The Outcast Dead (9 page)

‘I’m not an expert exactly but the Victorians fascinate me. They weren’t nearly as buttoned up as people think. I mean it was the age of Freud and Marx as well as the age of Dickens. There was Strauss telling them that the Bible wasn’t true, Darwin saying they were descended from apes, there’s a new middle class taking over, and the Queen goes into mourning and never comes out again. It’s no wonder they were all a bit mad.’

‘What about Jemima Green? Was she mad?’

‘I don’t think so,’ says Frank seriously. ‘She wrote a diary almost up to the moment of her execution and it’s very lucid, not the work of a madwoman at all.’

‘She kept a diary?’ Ruth thinks of her scorn when Mark mentioned a diary. Clearly the TV man had better instincts than her.

‘Yes, it’s very interesting. I’ve done quite a bit of research on Jemima Green. Shall I tell you about it?’

‘OK,’ says Ruth. ‘It’ll take my mind off crashing.’ Despite her earlier protestations she is finding driving slightly stressful.

‘Well, Jemima was born in Saxlingham Thorpe, not far from Norwich. She was the youngest of nine children so I suppose money was tight, but she did go to school and
could read and write. Her diary’s very well written and there are poems too. She trained as a nurse and worked in a mental hospital for a while. Then she lost her hand in a farming accident. Her father was a farmer and she was probably helping him with the harvest. There was a lot of new farming machinery at the time and accidents were common. Anyway, Jemima must have been desperate. She was twenty-nine, unmarried, she had to find some way to make a living.’

‘So she became a baby farmer.’

‘Yes, she took in unwanted babies. A sort of childminder.’

Ruth thinks of Sandra and shivers. But Sandra is a highly trained professional, a mother of three, not some nightmare Victorian hag. Nevertheless she has to stop herself looking round at Kate’s baby seat. Only a few hours before she can see her again.

‘The 1834 Poor Law Amendment meant that fathers didn’t have to provide for their illegitimate children,’ Frank continues, ‘so there would have been no shortage of desperate women knocking on Jemima’s door. Jemima took in the babies and then arranged for them to be adopted.’

‘Except she didn’t, did she? She killed them instead.’

‘We know she arranged for some to be adopted. She kept quite meticulous records. There were a few cases at the time of baby farmers deliberately letting their charges die from neglect but there doesn’t seem to have been any record of this with Jemima. All the witnesses testified
that the children in her care were clean and well-fed. Like I said, there were some deaths but then infant mortality was high. When she came to trial there were stories of her killing hundreds of babies, but there’s no evidence for any of this.’

‘What about the baby she was accused of killing?’

‘Joshua Barnet. He was the child of a governess, a respectable woman by all accounts. She handed him over to Jemima when he was just a few weeks old. The mother, Anna Barnet, seems to have kept in regular contact. Maybe she hoped to be able to reclaim him. Anyway, Joshua was never given up for adoption. When he was about a year old, Anna Barnet arrived to visit her son. She was told that he had died but Jemima Green wasn’t able to produce his body. Anna was frantic, as you can imagine. She persuaded the police to search Jemima’s house, which took some doing as the police weren’t particularly interested in foundling children. In fact, the police force as we know it had only just been formed. Anyway, the police found opium and blood-stained baby clothes and, most suspicious of all, something called ‘The Book of Dead Babies.’

‘The Book of Dead Babies?’ Ruth skins crawls. She wonders if Dani, with her preference for hard-headed facts, knows about this.

‘Jemima Green said it was a list of children who had died of natural causes while in her care. She wrote their names in a book and beside each name was a poem. Strange little poems. But there was no record of any of
the children being buried. One of the rumours was that she’d given the bodies to the Resurrection Men.’

They are getting close to the castle, its square walls rising up above the city. Ruth edges through the traffic, looking for the turning for the car park.

‘You mentioned them earlier. Do you mean the grave robbers?’ asks Ruth.

‘Yes. They had a lot of other names too: the sack men, the body-snatchers, the burkers – after Burke and Hare. There was a lot of hysteria about this in the mid-1800s. The medical schools needed bodies for dissection and the Resurrection Men supplied them. The 1832 Anatomy Act was meant to stop the trade because it gave doctors the right to use unclaimed bodies from workhouses and poor hospitals. The unclaimed poor, they called them.’

The unclaimed poor. It reminds Ruth of the service for the Outcast Dead.
We will remember them
.

‘How did the Resurrection Men get the bodies?’ she asks.

‘They’d look for freshly dug graves,’ says Frank, ‘then sneak in at night and dig up the corpses. People started to bury their loved ones in iron coffins for protection. There was the famous case of the Italian boy. Three resurrectionists called Bishop, Williams and May were touting the body of a young boy around the medical schools. The authorities grew suspicious and it emerged that it was the body of a fourteen-year-old street boy called Carlo Ferrari. Carlo had been murdered – drugged and drowned in a well – so that they could sell his body for dissection.
John Bishop wrote a full confession admitting that rather than just digging up dead bodies he actually killed people to order. He had a list of the corpses he had provided and it included lots of children. Children’s bodies were always in demand.’

‘And is that what they thought about Jemima Green? That she had killed the children to provide bodies for the resurrectionists?’

‘That’s what they said. There were cartoons of her putting children in her sack like some kind of evil Santa.’

They have reached the entrance to the underground car park, a great round O like a giant hobbit hole. They take the steps up to the castle grounds, passing the outdoor theatre where the service for the Outcast Dead was held. Today it’s full of schoolchildren with clipboards and felt-tip pens. The castle looms above them, its sides smooth and featureless like one of the pictures about to be coloured in by the children. The grass bank is studded with daisies. Ruth and Frank stand looking up at the fortress.

‘It was Norman originally wasn’t it?’ says Frank.

‘Yes,’ says Ruth. ‘You can still see the remains of the Norman keep inside the castle.’

‘So the Victorians built a nice tidy case to enclose it all,’ says Frank. ‘Typical.’

Ruth gives him a sidelong glance. His tone is light but she can tell an authentic historian when she sees one. She knows that he is seeing the castle, not as a twenty-first-century tourist attraction, but as an eleventh-century
garrison. Or maybe he’s seeing the nineteenth-century prison, the gibbet only yards from where they are standing.

‘Do you really think Jemima Green may have been innocent?’ she asks.

Frank turns to look at her. He has very blue eyes, Ruth notices. ‘There was no real evidence against her,’ he says. ‘Even the opium wasn’t really that unusual at the time. There was a popular children’s medicine called Godfrey’s Cordial, also known as the Mother’s Friend, that basically contained syrup and opium. No, what really condemned Jemima was her appearance. You’ve seen the photograph. That face, the hook. And she was a big woman, like a giantess some of the reports said. Add that to The Book of Dead Babies and she was as good as hanged.’

Ruth, who has also been called a big woman, thinks of the body in the trench. Was she also guilty of condemning Mother Hook on her reputation alone? She thinks of Mark Gates peering into the grave.
Women Who Kill
.

‘And then there were the accusations of witchcraft,’ says Frank. ‘Anna Barnet testified that Jemima Green always wore a silver medal round her neck depicting the devil and his daughter.’

They are crossing the bridge that leads to the castle entrance. Ruth stands stock still as the schoolchildren swarm past her. The devil and his daughter.

Nelson stares unenthusiastically at the faces ranged before him. Next to him his boss, Superintendent Gerald Whitcliffe, is positively vibrating with excitement.

‘Remember what you learnt in the media management course, Harry,’ he keeps saying, ‘press conferences are vital for improving police PR.’

Nelson, who only lasted half a day on the media management course, doesn’t see why addressing a group of bored and hostile reporters, most of whom think the police spend their time taking bribes or beating up prisoners, should help anyone.

‘We’ve got to show them the modern face of policing,’ says Whitcliffe. ‘Prove that we’re not all Neanderthals.’

‘Europeans have up to four per cent Neanderthal DNA,’ says Nelson. He learnt this from Ruth.

Whitcliffe ignores him, he is too busy beaming in a modern and caring way at the correspondent from the
Guardian
. Goodness, even the
nationals
are here.

‘OK,’ says Nelson, ‘let’s get started. Who’s first?’

Someone asks about evidence, giving the impression that Nelson routinely arrests people just for the fun of it. Nelson glowers in a distinctly prehistoric way. Whitcliffe chips in seamlessly, talking about the rights of suspects but also (with a caring smile) the rights of ‘the real victims here, the children.’

Pass me the sick bag, thinks Nelson. He tells the reporter from the
Telegraph
that yes, he has consulted the CPS and, in his opinion, there is enough evidence to bring Liz Donaldson to trial.

‘Will you be relying on expert witnesses?’ says the man from the
Mail
, with a slight sneer.

‘We may bring expert witnesses, yes,’ says Nelson. ‘I can’t say more at this present time.’

‘
Sub judice
,’ explains Whitcliffe with a smile. ‘I’m sure no-one wants to jeopardise this investigation.’

‘DCI Nelson, are you haunted by mistakes made on the Scarlet Henderson case?’

A low murmur in the room, the hacks turn to investigate this new voice, sounding so much younger and angrier than anyone else. Whitcliffe looks questioningly at Nelson who seems to have been turned to stone.

The voice belongs to the blonde girl, the one in the green jacket. Nelson stares at her, trying to remember where he has seen her before.

‘You missed vital clues in the Scarlet Henderson case. Do you think you’ve done the same here?’

‘We’re not able to discuss previous cases,’ says
Whitcliffe. ‘But you might remember that we brought the murderer of little Scarlet to justice.’

‘By accident,’ says the girl. ‘After you suspected her totally innocent parents.’

As Nelson still seems incapable of speech, Whitcliffe says, ‘Well, if that’s all for today, thank you for your time.’

He turns to Nelson, planning to have a supportive word about dealing with hostile questioning but his Chief Inspector has already disappeared into the crowd of journalists.

‘Wait a minute!’

The girl turns, flicking her long hair back from her face. She’s very pretty, with pale skin and wide-apart green eyes. She looks far too young to be a journalist.

‘Who are you?’ asks Nelson.

‘I’m Maddie,’ says the girl. ‘Maddie Henderson.’

Henderson. Nelson thinks back to Scarlet’s family. Delilah and Alan. The bohemian mother with her bare feet and ravaged prettiness, the thin-faced father whose nervous behaviour had certainly aroused suspicion at the start of the case, the younger brothers who had been quite excited by the presence of the policemen – and the eldest daughter, slightly apart from the rest of the family. He looks at the girl again.

‘You’re Scarlet’s sister.’

‘Yes.’

‘How old are you?’

‘I’m nineteen.’

As the father of daughters Nelson knows that teenage
girls can look completely grown-up or they can look like children. Maddie Henderson, disconcertingly, flits between the two. Her face is young – no make-up, pale eyelashes, slightly chapped lips – but her manner is that of an adult, an angry adult at that.

‘Are you a journalist?’ he asks.

For the first time, she hesitates. ‘I’m studying journalism. At Leeds Met.’

‘Why did you want to speak to me?’

‘I saw that you’d arrested Liz Donaldson for the murder of her children. I remembered when Scarlet first went missing, how you’d behaved around Mum and Dad. I know you suspected them. Hippies, dropouts, letting their kids run wild. I remember you digging up our garden. You thought we’d killed her.’

‘You’re wrong,’ says Nelson. ‘We had to follow every line of enquiry but your parents were never suspects. I give you my word.’

Maddie is still glaring at him. The other journalists have all left but Nelson knows, from the burning sensation in his back, that Whitcliffe is still in the room.

‘Look, why don’t we discuss this somewhere else?’ he says. ‘I’ll buy you a coffee.’

‘I don’t drink caffeine,’ says Maddie.

‘A milkshake then,’ says Nelson, rather wildly, trying to think of drinks his daughters used to enjoy.

‘I don’t believe in taking milk from baby cows,’ says Maddie but she accompanies him to the door. Something in her expression, half challenge, half acquiescence,
reminds him of someone. Then he remembers. Alan Henderson isn’t Maddie’s father.

Cathbad is.

*

Ruth and Frank make their way towards the excavations. Ruth is thinking about the revelation that Mother Hook’s medallion could be a black magic talisman. She feels a sudden atavistic fear about having the thing in her house. She must get rid of it. She’ll take it into the university tomorrow. But then she thinks: is it likely? Do they make medals showing Lucifer and Little Miss Lucifer? Did the devil even have a daughter? Aside from the one in old Christopher Lee films, that is. Frank seems to be suggesting that the case against Jemima Green consisted mainly of superstition and hearsay. The story of the satanic medal could be just another example. Anna Barnet must have had an interest in making Jemima seem as evil as possible. Ruth walks on, deep in thought, and doesn’t notice when Frank offers his hand to help her over the ditch at the bottom.