The House of the Hanged Woman (Albert Lincoln) Read online

  By Kate Ellis

  Albert Lincoln series:

  A High Mortality of Doves

  The Boy Who Lived with the Dead

  The House of the Hanged Woman

  Wesley Peterson series:

  The Merchant’s House

  The Armada Boy

  An Unhallowed Grave

  The Funeral Boat

  The Bone Garden

  A Painted Doom

  The Skeleton Room

  The Plague Maiden

  A Cursed Inheritance

  The Marriage Hearse

  The Shining Skull

  The Blood Pit

  A Perfect Death

  The Flesh Tailor

  The Jackal Man

  The Cadaver Game

  The Shadow Collector

  The Shroud Maker

  The Death Season

  The House of Eyes

  The Mermaid’s Scream

  The Mechanical Devil

  Dead Man’s Lane

  The Burial Circle

  Joe Plantagenet series:

  Seeking the Dead

  Playing With Bones

  Copyright

  Published by Piatkus

  ISBN 978-0-349-41837-7

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Kate Ellis 2020

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Piatkus

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  By Kate Ellis

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Wenfield, High Peak, Derbyshire March 1921

  Chapter 2: Rose

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4: Rose

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6: Rose

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8: Rose

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10: Rose

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13: Rose

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16: Rose

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19: Rose

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22: Rose

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26: Rose

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28: Rose

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31: Rose

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33: Rose

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37: Rose

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42: Rose

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47: Rose

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50: Rose

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53: Rose

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59: Rose

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63: Rose

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70: Rose

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73: Rose

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76: Rose

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78: Rose

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80: Rose

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  To everyone who works in public libraries

  and book shops, those wonderful people

  who can transport us to other worlds.

  Chapter 1

  Wenfield, High Peak, Derbyshire March 1921

  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.


  Chapter 2

  Rose

  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.

  Chapter 3

  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 t
he 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.