The House of the Hanged Woman

Book 3: Albert Lincoln

by Kate Ellis

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Derbyshire, 1921. When an MP goes missing in a Derbyshire village, Scotland Yard detective Albert Lincoln is sent to investigate. A grim discovery has been made in a cave next to an ancient stone circle: the naked body of a middle-aged man mutilated beyond recognition. The local police assume it is the missing politician but when Albert arrives in Wenfield he begins to have doubts. Two years earlier he conducted another traumatic murder investigation in the same village and he finds reminders of a particularly personal tragedy as he tries to help a vicar's widow who claims her husband was murdered. Then there is another murder in Wenfield. Could there be a link between all of Albert's cases?

Release date: November 26, 2020

Publisher: Piatkus

Print pages: 352

Sample

The man stumbled on, barely aware of his surroundings or his unfamiliar, ill-fitting clothes.

His limbs felt uncontrollable like the spindly legs of a newborn foal. They said the war was over, but they were wrong. Some could put the horrors behind them – they could drink, laugh and dance as if the world was about to come to an end – but others would never forget. They were doomed like him to relive the terrors over and over again each night in the silence of darkness.

Gas. Gas. The shouts; the mortar fire that made the eardrums bleed. The bodies ripped apart, limbs hanging on barbed wire, red and dripping like meat in a butcher’s shop. Too much for a human soul to bear.

For so long he’d been a dead man; a man with no identity, no history and no future. Then, once the hazy memories began to crawl from the fog of his brain, he’d gathered what little courage he had left and embarked on the quest for his old life. He’d searched for the man he used to be, following the half-remembered shreds of his past that returned in brief, vivid flashes like shell blasts. And when he’d reached Wenfield all hope had died.

As he rose to his feet and dragged his body towards the stones that protruded from the ground like the crooked teeth of some monstrous, long-buried creature, pictures ran through his mind, some clear, others hazy. Recollections of that perfect summer when he’d married his young bride. Heat and kisses and sweet wedding flowers. Then the horror of a shell landing in the trench, killing his comrades and emptying his head of memories, leaving him an empty shell, cared for by nurses with kind faces. An unknown soldier without a tomb.

His head was spinning and he hardly felt the jolt of bone against hard earth as he fell to his knees again and the nausea rose in his chest. He no longer knew where he was and his soul seemed to float above him. Or perhaps he no longer had a soul because it had been made quite clear to him that he didn’t exist.

He began to crawl towards the largest stone, the one in the centre of the circle. A faint memory told him that the stone was called the Devil. And that it was he who commanded the eternal dance before he dragged the unwary straight down to hell.

The Devil loomed over him, bent as though he was playing the fiddle for the helpless dancers, controlling their every move as they writhed in their frozen agony. The nausea eased a little and he crawled towards a crevice in the wall of rock that towered over the circle. Not far now. He was hardly aware of vomiting. He felt numb, all pain gone as he edged inside the cave, escaping the Devil before he was drawn into the terrible dance. He was cold now, so cold, but his head was clearer, as though all the confusion of the past couple of years had suddenly vanished. He felt strangely at peace as he lay down and fell asleep, his heartbeat slowing almost to a stop.

He didn’t hear the stealthy footsteps at the cave’s entrance. He didn’t feel the rock crashing down into his face. Once. Twice. Three times. Destroying his features. Ensuring that he no longer existed.

I lie awake and my hands finger the smooth fabric of the paisley quilt my mother gave me as a wedding gift as I listen to him breathe. Snuffling like a night creature making its way through undergrowth, sniffing its way blindly in search of sustenance – or prey.

Each night I dream of his death and I think of it every waking hour. I know I must be evil because I have murder in my heart. Murder. The taking of a life. The sin of Cain. I imagine that terrible, wicked act over and over again, and sometimes I think it can’t be so wrong because it is the one thing that will release me from the misery of this existence.

I turn over, finding myself trapped in my twisted nightgown, and I open my eyes to watch him in the moonlight that trickles in through the thin curtains. Asleep, he looks so harmless. Almost innocent. Almost like the little boy he must once have been. There’s no trace now of the raised voice, the clenched fist, the accusations, the words intended to wound and humiliate. If only he could stay asleep for ever.

He is handsome, there is no denying that. I was eighteen when we met and, because of my youthful naivety, I fell in love with his fair curls and boyish face. I saw him then as a character from one of the novels I love so much; the stories that whisk me far away from Derbyshire and land me in a different, warmer world where the plucky girl wins the brooding hero, tames him into a husband and lives happily ever after. That’s what I believed in when I walked up the aisle of Cheadle church that day just before Christmas in 1919, so grateful that he had come home safe from the war, so relieved that both of us had escaped the dreadful influenza that finished off so many of the young and strong.

It rained on our wedding day and the bare trees around the churchyard waved in the wind like the fleshless arms of the long-dead. They looked as though they were signalling me to stop, telling me not to take another step towards the old stone porch. It was an omen. I should have obeyed.

Bert stirs and my eyes open again. Sleep refuses to come and I know it never will until he is no longer lying there beside me. I slither out of bed and place my naked foot on the bare floorboards. Their chill makes me rise on tiptoe as I creep towards the door. I try the icy brass doorknob, doing my best to make no sound because I know he’ll be angry if I wake him up. The knob twists noiselessly in my hand and I pull it towards me but the door won’t budge. He has locked it again and put the key beneath his pillow. I am a prisoner.

But one day soon I’ll know happiness. One day soon my husband will be dead.

Detective Inspector Albert Lincoln had once heard someone say that November was the month of the dead – but he wasn’t so sure. It was early spring now and the earth was returning to life and yet death still haunted his waking thoughts.

There were so many dead for him to mourn; hundreds of them, all khaki-clad, all smiling, all swearing it would be over by Christmas. All trying to stay cheerful, keeping their chins up as the great adventure turned into a nightmare of blood, mud and rotting flesh. Sometimes he felt guilty that he had survived, even though a shell had left him maimed – his left hand reduced to a reddened stump, half his face burned away and his leg mangled. He had been lucky. Or so everyone told him. Now, three years later, it didn’t always feel like that.

From the office in Scotland Yard with his name and rank etched on the glass door he could see his sergeant, Sam Poltimore, sitting at his desk, frowning with concentration as he spoke on the telephone. Sam was a wiry man, nearing retirement, with a face that always betrayed his emotions. Albert could tell that the person on the other end of the line was imparting bad news.

Things had been unusually quiet recently with only a few unimaginative robberies and a couple of easily solved domestic murders over the Christmas period to break the monotony. Albert knew he should be glad of the lull in criminal activity now that his wife, Mary, was so ill, but things weren’t that simple. Over the past couple of years he had taken refuge in his work and at that moment he was hoping a case would come his way; some vicious and complex crime that would release him from the trap his home had become. A cage as strong as a prison with invisible bars and a phantom warder.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, experiencing a pang of guilt that he felt this way. It wasn’t Mary’s fault. She had lost a child – as had he. Part of her had died when their son, Frederick, had breathed his last; a small sad victim of the influenza that had ravaged the country, as though the bitter losses of war hadn’t been enough to sate Death’s appetite for human flesh. Albert had grieved with her and tried his best to support her, but she’d pushed him away, seeking other means of comfort. Since her loss she was no longer the woman he’d fallen in love with. It was as though, for Mary, Albert had ceased to exist.

Perhaps that was why the loyalty he’d always assumed was part of his nature had failed him. In 1919 the consequences of that failure had been disastrous. Then when he’d been investigating the strange death of a woman in the Cheshire village of Mabley Ridge last September he’d met Gwen Davies, the village schoolmistress. Gwen had seemed to understand what he’d been through. But after the traumatic events they’d experienced together she’d made the decision to return to her home city of Liverpool. At their final meeting she’d given him her parents’ address. He’d kept it with him, although he was sure he would never attempt to contact her, however much he was tempted. It had been a tantalising possibility which would come to nothing because of the vows he’d made to Mary when the world had been different. He’d been unfaithful to her once and that had been enough.

When Albert opened his eyes he saw through the glass that Sam was heading for his office. He shuffled the papers on his desk, trying to look busy, trying to look as though he wasn’t thinking of what happened last year in Mabley Ridge. His investigation there had been a qualified success: he had solved the case and brought one of the dead woman’s murderers to justice. He had even discovered who had been responsible for the death of a child in the same village before the outbreak of the war. However, another killer had evaded justice and that failure still nagged at him. The man could well be dead and one day his body might be found reduced to dust and bone. Or maybe he had survived, although Albert couldn’t bear to think of this particular culprit escaping justice after the evil he’d brought to that small Cheshire community.

Sam gave a token knock on the etched glass and Albert looked up from his false industry, hoping for something, anything, to take his mind off the mistakes he’d made in the past; mistakes he feared could never be put right.

‘A letter’s come for you in the second post, sir,’ Sam said with a sheepish look on his face.

‘The second post must have arrived a couple of hours ago.’

‘It did but …’ Sam Poltimore looked like a guilty schoolboy summoned before the headmaster.

‘What’s wrong, Sam?’

Sam held out a pale blue envelope, unopened. The handwritten address was neat, possibly a woman’s hand. ‘I recognised the postmark, sir.’ He paused. ‘It’s from Wenfield.’

Albert froze. Just the name of that village in Derbyshire’s High Peak set his heart racing. There were times when he’d almost convinced himself that what had happened there in 1919 had been his punishment for being unfaithful to Mary when she’d been in need of comfort.

As a result of his stay in Wenfield, Albert had gained another son, although he had never set eyes on the boy, only learning of his existence through third parties. He had no idea whether the child was living safely with a loving family or whether he had been placed in some grim orphanage – the unwanted offspring of a mother who’d committed the ultimate sin and paid the price demanded by the law. It was something he tried not to think about, although more often than not he failed. The boy kept bobbing back into his mind. His lost son. His own flesh and blood.

The previous September he’d taken the train from Mabley Ridge to Wenfield in the hope of discovering the truth. But when he’d arrived he’d found that the Reverend Bell, the one person who might have known something about the boy’s fate, was dead. Albert had returned to Cheshire despondent. Even so, a tiny glimmer of hope still remained in his heart. A little flame, so small that it could be easily extinguished. In optimistic moments he vowed he would find his son one day. But he knew all too well that reality often disappoints the hopeful.

‘Shall I open it, sir?’

Sam’s question broke through his thoughts like an explosion. ‘No, Sam. It’s addressed to me. I’d better …’

He took the envelope from Sam, noting that it wasn’t cheap, nor was it the most expensive stationery one could buy in the better London shops. He didn’t recognise the handwriting, although it looked to him like an educated hand, and he stared at it for a while, putting off the moment of revelation. Then he slit open the top with the paperknife lying near his inkwell – a dagger confiscated from a member of an East End gang.

Dear Inspector Lincoln, it began:

I’m not sure whether you will remember me from the time you spent in Wenfield in 1919. I am the widow of the Reverend Horace Bell, the vicar of that parish, who died unexpectedly last September. I gather you learned of the tragic news when you called at the vicarage while I was away staying with my sister. I am sorry I was not there to receive you but I’m sure you will understand that I needed some time away from Wenfield following my grievous loss. When my husband’s former curate, the Reverend Fellowes, was appointed as the new vicar he moved into my old home and I purchased a smaller house nearby which suits me very well.

I hope you do not mind me writing to you, but I did not know who else might be in a position to advise me. I recall that my late husband spoke highly of you, choosing to overlook your friendship with Flora Winsmore. I still find it hard to believe she was a murderess. She seemed such a sweet young woman. How appearances can deceive.

I hope you will not think me foolish but I fear that murder has visited our village again. It is my belief that my husband’s death was not natural and that he was poisoned by some wicked hand. There, I’ve written the words that have dominated my every waking thought since I laid him to rest. As to the perpetrator of this dreadful crime, I have my suspicions but no proof. A vicar is privy to so many secrets and it may be that somebody wished to ensure that theirs was never revealed to the world.

The coroner concluded that Horace died of natural causes yet with each passing day I grow more and more certain that somebody ended my dear gentle husband’s life.

Since those terrible murders of 1919 it is as though a cloud of distrust and suspicion hangs over Wenfield like the mist that so often shrouds our Derbyshire hills. It would put my troubled mind at rest if you were to advise me as to my best course of action. While I have no doubt that Sergeant Teague and Constable Wren are good men, I do not trust them to understand my fears or to act upon them.

I await your reply.

Yours sincerely,

Caroline Bell (Mrs)

Albert found it hard to absorb the letter’s contents on the first reading so he read it through again. When he looked up he saw that Sam was still there, watching him as though he feared the letter might send him into a state of shock. Sam was the only person in London who knew the truth of what had happened in Wenfield. He was the one person Albert had been able to trust to keep the information to himself. And he’d had to share his burden with someone.

‘It’s from Mrs Bell, the widow of the vicar of Wenfield. Remember I told you he’d passed away last September?’

Sam nodded. ‘What does she want?’

Albert hesitated before answering. ‘She thinks her husband might have been murdered. I met her, Sam. She’s a sensible woman – not the sort to let her imagination get the better of her. She was very well thought of in the village … and … the woman always spoke highly of her.’ He found he couldn’t bear to utter Flora’s name. ‘Mrs Bell was one of the few people to stand up to that Society for the Abolition of Cowardice – those dreadful women who sent white feathers to soldiers suffering from …’

‘I know, sir. Some people had no idea. What does Mrs Bell expect you to do about it?’

Albert sighed. ‘She’s asking for my advice but I’m not sure how to reply to her. The coroner’s verdict was natural causes and she has no proof that it was wrong. Not that I’d ever want to set foot in that village again anyway.’ His last words were half-hearted and the possibility that Mrs Bell might be privy to information about his lost son kept flitting through his mind, even though he tried his best to ignore it.

Albert pushed the letter to one side and picked up one of the files on his desk, a signal the subject was closed. Mrs Bell’s communication had taken him by surprise and he needed time to consider his response. Sam sidled out of the office and shut the door behind him.

Albert stared at the file in his hand without really seeing it. Mrs Bell suspected, rightly or wrongly, that the coroner’s verdict was wrong and that her husband had been murdered. However, she was over two hundred miles away and if she had any doubts about her husband’s death it was only proper that she should share them initially with her local police. Besides, he had his duties to attend to … not to mention the heaviest duty of all: his duty to Mary, his wife.

He put the letter out of sight in his in-tray, resolving to consider the problem tomorrow. Perhaps his mother’s old adage, that things always seemed clearer after a good night’s sleep, would prove correct in this instance.

The following morning, however, he was to receive a message that would take the decision out of his hands. The late Reverend Bell would most likely have said it was Divine Providence. But Albert blamed coincidence.

Bert went to the mill first thing as usual, complaining that his shirt cuffs were still grubby. He said he was senior clerk and the slovenly way I keep house makes him look bad in front of his juniors. I was afraid he’d hit me again but he didn’t. I promised to have a word with Betty about the laundry but, to be honest, she frightens me. I am the mistress and she is the maid, but she is older than me and more confident. She knows I haven’t been married long and I’m sure my inexperience exasperates her. I’ve seen her watching me as I sit in the parlour reading my book and I wonder if she thinks of me as a spoiled child. A child who has nothing to do all day but read tales of romance while she blacks grates, sweeps crumbs and cleans clothes.

I imagine it’s hard to get Bert’s cuffs clean when there’s so much soot in the air from the village fires and the mill chimneys belching out smoke. But I’ve never tried to wash a shirt so that’s all I can do – imagine.

Mind you, it’s probably a good thing Betty’s always kept busy. While she’s busy she can’t poke her nose in where it’s not wanted. She can’t know what I do or who I meet when I leave the house. I know she can’t be trusted to keep my secret and I think she’d most likely take my husband’s side and betray me. I think she’s a sly one; an enemy to be feared just like the wicked housekeeper in the book I finished yesterday.

I close my eyes and think of my lover. My Darling Man. He’s so attentive; so exciting. He makes me feel alive again, as if I were a corpse risen from the grave into the marvellous light the vicar talks about in his sermons.

When I think about the loving words in my darling’s letters a smile comes unbidden to my lips. The very thought of him warms my heart and he’s told me he’s willing to do anything for me. Anything.

Bert doesn’t like me going out and if he wasn’t at work he’d probably try to stop me. But I promise him I only visit the shops and the library and what would I do all day if I didn’t have books to read? When he sees my books he gets annoyed and talks as though the library is a den of sin and iniquity filled with dangerous ideas, but he hasn’t forbidden me to go there, provided I’m always home when he comes in for his dinner at twelve thirty.

I confess that his restrictions have made me cunning and the library provides the perfect excuse for me to communicate with my Darling Man. He too has his obligations, but we have learned to overcome all obstacles. And we write to each other such loving words and such secret plans. Plans of freedom. Plans of murder.

Before I set off for the library I have to speak to Betty. I can hear her clattering pans in the kitchen and I hold Bert’s shirt, summoning the courage to tell her about the cuffs. But it has to be done or I might suffer for it. Bert doesn’t like to be thwarted, especially by women. Especially by me.

When I walk into the kitchen Betty looks up from her work. She is peeling potatoes for tea and her hands are filthy with the soil that clings to the skins. I mutter Bert’s instructions, expecting to see contempt in her eyes. But instead I’m surprised to see pity and she says she’ll see to it after dinner. Perhaps Betty has begun to realise what my husband is. Perhaps she will be my ally. Although I won’t trust her until I know for sure. If Bert were to suspect the truth, I might be called upon to pay with my life, for he has a terrible temper.

Before I leave the house I adjust my hat in the mirror. My hatpin is long and sharp, lethal in murderous hands, and as I push it into the fabric of my hat to secure it onto my head, I fantasise about pushing it into Bert’s heart. Perhaps I’m a wicked woman for having such thoughts but my life with him is hard to bear.

I leave the house, carrying my basket over my arm like any other housewife making for the village shops. I pass the library, which is a grand building built of red brick rather than the local stone. The words Public Library and the date 1897 are picked out in ornamental brick above the entrance and at once I feel as though I am being drawn inside that place of stories and escape. But today I have other plans. I hurry past, glancing round, relieved when I see that everyone in Wenfield seems to be absorbed in their own business so I might as well be invisible. I walk on, making for the edge of the village, passing the mill where my husband spends his working day, and taking the footpath out to the open countryside.

If I had been raised in Wenfield my actions would no doubt be fraught with danger because everyone would know me and report back to their family and neighbours. But as it is, I was born in the village of Cheadle in the north of Cheshire so my face is unfamiliar. How I long for Cheadle and those days before my marriage, but I can never go back there because my parents are dead and my brothers were both killed at the Somme. I thought marriage to Bert would give me a new and happy beginning, but it wasn’t long before my hopes of bliss were shattered.

But now I have fresh hope. If everything works out as I want, Bert will soon be gone and I will have a new husband; a kind, clever, wonderful man who will carry me away from Wenfield and love me for the rest of my life. One big sin will set me free for ever. Though the smell of smoke clings to my clothes and hair long after my husband’s mill with its belching chimneys has faded from view, I find myself skipping over the grass like a child.

I’ve heard people talk about the place we’ve agreed to meet, but I have never been there myself. It is some way from the village and when it was described to me I felt a chill, as though I had encountered something evil. The place is known as the Devil’s Dancers; a circle of stones so ancient that nobody knows their age or how they came to be there. The Devil stands in the centre with his fiddle while the dancers swirl in a circle around him. I don’t know why anybody would go dancing with the Devil. Perhaps they were witches. Or maybe it’s just a fanciful tale because people love stories. I’ve heard there’s a curse on the place and that anybody who goes near the stones at midnight will be dragged down to hell. I wonder if it’s ever happened.

There is a sharp chill in the March air and I pull my coat around me. The grey clouds glower over the tops of the hills and as I climb the hill I look back at Wenfield. The houses look tiny now, like dolls’ houses, and I can see people, small and diminished. From here everything seems so harmless.

There are sheep in the fields I walk through but they show more interest in grass than in a faithless woman meeting her lover. They ignore me and carry on grazing. I had thought to see some sweet little lambs but there are none. Perhaps they and their woolly mothers are in another field. These sheep I pass look thin and their fleeces are dirty grey and hung with mud – or something worse, as if the Devil has put a curse on them too.

The ground . . .