by Giles Ekins
Chapter 10
THE BODY OF ALICE NEWTON WAS FISHED OUT OF THE THAMES, almost two months to the day after he discovery of Black Eyed Mary’s corpse. She had died in an identical fashion, crucified, tortured and mutilated, and then her body tossed contemptuously in the river. Unlike Black Eyed Mary, Alice Newton was not a prostitute. She was employed as the downstairs maid for the family of Doctor Hastings-Haskey, senior professor at the University of London Medical School. The family of Doctor Hastings-Haskey, who lived in an elegant four storey Georgian terrace house in Montague Street, Bloomsbury, thought very highly of Alice and were most distressed at her murder, especially Camellia Hastings-Haskey, the seven year old daughter of the house. She cried bitterly for Alice and refused to let any of the other servants curl her hair. It had always been Alice who tightly wound Camellia’s long dark hair around brown paper tubes to try to induce curls; telling her stories of fabulous princesses and knights in shining armour and damsels in distress as she did so.
Alice was allowed a half day per fortnight to visit her family in Southwark, across the river in South London. The day Alice Newton disappeared, the last to see her was Mrs. Talbot, the cook/housekeeper. Mrs. Talbot had seen Alice as she climbed up the basement steps towards the street, re-tying her blue bonnet about her head as she did so. She gave Mrs. Talbot a cheery wave, opened the wrought iron gate at the top of the stairs, stepped out into the street – and was never seen alive again.
Alice always walked from Montague Street, past the heavy stone edifice of the British Museum and onto High Holborn. From High Holborn she would walk down Drury Lane, before cutting across down Bow Street to the Strand. By Somerset House, she walked down Wellington Street and across Waterloo Bridge and along Waterloo Road before crossing onto New Cut, where her widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters lived in two rooms over a tailor’s shop.
She could have avoided the penny toll on Waterloo Bridge by walking farther on to Westminster Bridge, but this added too much time on her journey, time she could ill afford. As it was, she barely had three hours with her mother and brothers before having to head back to Montague Street. Doctor Hastings-Haskey was most insistent that Alice be back by 9 o’clock. It is not seemly for a young lady to be out upon the streets after that hour, he proclaimed. In any case, Alice had no desire to be abroad beyond that time, there were many unsavoury characters about even at that time of night.
None of the shopkeepers or regulars along her route could recall seeing Alice Newton that day. Alice never arrived at her Mothers lodgings. She was just seventeen years old.
Although the body of Alice Newton was identified within a day, as with the Mary Hopwell killings, the identity of the victim brought Collingwood and the other officers working on the case no closer to their killer. All references to similarities in the cases were withheld from the official statements.
SUSAN SIDDONS WAS JUST UNLUCKY. A classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, victim of that blind chance that bring killer and victim swirling together into the same murderous orbit. Quite simply, she got out at the wrong station.
Susan had been to visit her crippled mother in Hammersmith. She had taken tea and thin cucumber sandwiches, but feeling unwell, declined more tea and a slice of cherry and almond cake and set out for home. She boarded the underground train at Hammersmith Station, on the District Line. She would take the train to Westminster Bridge Station and cross over the river by Westminster Bridge to Lambeth, past Lambeth Palace, home of the Bishop of Southwark, and to a small, terraced rooming house by the railway tracks where she lived with her husband Edgar and his sister Agnes.
She had had a severe headache for most of the day, a sick muggy headache not helped by the thundery weather, a close humid day pregnant with an oncoming storm that stubbornly refused to arrive.
The stifling confines of the tube train did nothing to ease the throbbing ache that burned across her brow like a blowtorch melting tar. The rattling of the railway carriage, the flashing stations lights, the rushing proximity of smoke blackened walls as the Underground train hurtled through tunnels served only to heighten the racking headache that she felt threatened to split her head apart.
She clasped her hands to her head, massaging her throbbing temples with her palms to try to ease the pain, if only for a moment or two. The flashing lights speared into her eyeballs like darts of fire, waves of nausea swept over her and she feared she was about to vomit. There seemed to be no air, her skin felt hot and clammy at the same time and the rocking of the carriage jarred her throbbing head and neck even more. She had to get out. She had to get some air. With a jerk and a hiss of steam, the train pulled into a station. She looked up from her misery to try to read the station name, but her vision was blurred and smeared. This must be my stop, she thought, trying to count how many stops the train had made since she boarded. Baron’s Court, West Kensington, Earl’s Court (where her now dead father had taken her to see the Great American and Buffalo Bill show when she was a girl) Brompton, South Kensington, Sloane Square, Victoria, she remembered passing Victoria. Must be my stop, she thought, must be my stop.
Another wave of nausea hit her like a punch to the stomach. She had to get out. Staggering to her feet, she pushed her way past on-boarding passengers; angry words of rebuke followed her as she pushed her way out onto the platform, reeling across to lean against the far wall, resting her head against the cool of the glazed tiles. Another hiss of steam and the train moved away, the rush of air buffeting at her clothes like a series of slaps.
How long she stood there she couldn’t say, a burst of onrushing air ejected from the darkening tunnel heralded the arrival of another train. The olive green train, with polished brass dome covers, hissed into the station like an angered dragon. A jostle of passengers passed her by and, slowly, Susan made her way along seemingly endless passageways, up the moving staircase and, without knowing how, out into the cool fresh air of the street. The threatening storm had not broken and the heat and humidity was more oppressive than ever, it felt as though her head was being beaten on an anvil of heat and pain.
She walked a short distant, not looking at her surroundings, walking with a blind instinct in the direction she would always take when leaving the station heading towards the Embankment and Westminster Bridge.
Suddenly she sensed that something was not right, some unfamiliarity had struck her subconscious, and, looking around wildly, realised that in her fevered desperation to escape from the stifling confines of the underground she had got off at the wrong station. She did not know where she was. Nothing was familiar, the street, the houses, the shops; none of them resembled the streets where she should have exited. She was lost and her panic closed down upon her like a heavy black shroud. She had already turned another corner away from the station and could find no bearings, in her desperate urge to get back to the station she took a wrong turning yet again and found herself more lost than ever. Close to tears, tormented by her headache she turned back again, walking even further away from the station concourse. She staggered down the street as another wave of nausea hit her, almost doubling her up and she clung to a gas-lamp post to stop her tumbling over.
She did not see the coach that pulled up alongside her, heard only the soothing voice that offered her help, the hand on her elbow that assisted her inside, the black silk curtains that shut out the light from her eyes forever.
Her body, like the previous two murders, had been dumped into the Thames. She was found at low tide upon the riverbank on the Isle of Dogs. The body had been in the water for far longer than the other two bodies and decomposition was well established, but Hamilton Dewar was still able to establish the manner of death. The cutting and mutilation left no doubt that Susan Siddons was the third known victim of the Crucifixion Killer. Susan Siddons was twenty years old, only recently married. Her husband, Edgar Siddons, a bank clerk at Coutts Bank in the Strand was distraught; the day after his wife’s funeral, he hanged himself from the stairs of
their Lambeth rooming house.
Chapter 11
WITH A SIGH, CHARLES COLLINGWOOD LAID ASIDE THE FILE on Susan Siddons. He looked at the pile of other documentation that Gimlet and PC Maggs were trying to collate into their original files.
At random, he picked a loose document from an unsorted pile at random. It was a copy of his report, prepared some weeks after the murder of Susan Siddons, summarising the progress of the case to that date. In essence, there had been no substantive progress.
There were names in the report. Names given by informants, but informants often had a grudge to bear and named people they disliked out of spite or revenge. There was no evidence connecting any of those named (by unknown informants) with the murders and Collingwood had to surmise that most of the information was malicious in intent, but even so, every lead, spurious or not, had to be investigated.
He had written:
No progress has yet been made in obtaining any definite clue to the Crucifixion murderer or murderers. A great number of clues and leads have been examined and exhausted without finding anything suspicious that could lead to the identity of the perpetrator. A large force of officers is employed and every point is examined that seems to offer any prospect of a discovery.
The main points of enquiry are:
The lunatic Hindsmith, who claims to be the killer, is conclusively eliminated from this enquiry as he was incarcerated in an Asylum for the Insane in Bow at the presumed date of all killings.
A man named Edgarson or Edgarsen [sic] a Swedish man was arrested in Charing Cross for threatening a prostitute with a knife when she attempted to steal his pocketbook. He was released on bail but has since absconded. He is being looked for but cannot be found as yet. The suspicion must be that he has fled to his home country.
A brothel keeper, one Millicent Maguire claims that her husband, James Patrick Maguire, arrived home on the morning of the Siddons murder with blood on his hands and clothes. No bloodstained clothes have been found and Maguire can prove beyond reasonable doubt that he was in the company of another woman at the time of the murder. Mrs Maguire’s allegations are thought to be motivated by jealousy.
A lodging house proprietor, who will not give her address or name, writes to state that a man recently living in her house is ‘acting strangely’ and ‘was seen with blood on him.’ His appearance was described and where he might be found. When the detectives came near he bolted but was chased and apprehended. The blood is animal, (he is a slaughter man at Smithfield’s) and ran because he is wanted for burglary and housebreaking. He is now in custody
awaiting trial for these offences.
All these cases are being followed up, but no doubt will be exhausted in a few days.
Hours and hours of wasted police time producing absolutely nothing. Passing the file across to Maggs for him to file, Collingwood then reached for the file on Katherine Anne Pellew, known as Katie Cornfields, because of her bright yellow hair, hair the colour of sun bleached corn on a bright blue skied summer day.
KATIE CORNFIELDS WOULD ALWAYS SWEAR that she was not a regular prostitute, but she had no other known source of income and had been arrested on no less than five occasions for solicitation. She worked a patch on the upper end of Haymarket, not far from Piccadilly Circus, just round the corner from Leicester Square. To the back of Haymarket, behind the porticoed façade of the theatres and bright lights of the saloons, lay a knotted tangle of narrow streets and alleys, a warren of dark courts, unlit passageways, verminous tenements and squalid criminal taverns, a netherworld of painted drabs, drunken bullies, child whores, prize fight pugs, pickpockets, magsmen, macers and shofulmen.
However, Katie Cornfields kept herself above the tide of scum that ebbed and flowed through the rookery behind her, telling herself she was a cut above all that. ‘Well, she’d say. ‘ If I’ve got no friends to call on, I’ll get myself up about four o’clock, bathe and dress and take my son, my son Clarence, round to my mother’s, she looks after him for me. I give her a few shillings or so, and he’s glad to go, dotes upon his grandmother he does, more so than ever he does on me, and that’s the honest truth.
Then I may stroll the streets for an hour or two, maybe I might meet someone, if I want some money that is; then down I’ll go to Holborn , dance a little and if somebody likes me I take him home with me. Else, I’ll go Haymarket, maybe wander from one café to another, or else I’ll watch the carriage trade, the broughams and hansoms, certain to find a good man there. I do it if I like the man and he likes me, otherwise not. There’s the theatre trade and café trade, a good class of gentleman, appreciative of a lady like me.’
Unlike the girls who worked the streets behind, Kati did not regularly fornicate up against the walls of alleys or doorways. Preferably, her clientele took her either to a hotel or convenient ‘hot bed’ night house, or if it were to be an all-night assignation, back to her rooms in St Martin’s. But she could only ever take one man back to her rooms, her landlady, Mrs Magenta Blick, she would tolerate one man, for that was just being sociable, but more than one was not decent. Just not decent at all.
Even so, there were occasions, when her client was in a hurry, or had no money to pay for a room for an hour and if trade were slack, then she would take her punters into the rancid alleys and doorways behind the Haymarket. But that was not her usual trade. She was a Haymarket tail, a cut above the drabs who worked the streets behind, ready to raise their skirts to any man for the price of a glass of gin.
It was early evening; a constant regatta of broughams and hansoms plied up and down the Haymarket, stopping and setting down, a seemingly endless cavalcade of well-dressed men in starched fronts and opera hats and elegant women swathed in yards of watered silk, ready for the theatres or dinner. Katie Cornfields stood by the kerbside, white silk brollie about her shoulders, it was raining now, a steady monotonous summer drizzle, the insidious rain that seems not too heavy but can soak through to the skin as easily as a downpour. She smiled at every man who passed by her manner an open invitation, her other hand perched on a saucy hip, her profession obvious to all, no matter how she might try to convince herself otherwise.
Katie saw the black coach as it turned up Haymarket, carriage lights unlit. She instantly knew, from the slow deliberate way it made its way up the cobbled street that the occupant was looking for trade. She stepped forward, a bit of class this one and I’m just the girl for that. A girl she slightly knew, Charlotte Baggelley, known as Charlie Baggs, who normally worked the backstreets behind the Haymarket, tried to catch the attention of the coach, but it glided on past. Charlie shrugged, noticing, almost without realising it, a golden swirly S painted onto the door of the coach.
The coach pulled up alongside Katie Cornfields, the near-side horse, as black and as shining as the coach itself, suddenly tossed its head and snorted, making her jump. Then it raised its tail and defecated, dumping a steaming heap of dung right by her feet. She wrinkled her nose at the acrid smell and stepped back. As she did so, the carriage door swung open in an obvious invitation for her to enter. Anxious to get out of the insistent rain and away from the stink of horse dung, she climbed into the coach without a second thought.
Charlie Baggs walked up Haymarket and watched Katie Cornfields climb into the black coach, for some reason the black coach, and its unseen occupants intrigued Charlie. She knew she was as pretty as Katie Cornfields, prettier in fact, even though she did not have the golden tumble of blonde hair like Katie, but then, nobody, but nobody, had hair like Katie Cornfields. Why, Charlie wondered, why had she been turned down in preference to Katie Cornfields? Whom everyone knew had more airs and graces than a duchess, trying to make out she was somehow better than all the other working girls – but she lifted her skirts and spread her legs for money just the same as all the others. Bitch.
Two days later, Katie’s mother Constance, tired out by the incessant demands of her grandson Clarence and worried about her daughter, reported her missing. ‘She’s stayed away o
ne night, oftentimes one night but sure as rain is rain she’ll come by in the late morning to pick up Clarence. Sure as sure. She’s a good girl, a good girl, and she’s never stayed away two nights. Never she done two nights away and I are sorely worried, that I am.’
Enquiries were made on the street and Charley Baggs remembered Katie Cornfields climbing into the black coach with the swirly gold ‘S’ embossed upon the door. She told PC Fiddymount, a young policeman whose beat passed her working pitch. Fiddymount’s report was passed up the chain of command to Collingwood, who interviewed Charlie at some length and then issued a bulletin requesting that all officers look out for a black coach, drawn by two horses, heavily curtained but with a monogrammed gold ‘S’ painted on the door.
Charlie even drew a likeness of the monogram, the swirls curling about the head of the letter like a cracking whip.
Collingwood did not know for sure that Katie Cornfields was another girl to be added to the list of crucified victims, in fact he prayed that he was wrong. That Katie Cornfields had gone away for a longer assignation than normal and that in a day or so she would stroll back onto her pitch on the Haymarket as if nothing were amiss, but deep in his heart of hearts he knew, he knew, with that feral gut instinct that any good policeman develops that she was dead. Had died in the foulest manner imaginable and that her mutilated corpse would end up in the river as had all the others. The sighting of the black coach was the only solid clue he had, but he could not, dare not, place too much hope upon that briefly glimpsed sighting.
Chapter 12
IT WAS CLOSE TO THE END OF HIS SHIFT AND PC PERCY GUTTERIDGE WAS TIRED. He was fifty-six years old and was feeling ever one of those years this day. But even so, tired as he was, he was still a good copper, observant to the ebb and flow of his beat, the same beat he had walked day and night for seventeen years now, ever since his transfer to Chelsea, B Division, from F Division in Paddington.