The Hourglass Factory (4 page)

The man began to fumble under the counter, and at length emerged with a very sleek looking hammer, painted green at the handle, its bulb in burnished steel.

‘Oh that looks lovely.’ She took it into her hands. ‘It has to be able to smash glass you see. Efficiently.’

The man gave her a brisk nod. ‘That’s your one.’

‘Lovely.’

‘Trouble is,’ he scratched his head, ‘I think I only have eighteen of them in the back. Could get them by next week.’

‘Well, you see it’s rather urgent. We do need them tonight,’ she hesitated. ‘I mean tomorrow morning. First thing.’

The man shook his head. ‘Afraid it’s all I can do. They’re shilling and six but if you take all eighteen I’ll do them a shilling each.’

Mrs Pankhurst ceased fingering the painted green stem and looked up brightly. ‘Well, I think that sounds splendid. Some of them will just have to share.’

‘Indeed they will Madam,’ said the shopkeeper as she delved into her purse. ‘Indeed they will.’

Further north, Mrs Deacon of 72 Popham Drive had also just walked into an ironmonger’s on Cricklewood High Street.

The owner, a stout, shabby man with tufty whiskers, was taken aback to see a woman so delicately dressed in dark green velvet approach his grubby counter. He thought to himself, her maid must be
sick. She must be running an errand for the household.

What she said next surprised him. ‘Excuse me, I’m looking to purchase a number of hammers. Twenty-five to be exact.’

The shop owner gave her a startled look. Then he realised. School marm, he thought to himself. A boy’s school, no doubt. And it all made perfect sense.

By the time Frankie returned to 125 New Bond Street, Mr Smythe had turned the gaslights in the window off and was on his knees, picking up wooden hangers and stacking his
corsets back onto the racks. Beside him, a girl in a brown linen dress and pinny, with glossy black hair, stood brushing down the garments and straightening the laces as he passed them to her.
Frankie gently pushed open the door. The bell knocked a soft sing-song, but the two figures didn’t look across. In the air still hung the faint lingering smell of
poudre
d
’
amour
that Ebony had left in her wake.

Frankie muttered her ‘excuse me’s’ and crept past them, trying to eavesdrop on their quiet conversation. Noises from the upper floor, where she assumed the workshop must be,
churned through the ceiling, so she only picked up on a few hushed words: ‘lace’ and ‘feather piping’ on a costume the girl had been making for Ebony, and her lament that
Miss Diamond had not stayed to try it on. As she made her way discreetly to the rear of the shop where the camera case lay, Frankie heard Smythe mutter, ‘I’ll try it myself, and if it
doesn’t fit when she comes to pick it up it will be her own fault.’

Startled by the suggestion, she snuck a glance again at Smythe’s waist and came to the conclusion that he probably was corseted to about the same size as Ebony Diamond. She felt a nicotine
gurgle creep up her throat just thinking about it.

The case was lying by the fitting room, kicked into a corner out of the way. She slid the damp camera back inside, then reached for the strap. It had got itself half-tucked under the green drape
running along the chamber’s back wall. As she began to tug it, she felt resistance. Thinking it was caught on something, she rippled the drape, searching for the edge. Workshop noises from
beyond gradually swelled, metal softly chinking, along with quiet regular wooden clicks. She found the parting, peeled back the curtain, and jumped.

At first the woman – at least Frankie thought she was a woman from the little she could see of her – was bent down picking with curiosity at the loop of the strap, but on seeing
Frankie she stood up sharply, too sharply for Frankie to stop a short gasp escaping. Her grimed brow was skimmed by the lace of an old-maid’s bonnet, the eyes beneath it rheumy. The rest of
her face was obscured by folds of dirty cream linen wrapping the bridge of her nose, concealing her mouth, bundled down underneath her chin and secured tightly in a knot. She spoke, and her voice
sounded like she was chewing wads of cotton.

‘Get out, private property.’ She shooed Frankie with her hands.

It then dawned on Frankie what was wrong with her. She had heard of women of her mother’s generation with phossy jaw from the match factories, but she had never seen one. Most of them
hadn’t survived. It was a horrible disease, swelling the jaw, attacking the bones and leaving the victim with no option but to have part of their chin removed. There was a lady at the end of
her street the locals said suffered from it. Frankie looked away, ashamed to find that she had been staring.

‘There, take it.’ The woman flicked the strap. Picking up the case, Frankie dodged back out into the chamber of the shop where she bumped straight into the squeezed waist of Mr
Smythe.

His voice was soft but cold. ‘That part of the shop is off limits. Perhaps it isn’t clear from the signage.’ He quickly ruffled the drape shut, blocking sight of the woman with
phossy jaw.

‘My apologies,’ Frankie mumbled, ‘I was picking up my camera bag.’

Smythe hesitated before standing aside.

‘Incidentally,’ he said as Frankie brushed past his cotton shirt, ‘if you really are a journalist, you only had to say. We’ve received quite a lot of positive press in
the past. We advertise too. In
The Times
, the
Pall Mall Gazette
. Which paper was it you wrote for?’

‘The
London Evening Gazette
.’

His silence drifted towards her. She could practically hear the wrinkling of his nose. She thought she might as well chance her luck anyway.

‘Actually while I’m here, d’you happen to know where I might find Miss Ebony Diamond? Usually? Of an evening?’

His gaze chilled.

‘Right,’ Frankie said. ‘Shall I leave a card? Just in case?’

‘If you like,’ he said politely, then took it from her at a pained distance. All of his irritation had been carefully swallowed by the time he held the door open. Just before she
passed through it she felt a pinch on her hips. She was on the verge of howling when she caught the eye of the seamstress girl with the black hair and brown dress, standing right behind her. The
girl flashed wide her dark eyes. Frankie closed her mouth.

‘You want to try Jojo’s in Soho,’ she whispered. ‘If she’s not here, she’ll be there.’

Frankie nodded a silent thank you and was relieved to hear the final jangle of the bell as Mr Smythe snapped shut the door.

Out in the street, she rubbed her hands together and breathed a long steaming puff of air into the darkening fog. She checked her pocket-watch. It would take just twenty minutes perhaps to get
to Twinkle’s flat on foot. Was there time before then for a jaunt to Soho? Probably not. On the other hand, arriving early at Twinkle’s could be hazardous; she might be made to eat all
manner of unspeakable diet foods.

As she moved away in the rough direction of Soho she caught sight of the saloon doors of a public house on the corner of the street. The Maid in the Moon. She knew the landlord of that one,
Tommy Dawber, a Tottenham man she used to see at the Spurs matches with her father when she was little. He’d done well for himself, with three or four gaffs now in the centre of town. She
paused, looking again towards Soho, then back at the public house. Through the steamy windows she could see clutches of workers gathered around small tables, an old gin queen up at the bar with
rouge on her cheeks and powder spilling from her hair. Tommy was behind the steel-topped counter, his head thrown back, spitting while he laughed. The foamy stout coming out of the pumps as he
pulled them looked tasty. She could probably get him to tap her one for a favour too, if she mentioned the Spurs. The wetness of the camera was beginning to leak through the case and into her
back.

She took one last look along to the end of the street, then jogged across the road, letting thoughts of Ebony Diamond spill away as she pulled open the door of the Maid in the Moon.

Dusk had given way to brownish night by the time Frankie drained the bitter dregs of her stout and made a move back towards the public house’s swinging doors. She pulled
out her grandfather’s old pocket-watch and took a look at the time. Twinkle would be expecting her. Her heart grew sluggish. Reaching into her pocket, she took out a Matinee, sparking it up
on her way out of the door. A hackney drove past and the driver slurred at her, something about women smoking. She tossed the spent match in his wake.

The streets were almost empty now, except for a few men with briefcases scurrying towards the underground station and shopgirls with hands clutched to their throats, holding shut their coats
against the cold. I was right all along, Frankie told herself. Sunshine never lasts in November. Fools the lot of you, she thought, snuggling into her tweeds.

A few puffs into the cigarette she set off in the direction of Marble Arch. She had only gone a few paces when a noise distracted her.

It was horses’ hooves but not the usual kind, the cab nags. This was a tidy clop, a fine dressage trot. A memory stirred of military processions along the Mall. Something made her
turn.

Out of the foggy street a lone carriage appeared, a four-wheeler, richly decorated with red touches on black, the kind that would pull up at Covent Garden for the opera or Westminster on
Coronation day. Two black horses lurched to a halt and tossed their shiny heads, stopping parallel to the shop. The cabbie wore a cloak and top hat and paused for no more than a second before
pulling off again and disappearing into the mist, tucking the horses’ heads in on a tight martingale rein.

Frankie hid the glow of her cigarette with one hand and looked back towards the shop. Where the pavement had been empty, a pair of long black legs had now appeared. The silhouette of a man in a
top hat, carrying a strong black cane, was now outlined by the gas lamps, his face lost in the murk. He straightened his coat and walked quickly to the opening of Lancashire Court, the alley that
ran down the side of Smythe’s. His shoes cracked the silence; in a second or two he was gone.

From the recesses of her grubby pocket she withdrew her watch again. She knew she should be on her way. He might not even have been going in to Smythe’s. There could be another apartment
further down; the area was fairly well-to-do with hotels and museums.

Suddenly, a slice of light cleaved the middle of the first floor window above the shop. It vanished as quickly as it came, the twitch of a thick curtain folding it back into the room.

Cold was closing in and Frankie breathed into her hands, feeling the hot moisture turn quickly to a chill wet film. She had just straightened herself to be on her way again when the second
carriage arrived.

Like an apparition drawn by a ghost horse it stopped as discreetly as the last. Down stepped a man in a brushed topper. His cloak reached the ground; a flash of pewter revealed the tip of a
cane. If he hadn’t coughed, Frankie might have thought she was hallucinating. The carriage melted back into the fog, the man disappeared down Lancashire Court. The next thing she heard was
the tap of pewter on glass. Three times. What, was he going in the window? She hardly had time to answer herself before a motor cab crept furtively to the kerb side, spouting blue smoke as it
crawled up to the gutter. Its passenger got out. Top hat, cane.

Suddenly the car thrust its engine to full force and sped past her, sending a gust of petroleum vapour straight up her nose. She choked on her cigarette smoke and went for the handkerchief in
her top pocket. By the time she looked back up the car was gone. But it wasn’t long before the fourth and the fifth vehicles arrived, and the sixth cab. Like a penny cinema screen with a
skipping reel on loop the spectacle repeated itself until she had counted thirteen top hats all in all into the darkness of Lancashire Court.

Night was falling by the time Detective Inspector Frederick Primrose gathered his belongings, packed his notepad into his leather briefcase and turned down his shirtsleeves.
Just before he reached for his desk-lamp switch he took one last look out the window. His office was on the third floor of New Scotland Yard’s headquarter building and he could see all the
way over Victoria Embankment to the river. A barrow-man was loading his unsold vegetables into a small wooden boat. Beside him, a little girl with a red ribbon in her hair sat on the boat’s
prow still trying to hawk the last of the day’s shrimps. ‘Half pound for sixpence. Get ’em fresh!’ Even in the din of omnibuses, electric trams and horse-hooves, her voice
cut through. It all seemed so vivid outside the office, compared to the dull quiet buzz within.

When had it begun, this fug of apathy about his work, this consuming melancholy? Before the move to Scotland Yard? Or after the move into the suffragette squad? When he had first arrived at the
Metropolitan Police, a fresh-skinned farm boy, Frederick Primrose the second had been bounced from division to division, from clerical work to the beat, his frustrated superiors wondering why a lad
so practical, so quietly intelligent had not the literacy to be able to file reports or write up casework, wondering if he was a lost cause destined to sniff out pickpockets in Charing Cross
station for the rest of his days. An opening for a Detective Inspector in the sixteen-strong branch allocated to deal with suffragettes had arisen several weeks ago, and someone unknown to him had
recommended him for the post.

Perhaps they thought it was a joke. That would explain the newspaper that was left on his desk this morning, its front page showing Mrs Billinghurst grinning in her wheelchair. May Billinghurst
had been part of the Black Friday demonstrations in November 1910, the worst violence yet in the women’s movement. Primrose, one of the hundreds of uniformed sergeants drafted in that cold
afternoon, had found her abandoned in an alleyway with the wheels ripped off her wicker bath chair, and kindly escorted her home in a police car. Only afterwards his Super had told him she had been
ramming the lines of police horses with her chair, making them rear. ‘A vicious piece of dynamite,’ the Super had said, ‘who would endanger lives as readily as she would butter
toast.’ The wheels had been removed by another officer. And now there she was, on the front page of the
Daily Mirror
, newly freed after two months in second division for throwing acid
in pillar boxes. Whoever had left the paper on his desk had drawn a big loveheart in red ink round the grainy photograph. Of course it was a joke. If he had been marked out as a suffragette
sympathiser how on earth could he have been given the special branch post? But the anonymity of the gesture – its silent, private positioning on his desk, rather than in the main office in
front of everyone – had been dogging him all day.