearance had lifted her spirit, the wardresses did not understand. They drew conclusions from what they saw. There had been opportunity enough in two weeks locked in a cell with the prisoner eight hours a day to read signals in her voice and expression. She might be sitting upright on her stool with her hands held together, but she was elated by what the solicitor had told her. If she had got the chance she would have hugged him. Between these two there were things going on.

‘Simon, which of the detectives questioned you about Howard? Was it the sharp-faced man with side-whiskers or the second one, with the beard, who pretended not to be a detective at all?'

‘The first.' Allingham frowned. ‘Why do you ask?'

‘Oh, because I believe I have seen the second. I was not supposed to, but while I was in the exercise yard this morning I happened to look up and saw a face at a window two floors up, staring down at me. He was the man Howard photographed, I am certain—the broad, scarred face, black beard and prominent eyes. Even the butterfly collar. As soon as I caught those codfish eyes he disappeared from view. I had to smile.'

Bell darted a warning glance at Hawkins. A word out of turn now, and either of them could be up before the governor. There were things it was forbidden under any circumstances to discuss with a condemned prisoner.

Allingham had an explanation. ‘Probably he was put on to the case after your trial. He would have had no opportunity of seeing you, except in photographs. He would be better employed meeting the trains at Dover than peering out of prison windows. This entire experience has done nothing to alter my low opinion of our detective force.'

She seemed not to be listening. She was looking at her fingernails, chipped and stained by prison fatigues. ‘Simon.'

He reddened. She had spoken his name with a kind of ardour.

‘In here, my thoughts have been much on the past,' she said, speaking in a low, earnest tone she had not used before. It seemed to Bell that it was calculated to make the wardresses feel they should not be listening. ‘I think a lot about Hampstead, and the Society. Those interminable lectures that we endured for the conversation afterwards. The picnics and the outings. That trip up the river when you wore your striped blazer. I was never so happy as then.'

The young man began to look uncomfortable. ‘Nor me—capital memories,' he said tamely.

‘Something we share,' she said, and paused, watching him. ‘In the night, when it is difficult to sleep, I find my thoughts often turn to what might have happened in my life if things had happened differently. Those were happy times and I thought I understood why, but really I did not. Simon, I was blinkered. I knew nothing of the world. Oh, I basked in its pleasures, the joys of laughter, sunshine, pretty things. Like a child. Such thoughts as I possessed were shaped by impulse. If there were things I desired, chocolates, flowers, anything, I directed all the power at my disposal to obtaining them. And because I was pretty and surrounded by people who adored me I was never thwarted. A selfish, spoilt child.'

‘Come now, that's too steep,' Allingham demurred. ‘You have a sweet disposition, always did.'

He was incapable of stopping her now she had started. It was so sudden that it shocked, this baring of the soul by the woman who had consistently refused to confide a word. It seemed indecent, worse than nakedness.

‘I lacked any judgment, Simon,' she said in a voice that did not expect to be challenged. ‘My actions were determined by impulse alone. Why do you suppose I married Howard? I could not give you a reasoned explanation.'

‘In matters of the heart—' Allingham started to murmur.

‘It was a whim, like everything else in my life up to that time,' she said, and her voice became less insistent, dreamier. ‘Howard was there, and I wanted him. I gave it no more thought than if I had seen a bonnet in a shop window. Oh, I don't mean that my head was not full of him. I doted on him. To me he was charming, handsome, urbane and his prospects were boundless. Yet what I wanted in truth was gratification. I was thinking of myself.' She sighed. ‘The difference in our ages, his possessive ways, his devotion to photography above all things, I dimly recognised, but I did not consider these as reasons to hesitate. I wanted him as my husband and that was the end of it. The end.' Her eyes moistened. ‘Nothing would deter me.'

She looked down at her hands again. Nobody spoke.

‘Simon, you of all people must have noticed that Howard and I … that the element one takes for granted in matrimony, the coming together of man and wife—'

Allingham appealed to her, ‘Spare yourself, Miriam. There is no need to … '

The wardresses sat in silence, pretending to hear nothing, least of all what was unsaid.

The prisoner continued speaking. ‘There had to be disenchantment. Really we entered into marriage without knowing each other.' She smiled faintly. ‘To Howard I was something between a child and a piece of porcelain. I needed to be guarded, humoured, cherished and photographed. He liked me best when I was silent and completely still.' She looked away, in her own thoughts. ‘It was difficult for me to accept after our courtship had been so full of variety and companionship. I had imagined the parties would go on as if nothing had changed. Instead I was confined indefinitely in Park Lodge. I might as well have been
here.
I even had a gaoler until I insisted she was dismissed. Howard didn't understand why I could not bear the woman. You know him, Simon. A kinder, more solicitous man does not exist. If Howard had made me unhappy from malice I could have rebelled, but he was infinitely kind. He bought me trinkets, chocolates, little toys and hid them in places where I would come upon them unexpectedly. What could I do but persevere, try to convince myself it was not the greatest mistake of my life?'

‘Miriam—'

‘Please listen to me, Simon,' she said quickly. ‘There is not much more. I believe even now I would be ready to face a life with Howard if he had been as honest with me as he was kind.'

‘What do you mean?'

She hesitated. ‘That he concealed from me the truth about Judith Honeycutt.'

Allingham's features creased into a look of bewilderment. ‘But, my dear, you knew about Judith.'

She looked at him with a gaze that seemed to penetrate his words and show them to be hollow.

‘There was the inquest,' he said, trying to fill the space. ‘You knew about the tragedy. We all did. God knows, it was catastrophic for Howard. If he had stayed in Hampstead, it would have ruined him. I don't mean to be callous about poor Judith, rest her soul, but she did not pause to think—'

She cut through his words with a bare statement. ‘Simon, I know how Judith died.'

He blinked and put his hand to his face. ‘Miriam, what are you saying?'

She said with deliberation, ‘He told me himself. He confessed it to me as he lay beside me in our marriage-bed'—she spoke the word with bitterness—‘at a moment when he felt constrained to reassure me that he was capable of loving a woman. What consolation I was to derive from it, I cannot imagine, because he confided to me, his wife, that he and Judith … that he was responsible for her condition at the time of her death. Whether it was true I doubt, knowing Judith as I did, but that is of no account. Howard believed it. When she told him, it threw him into a state of panic. You know how exercised he becomes about the smallest things. Imagine this! She threatened a scandal unless he married her. To Howard, the suggestion was unthinkable. Whatever had happened between them was a furtive, foolish thing, no basis for matrimony. In his mental anguish he decided there was only one escape: to do away with her.'

Allingham said, ‘Miriam, for God's sake. This can't be true!'

Her colour was high. She began speaking more rapidly, unsubdued by his protest. ‘You can be frank with me. You were a true friend to Howard. You saved him, told him what to say at the inquest—'

‘No, no!' Allingham agitatedly said. ‘Nothing of the kind.'

‘Simon, he told me the truth himself. Too late. By then I had married him. Can you imagine how I felt being the wife of a … ' She smothered the word with an inrush of breath. ‘If there had ever been any prospect of our marriage succeeding, it ended that night he told me this.'

Allingham was white. In a voice just audible, he said, ‘Miriam, I knew nothing of this. Nothing.'

‘I wanted you to know.'

As words stopped between them, the sound of his breathing filled the cell. The prisoner appeared calmer, her hands resting loosely on her lap while she waited for him to absorb what she had said.

In a lower key she resumed. ‘Perhaps you can understand what it does to a woman to be told such a thing. The last vestiges of those girlish dreams of mine vanished in a second. My husband was a stranger to me. He has been ever since. You are not blind, Simon. You must have seen for yourself.'

‘Yes,' he answered in a whisper. ‘I could not fail to notice.'

‘You had seen me go wilfully into marriage with Howard. You knew it was madness, didn't you?' she said. ‘You foresaw the frustrations I would visit on myself. Tell me I detected from you the suggestion that I should think again. I mean those times you glanced at me in your special way or brushed your hand against mine.'

The young man flushed with embarrassment.

‘I like to think you were trying to tell me in your own way about your secret sentiments. Simon, I would not speak like this if I could avoid it. Perhaps I am deceiving myself again, but I thought—I like to believe—'

He responded. ‘You are right. If I could have spoken to you … I knew it would make no difference.'

‘Yes.' A tear slid from her eye. She let it move slowly down her cheek.

They said nothing for what seemed a long interval.

The prisoner ended it. ‘Simon, if there were a chance to begin again, as we were in the Hampstead days, before I married Howard, do you think it possible that you and I—knowing all you did about the kind of person I am—'

‘I can think of nothing I would rather wish for,' he gently interposed.

She smiled, and sniffed to keep back tears, bowing her head.

‘It is better to forget such thoughts,' he said.

Her eyes came up slowly to meet his and fix them with a look of extraordinary intensity. ‘There is a way.'

He appeared not to understand.

She said, ‘If they find Howard, they will arrest him.'

‘They would be obliged to pardon you before any magistrate would issue a warrant,' he said.

‘Howard will be brought to trial, as I was, unless he can convince them he is innocent and they drop the charge.'

Allingham still wore a frown. ‘That is true, but—'

She hesitated, watching him. ‘If it … happened … that he was unable to convince them—'

‘Miriam, what are you saying?'

‘That I should be free in the real meaning of the word.'

He shook his head. ‘Not that way.' His hand went to the nape of his neck and clutched it. ‘No, I could never bring myself—'

‘Simon, he is guilty. Judith died in agony. Whatever view the law might take of the present case … '

Articulating each word as if it caused pain, he said, ‘I could not do that to Howard.'

‘Not for my sake?' she asked, her voice rising challengingly.

‘He is your husband.'

‘In name only.' She closed her eyes and said, ‘Simon, you are a man!'

He sat staring at her.

Bell, no less than he, was stunned. Emotional scenes were usual in the condemned cell. Until today, the prisoner had been unexampled in her self-control. Cold-blooded, she had seemed. Whatever was going on between these two—and it was not easy to divine—the meaning of what the prisoner had just said could not be plainer. Or bolder.

‘Simon,' she said, ‘I would not ask you to say anything that was not true. Only to keep silent if the moment comes.' She looked steadily into his eyes. ‘Will you do that for me?'

In a dazed voice he answered, ‘I do not know that I have your strength, Miriam.'

‘You are a man!' she said again. ‘For me, you will be strong.'

He continued to look at her without saying anything.

‘Go now,' she told him gently.

He nodded.

The prisoner's face resumed its look of passivity, as if nothing more needed to be said.

Bell felt for the keys on her belt.

The governor cleared his throat. ‘You are, em, keeping well?'