She was puzzled. Why wasn’t he making his move while she was in jail?
“Had to recruit,” Agnes said. “He can’t take over all on his own.” Maddox, she said, had trawled the streets for ne’er-do-wells—tramps, homeless men, toe-rags of the first water and disaffected war veterans press-ganged on street corners. Not to mention some of his own colleagues from Bow Street, who fancied a slice of the pie that Maddox was planning to feast on. “Going to take your clubs by force,” Agnes said.
Furthermore, just to add to Nellie’s woes, Agnes said a new broom was about to arrive in Bow Street, a Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher, who intended to sweep the Cokers and their ilk out of the door.
* * *
—
Disturbed by her own soothsaying, Nellie collected her Lenormand cards from the dining table and returned them to the silk square that they were always wrapped in. She would go for a walk, she thought. A stroll, a leisurely one, merely for enjoyment. Walking was usually a practical activity for Nellie, it got her from one place to another and had little to do with enjoyment. Enjoyment was something that other people paid Nellie for. Nowadays, of course, she had the Bentley and her chauffeur, Hawker, and hardly walked anywhere. She had a bad hip, exacerbated by a thin prison mattress on an iron bed. In the Amethyst earlier, Edith had given her the present of a silver-topped cane, “to mark your coming out,” Edith said, as if Nellie were a debutante.
“I’m going for a walk,” she said to the cook, who raised an eyebrow at Phyllis, the new little scullery maid, once Nellie was out of sight. The cook had been with the Cokers so long that she had acquired their expressions for her own. The Cokers all had very eloquent eyebrows. They could conduct entire conversations with them, without saying a word. Phyllis had not yet mastered this skill and said, “What?” to the cook, but the cook had turned her attention to the pair of eggs she was boiling for Shirley. Breakfast, which rarely took place before lunchtime, was a moveable feast in Hanover Terrace. The cook was driven to distraction by the Cokers’ irregular eating habits and had been threatening to hand in her notice for years now but knew that Nellie would call her bluff.
“By the way,” Nellie said, reappearing so suddenly that the cook gave a little scream. Phyllis, who came from a disorderly home, was less prone to be unnerved by Nellie’s well-practised gift of stealth.
“Yes, Mrs. Coker?” the cook said.
“Keep an eye on Edith for me while I’m out.”
“Edith?”
“Yes, Edith. She’s not herself.”
She disappeared again and both the cook and Phyllis held their breath until they were sure that she had gone this time.
It was Phyllis’s turn to raise an eyebrow. She was a quick study.
* * *
—
Nellie had walked too far, almost as far as the zoo, and felt quite weak. She stopped to rest on a bench. Something very troubling had happened to her in prison. Startled awake in the middle of the night, she had watched as a woman glided out of the wall and approached her bed, where she floated a few inches above the floor, staring silently at Nellie.
Nellie did not cry out in horror at the sight of this spirit. She did not wake her cellmate, Agnes, or call for a wardress. There was no point, because she knew the identity of her ghost. It was Maud, the hostess who had died of an overdose on Armistice night in Jaeger’s Dance Hall.
The spectral Maud was covered in river mud, her hair embellished with dripping weed. Water streamed off her clothes onto the stone flags of the cell floor. Nellie even recognized the dress she was wearing—oyster satin and lace, now stained dark with water. She remembered the girl’s cards, how they had bewildered her. The robber mice, a coffin, a ship. A fearful journey by water. Did Maud drown? Had the girl been alive when she went into the river? And now she had dredged herself up to haunt Nellie?
The phantom had faded back into the stone wall of the cell and did not return to Nellie during the rest of her time in Holloway, but she knew that it was not the last time she would be visited by her. Maud was an account demanding to be settled. There was a reckoning coming for Nellie. Could she outrun it? That was the question. Not even Deauville seemed far enough.
Everything Nellie had done had been done for her children, not so much from love as from biology, the maternal imperative to foster and protect the generations, enabling the Cokers to go on and on until the crack of doom and the Last Judgement, a day that Nellie preferred not to think about. It couldn’t all be thrown away, whether through death or retirement or general fecklessness on the part of her children. She must safeguard that legacy for the future, even if sacrifice was necessary, her own or someone else’s. Someone else’s, for preference. Frobisher must not be allowed to destroy it, and Maddox—or anyone else, for that matter—must not be allowed just to waltz in and swallow it whole. Deauville was shelved, it seemed.
Nellie flinched, as if an icy hand had touched her nape. Looking around Regent’s Park, she could see only the tardy workers rushing to their offices and the early nannies with their perambulators. She suspected Maud, no living person would have such a cold touch. Although there was someone—flesh and blood, not a ghost—a man who was lurking behind a large beech tree, half hidden by its wide girth. When he saw that Nellie had spotted him he stepped further out of view, although his shoes remained comically visible.
Of course, in Nellie’s (quite wide) experience, a man lurking behind a tree could be up to any number of things, most of them unpleasant. Especially one who was wearing two-tone shoes. Co-respondent shoes may be good enough for the Prince of Wales, but it was Nellie’s belief that they gave a man a vulgar air (although few people would have taken fashion advice from Nellie Coker). But this man belonged to her.
He was making himself very obvious. Shouldn’t a spy try to fade into the background a bit more? And why was he watching Nellie at this moment in time? He was supposed to be keeping an eye on Hanover Terrace, for heaven’s sake.
She got up from her bench and waddled towards the beech tree, lifting her new cane as if it were a bayonet with which she was intending to stab the owner of the shoes.
Landor, unshakeable in the face of most violent assaults, took a step back in alarm.
“Stop lurking,” Nellie said.
A Shropshire Lad
On his way to the Dead Man’s Hole, Frobisher took a detour through the Floral Hall opposite the police station. He could smell lilac. The scent drew him inside like a thread, to a stall that had a row of galvanized buckets full of great-headed blooms that must have come up from the country somewhere.
He should buy Lottie some flowers. She disliked lilacs. And lilies, of course, the French reserved lilies for funerals. Freesias, perhaps, something that indicated spring. Or tulips. You couldn’t go wrong with tulips. He would stop in on the way home.
He was keeping knowledge of Lottie away from Bow Street. His colleagues would have been intrigued to know he had a French wife, even more intrigued to know that she was often not in her right mind. He preferred that they imagine his wife was called Hilda or Mabel and that she scurried around him when he came home, hanging up his overcoat, frying him a pork chop, soothing his troubled brow. They would have been baffled by the erratic Lottie, who would sometimes spend an entire evening crooning to a little cloth doll she had made.