THIRTY-EIGHT

SEPTEMBER 1949

CAMPDEN, ENGLAND

On Sunday, Augusta Harrison read about her own murder in the paper.

It must be a joke, was her first shocked thought. Like those fake newspapers you can buy where the headline proclaims you King of the Universe. Or perhaps it’s someone with the same name as me.

As it turned out, it wasn’t a joke and it wasn’t a case of mistaken identity. A year after she’d moved to Paris, then London, a man named John Perry found a pile of her bloody clothes in the living room of an abandoned house, and promptly contacted the authorities.

The police went looking for her and, of course, she could not be found. Augusta had only lived in Campden for a few months before moving on; her mother used to claim she had Gypsy blood. She hadn’t formed any real ties and did not notify anyone of her departure. She had gone to Paris—delightful, but ultimately too expensive—and then London, settling into a rented townhouse in the West End a few days past. Only half of her belongings had been unpacked when she read about her murder.

The clothes Perry had found weren’t just bloody; they had been repeatedly slashed with the kind of knife found in Mr. Perry’s kitchen. When Mr. Perry’s lawyer pointed out it was the kind of knife found in nearly every kitchen in England, the jury had not been swayed.

Worse still, Mr. Perry had been convicted of assault three years earlier at age nineteen (for which he served twenty-seven months), and had an IQ of seventy-eight. Once the bobbies had finished with him—which took days—he implicated not only himself but his mother and brother. The entire family had been convicted and would hang in a matter of days.

She sent a telegram to the Gloucestershire police.

Nothing.

She packed, bought a train ticket, went back to Campden, a town she had ardently hoped never to see again. Walked into the constable’s station. Announced herself.

Nothing.

Found Mr. Perry’s lawyer, who was engaged in dying from sepsis after his appendix burst and was, understandably, distracted.

She went back to the police and explained again. And as she perhaps should have foreseen, rather than admitting a mistake had been made, they decided that, somehow, the mistake was hers.

Because—and was it not absurd that this would cost a man and his family their lives?—she wasn’t like other girls. She had a history. She didn’t like staying in one spot very long, that was one thing. The thought of binding herself to a man and a house and his children for decades was horrifying, that was another. And she liked to drink. And she liked the idea of men, and the things an open-minded couple could do in a bedroom with the blinds drawn. Only the daily domestic details smacked of tedium.

Like this: She was small and red-haired and fair-skinned and dark-eyed and pretty and looked sweet, but wasn’t. Men wanted to take care of her, and were piqued when they discovered she neither wanted nor needed them. She liked to fuck and she liked her freedom, not always in that order.

Much of the time, this worked well for her. But sometimes those things combined in a most disagreeable way and she had to leave town earlier than she planned. But there were always new places and new men, and if she wasn’t hurting anyone, what was the harm?

She tried to explain this to her stone-faced audience, men who didn’t understand why a woman would want to be in charge of her own life, men who found the idea as repellant as it was incomprehensible.

But how to explain her bloody clothes?

“I have no idea! Before I moved away I donated a number of items to the church. I did the same in Paris. Anyone could have picked them up, and they could have blood on them for any number of reasons.”

But what were the odds of her clothes turning up soaked with blood?

“A good way to determine that the blood isn’t mine would be to note that I’m still alive.”

That was another thing. Her temper.

At least one suggested that she wasn’t who she said she was. “You don’t look like an Augusta,” one of them said, eyeing her riotous red curls and freckles. “You look like a Sally. Or a Bridget.”

It was all she could do not to fly at him and tear his face with her fingernails.

When, incredibly, it appeared the execution was going forward, she started talking to the press. “The press” in town consisted of an older gentleman in his forties, who was much more interested in her legs than the pursuit of justice. He, too, seemed to think the entire affair was a darkly hilarious misunderstanding, one it would be too much trouble to correct.

“But I’m here. I’m right here, I’m not dead. They didn’t kill me.”

A shrug. “Well, they killed someone.”

“How does that follow? As I told the police, that blood could be on the clothes for any number of reasons. And, once again—I do hate to belabor the point—I am not dead!”

“Perry has a violent history, he confessed, he’s too stupid to have done it alone, which means his family helped, that’s all.”

That was not all. “So you won’t report this. You won’t write about it.” Cajoling hadn’t worked. Getting angry hadn’t worked. Perhaps shaming would work. “You won’t lift a finger to save an innocent man? To expose a shoddy investigation? You won’t take the trouble?”

“Oh, that’s not my place.”

She blinked. “Not your— It is your place. It’s your essential function, what you are paid by Gloucestershire County to do.”

“I’m not paid to make enemies of the constabulary. And I’ll take their word over that of a drifter.”

“Oh, I’m a drifter now? Is that right? Because during the trial, you wrote that I was a ‘poor beloved local girl, brutally murdered by a monster who will face God’s judgment thanks to the tireless efforts of our heroic Campden constabulary.’ ‘Brutally murdered’ is redundant, by the way.”

He had been fool enough to be complimented when she quoted his words back at him, but had no use for her editorial opinion, if the ugly flush spreading from his eyebrows to his chin was any indication. “Perhaps you’ve made it all up, then.”

She clenched her teeth so her jaw wouldn’t drop. She had been doing that with such frequency, she had a constant headache starting about an hour after she woke up until, after fretting in her bed for hours, she finally fell into an exhausted asleep.

“Made it up? To what end? What possible reason would I have to leave my life in London to return to this wretched town and pretend to be a murdered woman?” She had no chance of swaying him to her point of view, which she should have seen earlier, and was done holding back. “Why would I—or any sane person—do something so daft? Please. Enlighten me. Please, dazzle me with your journalist acumen. I’m sure I will be fascinated instead of repulsed.”

“Girls like you,” he said, gaze flicking again from her face to her chest and back up, “like attention.”

“Men like you,” she said, standing, “don’t know the first thing about girls like me. And your office reeks of grease. You might try eating something besides chips. You’ll lose weight and your breath won’t smell as bad. Regrettably, you’ll still be bald.”

Then it was execution week: John tomorrow, his mother Wednesday, his brother Thursday. They anticipated her plan to disrupt the proceedings

(disrupt? I’ll torch the building if I have to, they’ll see a firestorm)

by closing the executions to the public, and forbidding her access to anyone in the station.

She packed. Again. She couldn’t save them, and was afraid to stay. Her resolution to tell the truth coupled with her waspish tongue had made her more enemies than usual; this town was no place to linger. She genuinely feared a late-night visit from any number of disgruntled men. Especially since she was already “dead.” Whatever they did to her, there wouldn’t be a trial.

The worst part for her (the worst part for the Perrys was entirely different) was that unpleasant things like this had happened to her before. She couldn’t remember her earlier lives, exactly, except in dreams that faded the longer she was awake. All she knew was she had betrayed the innocent and they always paid for her lies, while she never did. Her first memory was helping her mother making her third birthday cake. Her second was the strong sense that she must always take responsibility for all that she said and did. She made it a point never to lie, something that frequently brought her trouble, and never wavered from that conviction. But a clear conscience was worth the trouble, and she had thought that this time, this life, she had it licked.

I did the right thing, she told her diary. She had been keeping one since she was eight, but wouldn’t for much longer. What was the point of being careful, of never lying, of being sure of all sides before picking one?

Later, when she was writing it all down, she laid it out, almost as if someone who wasn’t her would be reading it:

From the moment I read about my murder, I did the right thing. How can it count for nothing? How can they all be executed?

I don’t understand it.

I’ll never understand it.