“Well, thank goodness for that. Does love come into this arrangement?”
“Love?” The word startled both of them into silence.
Gwendolen surprised herself even more by saying, “Can I think about it?”
“No,” Niven said. “If you think about it you won’t come with me.” He stood up abruptly and held out his hand to her. And there they must remain, suspended between coming and going for ever.
The Laughing Policeman
“Is it a hanging?” the boy asked his neighbour, standing in the crowd outside Pentonville prison. Yes, the very same newspaper delivery boy that we met outside Holloway many chapters ago. Always eager for an execution, his wishes were being fulfilled on a miserably wet morning in early December.
The jamboree crowd was particularly jolly, as the man having his neck stretched was an officer of the law. It was a shame, the crowd felt, that the execution was taking place inside the walls of the prison and was no longer a public show, although they were doing their best to make it into an occasion. A man was selling roasted chestnuts from a cart and another was hawking sixpenny broadsheets detailing the crime. There was an old-fashioned air to the event, it could have been Tower Hill or Tyburn three hundred years ago.
There were very few protests against the death penalty being carried out. The prisoner was getting what he deserved, was the general opinion of the crowd. In fact, the gallows was too good for him, several more bloodthirsty members of the congregation declared, to murmurs of agreement. Hung, drawn and quartered would have been their preferred punishment.
Inside Pentonville, the prisoner was still volubly protesting his innocence. He shoved away the priest who had come to give him succour in his final moments and the warder said, “Oi, watch it, Oakes.”
* * *
—
It had been a complex operation to secure the conviction. Phyllis’s mother and another of the Forty Thieves had quietly broken into Oakes’s shabby little house during the day, while he was at work and his wife was visiting her sister. The bloody little knife that had done for Maddox and was now wiped clean of fingerprints was slipped into the pocket of Sergeant Oakes’s coat, hanging on a hook in his narrow hallway. An anonymous tip-off as to the whereabouts of the knife was sent to Scotland Yard and several smartly dressed witnesses, all women, came forward to testify that they had seen Oakes and Maddox having an aggressive confrontation on the Embankment on the night that Maddox was murdered. “A brawl, really,” one of the smartly dressed witnesses said. “Looked like a fight to the death,” another one said.
When it came to the trial, the public benches were packed with more smartly dressed women who had come up from the East End. Some members of the court thought that their faces seemed familiar, but the jury was impressed by their composure and air of transparent honesty.
After the trial, Oakes’s barrister, who had put up a woefully weak defence, paid for an expensive wedding for his daughter and then took his wife on a jaunt around Europe in a Wolseley Open Tourer that he had come home with one day, to his wife’s surprise. Even the QC for the prosecution was spotted shopping with his wife for a new mink. He was a regular at the Crystal Cup and was compensating his wife for the many evenings he spent enjoying himself without her, courtesy of Nellie Coker.
The damning evidence was the little silver penknife. The initials “BC” that were engraved on the handle remained a mystery and were considered irrelevant. Oakes was unfortunate enough to come up against Avory, the hanging judge. The gloriously thrilling moment when the Black Cap was placed on Avory’s bewigged head and the verdict was pronounced was marred by neither cough nor whisper from the public benches. Only when Avory intoned, “And may God have mercy on your soul” did the crowd send up a cheer, and Oakes himself broke into a choleric fury, roaring his innocence to the court. It made him seem even more guilty, the members of the public were agreed.
Theatre and music hall, they were also agreed, couldn’t hold a candle to a good trial.
* * *
—
At a quarter past eight a warder came out of the prison and hammered a notice onto a wooden board by the side of the prison gate. It stated simply that the sentence of execution had been carried out on Leonard Percival Oakes for the murder of Arthur Edwin Maddox. The mood of the crowd turned from celebration to solemnity. The death of a man, any man, demanded a few moments of recognition. Then the convivial crowd came back to noisy life and dispersed quickly to get on with their day. “Good show,” the newspaper delivery boy said to the man standing next to him.