Looking round desperately she stammered: “But-but-”
Taking the woman’s arm firmly, Faro said: “I have already collected the ring for you and outside I think you’ll see a carriage awaits. Thank you, Mr. Jacob, you have been most kind”
And Faro marched her out of the shop to the police carriage he had summoned earlier, which had been lurking discreetly out of sight round the corner. It approached rapidly and at the same time, another carriage bowled down the road.
A man stared out and seeing that the woman had been taken and that several constables were erupting from all directions, he leaped down, took to his heels, and bolted down one of the closes.
“Bastard!” shrieked the woman after him. “Bastard!” Her screams and bad language as two uniformed constables restrained her caused a few passersby to blanch. One elderly woman was so overcome by this display of unseemly emotions that she swooned on the spot.
As for Faro, he was already in hot pursuit of the bogus inspector, who had discovered too late that his headlong flight carried him down a cul-de-sac.
The struggle was short and swift, since Faro’s early training had included lessons in self-defence from a retired pugilist. The constables who had followed, truncheons at the ready, were not needed.
Handcuffing the man, who was tall and fair like himself but considerably younger, Faro said: “You had better start talking, or it’ll be the worse for you. I dare say your doxy is already telling them all she knows.”
And one look at the woman’s scared face, the way she cursed and spat as her confederate was hustled into the police carriage, obviously convinced him that he need expect neither discretion nor mercy from that quarter.
“All right, Inspector Bloody Faro, you’ve won this time…”
As Faro suspected, the bogus inspector and the minister were mere links in an organised gang of jewel thieves.
Most of the missing gems from the haul at Jenners were recovered.
But that is another story.
The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter by Robert Barnard
‘Ah!’ said Mr Septimus Coram, surveying the large plate of eggs, bacon, pork sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, and – his particular favourite – blood pudding. ‘Gives you an appetite, my job, that nobody can deny.’
It was something he said on all such occasions, accompanying it with a deep swig from the pewter beer mug that he always used at such late breakfasts.
‘Brute!’ mouthed his daughter Esther. It was something she said on all such occasions, but only silently.
‘He went quiet, did he?’ asked his wife. It wasn’t that she wanted to know, merely that the neighbours would ask.
‘Didn’t have no option. One brawny warder on one side of him, and another brawny warder on the other side. Not that I couldn’t have coped on my own if need be.’
Mr Coram had all his life been wiry rather than heavy in frame, though a lifetime’s addiction to massive fried meals and beer had given him an unattractive potbelly. His droopy moustache, pince-nez spectacles, and protruding ears produced a facial effect that was far from alluring.
‘People like to know,’ murmured his wife.
‘Don’t I know it! And haven’t I had hundreds of good pints on the strength of it. He went quiet – more depressed than anything else. None of this shouting that he was innocent all the way, though they say he was protesting it even as they served him his breakfast. Innocent!’
He laughed heartily and speared a sausage.
‘They said at the trial there was doubt,’ said his wife.
‘Said at the trial!’ said her husband contemptuously, but not interrupting his chewing. ‘Who said it at the trial? The counsel for the bleeding Defence, that’s who said it. It’s his job. Beats me why they bother with one. No one believes a word they say. The police don’t make mistakes, and Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s judiciary don’t make them, either. Innocent? Innocent men don’t get hanged. And you can take that from me, who knows.’
‘Fool!’ mouthed his daughter, looking at her father closely as he finished the first tomato and sliced into the second.
‘Well, I’ll be off to the shops,’ said Mrs Coram. ‘And I’ll go along to see Bessy Rowlands afterwards. She’s poorly.’
‘Suit yourself,’ said her husband. ‘I’ll be having a kip. But mind you’re back to cook me my dinner.’
Since Mary Coram had cooked her husband his dinner every day of her married life except the day they went to Brighton and the day Esther had been born (and hadn’t he sworn on that occasion!), Mrs Coram didn’t feel any need to reply. As she banged the front door that led directly from the Corams’ parlour onto the street, Septimus put down his knife and fork.
‘A meal like that crowns the day, puts a seal on a job well done,’ he said. His daughter merely gave a sceptical grunt. ‘It’s like God giving me a nice pat on the back.’
‘Must be nice to think that God takes such a special interest in you,’ said Esther Coram. Her father stared at her suspiciously, but decided to ignore the note of satire in her voice.
‘It is, my girl. But it’s nothing to be surprised at. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I will repay.” I’m the instrument of the Lord’s wrath with evildoers. It’s natural He should take a special interest.’
‘I see. And He would protect the innocent, to prevent any possible wrong being done?’
‘Of course He would. But He doesn’t need to in this country. We have our constitution and our free judiciary to protect the innocent.’
‘And so if the courts say a man killed his wife, he killed her?’
‘Still harping on about handsome Mr Critchley? Didn’t look so handsome after the drop.’ He chuckled. ‘Yes – the court said he done it, and he did.’
‘In spite of the lack of evidence?’
‘Lack of evidence? The man works in a chemist’s. She dies of arsenical poisoning. It stands to reason.’
‘I’d have thought it stood to reason that if a worker in a chemist’s wanted to kill his wife he wouldn’t use poison.’
Mr Coram’s disgust was manifest.
‘That’s the trouble with you, my girl. Too clever by half. The man had a girlfriend in the background to boot.’
‘Name unknown, nature of relationship unknown.’
‘He was loyal to her, I’ll give him that.’
‘And there was someone in the wife’s life as well. Also identity unknown.’
‘She wasn’t in a position to tell us who it was, was she?’ Septimus Coram added, ‘Poor cow!’ without a trace of compassion.
‘She didn’t sound like a very pleasant person to me.’
‘A very pleasant person!’ said Septimus, imitating her fastidious distaste. ‘You’d believe anything the Defence told you, wouldn’t you? Even if it was that the moon was made of blue cheese. What he said about the wife was just what Evan Critchley told him: that she made his life miserable by nagging. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’
‘Not necessarily, if his defence was that he hadn’t done it;’
‘Hmm. Just trying to get the sympathy vote when he was found guilty… Ooh, that breakfast’s sitting heavy.’
‘That’s the trouble with good food, isn’t it, Dad? It has that built-in disadvantage.’
Coram’s only response was another ‘Ooh!’
‘So the situation was this, then: Evan Critchley had got a girlfriend, and in order to marry her he needed to be rid of his wife, divorce being too expensive for the likes of him and us.’
‘Quite right, too. Where would this country be if every Tom, Dick and Harry – not to say Henrietta – could get a divorce at the click of a finger? Morality would fly out the window.’
‘And his wife, meanwhile – in the name of morality, no doubt – was enjoying a flirtation, or something stronger than that.’