The Death of Lucy Kyte (20 page)

How much kinder it would have been if illness
had
taken Mrs Corder when it threatened the household. Josephine pictured the row of Corder graves in the churchyard, a mother's name the last to be added to the family, one son for ever missing from the line. It was hard to imagine the bleakness of that time on a day like this, but the diary did a good job of creating a very different Polstead, where sadness threatened with the darker days of winter and fortunes turned with the weather. Josephine looked up at the sky, glad that she had come to know the village at this time of year, that the beauty of this particular season would be fixed in her mind throughout the months to come. Hester's words seemed heartfelt, and Josephine had no doubt that she would see another, less hospitable side to Red Barn Cottage if she chose to spend time here during the bouts of rain and mud and bitter cold that stretched ahead.

4 December

The first snow of winter, and so cold I c'd almost see the trees shiverin' from my window. The room is icy and the draughts come through gaps in the window frame so wide that it scarcely matters if they are open or shut. At least Sally is in with me now, so there is the warmth of another body at night. It is the most useful thing she has done since she got here.

12 December

Sally has left. The Missis caught her takin' stuff from the pantry and told me to see her out o' the house. December is a wretch'd month to be out o' place in and I felt sorry, but she sh'd know better. It is not like the Corders to forgive. I help'd her pack her things and gave her a shillin' of me own. She left then, but she did not take the Missis's temper with her, more's the pity.

22 December

It is the anniversary of the Master's death, and we have all been fearin' more sorrow to come before the year is out, but Master John rallied a little and the doctor seemed pleased with him. Pray God that James will follow. The first snowdrop is out in the garden.

The misplaced note of optimism marked the last entry of the year, and Josephine put the pages down reluctantly. A warm, cheerful light had lingered into the afternoon and she was tempted to carry on reading, but her sense of duty got the better of her and she went inside. Hester's book would have to wait until she had done some more work on her own; it was shameful for a woman of her age to need incentives to get on with something she supposedly enjoyed, but a few entries of the diary would be a nice reward when she had earned it.

She made herself a sandwich and took it through to the study. A peacock butterfly fluttered against the window, its wings raggedy and faded, and she let it out into the sunshine to enjoy its last few days, then settled down at her desk, determined to remind herself of how it felt to write a thousand words in a single sitting. After three stilted paragraphs, during which she had struggled to explain Claverhouse's military training to a bewildered mythical reader, she was distracted by the sound of a bicycle and the lunchtime post. There were two letters: one was a polite enquiry about publication dates from her publisher, marked urgent and forwarded with an apologetic note from her father; the other was not for her, but the envelope had a London postmark and she had seen the handwriting before. She had intended to write to John Moore to let him know of Hester's death, but it had slipped her mind; now, when she read the bookseller's latest letter, she was glad that it had.

My dear Miss Larkspur,

I trust this finds you well, and very much hope that the last volume I sent met with your approval.

As I mentioned in my note, something genuinely unique has recently come into my possession and I am now in a position to offer it for sale. I would rather show it to you personally, but let me say for now that it harks back to Maria Marten's time and is, in its own way, as fascinating as Curtis's account of the circumstances surrounding her murder. Without wishing to sound too presumptuous, I am certain it is something which you would be pleased to own.

I would be extremely grateful if you could find time to view the item here at Leather Lane – or, if it is not convenient for you to travel to London at the moment, I will of course be more than happy to bring it to you. It is more than a year since we last met, and I look forward to seeing you. I must ask, though, if you would contact me at your earliest convenience; the item in question has a very special interest for collectors such as yourself, and – as much as I hope that its home lies with you – I cannot hold it indefinitely.

Yours very sincerely,

John Moore

The pitch was expertly delivered, despite being couched in such courteous terms: nobody with a passion like Hester's would have been able to resist the bait, and even Josephine was intrigued. She looked at the letters side by side and played with the idea of killing two birds with one stone. Clearly she needed to devote herself more seriously to the research for
Claverhouse
, and it made sense to go to London now, while she was south of the border, and spend some time in the libraries there. And if her memory served her well, Leather Lane was easily walkable from the British Museum; she could deliver the news of Hester's death in person, and find out what John Moore was so pleased about. Best of all, she would be able to see Marta again, sooner than either of them had dared to hope. Her decision made, she cast a sheepish glance at Bonnie Dundee and walked into the village to telephone her club.

14

The Underground train pulled into Chancery Lane with a protest of brakes and Josephine was relieved to get out. The Tube always depressed her, and she could never quite work out if its atmosphere made people dull and listless, or if they were already like that when they got on and had simply been gathered together in a common space. But today it had served its purpose, allowing her to stay longer at the British Museum and still get to Leather Lane before John Moore would think of closing for the day. She climbed the steps to the street and came out at the corner of Gray's Inn Road and Holborn, where two stone pillars in the road marked the City's former boundary to the west. It was not a part of town that Josephine knew particularly well, which was silly because the beautiful old courts that lay hidden and unchanged between Holborn and the river appealed to her sense of history and of peace. Even here, on the main thoroughfare, the commercial needs of the present day could not entirely eclipse the past. As she walked, she looked in admiration at a sixteenth-century frontage whose closely set timbers and mullioned windows – each row projecting a little farther over the street than the one below – proclaimed its period as faithfully as any document, and she vowed to get to know the area better.

Leather Lane was a narrow street on the left, linking Holborn to Clerkenwell Road, and Josephine wondered how it had got its name. Gamages, the department store, took up the entire corner block, but its windows – filled with household goods and a glittering array of toys – were the last hint of shopping on a general scale that the road had to offer. Further down, the shops were more specialised in what they sold – jewellery, clock repairs, a bootmaker – but there was a faded individuality about them that, if anything, made them more intriguing. She found what she was looking for about halfway along the street, just before Leather Lane Market. John Moore's premises were so subtly announced that it would have been easy to miss them. Sandwiched between a pawnbroker and a public house, the tall, narrow building looked more like a dirty, neglected office or private residence. There were no elaborate window displays and no boxes of books lined up along the pavement to tempt people over the threshold. Only the words ‘John Moore & Son, Bookseller' on a discreet brass plaque by the door gave any indication of what went on inside, and Josephine guessed that spur-of-the-moment customers were few and far between. The obscure location and the tone of John Moore's correspondence suggested that most of his trade came from clients like Hester, directed by word of mouth to his door for their own specific tastes and nurtured over a period of time.

Above the plaque, there was a white ivory doorbell circled with discoloured brass, but the door was open and Josephine did not bother to ring. Inside, the business was far less modest about its purpose: the front of the shop was filled with boxes of books that spilled out onto the floor, and it was impossible to say if they were new acquisitions that had yet to be sorted or if the effect was deliberate, a version of the market barrows that teased browsers with the hope of a bargain. Elsewhere, the shop was more conventionally arranged, not dissimilar to those she had just left in the streets around the British Museum, where everything was ordered, tidy and catalogued. The bookshelves were organised in such a way as to offer plenty of scope for undisturbed browsing, although Josephine suspected that very little escaped the sharp eye of the proprietor. John Moore – it seemed a safe assumption; she doubted the establishment employed a large staff – was an elderly man, in his late sixties at least, and she wondered how long the firm had existed and whether he was father or son. He was a striking man, even from a distance, with greying sandy hair, a heavy brow and a pronounced squint which a pair of small round glasses seemed to do very little for, and Josephine could not help thinking that if Uriah Heep had been thirty years older, this was what he would have looked like. His right arm, she noticed, hung uselessly down by his side, and she guessed it was a defect of birth rather than a war wound – he was surely too old to have fought. He acknowledged her arrival with a nod, but was too engrossed in conversation with another man to ask what she wanted, and she was grateful for the chance to look round without having to explain herself. The men sat opposite each other across a long, leather-topped desk, and their manner was more redolent of a consultation than a commercial transaction; had they been divorced from their surroundings, she would have said that they were lawyer and client or doctor and patient rather than bookseller and customer. Incongruously, the wall behind the desk was covered almost entirely with a painting of the Battle of Waterloo.

It didn't take her long to realise that the bookshop was devoted exclusively to the history of crime. Even the more general subject areas – literature, theatre, cinema – consisted of Victorian novels that centred on a murder or mystery, and films and plays that brought notorious killers to life. The largest section by far, though, dealt with true crimes, and Josephine was astonished by how much time had been spent in chronicling the misery of others; there were hundreds and hundreds of individual volumes, many covering cases she had never even heard of, and the collection as a whole would have put any police library to shame. The books were organised by the particular murder they described rather than by author, and she cast her eye along the shelves: Burke and Hare, Crippen, Florence Maybrick, Madeleine Smith, John Thurtell and Henry Wainwright were just a few of the more familiar names whose deeds seemed to have been widely celebrated in print, and those not famous enough to warrant their own section had been charmingly gathered together under headings like ‘Poison', ‘Railway Murders' and ‘Infanticide'.

The Red Barn murder had a shelf to itself, packed for the most part with different editions of Curtis and one or two of the anonymous fictional accounts that had been published shortly after the crime. Josephine recognised many of the spines from Hester's bookcase, but she picked up something she hadn't seen before – a pamphlet called
Maria Marten's Dream Book
. She looked at the date and was interested to see that it had been published as recently as the year before: more than a hundred years on, there was obviously still an appetite for new insights into the crime, and she had no doubt that Hester's book – if she could get it published – would be widely read. On closer inspection, the pamphlet she had found was only tenuously connected to what had happened in Polstead: the author – whoever he or she was – had simply used Mrs Marten's visions of her stepdaughter's body as a justification for a book on the interpretation of dreams. Amused, Josephine looked up those that had troubled her recently and learned that seeing a fire meant luck, but being burned was a warning of trouble, and that dreaming of a burial was generally the sign of a birth. It was hardly Freud, but she decided to buy it anyway.

She wandered further down the aisle, in time to see John Moore leave his desk and disappear into a room marked ‘private'. Daylight seemed to want nothing to do with the back of the shop, and the walls here were lit with lamps whose warmth belied the nature of the material. The final rows of books were interspersed with artwork, if that wasn't a contradiction in terms for such a morbid display. There were framed front pages from the
Illustrated Police News
and a few original examples of the broadsheets printed by James Catnach, but Josephine's eyes were drawn instantly to a hangman's noose, mounted in a wooden case shaped like an upside-down coffin; there was a label underneath the rope to tell her which poor devil it had dispatched, but she could not bring herself to go anywhere near it. Most startling of all, a life-size wax model of a woman dressed in black silk stood in the corner of the room, so realistic that it would have been easy to believe she was a customer left over from another age. Josephine walked over to her, intrigued and repelled at the same time. The woman was staged and carefully lit, and had a peculiarly sinister face, with dark, slightly oblique eyes and a sullen mouth; even if she had not been given pride of place in a room such as this, Josephine would have said that her expression was secretive and threatening, malevolent even. There was something about the waxen face, the stillness of the glance, that made Josephine feel as if she were actually staring at a corpse and she wanted to turn away, but the bookseller had returned and she was reluctant to show her distaste. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him hand over an odd-shaped parcel which clearly did not contain a book. The other man left the shop with his purchase – although purchase was perhaps the wrong word because no money seemed to have changed hands – and Josephine was conscious that she now had the bookseller's full attention.