Another World (8 page)

‘1898.’

It’s not just the war that’s missing either. They’ve passed several portraits of William Fanshawe, one of his first wife, Henrietta, two of his second wife, Isobel, three of the nephew who inherited the estate. But, as they know from the painting in Lob’s Hill, Fanshawe had a daughter and two sons. So far there’s not been a trace of any of them.

Where are the children?

Fran stops to look into one of the bedrooms. Huge four-poster bed with heavy curtains in a dull green-gold. Chaise longue, writing desk, cheval glass, windows full of sunlight.

‘All that and nursery maids and nannies to look after the kids,’ Fran says. ‘Marvellous.’

‘And the husband slept next door.’

‘Even better.’

‘Only you’d wake up and he’d be standing at the foot of the bed in his nightshirt demanding his conjugal rights.’

‘Oh, yeah? What’s changed?’

Ouch
. ‘Fran, I –’

‘It’s all right.’

It isn’t – the cursory brush of her mouth over his tells him so – but she’s trying. They both are.

Three ornate rooms further on and Jasper’s thoroughly fed up, grizzling and stamping his feet. Fran kneels to comfort him and he hits her in the eye.

‘Hey!’ Nick says, shaking his arm. ‘You don’t do that.’

‘I’d better take him out.’

‘Do you mind if I stay a bit?’

‘No, go on. I’ll be at the tent.’

‘I won’t be long. Five minutes.’

As soon as he’s left alone Nick plunges into the maze of corridors, scanning the walls, peering into bedrooms, at paintings, at clusters of photographs on dressing tables, looking for a clue, any clue, to the secret of the house.

There’s nothing on the first floor, nothing in the bedrooms, where intimate family snapshots might be displayed, nothing on the staircase or in the main hall, where large-scale portraits of Fanshawe, his wives and other members of his family line the walls. Then, near the main entrance, opening off to the left, Nick comes across Fanshawe’s study. A printed notice by the door says that his desk is exactly as he left it when he went upstairs on the night of his death. Nick leans across the rope that closes off the room from visitors. It’s very quiet. A guided tour has just gone past and left the hall empty. Too quickly to feel any surprise at his own action, though normally he’s the most law-abiding of men, Nick unhooks the rope and goes into the room.

Tall windows behind the desk open on to a vista of wooded hills. Touching the back of Fanshawe’s chair, Nick sees Fanshawe’s signature in mirror writing on the blotter. A clock, stamps, stacks of paper, envelopes – no photographs.

But Nick’s already lost interest in the desk, for he can see from his new position that the room’s L-shaped, though the horizontal bar of the L is so short it’s hardly more than an alcove. Nick slips into it, with relief, because now he can’t be seen from the door.

He turns. There, hanging on the wall where nobody in the house can see it, is not
a
portrait, but
the
portrait, the photograph on which the wall painting in Lob’s Hill was unmistakably based. The boy, who here seems merely sullen and rebellious, rests his hand on his father’s shoulder. The girl looks unhappy, perhaps, but Isobel’s obviously proud of her small son, and Fanshawe – Fanshawe’s simply himself, alert, energetic, avid.

A fine family. That’s what anybody, on the evidence of this photograph, would think, so why put it here where almost nobody would ever see it? Even Fanshawe, if he wanted to look at it, would have had to get up from his desk and go into the alcove. He could never glance up from his desk and be surprised by this. Why? Because the sight of his children was, for some reason, painful? Because he needed to brace himself to look at them? Nick’s gaze tracks from one young face to the next, and a gust of despair sweeps over him. Not his own – Fanshawe’s.

Quickly and cautiously, Nick leaves the room, hooks the rope back across the door, and goes out through the main entrance on to the lawn, lifting his face to the warmth of the sun, as if the chill that lingers on his skin could be so easily dispelled.

The inside of the tent glows yellow with sunlight, and there’s a smell of hot grass under canvas, a smell that recalls some childhood excitement, though Nick can’t place the memory.

Adults on chairs at the back, kids cross-legged at the front. Two men in orange overalls stagger in carrying mops and buckets. Much hitting of each other’s bums with broom handles follows, greeted by gales of laughter from the younger children. The shorter of the two, blubbing loudly, climbs on to the knee of the youngest and prettiest mother and demands to have his bottom kissed better. It’s all very well done. Howls of pain to please the kids, just enough innuendo to stop Dad nodding off to sleep. Though this particular Dad’s badly in need of a cigarette. He touches Fran’s arm and points to the door.

Outside he decides to see if he can buy a guidebook. Fran likes them: if Jasper’s playing up she sometimes sees more of a place later in the guidebook than she does when she’s there. He goes across to the converted stables and finds the shop almost empty. Everybody’s either in the circus tent or sitting outside the restaurant at tables in the sun. Nick asks for the official guide, but finds they’ve sold out. Disappointed, he makes do with postcards, and then goes across to the books section and searches for something on the Fanshawes.

He’s given up and is just about to leave when he sees a book called
Mary Ann Cotton’s Teapot and Other Notable Northern Murders
, by Veronica Laidlaw. He knows Veronica slightly, having met her once or twice at college dinners. She’s a rather prolific historical novelist, but he had no idea she was interested in crime. This had been published in 1995 by the Vindolanda Press. The cover has a picture of Mary Ann carrying the infamous teapot, which contained, or so she always claimed, right up to the steps of the gallows, nothing but fortifying herbal infusions. Lying on a bed in the background of the picture, about to be fortified, was one or other of her various husbands.

If everybody connected to Mary Ann Cotton who died suddenly from gastrointestinal upsets was actually murdered, she is easily the most deadly of British killers. But of course we don’t know that. Many of her children, according to their death certificates, died of ‘teething’; and some of these deaths may have been natural. Nick knows about her through Geordie, who remembers his sister Mary and the other little lasses singing a skipping rhyme.

Mary Ann Cotton, she’s dead and she’s rotten.

She lies in the grave with her eyes wide oppen.

Sing! Sing! Oh what shall I sing?

Mary Ann Cotton is hung up with string.

Where? Where?

Up in the air.

Selling black puddings a penny a pair.

He also remembers being put in a dark cupboard under the stairs when he was naughty and being told that Mary Ann Cotton would get him.

It’s worth buying, Nick thinks, for that reason alone. The garish cover’s misleading. Veronica’s treatment of her selected crimes is anything but sensational.

Mary Ann Cotton is dealt with in the second chapter, the first being devoted to the gibbeting of William Jobling at Jarrow Slake. The last chapter is on Mary Bell, an eleven-year-old girl who, in 1968, killed two small boys, one of them on the Tin Lizzie, a stretch of waste land less than a mile from Lob’s Hill. Nick remembers the case: the air of gloom that spread throughout the city, though by contemporary standards media attention had been restrained.

Nick wanders out into the sunshine to read it. He can’t think of any other ‘notable northern murders’, and flicks through the intervening pages until his attention is caught by the name: Fanshawe. With a slight drying of the mouth, he turns to the beginning of the chapter – Chapter Five – and reads: ‘The Murder of James Fanshawe at Lob’s Hill’.

James Fanshawe was two years old at the time of his death, the only child of the second marriage of William Fanshawe, a local armaments manufacturer. By his first marriage, William had another son, Robert, aged eleven at the time of the murder, and a daughter Muriel, who was aged thirteen. Neither of the children of the first marriage liked their stepmother, and both seem to have been jealous of their half-brother, James.

On the morning of 5 November 1904 Jessie Baines, the nursery maid, went into the nursery and found James’s bed empty. Normally she would have been sleeping in the nursery with him, but she had a bad cough, and his sister Muriel had slept in his room instead. James was a nervous child, frightened of the dark, and still more frightened of the shadows cast by his night-light. His first word, pointing at the shadows, had been ‘sadda’. Jessie shook Muriel awake, but she was difficult to rouse and seemed unaware of her surroundings. James was nowhere to be found and the police were called to the house.

At almost the same time as James’s bed was found empty, a boy from Tidmarsh Street, playing truant from school in order to guard the street bonfire from rival gangs who might steal from it or set it alight, crawled inside the open space at the heart of the fire, and found himself confronted by the body of a fair-haired toddler. The Guy’s mask had been placed over his face, perhaps to hide the terrible injuries underneath, but blood had seeped through.

The Fanshawes were immediately informed of the discovery, and shortly afterwards William Fanshawe identified the dead boy as James. There were no signs of a forced entry to the house, though the front door, which William Fanshawe distinctly remembered locking, was open.

William and Isobel Fanshawe slept together. The two maids shared a bedroom in the attic. That left Robert, sleeping by himself, and Muriel, sleeping in James’s room. She had taken cough medicine, she said, thinking that her cough was keeping James awake. She had seen and heard nothing. Robert’s story was even simpler. He had gone to bed and gone to sleep. The next thing he knew Jessie was screaming. He had, however, noticed a tramp hanging about in the lane behind the house several days previously, though he had not thought to mention it to anybody at the time. Muriel had seen him too, or so she said. They described a scruffy villainous-looking man with a scar down one cheek, the sort of figure who could not possibly have passed unnoticed. Nobody else had seen him.

The Fanshawes were well known, and news of the murder spread quickly. William Fanshawe was the largest of the local employers, and almost everybody in the neighbourhood either worked in his factories or was dependent upon somebody who did.

The day following the discovery of the body, one Jeremiah Cookson came forward and said that on his way home on the night of 4 November he had seen two children pushing what he took to be a Guy on a wheeled trolley. He had noticed them particularly because they were smartly dressed, and it seemed strange that two such children should be out alone at that time of night. It was well past midnight. So strange did it seem that he made a point of following them. They became aware of his footsteps behind them, and paused under a street lamp to look back. It was Robert and Muriel Fanshawe.

Cookson was a petty criminal, and the police were reluctant to rely on his evidence, but public opinion was pressing for an arrest. The creaking trolley, with its grotesquely masked burden, haunted the imagination. People had nightmares about it. What were the police doing?

Three days after the discovery of James’s body the Fanshawe children were charged with James’s murder and taken to Westgate Police Station for questioning. They denied everything and went on denying it. The great strength of their story was its simplicity. If they had been asked to account for their movements, or to supply alibis, they would almost certainly have begun to contradict themselves. But there was none of that. They were in bed, they were asleep, they knew nothing – and they said so over and over again. Their father, who, despite his grief, never wavered in his support for them, sat in on every interview. It was noticeable that during Muriel’s interviews her father’s gaze never left her face.

The first day of the trial dawned cold and bleak. People hurrying towards the Moot Hall bent their heads to battle with the wind that blew off the Tyne, carrying with it flakes of stinging snow. The courtroom smelled of wet wool, and even at noon there was a constant hissing of gas jets.

Mr Justice Lowther presided. Muriel was represented by Patrick Johnstone, probably the best defence counsel of his day; Robert by the scarcely less distinguished Nigel Walters. Both children pleaded not guilty to murder.

Cookson, whose evidence was crucial to the prosecution, proved to be a bad witness. The children, when they paused under the street lamp, had been standing beside a wall. Were they shorter than the wall, Johnstone asked, level with it, or taller than it? About level, Cookson thought. Then it could not have been Robert and Muriel Fanshawe. The wall measured five foot ten inches. Muriel, the taller of the two children, was five foot three, now, and she had grown since then. How much had Cookson had to drink? ‘A canny few,’ Cookson said. ‘A canny few,’ Johnstone repeated. Mr Justice Lowther intervened to say he could attach no meaning to the word ‘canny’ in this context. As far as he was concerned, it meant shrewd, thrifty or explicable in natural terms. ‘Were you the worse for drink?’ he asked. ‘No, my Lord, I was the better for it,’ Cookson replied. (Laughter.)

His quip did Cookson little good. Johnstone established easily enough that he had been in three or four public houses that night and had consumed ten pints or more of strong beer. Worse than that, he had been dismissed from Fanshawe’s works the previous year for drinking on the job. ‘You have a grudge against William Fanshawe, haven’t you?’ Johnstone said. ‘I know what I saw,’ Cookson insisted. But he was becoming flustered, and Johnstone moved in for the kill, thundering across the courtroom: ‘I put it to you that you saw what you wanted to see.’