prettiest mother and demands to have his bottom kissed better. It’s all very well done. Howls of pain to please the kids, just enough innuendo to stop Dad nodding off to sleep. Though this particular Dad’s badly in need of a cigarette. He touches Fran’s arm and points to the door.
Outside he decides to see if he can buy a guidebook. Fran likes them: if Jasper’s playing up she sometimes sees more of a place later in the guidebook than she does when she’s there. He goes across to the converted stables and finds the shop almost empty. Everybody’s either in the circus tent or sitting outside the restaurant at tables in the sun. Nick asks for the official guide, but finds they’ve sold out. Disappointed, he makes do with postcards, and then goes across to the books section and searches for something on the Fanshawes.
He’s given up and is just about to leave when he sees a book called Mary Ann Cotton’s Teapot and Other Notable Northern Murders , by Veronica Laidlaw. He knows Veronica slightly, having met her once or twice at college dinners. She’s a rather prolific historical novelist, but he had no idea she was interested in crime. This had been published in 1995 by the Vindolanda Press. The cover has a picture of Mary Ann carrying the infamous teapot, which contained, or so she always claimed, right up to the steps of the gallows, nothing but fortifying herbal infusions. Lying on a bed in the background of the picture, about to be fortified, was one or other of her various husbands.
If everybody connected to Mary Ann Cotton who died suddenly from gastrointestinal upsets was actually murdered, she is easily the most deadly of British killers. But of course we don’t know that. Many of her children, according to their death certificates, died of ‘teething’; and some of these deaths may have been natural. Nick knows about her through Geordie, who remembers his sister Mary and the other little lasses singing a skipping rhyme.
Mary Ann Cotton, she’s dead and she’s rotten.
She lies in the grave with her eyes wide oppen.
Sing! Sing! Oh what shall I sing?
Mary Ann Cotton is hung up with string.
Where? Where?
Up in the air.
Selling black puddings a penny a pair.
He also remembers being put in a dark cupboard under the stairs when he was naughty and being told that Mary Ann Cotton would get him.
It’s worth buying, Nick thinks, for that reason alone. The garish cover’s misleading. Veronica’s treatment of her selected crimes is anything but sensational.
Mary Ann Cotton is dealt with in the second chapter, the first being devoted to the gibbeting of William Jobling at Jarrow Slake. The last chapter is on Mary Bell, an eleven-year-old girl who, in 1968, killed two small boys, one of them on the Tin Lizzie, a stretch of waste land less than a mile from Lob’s Hill. Nick remembers the case: the air of gloom that spread throughout the city, though by contemporary standards media attention had been restrained.
Nick wanders out into the sunshine to read it. He can’t think of any other ‘notable northern murders’, and flicks through the intervening pages until his attention is caught by the name: Fanshawe. With a slight drying of the mouth, he turns to the beginning of the chapter – Chapter Five – and reads: ‘The Murder of James Fanshawe at Lob’s Hill’.
James Fanshawe was two years old at the time of his death, the only child of the second marriage of William Fanshawe, a local armaments manufacturer. By his first marriage, William had another son, Robert, aged eleven at the time of the murder, and a daughter Muriel, who was aged thirteen. Neither of the children of the first marriage liked their stepmother, and both seem to have been jealous of their half-brother, James.
On the morning of 5 November 1904 Jessie Baines, the nursery maid, went into the nursery and found James’s bed empty. Normally she would have been sleeping in the nursery with him, but she had a bad cough, and his sister
Outside he decides to see if he can buy a guidebook. Fran likes them: if Jasper’s playing up she sometimes sees more of a place later in the guidebook than she does when she’s there. He goes across to the converted stables and finds the shop almost empty. Everybody’s either in the circus tent or sitting outside the restaurant at tables in the sun. Nick asks for the official guide, but finds they’ve sold out. Disappointed, he makes do with postcards, and then goes across to the books section and searches for something on the Fanshawes.
He’s given up and is just about to leave when he sees a book called Mary Ann Cotton’s Teapot and Other Notable Northern Murders , by Veronica Laidlaw. He knows Veronica slightly, having met her once or twice at college dinners. She’s a rather prolific historical novelist, but he had no idea she was interested in crime. This had been published in 1995 by the Vindolanda Press. The cover has a picture of Mary Ann carrying the infamous teapot, which contained, or so she always claimed, right up to the steps of the gallows, nothing but fortifying herbal infusions. Lying on a bed in the background of the picture, about to be fortified, was one or other of her various husbands.
If everybody connected to Mary Ann Cotton who died suddenly from gastrointestinal upsets was actually murdered, she is easily the most deadly of British killers. But of course we don’t know that. Many of her children, according to their death certificates, died of ‘teething’; and some of these deaths may have been natural. Nick knows about her through Geordie, who remembers his sister Mary and the other little lasses singing a skipping rhyme.
Mary Ann Cotton, she’s dead and she’s rotten.
She lies in the grave with her eyes wide oppen.
Sing! Sing! Oh what shall I sing?
Mary Ann Cotton is hung up with string.
Where? Where?
Up in the air.
Selling black puddings a penny a pair.
He also remembers being put in a dark cupboard under the stairs when he was naughty and being told that Mary Ann Cotton would get him.
It’s worth buying, Nick thinks, for that reason alone. The garish cover’s misleading. Veronica’s treatment of her selected crimes is anything but sensational.
Mary Ann Cotton is dealt with in the second chapter, the first being devoted to the gibbeting of William Jobling at Jarrow Slake. The last chapter is on Mary Bell, an eleven-year-old girl who, in 1968, killed two small boys, one of them on the Tin Lizzie, a stretch of waste land less than a mile from Lob’s Hill. Nick remembers the case: the air of gloom that spread throughout the city, though by contemporary standards media attention had been restrained.
Nick wanders out into the sunshine to read it. He can’t think of any other ‘notable northern murders’, and flicks through the intervening pages until his attention is caught by the name: Fanshawe. With a slight drying of the mouth, he turns to the beginning of the chapter – Chapter Five – and reads: ‘The Murder of James Fanshawe at Lob’s Hill’.
James Fanshawe was two years old at the time of his death, the only child of the second marriage of William Fanshawe, a local armaments manufacturer. By his first marriage, William had another son, Robert, aged eleven at the time of the murder, and a daughter Muriel, who was aged thirteen. Neither of the children of the first marriage liked their stepmother, and both seem to have been jealous of their half-brother, James.
On the morning of 5 November 1904 Jessie Baines, the nursery maid, went into the nursery and found James’s bed empty. Normally she would have been sleeping in the nursery with him, but she had a bad cough, and his sister
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