Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  His greatest dream was to see the creation of a museum for the resort, where its role as a catalyst for social change, as well as for entertainment, could be properly celebrated. From its first great expansion and period of popularity in Victorian times, through the town’s heyday in the 50s and 60s, to its present decline, his faith in the resort was unshakeable. Colin was its staunchest advocate and defender, despite those voices, including some of the town’s own public figures, which predicted a lingering and inevitable death. He would not see this wonderful place dismantled like some sort of redundant liner hauled into dry dock. If history had taught him anything it was that the resort’s time would come again.

  He looked at the photograph. The hats in question belonged to a sea of Victorian faces crowded onto the pier, the people so tightly packed that the planking could not be seen; faces that looked out at Colin across the years in faded monochrome, and yet somehow had lost none of their humanity, none of the quirks and characteristics that had made them who they were. The archivist angled the photograph towards the window. The hats! Every single person in the picture was wearing some sort of hat, creating a perfect graphical representation of the social classes gathered on the pier in that pale afternoon sunshine. One or two highly polished toppers rose above the masses, there was a scattering of bowlers, and the rest wore flat caps, with the ladies’ creations standing out like fanciful meringues. It could have been staged, so neatly did this ubiquitous wearing of headgear demonstrate the era’s sharply delineated social strata, yet Colin knew it was simply folk, probably in their Sunday best, enjoying a brief respite from their labours as they took the sea air with a stroll along the pier.

  A toff, wearer of one of the top hats, was poised, about to take a drag from his cigarette; two women giggled in the foreground, clearly amused and slightly embarrassed by the photographer’s presence; one of the bowler-hatted middle-class gents, wearing a pair of small round glasses and sporting a severely clipped moustache, looked alarmingly like Doctor Crippen. They all had purpose, life, but then they had walked past the camera and were gone, back into the mystery of their resumed, unphotographed existence. What had happened to them after that second, that moment’s immortality? Who had they loved? What had they hoped for? It was this immense unknowability to history that Colin loved above all else, the dozens of questions posed by even the simplest photograph or artefact; this, and the uncovering of an answer to just one of these questions, when his spotlight picked out another detail on the dark hull of the past.

  Colin gently slid the photograph into a plastic folder, attached a circular self-adhesive label to the folder and printed VA341 on the label, then added the code to his Victorian Archive file and wrote Crowded Pier — late nineteenth century (HATS!) alongside the code. He smiled at this touch of whimsy, which was all the more conspicuous for its positioning amongst the dispassionate numbers and phrases elsewhere on the page, like a Hawaiian shirt at an undertakers’ convention. The professional in him baulked slightly at this lapse into subjectivity. In five hundred years scholars looking through this archive could be influenced by the word, with its bold lettering and exclamation mark, and come to a skewed conclusion as to its importance. He thought about Tippexing the entry out and writing another, but then what would those same hypothetical scholars think? They might be sufficiently intrigued by the correction fluid to use some sort of X-Ray scanner to reveal the original entry, discover HATS!, and make assumptions about why the word had been erased. This would, Colin, concluded, be a more disruptive intervention than simply leaving the word as it was, so he moved the archive file to one side and reached into the shoebox for another photograph.

  This one depicted a street scene, with a horse and cart carrying what appeared to be bales of cotton or cloth as its main focal point. The cart’s driver stood next to his horse, one hand holding the reins while the other was tucked, somewhat awkwardly, into his jacket pocket. Colin could imagine the man’s indecision leading up to the photograph being taken, as he tried to decide what to do with his free hand. Being photographed in Victorian times would have been an unusual, if not daunting, experience, so for the drayman to find himself the subject of this street photographer, with his intimidating contraption of wood and brass, it was not surprising he affected a somewhat stilted pose. His parents may have been able to afford a photograph of him as a baby or young child, and if he had served in the armed forces or some other official organisation he could well have posed as part of a group, but apart from such possibilities this image may have constituted the only visual record of the man. Had he understood its significance, and placed his hand in several positions before, undecided and unnerved by the photographer disappearing beneath his cloth, thrusting it into his pocket? At least, if this was the drayman’s only image, he had managed to bequeath a dignified expression to history, unsmiling but with a compassionate light in his eyes. The young man sitting on top of the bales, presumably an assistant or apprentice, had turned his head as the picture was taken, reducing his identity to a grey blur.

  The archivist turned his attention to the background. He enjoyed trying to match the grimy, soot-stained facades and buildings in historical photographs to the present-day resort; any small detail which could flesh out the town of a century or more ago was precious, because to Colin it was these fragments that brought the past to life, far more so than the extensively documented national figures and events of an era.

  It was then he noticed a bill poster attached to a fence and half-obscured by one of the cart’s wheels. By its layout Colin could tell it was advertising some form of theatrical entertainment, but the graininess of the image, combined with his need for a new, stronger pair of reading glasses, meant some assistance was needed to reveal more detail. He reached for his magnifying stand, placed the photograph underneath it and manoeuvred the desk lamp into position next to the stand. When he looked down again Colin felt his heart thump as the white ‘Pavilion Theatre’ masthead came into focus, below which could be made out, in bold type, ‘Georgie P—’, the rest of the name being covered by the cartwheel. To the local historian, however, the name’s visible portion was more than enough to know that this poster was advertising Georgie Parr, the Camden Clown, a name synonymous with one of the resort’s darkest episodes. Naturally Colin knew about the music hall star’s suicide beneath the pier following the brutal murder of a young prostitute, but there were precious few facts to be found regarding the terrible incident. It was almost as though there had been some form of cover-up, perhaps instigated by certain of the town’s authorities in order to protect the reputation of the resort. A scandal involving one of that era’s most well-known and controversial entertainers, who had been celebrated and condemned in equal measure by his contemporaries, may well have tainted the resort’s hard-won pre-eminence. There had been, of course, one or two lurid headlines in the papers, but the story appeared to vanish from the collective consciousness with amazing alacrity. Now, seeing the poster guilelessly advertising that infamous name triggered a burning desire within the archivist to find out more, regardless of the difficulty. There was something terribly unresolved about the whole affair, not only for Georgie Parr and the prostitute but also for the resort. These two deaths had been overlooked for too long, their voices ignored, and this treatment had to have left a sense of shame within the resort’s psyche. Colin was sure that an explanation could be found, that he could bind together sufficient fragments to offer at least some degree of closure. He did not believe in an afterlife, nor could he discern any kind of benevolent guiding hand behind the blood and struggle of history; facts were his only gospel, and if they were hidden, or remote, then surely this made them all the more important.

  VA342 he wrote on a label, before sticking it to a new plastic folder and sliding the photograph into its new home. Draymen with pier Pavilion Theatre poster — Georgie Parr top of bill he wrote in the file, and this time his entry seemed to him a model of understatement, like the unruffled surface of a dee
p, and very dark, lake.

  “Colin?” came a thin, high-pitched voice from across the hall.

  He leaned slightly towards the lounge doorway, as though this marginal reduction in distance would help his mother hear him more clearly. “I’m in here, Mum.”

  “What time is it?”

  He glanced at the mantelpiece clock. “Half-past six.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” There was a pause. “Colin?”

  “Yes?” he said, a note of long-suffering forbearance elongating the word, stretching it from the lounge to the bedroom like a pennant of servitude.

  “Is it too early for a cup of tea?”

  The Rusting Truth

  Colin’s large, hairless hands operated the microfilm viewer’s controls with a practised and casual dexterity, spinning the spools backwards and forwards as he hunted for a certain front page from November 1880. Outside the viewer’s metal hood the reference library’s quiet industry continued — the soft rhythm of books, an occasional rustle of newspaper, a cough, a sniff — but within the nineteenth century held sway, re-animated in the archivist’s head by so many wonderful trivialities: a paragraph detailing the transfer of a licence for the Unicorn Inn from one Gareth Humpage to a Miss Martha Lomas; an advertisement for ‘Beautiful French Millinery’; a flowery article on the joys of railway travel; the matter-of-fact reporting on the devastating bombardment of Alexandria by the British fleet; all these and more he could place within an imaginary three-dimensional template that, as the number of details grew and coalesced, formed a separate, entirely habitable world.

  The headline slid past and was gone again, but the archivist’s eyes were attuned to these briefest of glimpses; it was not reading as such, more a kind of subliminal absorption, so when TERRIBLE TRAGEDY ON PIER swept across the screen his hands were stopping the spools and rewinding almost before Colin had thought consciously about his actions.

  The page re-appeared. Colin adjusted his reading glasses and leaned in towards the viewer.

  TERRIBLE TRAGEDY ON PIER

  Music Hall Performer Hangs Himself After Brutal Murder

  A scene of the utmost depravity was to be found this morning when early mists lifted from the beach and pier to reveal the body of popular music hall entertainer Mr George Parr, hanging by the neck from a length of rope, having evidently taken his own life beneath the very pier upon which his work and reputation rested.

  Indeed, this would by all accounts be a tragic enough circumstance, but further horrors awaited the observer if he were to conduct no more than a cursory examination of the scene, as on the beach but a short distance from the sad remains of Mr Parr there lay the body of a Miss Hannah Goodwin, a young woman of fallen virtue, whose bruised and torn throat indicated that she had been most brutally strangled.

  Upon discovery of these two corpses the police were summoned, and an expeditious removal of the sad remains was swiftly ordered, with officers cognisant both of the sensibilities of visitors to the beach and pier, as well as the uncontrollable and pressing attentions of an incoming tide.

  As we describe this tragedy there have been no witnesses either called upon or who have volunteered to cast light on what may have transpired, so it seems the inescapable conclusion to be drawn is of a most villainous deed perpetrated by Mr Parr, who then, seized by some great remorse, fixed upon his own destruction as the only action remaining open to him. The reasons behind this savage act remain a mystery, notwithstanding the best efforts of the constabulary, but we can at least be somewhat eased in our sorrows with the knowledge that the family of the unfortunate Miss Goodwin has seen swift justice served on their daughter’s behalf.

  The results of a post-mortem examination on both players in this calamitous drama are due presently, their details to be found here together with any further developments.

  Colin levered his reading glasses up on top of his head and rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. The report, with its typically Victorian style of journalism, combining moral outrage with a salacious eye for gory detail, appeared to be wholly confident in its assessment of the situation, presumably encouraged by the lack of anyone to contradict its conclusion. Without witnesses, and with both protagonists taking their own account to the grave, it was perhaps tempting to put forward a likely scenario, particularly if it helped to sell newspapers, but the archivist was far more wary of such conjecture. All he saw was a hanged man and a strangled girl; what the circumstances of each death were, and whether or not there was a connection between the two, would be a matter for research. And even following a determined and exhaustive effort to uncover the truth, Colin was well aware he might never find it. Over one hundred years lay between him and that misty November night. The remote possibility of anyone still being alive who could have witnessed it first hand was hampered still further by their being little more than a baby at the time, and even if, allowing for a truly precocious feat of infant memory which was then recalled a century later with total accuracy, the likelihood was that their parents or nanny, on seeing the police activity or the corpses themselves, would have rapidly turned the pram around to spare their child from having to see such a distressing sight. No. If answers there were, they would be found by nothing more than methodical inquiry. Letters, diaries, newspapers, official records, death certificates; if anyone could coax the past from paper and ink it was Colin Draper.

  His first, simplest piece of groundwork was to see what the paper had subsequently to say, so the archivist scrolled through the rest of that day’s paper, moving the roll of microfilm along to the following day’s front page. Here, however, he could find no mention of the double death, neither as the main headline nor a smaller article, which surprised him. Undeterred, Colin worked his way through the entire paper. Nothing. This silence continued for another two days, until suddenly there it was again, second lead on page one.

  Music Hall Star’s Secret Vice

  No one in this thriving yet close-knit community can have studied the recent events relating to the music hall star Mr George Parr, known to many thousands as ‘Georgie Parr the Camden Clown’, and failed to be appalled by his treatment of the young prostitute Hannah Goodwin, who, little more than a child herself, was through sorry circumstance obliged to find work in this basest of professions.

  As regular readers will know, it is the steadfast stance of this newspaper to fight against immorality in the resort, as such behaviour can only tarnish its hard-fought reputation as the ideal recreational destination for decent, hard-working folk and their children, but we have a heart, and so feel only sorrowful pity for Hannah, who did not deserve to meet her fate in so ghastly a circumstance. There has been a good deal of detailed and scientific investigation into the case since last we reported on it, and we shall presently allow the man in charge, Inspector Henry Price, to explain in his own words his findings and conclusions, but first we must pass on the shocking revelation that George Parr had been an habitual guest of this town’s seamier inhabitants, regularly calling on their services for purposes that modesty precludes us from expounding upon.

  It seems, then, that Mr Parr’s behaviour took its lead from the coarse and licentious tone of his music hall act, which has for some years sailed perilously close to the wind in its choice of material, often causing outrage amongst the greater public whilst, we have to admit, garnering a devoted following in the halls themselves.

  Recent tragic events, therefore, seem to supply a compelling argument in favour of curbing the wilder excesses of these ‘comic’ turns, as they clearly have a disastrous effect on the morals of those exposed to them for any length of time. Granted, Mr Parr has had to endure tragedies in his personal life, losing first his wife and then his only child, but so have many folk, if not worse, and they have faced such adversity with fortitude and without recourse to immorality and murder.

  To close this tragic chapter we hand over editorship to Insp. Price, who provided us wit
h a statement which, in its professional and objective analysis, offers the definitive version of events that transpired beneath the pier on the 14th November 1880, in the fervent hope that we never again have to relate such a harrowing tale.

  ‘I was assigned to this case,’ Insp. Price begins, ‘less than an hour after the discovery of the two bodies, so on arrival at the scene they were in situ and I could make an initial assessment. Mr Parr’s corpse was quite advanced in its state of rigor mortis. My calculation was that death had occurred approximately eight to ten hours previously, by asphyxiation due to a makeshift noose. I also noted two scratches running along his jawline, and his jacket sleeve was slightly torn away. Moving to Miss Goodwin, I ascertained that her own death must have been concurrent with Mr Parr’s due to a similar degree of rigor to the limbs, and that death had been due once again to asphyxia, as evidenced by the severe bruising and tissue damage to her throat. I examined the area around both bodies and could find no other weapon, or indeed anything other than that which one would expect to find on a beach. There was no blood, and no visible wounds to either body.

  ‘I instructed my men to remove the bodies, which were then transported to St Barnabas’ Hospital morgue and prepared for autopsy. These were carried out by Dr Jonckheer, a gentleman of huge experience and skill in these matters, and on whose findings I have always placed the highest of regard.