by A J Wright
HANGING MURDER
A. J. Wright
© A. J. Wright 2019
A. J. Wright has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2019 by Endeavour Quill Ltd.
Endeavour Quill is an imprint of Endeavour Media Ltd.
Oh, to share a pint or two once more with friends who have gone:
John Edwards; Ray Peycke; Steve Arbury; John Stavers – Leeds University
John Kelly; John and Jimmy Mulligan; Jimmy Ball; Billy Rennox; Terry Critchley – Wigan
John Lewis, my brother-in-law with whom I travelled to Australia [twice!] and New Zealand to watch England Rugby League - Leigh
Jimmy Lewis, my brother-in-law, a proud ex-marine commando, later a coal miner who also worked in Mines Rescue – Leigh
Acknowledgements
Again, a great debt of gratitude to my agent, Sara Keane, of the Keane Kataria Literary Agency, whose advice and support I treasure.
I should also like to express my deepest thanks to Alice Rees and Miranda Summers-Pritchard at Endeavour. Their meticulous editing and sensible suggestions were greatly appreciated!
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.
I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
‘That fellow’s got to swing.’
Oscar Wilde – The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Table of Contents
Prologue
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
Epilogue
Prologue
For one person present, it was an object of beauty.
Its circumference was two and a half inches and made of white Italian hemp, four strands thick, and it stretched for twelve and a half feet, with an inlaid brass thimble at its lower end. A leather washer was then slid into place, adjustable, naturally, in order to provide a comfortable and practical fit.
With great care, he moved to the lever on the right of the two trap doors where the condemned man would soon stand. He gripped the ebony handle of the lever and pulled back hard. Immediately, both trap doors dropped open, remaining thus with the aid of the two springs on either side to prevent the doors rattling back. He nodded, satisfied, and ordered the attendant to close the trap doors, whereupon he repeated the routine twice more until he was sure the doors would drop freely.
Then he retired for the night, in the room in the prison grounds traditionally set aside for his use. Sleep would come easily for him, though not for the other one.
The next morning, he stood in the execution shed and looked at his fob watch. Two minutes to eight o’clock. He prided himself on his timing.
A door from the cells swung open, and the condemned man, Benjamin Goodfellow, was brought in. The prison chaplain, wearing suitably sombre robes, was walking close by his right-hand side, murmuring prayers from the burial service.
A faint smile made an attempt to enliven the hangman’s features, but with an admirable sense of place and duty, he quickly suppressed it.
Goodfellow.
If ever a chap were more wrongly named! There was nothing remotely good about this defiler and murderer of women. Still, he thought, taking some perverse satisfaction, what could be more cruel than what the chaplain was doing – reciting words from the fellow’s own funeral service while he still walked the earth? Within his hearing?
No other human being on God’s earth would hear the low, melancholy incantations from his own burial service. Only the condemned man is accorded such a grisly privilege.
Managing to combine swiftness with a measured calm, Simeon Crosby pinioned the man’s legs firmly, reaching up next to place the white hood over his face. Sometimes, before the hood removed from sight their last vision of life in the physical world, they wished to say something – a name, a prayer for forgiveness, even a last-second denial of guilt – but the practice wasn’t now encouraged, and Simeon would much rather they kept their mouths shut. He wouldn’t know how to respond other than with a grim silence. It was the reason he had refused to accompany the chaplain to the condemned man’s cell. The last time he had met Goodfellow, two weeks earlier, had resulted in the wretch flinging himself at Simeon’s feet in the cell and begging him to ‘show some fuckin’ mercy!’ The response the hangman had given – ‘Like you showed your poor wife, you mean? She was barely out of childhood!’ – had brought a stern note of warning from the governor and an official reprimand from the county sheriff. A condemned cell was no place for gloating, their expressions had said.
‘My Ada was a viper!’ Goodfellow had yelled, a pathetic attempt to justify, even at so late a stage, the foul crime he had committed. Now, though, he was silent, and Simeon could see the man’s legs shaking.
Simeon held his tongue. Any form of converse with the condemned man was to be avoided at all costs.
He stepped back, reached forward and placed the noose over the man’s head, hearing the sharp breathing and watching the fabric of the hood sucked in to assume the shape of the man’s mouth. Carefully, he placed the rope’s knot behind the man’s left ear, next to his jawbone. Then he examined for the final time the rope, the man’s pinioned legs and the two trap doors before moving quickly towards the lever. There was a dreadful hiatus as he waited for the under-sheriff to give the lethal order.
Once it was given, Simeon Crosby gripped the lever and pulled back with both hands as the man’s whole body started to quiver.
Nothing.
He lunged the lever forward, held on tightly and once more tugged hard, forcing the lever backwards.
But the trap doors stubbornly refused to budge.
‘Mr Crosby, sir?’ said the governor, his voice a blend of anger and horror.
A low keening filled the room. The condemned man was weeping. Crosby saw he had wet himself.
Suddenly, the room felt very hot. He tried for a third time to work the lever and bring about an end to this dreadful, not to say embarrassing, situation, but once more, the doors failed to open.
‘That is enough!’ The shout came not from the governor but from the under-sheriff who had been standing in the background, anxious that his first official witnessing of such an execution would soon be over. ‘Mr Crosby, remove the noose!’
‘But it’ll take only a minute. Seconds even. Those bolts must be…’
‘Now, sir!’ bellowed the under-sheriff.
The governor walked over and removed Crosby’s hands from the lever. It was coated in sweat.
Five minutes later, Goodfellow was back in his cell, his pallid features rendered spectral by the wide-open eyes and the bared teeth, listening to the ministrations of the chaplain, for whom the situation was both unprecedented and unsupported by anything the Good Book could offer, Lazarus, he felt, being wholly inappropriate.
The news of the failed hanging had spread to the gathered masses outside the
prison gates, where two opposed factions had maintained a long vigil: a small group, led by Ada Goodfellow’s two brothers, had been there since the early hours to make sure justice was carried out for their sister’s murder. The other, much larger group of abolitionists, had sung hymns and prayed. Once the bulletin was posted on the prison gates, trouble flared with the now enraged brothers and their band, having no other recourse than to weigh into the cheering crowd whose prayers had been answered and were now singing hymns of praise and deliverance.
Simeon Crosby left the prison an hour later, under police escort and by a side door, unrecognised. The words of the under-sheriff were still ringing in his ears. Never had he been spoken to in such terms. His reputation was being impugned, despite his protestations of faulty workmanship, warped wood and rusted bolts.
In the following year, he performed twenty-seven more executions, all of which went very smoothly, to the accompaniment of glowing testimonials, before he decided finally, as he put it so jovially, to hang up his noose for the last time.
He had decided to write a book.
1.
The woman who sat in the railway carriage found it difficult at first. She had smiled, of course, when the three people entered the compartment at Preston – the two men and one woman had acknowledged her presence with courteous smiles and the usual meaningless comments on the weather – but after that initial verbal flourish, the journey settled into silence as the train continued on its way.
Between them, the newcomers had two brown leather suitcases. As the men had placed them on the overhead rack, she noticed that both cases were monogrammed – SNC and GJC – which might suggest they were related. Two cases rather than three might suggest that one of the suitcases contained clothing for the woman as well. Married to one of them would be the most likely explanation.
It did strike Ellen Brennan as slightly odd that the three of them sat there gazing out of the window, saying nothing to each other. Perhaps they find it hard to speak to each other because I’m here, she reflected. So she decided to while away the rest of the journey by contemplating each of them – surreptitiously, of course – and entertaining idle speculations about their backgrounds.
The older man, for instance. He was of a rotund appearance, at least two chins that she could see beneath his greying beard, with heavy eyelids and dark brows that gave the impression of boredom. Her first impression had been that he was a wealthy man, yet here he was sharing a third-class compartment. And the suit he wore was, on closer inspection, rather threadbare and frayed at the cuffs, a curious contradiction to the gold chain looped into his waistcoat pocket. Fifty-five? Fifty-six years old?
The younger man to his left seemed rather anxious, occasionally tugging at his collar as if he felt the carriage was too stuffy. He was watching the passing scene, his eyes flicking from one object of interest to the next. He was broad shouldered, his dark eyes seeming soulful during unguarded moments. His most prominent feature was something she was sure he hadn’t been born with: a scar, slightly curved down from his right ear to just below his right cheekbone. He sported a dark moustache, and occasionally, he licked his lips slowly, letting the tip of his tongue brush against the hairs on his upper lip. He too wore a suit, although this seemed a finer specimen than the one worn by his companion. If they were related, they could well be father and son, or perhaps brothers. By the time they reached Euxton Station, she had decided he was rather handsome, despite the scar that she only occasionally caught sight of, as he had his face turned to the right most of the time. Actually, both the scar and his attempts to hide it made him all the more intriguing. An adventurer, then. Or a military man. Survivor of some Indian Mutiny.
Michael would indeed be proud of my observations, she reflected, though it’d be best to miss out the part about him being handsome. Even detective sergeants get jealous!
Once the train pulled away from Euxton and continued on its journey to Wigan, she directed her gaze now towards the woman. She seemed of a similar age to the older man, and through the gloved left hand, she could see the raised impression of a wedding ring. His wife then. Her travelling wear was dark, rather plain, with a small winter bonnet, trimmed with velvet and silk ribbon. There was something about her eyes, though, that suggested both a melancholy and a pride. What had happened to produce such an impression? She had taken out a book entitled Moths, according to the gold-embossed spine, by someone Ellen had never heard of – Ouida.
Now who in their right mind would wish to read a book about those horrible creatures, she wondered idly. And the book itself was quite thick.
She wished she had the patience and the time to read a book. Any book. But not about moths! Many a time, Michael had urged her to subscribe to the town’s lending library, and many a time, she had promised to do so when the cows came home, an expression that had initially disturbed their six-year-old son, Barry, who had wondered how on earth cows would fit into their house.
After a short stop at Standish, during which time no one alighted or boarded, the train chugged its way towards the next stop – Wigan – and for the first time, someone spoke. It rather alarmed her, and she immediately looked down at her clasped hands in an attempt to ignore the fact that she had jumped a little in her seat at the unexpected sound.
It was the younger man who spoke.
‘How much longer?’ he said to no one in particular.
She noticed he was now sweating quite a lot, minute globules appearing on his forehead like tiny blisters. ‘A few minutes,’ Ellen said reassuringly.
He gave a curt nod but made no response. Then he turned to the man beside him and said, ‘I don’t think I shall be there, after all.’
The older man stared at him, his eyes narrowed and a deep frown appeared on his forehead. He seemed to take no notice of the other’s discomfort.
‘I think you will,’ he said in a deep, firm voice, glancing to his right as if seeking the support of the woman beside him.
But she merely kept her gaze firmly on the book in her lap. When silence once more fell, she occasionally glanced through the window at the changing scene beyond, the darkening clouds that gave a sombre background to the number of winding-heads from neighbouring pits and the dim glow of gaslight from the large faded red brick of an imposing building, its several chimneys belching grey smoke into the darkening sky. With a sigh, she would then return her attention to the book, her expression warming as soon as her eyes rested on the page.
The younger man gave a cough, whether through apology or defiance it was hard to tell. Still, the older man’s response had seemed to do the trick, for he said nothing more, merely tugged at his collars as if the carriage were uncomfortably hot.
How curious!
A few minutes later, the train pulled slowly into Wigan Station. She watched as her three fellow travellers prepared to disembark, both men reaching up to reclaim their cases while the woman tidied her clothing, smoothing the creases and fixing the bonnet. Ellen, too, stood up as the train came to a halt.
‘You live in Wigan, madam?’ the older of the men asked her.
‘I do,’ she said and watched as one of the station assistants swung open the door. She was somewhat annoyed when the man with the scar stepped down from the carriage before she could, without observing the niceties you’d expect.
‘Our first visit,’ the older one replied, as if that in some way apologised for his companion’s lack of courtesy.
She flushed, not really knowing what the proper response would be to that. She said, ‘Welcome,’ and accepted the assistant’s hand as he helped her step down from the carriage. Then, along the platform, she saw her husband making his way towards her, a huge smile on his face.
As he reached her, he gave her a tender peck on the cheek and glanced up at the sky.
‘A storm on its way,’ he observed. ‘How was cousin Bessy?’
‘Strong as an ox. And the baby has a fair pair of lungs on him.’
He noticed her fellow travel
lers, catching sight of the older man’s monogrammed suitcase. Immediately, his smile vanished.
‘Mick?’ said Ellen. ‘What is it?’
But Detective Sergeant Michael Brennan merely shook his head and escorted his wife back towards the exit.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said.
As they passed through the ticket barrier, Ellen Brennan smiled when she saw a large uniformed figure standing beside a hackney carriage on the station forecourt. ‘What’s this?’ she asked. ‘Police escort?’
Brennan gave his constable a wave but guided his wife away onto the main thoroughfare of Wallgate. ‘Constable Jaggery is here on official business,’ he said.
‘Is he waiting to arrest somebody?’ she asked.
‘No,’ came the reply. ‘He’s been sent by his lordship to escort a passenger down to the station. Matter of professional courtesy.’
‘Who’s that then?’
Brennan stopped and gave a nod back to the ticket barrier, where his wife’s recent companions were emerging.
‘So they’re important?’
‘Not important, no. But necessary.’ He smiled at her confusion. ‘The one with the beard was at one time, anyway.’
‘Go on. Tell me. Who are they?’
‘I’ve no idea who the younger man is, or the woman. But the one with the beard is Simeon Crosby.’
‘And who’s Simeon Crosby? Is he famous?’
‘Oh aye,’ said Brennan and watched Constable Jaggery approach the three travellers, salute the older man and take their cases, handing them to the cab driver before inviting them to clamber on board. ‘Mr Crosby has killed over seventy men. Oh, and two women.’
Ellen Brennan gripped his arm and swallowed hard. ‘And Freddie Jaggery’s fawning over him?’
‘Of course,’ Brennan replied with a smile. ‘It’s not every day we get a visit from one of our official executioners.’