by Robin Adair
What made me think of that? mused the Patterer and shrugged. No matter. Maybe it would come back to him.
Even for Dunne and William King, any questions about Obadiah Dawks – whether addressed to publicans and patrons in the St Patrick’s Inn and other pubs, or to shopkeepers and passers-by – met with blank stares, sullen shrugs and denials of any knowledge. Their Englishness was obvious enough for one drinker to mutter at them, under his rummy breath, ‘Erin-go-bragh’ – and obligingly translate it for the ‘strangers’ into ‘Ireland forever’.
‘All that’s left,’ confessed the Patterer, as they found themselves in a certain part of Cambridge Street, ‘is the Hulk.’
He did not mean the gradually rotting wreck of the once good ship Phoenix, which slumped sail-less in the harbour, serving out its last days as a makeshift extra prison. Dunne’s Sheer Hulk, though also much decayed, was a tavern, yet a pale shadow of the hostelry it had been when Sam Hulbert had first hung up his sign ten years earlier.
Hulbert had also been a boatman for the fabulously wealthy Naval Officer, which also meant Customs Collector, Captain John Piper. Some of that worthy’s fame rubbed off onto Hulbert – in a most dramatic manner. The Patterer recalled the events of a year earlier, when the Collector, widely known as ‘the Prince of Australia’, had tried to end his life (at the same time burying accusations of incompetence, if not dishonesty) by throwing himself from his yacht at the Heads. Sam was one of the crew that jumped in and saved him. Now, Captain Piper was gone, retired to his country estate, Hulbert was no longer mine host, and the Sheer Hulk had a completely different crew.
The Hulk certainly had a colourful clientele, the Pieman and the Patterer agreed as they stepped from the sunlit street into the taproom. There was a long bar against one wall, with rough tables and benches ranged against the others. Ragged civilians, tanned men who must be sailors and some soldiers drank and talked or played cards, all by the light of sputtering candles.
A small woman with no teeth sang loudly, to the accompaniment of a fiddle scratched by a string bean of a man whose trouser legs were too short, showing scars and scabs left on his ankles by chafing prison leg-irons. A giant islander, perhaps an Otaheitean, danced with a young white girl.
The pub was a sanctuary for people unhappy with the trappings of relatively polite public-house society, which doubtless was happy to see the back of them.
The Patterer needed only one outsider – and he found him – a man whose difficult life now left him no inclination for political or cultural considerations. Survival was all that worried Thomas Hughes, who had not been resilient or lucky enough to overcome the stigma of having been a hangman, and a bad one to boot.
Hughes bleated that he could – nay, should – have had a tavern of his own. Mr Redman, in the heart of the town, was supposed to have been a hangman, but the flawed Jack Ketch in the Sheer Hulk wasn’t sure if that was true. He suspected it was just malicious gossip. Anyway, as some retired executioners in Britain appeared to have done, he would call his pub the Help the Poor Struggler, a reference to the time-honoured tradition of a hangman being merciful in his duty and dragging down on the legs of a slowly choking victim to break their neck.
Therein lurked the problem that had destroyed his career and way of life. The days of simply ‘turning off’ – kicking away a ladder under a condemned man or driving away a cart, either way leaving the prisoner strangling on the gibbet – were doomed.
The newfangled ‘drop’ system required an executioner to ensure mathematically the instant success of the hanging by relating the distance of fall to the body’s height and weight. Too short a rope and the subject was slowly strangled, too long and the head was in danger of being ripped off.
It was most unfair, he moaned. How was an unlettered cove supposed to know, for instance, that a man (or woman) weighing 142 pounds and standing five feet and four inches tall needed a long drop of seven feet and nine inches to make the falling body break at the third cervical vertebra? After all, no one expected a scourger to know that his ‘cat’ should have a handle twenty inches long and cord tails each thirty-one inches. It was all bullshite!
So, he found it hard to find a friendly nod or even nourishment, let alone lodgings and employment. The habitués of the Sheer Hulk were less censorious – and then, today, there were these two friendly fellers who bought him a bottle and gave him money for a feed. And all he had to do was tell them the whereabouts of that scribbler from The Gazette who would get himself arseholes on rum, brandy, anything, and bore everyone in the bar witless with his mad jingles.
The Patterer and the Flying Pieman finished their drams of watered rum, for once grateful a barman had cheated them – they would need clear heads. They stepped out into the sunlight, to plunge into the Lord Wellington and hope that Captain Francis Nicholas Rossi had not met his Waterloo.
Chapter Twenty-nine
They went and told the sexton, and
The sexton tolled the bell.
– Thomas Hood, Faithless Sally Brown (1826)
St Phillip’s church, sketched by Joseph Fowles.
The inky-fingered, penny-a-liner, Grub Street hack, Obadiah Dawks, according to hangman Hughes, was of late in the habit of hanging his hat (and, no doubt, hopefully his trousers) at the home of a young widow, a seamstress, in Cumberland Street. The house turned out to be at the southern end of the street, near Charlotte Place, which ran at right angles to the main road, George Street, and between the army barracks’ main guardhouse and St Phillip’s church.
But when the three searchers arrived, they found the small cottage empty, with no signs of recent life. The furniture was clean, so someone had dusted since the last ‘Brickfielder’, but there was no fresh food and the stove was cold.
The Patterer left the others inside and walked into Charlotte Place and noted that the clock on the squat church tower stood at one p.m. Odd. He consulted his watch, which was a handsome gold half-hunter, the only luxury item in his deliberately drab day dress. In a town teeming with rehabilitated (perhaps) ‘fingersmiths’, discretion was the better part of vanity and he kept the watch securely unseen.
The delicately enamelled dial clearly showed one-thirty p.m. He frowned. By now, they had searched for the journalist for no more than an hour, surely. Dawks had left the Cat and Fiddle at noon and they had been hot on his heels. Where did the other thirty minutes on the church clock come from? Or, rather, where had they gone to?
His frown deepened until he recalled that the Charlotte Place clock was always half an hour slower than the timepiece on the central Hyde Park convict barracks, the clock against which most people tended to set their time. And that was his habit, too.
So, it really was one-thirty p.m. God knows, chided the Patterer, you’d imagine that with so few prominent public clocks they’d agree. But, no, it seemed that two different gentlemen tended their mysterious workings and they had a never-ending difference of pig-headed opinion.
His forehead creased once more. Something else was odd, too: that’s it – the manner in which the church bell was ringing. From the sound of it, the campanologist in question was no more adept at his art than was the clock-winder at his. For these were erratic tones, no skilled ringing of the changes.
Dunne looked across and studied the church closely. He knew it was not the original – that had fallen into disrepair and been rebuilt. But for the moment there were still structural problems, and the stocky Norman-style building had no functioning belltower. Thus there was no carillon of up to four bells, only the one. All this meant that the rope was controlled at floor level, behind the pulpit.
Of course, the bell often rang, for holy offices, celebrations of life and death – weddings, christenings, funerals – and national triumphs. In January 1816 there had been many peals to mark the victory of Wellington over Bonaparte at Waterloo. Better late than never – the news had taken seven months to reach the colony. But today the doors were shut, the forecourt empty of people, the stre
et bare of parked carriages or tethered horses.
On an impulse, the Patterer walked across the pavement, pushed open the iron-studded door and entered the gloomy vestibule. His vision gradually adjusted as he moved to the empty nave and walked towards the chancel. Apart from the irregular clanging of the bell, the church was silent. There was no one in the pews, before the altar or in the pulpit.
Something did move, however.
Within a minute of entry Dunne was outside in the street, beckoning to the Captain and the Flying Pieman, who had come out to look for him.
‘I believe we’ve found Obadiah Dawks,’ he announced when they met. ‘He’s in the church.’
‘How is he?’ asked Rossi. ‘Still dead drunk?’
The Patterer shook his head. ‘No, just dead.’
‘Dead! How?’
‘See for yourself.’ He ushered them into the sandstone sanctuary of the vestibule, their rather hesitant paces marching in time to the tuneless bell.
What the Police Chief and the Pieman saw shocked them with its inhuman irreverence.
Over the years many dead men had been on display at this head of the nave, lying there during their funeral service, before their long last journeys to the old burial ground or the Sandhills cemetery. Dignity was all.
This man was dead but different. He was not decently coffined; instead, he swung by the neck in a rough noose made by coiling the bell rope beneath his chin. His head hung forward and his feet just brushed the flagged floor. An earlier series of twists to the rope was still causing the bell to ring, albeit progressively more slowly, and making the suspended man continue to turn in an ever-diminishing dance of death.
William King pushed forward. ‘For pity’s sake, cut him down! He may be still alive.’
The Patterer restrained him. ‘Steady, Pieman,’ he soothed. ‘He’s gone. I felt earlier for a pulse. There was nothing.’
Captain Rossi was cool. ‘Why, in heaven’s name, would he do this? What drove him? He seems to have been on the run. From us? We only wanted to question him, not arrest him. However, young William is right – we should get him down and off to the hospital. Owens may be able to tell us something that is not apparent to us now.’
He moved to unwrap the choking rope but, again, Dunne intervened. ‘No, sir, I’m sorry, but I believe the doctor must see him in situ. Something is seriously amiss here and we must have a second opinion.’
‘What’s amiss?’ protested Rossi. ‘Apart from the poor fellow topping himself, of course.’
‘That’s it exactly,’ replied the Patterer warmly. ‘You ask why he did it, and it’s a good question. But I have an even better one: Did he do it?’
In the stunned silence that followed, he explained, partly. ‘Within this last hour or so I had a seemingly unimportant conversation. That now raises in my mind the doubt that this was a suicide, or perhaps an accident. No, gentlemen, this smells of yet another murder, one strangely related to our case.’
The Captain gave in to the Patterer’s resolve. ‘Very well. William, find my carriage. We must have come almost full circle from where we left it near the Cat and Fiddle. I’m spent. Take it and bring back Dr Owens.’
After the Pieman had flown on his errand, Rossi and Dunne sat in a pew. They did not speak. And, as if in some strange sympathy, it was soon time for the body to stop its oscillation and the bell to stop tolling.
Chapter Thirty
That all was wrong because not all was right.
– George Crabbe, Tales ‘The Convert’ (1812)
After a quick but careful look at the body hanging from the bell-rope noose, Dr Owens turned to Nicodemus Dunne and Captain Rossi, who were sitting in a front pew. ‘You can bring him down now,’ he instructed, at which Dunne unravelled the loose loops of rope and gently let the body settle on the stone-flagged floor.
Owens took over now and examined Dawks more closely. ‘I’d say he died not long before you found him,’ he told the Patterer. ‘That’s why the bell was still ringing – he was senseless but his last spasms were decreasingly agitating the rope.’
‘Did he hang himself?’ asked Rossi. ‘Or did someone top him?’
Owens hesitated, then spoke carefully. ‘He didn’t hang himself, in the sense of execution. But then, no one else did either.’
‘I don’t understand,’ complained the Pieman, and he spoke for his two companions.
‘Well,’ said the doctor, ‘someone strung him up, but not to kill him that way. He wasn’t “hanged by the neck until dead” in our judicial sense. I can tell straightaway. Look.’ He waved at the corpse. ‘The neck is lolling, certainly, but is not broken. The tongue is not blue, swollen or protruding. Note, too, that there is no blueness of the skin indicating cyanosis, imperfectly oxygenated blood. Also, the whites of his eyes are not marked by flecks of blood.
‘Yet he was dying when he was arranged in that makeshift noose.
‘How? Only when I examined his head did I receive a clue – nay, more than that, confirmation. See?’ He pushed aside long, lank hair from Dawks’s left temple. ‘There is a considerable and regular contusion surrounding a small, but deep, wound. Something hard smacked our fellow’s temple and something else, very sharp, tore and punctured the area. Then he was hoisted up unconscious in the bell rope. He died from the blow, of uncontrollable bleeding to the brain. A clot.’
‘What could the weapon have been?’ asked the Captain.
‘Ah,’ said Owens, ‘shall we say weapons plural? But there’s nothing in this immediate area to fit the bill. I suppose he could have been struck elsewhere and brought here. But if so, there would have to have been at least two attackers, to carry him. There are no scuff marks on the body or its clothes to suggest dragging by one person.’
‘What of the nature of the wound,’ ventured Dunne. ‘I recall that, in the matter of the castrato, Bello, you made a point that different weapons left identifying marks – you recall the triangular bayonet theory?’
‘I do indeed,’ replied Thomas Owens, ‘and I can apply that rule here – though it disturbs me.’
‘How, pray?’ asked Rossi.
Thomas Owens frowned. ‘I’m disturbed because the evidence before me suggests that Obadiah Dawks was somehow pecked to death.’
‘Pecked?’
‘Precisely, by a giant bird of prey.’
He showed them the wound on the temple, close up. ‘Look. There’s the bruising on the unbroken skin. Then the entry point, and there is little flesh in this part to distort the incision, which is exactly the rip or tear that the hard, sharp beak of a diving hawk, falcon, eagle or some such would make. There is a bird here, the Great Australian Kingfisher, the “laughing jackass”, that has an even more pointed beak that could skewer a victim. It will crack a snake’s back like a whip with ease.’
‘But don’t raptors have sharp claws for seizing and tearing at their prey?’ queried Dunne. ‘And Dawks or his clothing have no such marks.’
‘Agreed,’ said Owens. ‘But I still believe the wound was made by a bird’s beak. I think his killers “hanged” him in the hope of distracting attention from the real method.’ He stood up. ‘If the Pieman could return me, I’ll take the body now.’
The doctor left with the Pieman and Dawks just in time to avoid any part in the task of pacifying the distressed sexton, who had just arrived.
This is all very exciting, but I really must do some bread-and-butter work, decided Dunne and headed for The Gleaner, the academic Dr Laurence Hynes Halloran’s ailing newspaper. He was pleased that, by placing the advertisement that had smoked out Bagley, he had been able to help the ageing Emancipist, who had discharged his seven years’ transportation for forgery.
As Dunne was about to leave the Gleaner office, he remembered something else about the publisher – as well as having been a teacher, he had been a Royal Navy chaplain at Trafalgar. Dunne knew that the man was an expert on the battle of twenty-three years ago. Perhaps he also knew details of the Battle of the
Nile in 1798?
Not a lot, admitted Halloran. Yes, he understood William Balcombe had served there. On the William Tell? He could not place it in the British battle fleet. He began a halting, tedious list of the dozen Royal Navy ships of the line he believed were involved – Goliath, Theseus, Audacious, Bellerophon, Minotaur …
The Patterer halted the recital as courteously as he could and hastily took his leave. He had seen, sailing under full canvas down the street outside, someone else he wanted to question further: Mrs Betsy Abell.
She was escorted by Grenville, so Dunne could quite properly approach her. He idly thought how protocol was amusingly inconsistent. He could be informal in public with Miss Susannah Hathaway because she was of the stage and, thus, not quite respectable. Some theatrical ladies even appropriated the ‘safe’ title ‘Mrs’ even though they were single. At the other end of the social spectrum, Mrs Abell (though unfairly tainted to some degree by her husband’s desertion) should only meet a strange man when accompanied by a male escort of her own family.
Dunne bowed to the young woman and nodded to her companion, who returned the courtesy with his usual black-toothed smile.
‘Perhaps you can enlighten me, madam. Why did they call Napoleon Bonaparte the Little Corporal, when he was never a corporal and nor was he little? I believe he stood about five feet eight inches tall, a good height.’
‘You are right, Mr Dunne,’ she replied. ‘He perhaps looked shorter because he had quite a bull neck, which seemed to drag down his head. The “little” and the “corporal” were actually affectionate names bestowed by his men, because his victorious march began when he was so young and, although it was a false impression, inexperienced.’
‘He made the bee his emblem,’ said the Patterer, ‘an unusual sign for a warrior.’