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“Isaac,” Gertrude moaned.
“Shut up, mother,” Isaac snapped.
“This doesn’t just affect you.” Gertrude held a folded piece of pink paper out to him. “This arrived this morning.” Isaac made no attempt to take it off her, so Gertrude lowered it to her lap and told him of the contents instead. “It says that we are no longer invited to dine with the Brabingers next week.”
“Should I care?”
“There are three dinners being held by close friends to which we have been invited, but the invitations have now been rescinded. Further, I have had two cancellations from friends I was supposed to take tea with tomorrow, and another cancellation to dine with the Allsopp’s tomorrow night. People are closing their doors to us, Isaac.”
“So that is a good enough reason why I should let an innocent woman go to the bloody gallows, just so you can dine with your friends?” Isaac snarled. “Mother of God, woman, do you not understand what we are discussing here? If Mark’s boss gets his way, Tuppence will go to the gallows and hang for the murder of Mr Lewis, Mr Richmond, and now Mrs Girdling, just so the Chief Inspector can appease the public and prove that he can arrest people, and you can dine with your narrow-minded and obviously judgemental friends. It doesn’t matter to him, or you, that an innocent person will lose their life because he needs to save face and you need to feel socially included. Tuppence is, after all, just a pauper with no family to object against the travesty of justice being meted out to her. She is helpless, don’t you see? That is what the killer, and Great Tipton Police, are taking advantage of.”
Gertrude lapsed back into her chair looking pale and shaken. Isaac turned to glare at Mark. “I think you had better get out of my house. I don’t want you coming back here again unless you have the necessary warrants. You have been told this before. You can tell your boss at the station that I have written to my good friend the Lord Chief Justice about how swiftly the Chief Inspector is prepared to hang an innocent woman for a crime she didn’t commit. He is not going to get away with it.”
“I have already written to Ralph,” Sir Reginald interrupted. “The oaf at the station didn’t seem to care about proper legal procedures when I fetched Tuppence from the station, so I informed Ralph of his unprofessional conduct. It won’t stop Tuppence hanging if the facts are stacking up against her, but it will mean that the highest law makers in the land will consider her case before she appears in front of a judge.”
“So there has to be undisputable facts put before a judge for them to execute her for the murders,” Isaac growled, unsure if he should be appeased or not. To him, it was wrong that they were even discussing the possibility of her appearing in court.
“It means that while there is a possibility that someone else might be killing people, Tuppence cannot be hung for the murders,” Sir Reginald assured him.
“I know what you are going to suggest,” Isaac warned when he saw Sir Reginald’s hesitation. “You know that the bastard will try to hang her with a swift trial even the Lord Chief Justice can’t halt.”
“He would rush her through the courts if he thought he could get away with it,” Mark confirmed. “Tuppence can’t go back to jail. You cannot hand her over. Isaac is right. Davies is eager to appease the locals. They want to see the killer arrested. The murder of Mrs Girdling makes it look as if Tuppence has killed the witness who saw her with Mr Lewis’s body. The boss will use Mrs Girdling’s murder as a reason to push through with a swift trial. Unless you can get the Lord Chief Justice here in person to stop the bastard, Davies is likely to make sure that Tuppence hangs. You will then be left with th
e possibility that you might have to posthumously pardon her – assuming you can prove a dead person innocent of any crimes against her because Davies will have manufactured the evidence.”
“Mother of God.” Isaac stared blankly at Sir Reginald who himself looked grave.
“She must stay here,” Sir Reginald conceded, wondering why he had even bothered to contemplate the possibility of letting Tuppence appear in court just so he could prove to the world that she was innocent. Even he could see that it was safest to keep her out of the police station.
“It might help if there is somewhere else you can take her. If there is some way you can get her away from here, do it. If you all left, and this house was empty, and the servants went home, you are all safe. Right now, with this killer striking anybody linked to the death of Mr Lewis, I don’t doubt that he will target here again.” Mark wondered if it was time to send Harriett off to stay with Beatrice in London for a while.
“What do we do?” Gertrude whispered when a heavy silence fell over everyone.
“Running makes us look guilty,” Sir Reginald warned.
“We aren’t running, though, are we? We are moving out of the house and going into hiding because a killer keeps coming onto the estate. But the staff can’t leave. They have animals to look after. If the gunman were to murder again, he could kill my staff. They can’t run and so nor can I. We can’t just pack everything up and leave them. This is the family estate. It belongs to me. It is my responsibility to keep it safe, to protect the workers who work and live here. I won’t abandon them.” Isaac was so furious with the killer that he wished he knew who it was just to make all this stop.
“Maybe it is best that the invitations have been rescinded. It is best that you stay inside where it is safe, Gertrude. I am going to have to try to flush the killer out somehow,” Mark warned.
Gertrude stared blankly at him as if she had never seen him before. She grew paler by the second. The hand she lifted to the pearls around her neck shook visibly.
“Why don’t you go and stay with Margaret for a while? She is over in Gloucestershire. It should be far enough away for you to be safe. If you left, you could be there by tomorrow night. There is no reason to suspect that the killer would follow you. It is Tuppence he is after,” Isaac suggested.
“I can escort you to the county border,” Mark offered.
Gertrude seriously contemplated going but shook her head mostly because she felt she needed to stay at the estate. This was her home too. It felt wrong to simply abandon her son to face the killer alone. Secretly, she wanted to stay to make sure that Isaac didn’t do anything else that was foolish like marry the woman who had brought them so much trouble. She shuddered at the thought that Isaac was so determined to help Tuppence because he cared for her and hoped to eventually marry the woman. She tried to think of all the things she could do to stop it happening but found that she couldn’t come up with anything. The only thing she could think of, and it shamed her to think of it, was that it might be best for Tuppence to swing at the gallows.
For the first time ever, Gertrude felt her first sense of real shame. It began to slide through her, eating away at her conscience until she felt awful and began to wonder what kind of person she had turned into. It was horrifying to think that she could stoop so low. Shaken by the depravity of her own thoughts, Gertrude tried not to weep. She knew her husband would have dealt with the situation in the same way as Isaac had he been alive. He was the kind of man who would have defended the innocent too and would have helped the impoverished regardless of what people thought of him. In contrast, she wanted a woman to hang just so she could live a peaceful life.
“Oh, Isaac,” Gertrude whispered without realising that she had spoken the words aloud.
“I cannot live with myself if she swings for this,” Isaac said. “I am not going to allow it. The stain on the family name for allowing her to swing while a murderer walks free will be too dishonourable for us to survive. We would be scorned if she swung and the killer continued to claim victims, and we had just handed her over to the authorities to die. We would never live with the condemnation. I could never live with my conscience.”
“My boss is adamant that I arrest her today. He hadn’t heard about Mrs Girdling when I left the station this morning, but it will only be a matter of time before he does. I can keep myself busy, and away from there for the rest of today, and hopefully most of tomorrow, but if I don’t return to the station with Tuppence, the boss is likely to send someone else to arrest her.”
“What facts do you have on the case thus far?” Sir Reginald squinted at the lawman. He was interested to know if Mark had even started to investigate the murders properly yet, or if he was simply trying to find ways to delay having to arrest Tuppence.
“It appears that Mrs Girdling opened her back door to the murderer voluntarily. The killer came around the back, we think just before dawn. Mrs Girdling must have recognised him because she let him into the house. I am assuming that the killer is a man because of the brutal struggle that took place in Mrs Girdling’s house. Together with the angle and height of the knife that had been pushed into Mr Lewis’s back, and Mr Richmond’s shooting, I assume we are looking for a man.”
