‘No, she ain’t. I just told you. She is deceased. Dead. Hung herself. This morning. Found in her cell.’

‘Do not take our word for it. You shall read of it in tomorrow’s paper,’ said the guard who stood behind him and who seemed fascinated by the young woman’s reaction to the news.

‘Here is her things,’ said the first man, pushing a meagre parcel tied with string through the opening. ‘Take it.’

But Alice could not take it. Alice could not move.

‘Give her some brandy,’ said one of them. ‘Oh, but I clean forgot—we are all out of brandy!’

And they laughed.

Alice took the parcel. She left the prison and walked down Forbes Street and this time she did not take the tram. This time she walked.

CHAPTER NINETEEN: OFFENCES AGAINST THE PERSON

CHAPTER NINETEEN

OFFENCES AGAINST THE PERSON

‘Will you go to the police, sir, with the letter that warned of the accident on the line?’ said James Greensmith as they sat in the compartment of the afternoon express train on its return journey to the city.

And thus was the existence of the letter, delivered that morning by the secretary’s own hand and up to this point kept from her by her husband, made known to Eleanor Dunlevy. Not the details of its contents, perhaps, but enough for her to understand it predicted dire calamity should the minister and his entourage venture to the west that day. The unfortunate Greensmith, whose indiscretion this was (earning him a look of furious disbelief from his employer), fell silent. He had stopped short of producing the letter—an illiterate missive penned in a childish hand that one no more heeded than a child’s toy hurled in a tantrum—but there was little point now in denying that the letter existed, that its warning had almost come true.

No one spoke.

Eleanor said nothing. She sat staring out of the train window and Alasdair was witness to every sort of emotion that now flitted across his wife’s face; indeed he could feel each one, her fury, her disbelief, her fear, perhaps (though of this he was less certain), and the compartment fairly crackled with it all the way home.

As the front door closed behind them she turned to him, her anger white hot. ‘You knew? You had received a warning but you did nothing?’

And it was as well that the maid, who ought to have opened the door to them but had not, was nowhere to be seen.

‘Of course I did not know!’ Alasdair replied, his justifications already prepared, for it had been a long train ride home. ‘Certainly I received a vague threat in an anonymous note, which is nothing unusual in my position, though I do not always choose to share it with you. If I acted on every crazed threat that I received I should never go anywhere and these malefactors would have their victory.’