Hanging Murder

by A J Wright

  ‘I was resting my eyes. Well?’

  Simeon Crosby gave a little cough. ‘Just wanted to clear up a few things about the book.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, recognising the telltale sign that he was lying.

  ‘I’ve reserved a table for eight o’clock,’ he said as he moved to the window. Once there, he gazed down at the scene below. Several people were taking shelter beneath the canopies of the shops opposite. Large puddles had formed in the road. He watched as two rough-looking boys came running along the pavement and stopped suddenly, waiting for a man who was walking towards them. He wore a dark brown ulster, a bowler hat and was pulling his muffler close to his chin. The boys watched him stop at the kerbstone for a tram to pass by; then they chose the exact moment when he stepped into the road to launch themselves at the largest and nearest of the puddles, sending what seemed like waves surging towards their unfortunate victim, soaking his coat and the lower sections of his trousers before rushing down the street, giving him a flick of their hands in the air and what must have been a string of obscenities, to which the poor chap responded in kind.

  Simeon smiled. Those two miscreants might one day make that fateful walk to the gallows. They wouldn’t be rushing then, he reflected.

  ‘Just the two of us?’ she asked.

  He turned to face her.

  ‘Just the two of us,’ he replied.

  She sighed and returned forthwith to Villafranca.

  *

  The generally agreed diagnosis of Oscar Pardew’s mental condition was Insanity by Virtue of Delusion. This manifested itself through what was termed a Monomania of Suspicion, whereby the patient has created a delusion of persecution which originated, he claimed, during his time on the sub-continent. It was his contention that a curse had been placed upon him by some holy man as a result of some slight. The incident was doubly unfortunate for Pardew, as he was accompanied by the district officer – his immediate superior in the Indian Civil Service – and the disturbance in the village that ensued gave him a quarrelsome reputation a mere month into his posting in Calcutta. The curse, and the D.O.’s obvious disapproval, had played on his mind, and once he contracted a fever, he felt that the whole world was conspiring against him, urged on by the holy man. His mind, therefore, created a whole litany of disasters that would subsequently befall him.

  During his period of convalescence, the sense of persecution waned, and he grew in strength as the fever abated. Even the D.O. visited him and wished him a speedy recovery. He returned to his work in the ICS, feeling much refreshed, spending a great deal of his time studying for his departmental examinations and longing for the expiry of his first year in his new life, when he would no longer be referred to as a griffin and would be regarded as a valued member of the service.

  But in his second week back at work, he received an urgent and distressing letter.

  His father had been brutally killed in a card game gone wrong.

  The curse, he realised, was alive and well.

  In profound distress, he was shipped back to England where, after hearing the gruesome details of the murder and discovering that his father had been buried two months earlier (What in God’s name did you expect, Oscar? That we keep our dear father on ice while you sail the seven seas?), Pardew finally succumbed to the horrors of his life, and his mind let go of reality. Finally, his unstable condition was too much for them to cope with and so they had him committed to the asylum.

  He had been placed in a private room, paid for by his family, where he spent every night singing some baleful ditty to a small framed photograph of his elder sister sitting in a chair, her hand stretched out to hold the hand of the older man seated beside her: his father. It had been a specially commissioned photograph, which his sister had claimed would give him comfort. Indeed, he showed the photograph of Dead Father to others in the asylum, a bizarre reversion of the normal practice of proud parents showing off their children.

  He told others, in his more lucid moments, that the song he sang over and over was a remnant of a folk tale he had learned in India when he was a mere griffin. It told of a prince wandering the land and coming across a graveyard, where a headless corpse sat lamenting its fate by a freshly dug grave:

  On earth I was even as thou,

  My turban awry like a king,

  My head with the highest, I trow,

  Having my fun and my fling,

  Fighting my foes like a brave,

  Living my life with a swing.

  And, now I am dead,

  Sins, heavy as lead,

  Will give me no rest in my grave!

  One day, one of the other patients had asked him a question about the song.

  ‘How can the corpse talk if it’s headless?’

  Another asked, ‘How can it talk if it’s dead?’

  Yet another said, ‘And what happened to his turban?’

  ‘How can you be a griffin?’ asked one. ‘That’s a lion’s body and an eagle’s head. I drew one at school.’

  ‘I was a griffin!’ Pardew had ranted. ‘Everyone’s a griffin when they first go out there. Everyone. You calling me a liar?’

  Then, confused and angered by the interrogation, he had begun to hum the tune and rock to and fro until the attendants had come to his rescue. But always, he held the small framed photograph close to his chest, and he looked for all the world to be singing Dead Father to sleep.

  It was part of his nightly routine, too, once his door was locked from the outside, to delve into an old copy of The Graphic, where he relished the writings of Mary Frances Billington, whose reports from India under the heading Woman in India transported him back to the subcontinent, a place he still harboured hopes of returning to once the fog and the fever in his head had dissipated. Tonight, for instance, he read avidly about the most common crimes of Indian women, foremost of which was infanticide as a way of gaining revenge on violent husbands.

  ‘That’s not right,’ he whispered, directing his comments to the small photograph that now rested on his bedside table. ‘Poor innocents, Father. A good sessions judge would make ’em swing for it and no mistake about that. No, sir.’

  He also read an article about the executioner in this country, Simeon Crosby. Or rather, an article devoted to those who had been affected in some way by the hangman’s actions. Relatives of those whom the condemned person had murdered.

  Like Oscar himself. A bereft son.

  Hadn’t that same executioner been the topic of conversation between the two attendants?

  He turned to look at the photograph of Dead Father.

  ‘It’s like you’re telling me something,’ he said softly. ‘It’s like I can hear you, Father. Simeon Crosby! He’s the one who…’ But he stopped, looked round, wondering if, even now, someone was standing outside his room, listening, sniggering.

  Later, as he lay in his bed, all the lights extinguished and the darkness giving shape to all kinds of distortions peopling his room, he closed his eyes, as always facing the photograph of his sister and his dear father, and listened to the nightly sounds from the dormitory beyond his door, the coughing, the mumblings, the rhythmic thump-thump of a fist against the dormitory wall. Behind his eyelids, he saw fantastic outlines silhouetted in reds and dull greens and tried to follow their fluid movements with his eyeballs, only to find the shapes vanishing at the outer edges of his shuttered vision then returning from the right-hand side and begining again their slow movement across his mind. He could never quite get them to stop, never quite focus on what the images were. He imagined them to be sandgrouse, and from somewhere, he remembered a shooting expedition and suffering a reprimand when he asked why, if sandgrouse were so vile to eat, were they even shooting them from the skies?

  Tonight, though, he saw a new shape suddenly appear, one that assumed the definite features of firm lines that became a rectangle, then a rectangle within a rectangle, then a man’s upper torso in profile staring to his left.

  It was a playing card.
/>   A knave.

  A knave whose head suddenly vanished.

  And, as the vision remained still, not sliding off to the left as all the other images did, he could hear a faint whisper, and the whisper was coming not from the dormitory beyond his door but from inside his head.

  It was the headless knave.

  Oscar Pardew then watched the outline of the card fizzle, the way a real one would if you set a corner alight. He could almost smell the burning!

  Though he kept his eyes shut in case the vision vanished, he strained to listen and nodded several times and said, Yes I will, even though his lips stayed perfectly still. His father, his dear father, was calling to him, cursing the one who stabbed him through the heart. I know! Oscar assured him silently. He was cheating and you exposed him, and he waited for you, and he stabbed you… Yes. I promise. I will, Father.

  Once the vision had faded into windblown ashes, he felt a warmth inside him as if the card were still burning. Everything was clear now.

  It was as if you made those two talk about him, Father, while I was doing my business. You were directing me.

  His plan was formed. He smiled to himself, almost sniggering beneath the bed sheets, where he clutched a small purse, filled with coins, to his chest.

  ‘My treasure chest!’ he whispered to himself and giggled at his own joke.

  He pulled back the sheets, reached to his right and gently took hold of the photograph, which he placed inside his nightdress for safekeeping.

  Then he let forth a scream of anguish.

  6.

  The billiard room of the Ship Hotel on Millgate, not twenty yards from the Royal Hotel, still retained that slightly sickening smell of freshly painted wood, having been reopened only a few months earlier. There were over fifty people in the room, and the odour had grown thicker as the evening progressed, what with the cigar fumes hovering like some miniature storm cloud over the green, mingling with the reek of damp clothing from the incessant rain they had all eagerly rushed through to get there.

  Diggle, a Liverpudlian and the billiards champion of the north, was facing a challenge from a local amateur, Eddie Gorton, with the game a target of a thousand points, the challenger, Gorton, being credited with a start of four hundred. Diggle had already made an impressive thirty-four when, to the delight of the local crowd, he failed a simple cannon. Gorton responded with a delightful slow screw off the red, earning an even louder roar of approval from the locals.

  ‘I thought this Diggle chap was a champion?’ Gilbert Crosby said to the man next to him, one of the faces he recognised from his earlier audience in the bar of the Royal and who had asserted that it would be a privilege if Mr Crosby would allow him to buy him a drink.

  The man leaned closer, anxious lest their conversation was overheard. ‘Playin’ to the crowd, Mr Crosby. Wouldn’t do if he cleaned up early, would it?’

  ‘I dunno,’ Crosby replied. ‘I’m sure I would. Pride, y’see.’

  ‘Aye,’ said his companion, who didn’t see at all.

  ‘Who do I speak to?’

  ‘About what?’

  Crosby smiled. ‘A wager.’

  ‘Tha means a bet?’

  Crosby nodded.

  The man pointed to a small weasel of a man standing in the far corner of the room, next to the door leading downstairs to the main bar. ‘Benny Liptrot,’ he said. ‘He’ll take thi money right enough. Who art backin’?’

  ‘Why, Diggle, of course.’

  The man laughed. ‘Benny’s not daft. Tha cawn’t back Diggle. Tha can only back Eddie. But he’ll give thee a better start than four hundred.’

  Crosby shrugged. As he moved through the crowd to Liptrot, there was another roar – Gorton had just made a respectable break of twenty-five, making the score 493–442 in Diggle’s favour.

  Within less than a minute, Crosby had handed over five pounds in return for a start for Gorton of six hundred points, which meant Gorton’s score was now 642. If Diggle had it in mind to produce a crowd-pleasing display of thrilling, nail-biting billiards, he might well allow the challenger to encroach close enough to produce, for Gilbert Crosby at any rate, a most rewarding outcome. Benny Liptrot, holding the note up against the table light, had made some humorous reference to his scar:

  We don’t go in for that sort o’ stuff round ’ere, pal – if tha doesn’t pay up, all tha gets is a thick lip. But tha’s already paid so tha’re awreet.

  His two larger companions laughed at that, one even going so far as to shake Crosby’s hand with the grip of a bear.

  Once he’d made his way back to his new-found friend, Crosby was feeling quite pleased with himself, especially after he saw Diggle once more make a hash of what seemed to be a simple cannon. But as the game progressed, it became patently obvious that Diggle was not only playing deliberately badly on occasion but also that he was playing to instructions. He saw the weaselly Benny Liptrot – who had been taking bets more frequently as Diggle’s game periodically faded – give a series of curious signals involving his forefingers pressing against his temples that could well have been mistaken for an incipient headache. Except that, upon seeing the signs, Diggle became elegantly potent, notching up a break at one stage of 178 including some masterful nursery cannons, resulting in a win for Diggle by one thousand to 726. Even with the extra two hundred Gilbert had negotiated, Gorton’s final score was 926. Seventy-four points adrift. Gilbert was five pounds down.

  ‘Hard luck,’ said his drinking companion.

  ‘Luck has nothing to do with it,’ he replied through gritted teeth. He saw Liptrot leaning over a table where he was making a great show of counting his money – piles of coins, a smaller pile of banknotes, along with two pocket watches, a woman’s dress ring and, unbelievably, a silk umbrella.

  ‘Told you. Benny’s not daft.’

  ‘No, he certainly isn’t.’ Gilbert drained his glass and moved through the smoke and guffaws of laughter and past the small group commiserating with the loser Gorton. When he reached the bar, he ordered a whiskey then turned to observe Benny Liptrot, who was now beaming with satisfaction and nodding at something one of his larger associates had said. At that point, Diggle extricated himself from a large gathering of men, who were all eager to pass on their congratulations and bask in some reflected glory, and began to head for the door that obviously led to a smaller, more private room. One of Liptrot’s men opened the door, patted the victor on the back as he moved into the room. The man kept the door held open, for within seconds, Liptrot, who by now had pocketed all the winnings, apart from the umbrella which he began swinging in imitation of a toff, followed Diggle inside. The door was firmly closed behind him.

  ‘You little bastard,’ said Gilbert softly.

  *

  From the short time he had spent in the sick room at Haydock Lodge when he was first admitted, Oscar Pardew knew that it was the only place in the entire asylum where the windows were left partially open. Every other room had doors and windows securely locked. But in the sick room, the rules demanded a full supply of fresh air to counteract the noxious fumes from patients with lung diseases, weeping and festering sores, unhealthy perspiration and those of wet and dirty habits.

  It was the reason he was there now, feigning a set of painful stomach cramps, the general view being that, if his condition were to deteriorate with foul consequences, at least in the sick room the impact would be tempered by the circulating air. One of the attendants had taken the unusual step of opening the damper on the grate in the fireplace. Although no fire burned there this night, the open flue would provide extra ventilation. The resultant fall of dislodged soot could easily be cleaned away in the morning.

  Now, as the attendant dozed at his desk at the far end of the room and as the other patients – some five in total – snored and groaned and uttered nonsensical words into the darkness, Oscar slowly, silently, threw back the bed covers and stepped out of bed, making sure that the photograph was secure against his heart. The attendant gr
unted, arms folded and feet resting on a chair, and settled back with his head drooped low on his chest.

  Conscious that this was the most hazardous phase of his escape, Oscar crept towards the window halfway along the room, keeping a wary eye on the patient who rested beside it, an elderly chap whose lungs were fading fast and whose condition rendered it vital that he be placed as close to the open window as possible. Oscar smelt the soiled linen when he stopped beside the man’s bed. The attendants were under the strictest of instructions to remove such noisome items as soon as they were discovered, but he knew that the night-time, and the lack of official supervision, meant that such orders were often ignored. Who wants the trouble of waking, cleaning, changing and settling at such a late hour?

  A laxity for which Oscar, tonight, was truly grateful.

  As he reached up and gripped the lower sash to force it upwards, he heard a sound.

  A sharp stab of breath.

  He turned to his right and gazed down. The elderly man was wide awake, his eyes flaring open and a look of sheer terror on his face. Oscar held his breath and waited for the scream that would stir the attendant and force him either to abandon or continue his flight.

  But there was no scream.

  Instead, the old man swallowed hard, his eyes still intensely staring at the figure standing by the window. Then he whispered something Oscar couldn’t quite catch.

  ‘What?’ he mouthed before bending down, both to hear better what he said and to forestall anything louder.

  ‘Not ready!’ he rasped. He was beginning to show signs of agitation.

  Oscar glanced up, saw the attendant rub away an imaginary fly.

  ‘Not ready for what?’ The last thing he wanted to do was engage this old fool in conversation.

  ‘I’m not coming,’ said the man, shaking his head.

  ‘No. No, you stay here.’

  ‘Not my time yet. You hear?’

  ‘I hear.’

  He patted the old man’s hand gently. The skin was clammy but cool to the touch. He’d seen enough of death in India to recognise the signs.