Gallows Thief

by Bernard Cornwell

  If Berrigan was surprised or discomfited by this strange admission, he did not show it. Instead he seemed interested. ‘Your father was dishonest?’

  Sandman nodded. ‘If there was any justice in this world, Sergeant, then he would have been hanged at Newgate. He wasn’t a felon like the folk who live here. He didn’t rob stage coaches or pick pockets or burgle houses, instead he tied people’s money into crooked schemes and he’d still be doing it if he hadn’t met an even cleverer man who did it back to him. And there was me, claiming to be virtuous, but I still took his money all my life, didn’t I?’

  Sergeant Berrigan lowered the pistol’s cock, then put the weapon on the table. ‘My father was honest.’

  ‘He was? Not is?’

  Berrigan used a tinder box to light two candles, then lifted a jug of ale that he had kept hidden on the floor. ‘My father died a couple of years ago. He was a blacksmith in Putney, and he wanted me to learn the trade, but of course I wouldn’t. I knew better, didn’t I?’ He sounded rueful. ‘I wanted life to be easier than forever shoeing horses and banging up trace-chains.’

  ‘So you joined the army to escape the smithy?’

  Berrigan laughed. ‘I joined the army to escape a hanging.’ He poured the ale and pushed a tankard towards Sandman. ‘I was peter hunting. Do you know what that is?’

  ‘I live here, remember,’ Sandman said. Peter hunting was the trade of cutting luggage off the backs of coaches and, if it was well done, the coachmen and passengers had no idea that their trunks had been slashed off the rack. To prevent it many coaches used steel chains to secure the baggage, but a good peter hunter carried a jemmy to prise the chain’s anchoring staples from the coach’s chassis.

  ‘I got caught,’ Berrigan said, ‘and the beak said I could stand trial or join the army. And nine years later I was a sergeant.’

  ‘A good one, eh?’

  ‘I could keep order,’ Berrigan said bleakly.

  ‘So could I, oddly enough,’ Sandman said, and it was not such a strange claim as it sounded. Many officers relied on their sergeants to keep order, but Sandman had possessed a natural and easy authority. He had been a good officer and he knew it and, if he was honest with himself, he missed it. He missed the war, missed the certainties of the army, missed the excitements of campaigning and missed the companionship of his company. ‘Spain was the best,’ he said. ‘We had such happy times in Spain. Some bloody awful times too, of course, but I don’t remember those. You were in Spain?’

  ‘’twelve to ’fourteen,’ Berrigan said.

  ‘Those were mostly good times,’ Sandman said, ‘but I hated Waterloo.’

  The Sergeant nodded. ‘It was bad.’

  ‘I’ve never been so damned frightened in my life,’ Sandman said. He had been shaking when the Imperial Guard came up the hill. He remembered his right arm quivering and he had been ashamed to show such fear; it had not occurred to him until much later that most of the men on the ridge, and most of the men coming to attack them, were just as frightened and just as ashamed of their fears. ‘The air was warm,’ he said, ‘like an oven door had been opened. Remember?’

  ‘Warm,’ Berrigan agreed, then frowned. ‘A lot of folk want you dead, Captain.’

  ‘It puzzles me,’ Sandman admitted. ‘When Skavadale offered me that money I was convinced that either he or Lord Robin had murdered the Countess, but now? Now there’s someone else out there. Maybe they’re the real murderer and the strange thing is I haven’t a clue who it might be. Unless this has the answer?’ He lifted the letter that the landlord had given him. ‘Can you push a candle towards me?’

  The letter was written on pale-green paper and was in a handwriting he knew only too well. It was from Eleanor, and he remembered how his heart would leap whenever her letters arrived in Spain or France. Now he slit her green wax seal and unfolded the thin paper. He had hoped the letter would reveal Meg’s whereabouts, but instead Eleanor was asking Sandman to meet her next morning at Gunter’s confectionery store in Berkeley Square. There was a postscript. I think I might have news, she had written, but nothing else.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t have the truth yet, but I think I’ll have it soon.’ He laid the letter down. ‘Aren’t you supposed to shoot me?’

  ‘In a tavern?’ Berrigan shook his head. ‘Cut your throat, more like. It’s quieter. But I’m trying to decide whether Miss Hood will ever talk to me again if I do.’

  ‘I doubt she ever will,’ Sandman said with a smile.

  ‘And the last time I was on your side,’ Berrigan said, ‘things looked rough, but we did win.’

  ‘Against the Emperor’s own guard, too,’ Sandman agreed.

  ‘So I reckon I’m on your side again, Captain,’ the Sergeant said.

  Sandman smiled and raised his tankard in a mock toast. ‘But if you don’t kill me, Sergeant, can you return to the Seraphim Club? Or will they regard your disobedience as cause for dismissal?’

  ‘I can’t go back,’ Berrigan said, and gestured at a heavy bag, a haversack and his old army knapsack that lay together on the floor.

  Sandman showed neither pleasure nor surprise. He was pleased, but he was not surprised because from the very first he had sensed that Berrigan was looking for an escape from the Seraphim. ‘Do you expect wages?’ he asked the Sergeant.

  ‘We’ll split the reward, Captain.’

  ‘There’s a reward?’

  ‘Forty pounds,’ Berrigan said, ‘is what the magistrates pay to anyone who brings in a proper felon. Forty.’ He saw that the reward money was news to Sandman and shook his head in disbelief. ‘How the hell else do you think the watchmen make a living?’

  Sandman felt very foolish. ‘I didn’t know.’

  Berrigan filled up both ale tankards. ‘Twenty for you, Captain, and twenty for me.’ He grinned. ‘So what are we doing tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Sandman said, ‘we begin by going to Newgate. Then I am meeting a lady and you will, well, I don’t know what you’ll do, but we shall see, won’t we?’ He twisted in the chair as the door opened behind him.

  ‘Bleeding hell,’ Sally frowned when she saw the pistol on the table, then glared at Berrigan. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Come to have supper with you, of course,’ Berrigan said.

  Sally blushed, and Sandman looked out the window so as not to embarrass her and reflected that his allies now consisted of a club-footed reverend aristocrat of radical views, a sharp-tongued actress, a felonious sergeant and, he dared to hope, Eleanor.

  And together they had just three days to catch a killer.

  6

  It was raining next morning when Sandman and Berrigan walked to Newgate Prison. Sandman was still limping badly, grimacing every time he put weight on his left foot. He had wrapped a bandage tight about the boot, but the ankle still felt like jellied fire. ‘You shouldn’t be walking,’ Berrigan told him.

  ‘I shouldn’t have walked when I sprained the other ankle at Burgos,’ Sandman said, ‘but it was either that or get captured by the Frogs. So I walked back to Portugal.’

  ‘You, an officer?’ Berrigan was amused. ‘No gee-gee?’

  ‘I loaned my gee-gee,’ Sandman said, ‘to someone who was really injured.’

  Berrigan walked in silence for a few paces. ‘We had a lot of good officers, really,’ he said after a while.

  ‘And there I was,’ Sandman said, ‘thinking I was unique.’

  ‘Because the bad officers didn’t last too long,’ Berrigan went on, ‘especially when there was a fight. Wonderful what a bullet in the back will do.’ The Sergeant had slept in the Wheatsheaf’s back parlour after it became clear he was not to be invited to share Sally’s bed, though Sandman, watching the two during the evening, had thought it a damn close-run thing. Lord Alexander, oblivious that he was losing Sally to a low-born rival, had stared at her in dumb admiration until he nerved himself to tell her a joke, but as the jest depended for its humour on an understanding of the Latin g
erund, it failed miserably. When Lord Alexander finally fell asleep the Sergeant carried him out to his carriage which took him home. ‘He can drink, that cove,’ Berrigan had said in admiration.

  ‘He can’t drink,’ Sandman had said, ‘and that’s his problem.’ Lord Alexander, he thought, was bored and boredom drove him to drink, while Sandman was anything but bored. He had lain awake half the night trying to work out who beyond the Seraphim Club might want him dead, and it had only been when the bell of St Paul’s church rang two o’clock that the answer had come to him with a clarity and force that made him ashamed for not having thought of so obvious a solution before. He shared it with Berrigan as they walked down Holborn beneath clouds so low they seemed to touch the belching chimneys.

  ‘I know who’s paying to have me killed.’

  ‘It ain’t the Seraphim Club,’ Berrigan insisted. ‘They’d have told me just to make sure I didn’t get in the way of some other cove.’

  ‘It isn’t the club,’ Sandman agreed, ‘because they decided to buy me off, but the only member with sufficient funds immediately available was Lord Robin Holloway, and he detests me.’

  ‘He does,’ Berrigan agreed, ‘but they all contributed.’

  ‘No they didn’t,’ Sandman said. ‘Most of the members are in the country and there won’t have been time to solicit them. Skavadale doesn’t have the funds. Maybe one or two members in London donated, but I’ll wager the largest part of the twenty thousand came from Lord Robin Holloway, and he only did it because Skavadale begged him or ordered him or persuaded him, and I think he probably agreed to pay me, but privately arranged to have me killed before I could accept or, God forbid, cash his note.’

  Berrigan thought about it, then reluctantly nodded. ‘He’s capable of that. Nasty piece of work, he is.’

  ‘But maybe he’ll call off his dogs,’ Sandman said, ‘now that he knows I’m not taking his money?’

  ‘Except if he killed the Countess,’ Berrigan suggested, ‘he might still want you nubbed. What the hell’s happening here?’ His question was caused because the only thing moving on Newgate Hill was a trickle of dirty water in the gutter. The carts and carriages in the roadway were motionless, all held up by a wagon that had shed its load of pear saplings at the corner of Old Bailey and Newgate Street. Men shouted, whips cracked, horses buried their faces in nosebags and nothing moved. Berrigan shook his head. ‘Who’d want half a ton of bloody pear trees?’

  ‘Someone who likes pears?’

  ‘Someone who needs their bloody brains reamed out,’ the Sergeant grumbled, then stopped to gaze at the granite façade of Newgate Prison. It squatted grim and gaunt, sparsely supplied with windows, solid and forbidding. The rain was falling harder, but the Sergeant still stared in apparent fascination. ‘Is this where they hang them?’

  ‘Right outside the Debtor’s Door, whichever one that is.’

  ‘I’ve never been to a hanging here,’ Berrigan admitted.

  ‘Nor have I.’

  ‘Been to one at Horsemonger Lane prison, but they hang them up on the roof of the gateway there and you don’t see a lot from the street. Bit of jerking, that’s all. My mum used to like going to Tyburn.’

  ‘Your mother did?’

  ‘It was a day out for her,’ Berrigan had heard the surprise in Sandman’s voice and sounded defensive. ‘She likes a day out, my mum does, but she says the Old Bailey’s too far – one day I’ll hire a coach and bring her up.’ He grinned as he climbed the prison steps. ‘I always reckoned I’d end up in here.’

  A turnkey accompanied them through the tunnel to the Press Yard and pointed out the large cell where those to be hanged spent their last night. ‘If you want to see a hanging,’ he confided to Sandman, ‘then you come on Monday, ’cos we’ll be ridding England of two of the bastards, but there won’t be a crowd. Not a big one, anyway, on account that neither of ’em is what you’d call notorious. You want a big crowd? Hang someone notorious, sir, someone notorious, or else string up a woman. The Magpie and Stump got through a fortnight’s supply of ale last Monday, and that was only ’cos we scragged a woman. Folks do like to see a woman strangling. Did you hear how that one ended?’

  ‘Ended?’ Sandman asked, puzzled by the question. ‘I assume she died.’

  ‘Died and went to the anatomists, sir, what do like a young ’un to slice apart, but she was hanged for the theft of a pearl necklace and I do hear how the owner found the necklace last week.’ The man chuckled. ‘Fallen down the back of a sofa! Might be rumour, of course, might just be rumour.’ He shook his head in wonderment at fate’s arbitrary ways. ‘But it’s a strange business, life, isn’t it?’

  ‘Death is,’ Sandman said bitterly.

  The turnkey fumbled with the Press Yard’s padlocked gate, unaware that his callousness had provoked Sandman’s anger. Berrigan saw it and tried to divert the Captain. ‘So why are we seeing this Corday?’ he asked.

  Sandman hesitated. He had not yet told the Sergeant about the missing maid, Meg, and it had crossed his mind that perhaps Berrigan had not really changed sides at all. Had the Seraphim Club sent him as a spy? Yet that seemed unlikely, and the Sergeant’s change of heart appeared to be sincere, even if it was prompted more by an attraction to Sally than any sincere repentance. ‘There was a witness,’ he told Berrigan, ‘and I need to know more about her. And if I find her …’ He left that thought unfinished.

  ‘And if you find her?’

  ‘Then someone will hang,’ Sandman said, ‘but not Corday.’ He nodded a curt acknowledgement to the turnkey who had unlocked the gate, then led Berrigan across the stinking yard and into the Association Room. It was crowded because the rain had driven the prisoners and their visitors indoors and they stared resentfully at Sandman and his companion as the two threaded their way through the tables to the shadowed back of the room where Sandman expected to find Corday. The artist was evidently a changed man for, instead of cowering from his persecutors, he was now holding court at the table closest to the fire where, with a thick pile of paper and a stick of charcoal, he was drawing a portrait of a prisoner’s woman. A small crowd surrounded him, admiring his skill, and they parted reluctantly to let Sandman through. Corday gave a small start of recognition when he saw his visitors, then quickly looked away. ‘I need a word with you,’ Sandman said.

  ‘He’ll talk to you when he’s finished,’ a huge man, black-haired, long-bearded and with a massive chest, growled from the bench beside Corday, ‘and he won’t be finished for a while, so wait, my culleys, wait.’

  ‘And who are you?’ Berrigan asked.

  ‘I’m the cove telling you to wait,’ the man said. He had a West Country accent, greasy clothes and a thick matted beard. He probed a finger into a capacious nostril as he stared belligerently at Berrigan, then withdrew it and gave the pickings a close inspection. He cleaned his nail by running it through his beard, then looked defiantly at Sandman. ‘Charlie’s time is valuable,’ he explained, ‘and there’s not much left of it.’

  ‘It’s your life, Corday,’ Sandman said.

  ‘Don’t listen to him, Charlie!’ the big man said. ‘You’ve got no friends in this wicked world except me and I know what’s—’ He stopped abruptly and uttered a gasping, mewing noise as his eyes widened in shock. Sergeant Berrigan had gone to stand behind him and now gave a jerk with his right hand that made the big man grunt in renewed pain.

  ‘Sergeant!’ Sandman remonstrated with mock concern.

  ‘Just teaching the culley manners,’ Berrigan said, and thumped the man in the kidneys a second time. ‘When the Captain wants a word, you nose-picking piece of garbage, you jump to attention, you do, eyes front, mouth shut, heels together and back straight! You don’t tell him to wait, that ain’t polite.’

  Corday looked anxiously at the bearded man. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ Berrigan answered for his victim. ‘You just talk to the Captain, boy, because he’s trying to save your miserable bleeding life. You wan
t to play games, culley?’ The bearded man had stood and attempted to ram his elbow back into Berrigan’s belly, but the Sergeant now thumped him across the ear, tripped him and, while he was still off balance, ran him hard and fast until he slammed into a table. Berrigan thumped the man’s face down hard. ‘You bleeding stay there, culley, till we’re done.’ He tapped the back of the man’s head as an encouragement, then stalked back to Corday’s table. ‘Everyone on parade, Captain,’ he reported, ‘ready and willing.’

  Sandman edged a woman aside so he could sit opposite Corday. ‘I need to talk to you about the maid,’ he said softly, ‘about Meg. I don’t suppose you knew her surname? No? So what did Meg look like?’

  ‘Your friend shouldn’t have hit him!’ Corday, still distracted by his companion’s pain, complained to Sandman.

  ‘What did she bloody look like, son?’ Berrigan shouted in his best sergeant’s manner, and Corday twitched with sudden terror, then set aside the half-finished portrait and, without a word, began to sketch on a clean sheet of paper. He worked fast, the charcoal making a small scratching noise in the silence of the big room.

  ‘She’s young,’ Corday said, ‘maybe twenty-four or -five? She has a pockmarked skin and mouse-coloured hair. Her eyes have a greenish tint and she has a mole here.’ He flicked a mark on the girl’s forehead. ‘Her teeth aren’t good. I’ve only drawn her face, but you should know she had broad hips and a narrow chest.’

  ‘Small tits, you mean?’ Berrigan growled.

  Corday blushed. ‘She was small above the waist,’ he said, ‘but big beneath it.’ He finished the drawing, frowned at it for a moment, then nodded in satisfaction and handed the sheet to Sandman.

  Sandman stared at the picture. The girl was ugly, and then he thought she was more than ugly. It was not just the pox-scarred skin, the narrow jaw, the scrawny hair and small eyes, but a suggestion of knowing hardness that sat strangely on such a young face. If the portrait was accurate then Meg was not just repulsive, but evil. ‘Why would the Countess employ such a creature?’ he asked.