A Death Left Hanging (2 page)

Her thoughts were becoming fuzzy, and she realized that she must be falling asleep. She wondered briefly how many more nights' sleep she would have before the end came. And then the drowsiness overtook her and she was thinking of nothing at all.

The condemned prisoner was never informed of the date of execution until the actual day arrived. But those out in the wider world suffered from no such limitations, and as dawn broke the following morning, a small crowd had already begun to gather outside Strangeways Prison.

Those who had chosen to come had done so for a mixture of motives. One group was made up of well-meaning Christians and humanists. They burned candles and held up placards, which announced, ‘Capital Punishment is a Sin', and ‘Only God can take a life'.

A second group, keeping themselves well apart from the first, took exactly the opposite view. They knew their Bible. They recognized a godly command when they heard one. And they were there to witness that an eye was paid for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

It was the third group gathered in front of the prison that was the largest, the most amorphous and – probably – the least able to explain its reasons for being there.

They're like iron filings close to a magnet, thought the big young man who was standing at the edge of the crowd. ‘They can feel the pull, but they've no idea what's causin' it.'

They certainly didn't expect to see anything, he mused. Executions had ceased to be public nearly seventy years earlier, and the brick walls they were gazing up at would look exactly the same at one minute past eight as they had at one minute to. Yet perhaps it was enough for them to know that the lever would be pulled as the clock struck the hour – and that in this confused and disorganized world there was at least one life which was being ending according to plan.

For a tackler's son from Whitebridge, you're doin' a lot of philosophizin', Charlie, the big young man told himself.

Though her wardresses normally let her sleep as long as she wished, that was not the case this morning, and in her first conscious moment she became aware that she was being gently shaken.

So this was to be the day! she thought.

‘What time is it?' she asked aloud.

‘Don't go worrying about that,' said the senior wardress, a plump woman with a tight blonde perm. ‘There's no rush yet.' She helped Margaret out of bed, though the prisoner needed no such assistance. ‘Would you like to have a bit of a wash?'

‘Yes, I think I would,' Margaret replied.

The other wardress – a tall, angular woman – opened the wardrobe and took out the dress. ‘And would you like to put this on while you're in the bathroom?' she asked, as if it were no more than a suggestion.

Margaret nodded. This particular dress had not been her first choice to die in. The one she had originally selected had been newer and shorter, but the plump wardress had told her that she should think again.

‘I thought I could wear what I liked,' she'd protested.

‘You can, but . . .'

‘But what?'

The wardress had hesitated before speaking again. ‘It's just that if you wear that dress, they'll have to use an extra strap. Around your lower thighs. You don't want that, do you?'

It had taken Margaret a second to realize what the wardress meant, and when she did understand, she laughed out loud.

‘They'll have to use an extra strap because they'll be worried that my skirt will blow up above my waist when the trapdoor opens!' she said.

‘That's right,' the wardress agreed neutrally.

‘Do they really think that what I'll be most worried about at that moment is showing them my knickers?' Margaret asked, her laugh now slightly tinged with hysteria.

‘They want you to die with dignity,' the wardress had explained.

And seeing the sense in that, she had chosen the long dress she was now holding in her hands.

‘What would you like for your breakfast?' the plump wardress asked.

‘What do they normally have?' Margaret wondered.

‘You shouldn't go thinking about things like that,' the wardress admonished her. ‘You can have anything you like, you know. A fry-up, a steak – whatever happens to take your fancy.'

What! And throw it up on the way to the gallows! Now that
would
be a loss of dignity.

‘I'll just have a cup of tea,' Margaret said.

‘You're sure?'

‘And perhaps a round of dry toast.'

The wardress nodded. ‘Don't worry, love,' she said. ‘You won't let yourself down.'

It was nearly five to eight. A slight drizzle had begun to fall, but it had done nothing to dampen down the tension within the crowd outside the prison. Far from it – the excitement was growing perceptibly with every second that passed.

Charlie Woodend, still at the edge of the group, felt like a complete outsider – almost a voyeur on other people's voyeurism. He had never planned to be there – would never even have
considered
being there, if his dad's boss hadn't asked him to do it as a favour.

‘But I don't see the point, Mr Earnshaw,' he'd protested.

‘Neither do I, exactly,' the mill manager had confessed, looking both sad and distressed. ‘I just want to know what it feels like. I want to know if you get any sense of what it's like to be inside.'

‘Then why don't you go yourself?' Woodend had asked.

‘I can't,' the manager had said, in the irritated offhand tone of a man not used to being questioned by people who lived in terraced houses on the wrong side of the canal.

‘I can trust you, Charlie,' he'd continued, much less brusquely, much more persuasively. ‘You're not like most of the young lads in this town.'

‘Aren't I?'

‘No, you're not. They're good people round here, Charlie. The salt of the earth. But they're
down
to earth as well. If they can't see it or touch it, it doesn't exist. You're more sensitive. More subtle. I saw that right from the start – even back in the days when you were a nipper in short trousers, following your dad around the mill during the school holidays. That's why, if I can't be there myself, having you there is the next best thing.'

Earnshaw had still not explained why he
couldn't
be there, Charlie Woodend had thought, but you didn't argue with bosses – even if they were your dad's and not your own – which was why he had risen early that morning, caught the first train out of Whitebridge, and now found himself standing in front of the stark, imposing prison walls.

‘I don't think they should ever hang women,' said one of the two men just in front of him. ‘It's not right.'

‘Not right?' his friend repeated. ‘After what she's done? She didn't just
kill
her husband, you know. She kept at him with that hammer long after he was dead. They say she crushed his skull to a pulp. They say it looked like she'd spilt detergent all over the floor by the time she'd finished.'

‘Maybe she'd been mistreated herself,' the first man suggested.

‘An' that makes it acceptable, does it?'

‘No, not acceptable, exactly. But two wrongs don't make a right, an' anyway, nobody's got any business hangin' a woman.'

Hadn't they? The question echoed around young Charlie Woodend's head. He'd been wondering for some time whether or not he should apply to the police force, and the question of capital punishment had been one of his biggest stumbling blocks.

The plain truth was that he was still unsure whether it was
ever
right for the state to take a life. And until he
was
certain, how could he even contemplate putting himself in a position in which he might find himself investigating a murder? Because it simply wouldn't be possible to make a proper job of an investigation when he disapproved of the inevitable end it was leading to.

Woodend laughed, more in self-mockery than amusement.

It's a long step from joinin' the police to bein' involved in murder investigations, Charlie, he told himself. Chances are that even if you do become a bobby, the closest you'll ever get to huntin' down killers is chasin' chicken thieves.

He looked up at the clock again. Three minutes to eight. It would soon all be over.

The three women in the cell had now been joined by two men. One of the men carried a book with a black leather cover, the other had a black leather bag in his hand.

‘Shall we pray together?' the prison chaplain asked. ‘Or perhaps you would prefer me to read you something from the Bible.'

Margaret smiled at him. ‘You're very kind but . . .'

‘It's the least I can do.'

‘. . . but God deserted me long ago.'

‘You should never think that, my child,' the chaplain said. ‘He will never desert you.'

‘Then perhaps I've deserted him,' Margaret replied. ‘In either case, your prayers won't be necessary.'

The doctor placed his leather bag on the table and unzipped it. He reached inside it and produced a bottle of brandy and a glass.

‘Would you like a drink?' he asked. ‘You're entitled to one, you know. Under the rules.'

Margaret shook her head. Whatever else they might say about her – and they would say many things – they would never be able to claim that she went to her death with the stink of alcohol on her breath.

‘What time is it?' she asked.

‘There's plenty of time yet,' the plump warden said.

They kept offering her things she didn't want, Margaret thought angrily.

A prayer.

A glass of brandy.

But when she
did
want something – wanted to know the bloody time, the simple bloody time – they denied her.

‘It is not too late to change your mind about praying,' the chaplain said.

‘It's been too late for a long while,' Margaret told him.

The cell door opened, and the room was suddenly full of people.

So it's eight o'clock, Margaret thought. It's finally eight o'clock.

She recognized the governor, but the other three new arrivals were strangers to her. One of these strangers took her arms and placed them behind her back. Though she had not willed it, she found that her fingers were interlocking. And then she felt the leather strap binding her wrists together.

The two wardresses had crossed the room and were moving the wardrobe. She wondered why they were doing that, then saw that it was in order to reveal a doorway she had never even suspected existed.

If I'd known about that, I could have escaped, she thought, almost whimsically.

She could not have been more wrong, she soon discovered, for when the wardresses each took an arm and led her through the doorway she saw that it did not lead to freedom at all, but a second empty cell. And beyond that was a third room – the execution chamber, which the governor had promised her was not far away.

The gallows were not what she had been expecting. They looked more like a very thick set of goalposts than an instrument of death, and had it not been for the chain and rope hanging from the crossbeam, she might have thought that she still had further to go.

There was a trapdoor just below the noose, and as her wardresses were manoeuvring her on to it, she noticed that a ‘T' had been marked out in chalk.

So that my feet are in the right place, she thought, marvelling at how calm she appeared to be.

The man who had bound her wrists together now placed the white hood over her head, while a second man bent down and tied a leather strap around her ankles. Then she felt the noose being slipped over the hood and something pressing – not too severely – against the angle of her jaw.

It had all been so quick, she thought. There had been no time for fear, no time for doubts – no time to change her mind her mind and tell all these people what had really happened to her husband.

She was right about the speed of events. From the moment the executioner had entered the room until the point at which he removed the safety pin from the base of the operating lever and the trapdoors flew open, a mere
seventeen seconds
had passed.

The prison doctor and the governor walked slowly down the stairs to the cell below the execution chamber. The doctor didn't make a move to examine the hanging woman. There would have been no point. It was his job to confirm that she was dead, and he knew that for several minutes yet her heart would still be beating weakly.

The doctor took out his packet of Players' Navy Cut and offered it to the governor.

‘How many executions is this we've attended together?' he asked, as he held a match under the other man's cigarette.

‘Do you
really
need to ask me that?' the governor replied, inhaling deeply.

‘No,' the doctor admitted. ‘No, I don't. This is our fourth. Do you think you'll ever get used to it?'

‘Not a chance,' the governor said. ‘Will you?'

‘Probably not,' the doctor conceded.

They smoked their Players in silence, and then the doctor placed his stethoscope against the woman's chest and pronounced her dead. They left the room, locking it behind them. It would stay locked for an hour, then the executioner would return, remove the body and prepare it for the autopsy and inquest that were required by law following a hanging. He would also, at some point, measure the amount by which the neck had been stretched.

Sometimes that elongation could be more than two inches.

At nine fifteen a senior warder appeared at the gate of the prison and pinned to it a notice that announced that Margaret Dodds, in accordance with the law, had been executed at eight o'clock precisely. The waiting crowd pushed and strained to see the notice for themselves, though they must already have known exactly what it would say.

Charlie Woodend did not join in the tussle. As far as he was concerned, he had done his duty by Mr Earnshaw, and was already walking back towards the railway station.