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.
By evening, Oakes’s demise was forgotten.
The newspaper delivery boy’s name was Norman. He joined the 4th Armoured Brigade in the next war and was killed during the invasion of Sicily in 1944.
And See You Not That Bonny Road?
Florence came home on a Saturday afternoon that midsummer, walking back into the Ingrams’ house on Tadcaster Road without any fuss, as if she had simply been coming home from school or had been out on a bike ride with Freda. Mr. Ingram was mowing the lawn and Mrs. Ingram was in the kitchen washing their pots from lunch, so it took each of them several minutes to realize that a stranger was in their midst. A stranger who was their daughter.
A flabbergasted Mrs. Ingram clutched her heart in shock at the sight of Florence and had to be helped to the sofa by Mr. Ingram, who could hardly see for the tears of happiness that were pouring from his eyes. “Florrie,” he choked, clutching Mrs. Ingram’s hand. “Florrie’s come home to us, Ruthie.”
Where had she been all these weeks? Mrs. Ingram wailed, but all Florence said was, “I’m starving. Is there anything to eat?”
Once she had recovered from her astonishment, Mrs. Ingram couldn’t stop touching Florence, as if she might not be real flesh and blood but a ghost conjured from her grief. “It’s a miracle,” she said. “God answered our prayers and brought you home.” (How had she got home?) Florence seemed to remember nothing about the past few weeks, or if she did, she wasn’t saying.
Was she the same Florence as before? She was thinner certainly, and a little taller, but she was healthy and showed no visible sign of harm. There would in time come a period when Mrs. Ingram developed the belief that the new Florence was an imposter, a changeling who had taken her real daughter’s place, but Mr. Ingram gradually made her see reason. (“Poor Ruthie.”)
Florence never did tell them where she had been, but, as Freda had predicted, she grew up and married and had two children (and yes, adenoidal and flat-footed), whom she did indeed take to the pantomime at York Theatre Royal every year, and there may well have been a moment during a production one year of Babes in the Wood when her memory was stirred by the sight of the villagers singing and dancing around a maypole, but the moment soon passed. Florence had no idea what had happened to her friend, in fact she seemed barely able to remember her.
Author’s Note
As anyone familiar with this period of history will recognize, inspiration for this novel comes from the life and times of Kate Meyrick, who for many years was the queen of Soho’s clubland. Her most famous club was the “43” at 43 Gerrard Street, now in the heart of Chinatown. She was imprisoned several times in her career for breaking the licensing laws.
Like Nellie Coker, Kate Meyrick also had a large brood that she was at pains to educate and “elevate.” Two of her daughters did indeed marry into the aristocracy and one son, Gordon, became a published novelist, writing mystery thrillers, including The Body on the Pavement in 1941. (I may have stolen a line from him, in homage.) In a case of life imitating art, he died during the war in somewhat mysterious circumstances after falling from a window of his top-floor flat onto the pavement below.
Kate Meyrick’s autobiography, Secrets of the 43 Club (John Long, 1933), perhaps not the most truthful account of a life, provided many small details for this novel—like Nellie, Kate knew the price of everything. We Danced All Night, Barbara Cartland’s autobiography, was a cornucopia of little facts now largely lost. She is particularly good on the “Bright Young People,” and I owe my knowledge of “Turk’s Blood” to her, as well as a vivid description of the Baby Party. Nights in London: Where Mayfair Makes Merry by Horace Wyndham (The Bodley Head, 1926) was a rather horrifying insight into the waspish, highly prejudiced mind of a social commentator of the time, and Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground by Marek Kohn (Granta, 1992) was informative. London After Dark by Fabian of the Yard (otherwise ex-superintendent Robert Fabian), published by Panther in 1958, undoubtedly influenced Frobisher. From him I derived my knowledge of “spielers.”