The Thief-Taker : Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner

by T. F. Banks

  Presley looked a bit surprised, but slipped his baton into his belt and pulled his coat over it. They jostled their way along Newgate to within sight of the prison. Here the crowd grew very dense, and Morton and Presley had to force their way forward.

  “Look to your purse, Jimmy,” Morton warned in a low voice.

  “Here?” Presley turned toward Morton, wondering if the older Runner was practicing on him.

  “Oh, aye. Within sight of the hangman.”

  A few paces farther on, Jimmy waved a hand down the street. “Look at them! There must be ten thousand, if there's a man.”

  “Twenty-five, even thirty thousand, it's said.” Morton pointed up Ludgate Hill, past St. Sepulchre's Church. “Not so many years ago they had a panic here—no one knows what set it off—but when all was said and done nigh on thirty people had been trampled to death: men, women, and children. Scores more lay injured. But the very next day the crowds were back—just as large—as though it hadn't happened at all. Oh, they're great admirers of our work, Jimmy.”

  This did not elicit even a smile from Presley.

  Morton nodded to the houses lining the street across from the blind edifice of the prison. There were people sitting high up on the roofs. “Two sovereigns it would cost you for such a view.”

  “Nay!” Presley protested.

  “It's the truth. Three guineas to watch from a window.”

  Pie-sellers and grog men began their bark, and a low, continuous rumble rose from the crowd pressed into the street before Newgate Prison.

  Earlier, dray horses had pulled the wheeled gallows into position and carpenters and their assistants had set the posts in place and erected barriers around the black-draped base.

  At a quarter of eight the City Marshall made his slow way on horseback through the pressing masses. Following on foot were the officials of the prison, the court, and the police. Immediately, parents began passing their children forward over the heads of the crowd so that they would be assured of a view.

  Morton and Presley were still some way off, but their height allowed them to see. The younger Runner drew a long breath, and looked around, as though searching for a means of escape. It was a cruel thing Morton was doing, dragging this young man to such a spectacle.

  The chimes of St. Sepulchre's started to sound the hour, and were answered by the dim ringing of the solitary bell deep within the walls of Newgate. The black debtors' door swung open and a party emerged onto the platform.

  “Hats off! Hats off!” people began to cry, not out of respect, Morton knew, but so that no one's view should be blocked.

  Before the sombre party came the Ordinary clergyman, in full canonical dress.

  “There he is,” Morton said softly to Presley. “The man who enriches himself by publishing the Calendar.” The clergyman used his privileged position to record—or invent—an endless stream of lurid last confessions. “The man in the dandy green jacket is Calcroft, the hangman. See the flower in his buttonhole? He says that as he's not an undertaker he won't dress like one. Oh, he's a rare wit, he is.”

  People in the crowd began to shout and jeer; Calcroft tipped his hat to them. Behind the hangman came his assistants, conspicuously bearing ropes, then the warders, and between them, heads bowed and hands bound, a man and a woman.

  Presley straightened, his attention entirely focused now.

  During the brief course of English justice, and the few days of their incarceration, the Smeetons had changed utterly. Where they had been but forty years of age when Morton and Presley apprehended them, they appeared sixty now. They shuffled forward, bent and ruined, faces pale as new-quarried stone. Morton could see the woman's cheeks glisten, but there was no sound of sobbing above the hush of the crowd. The man and woman came before the clergyman—like bride and groom, Morton thought.

  Just as the nooses were to be set in place, the man took a step forward and raised his head. Morton saw despair written there, but defiance as well, and anger.

  “Here's a pleasant diversion for you,” the condemned man hurled out, “watching old Caleb Smeeton and his good wife hang! Thieves, you think us!” He paused and Morton thought the man would break down, but he went on, strangely calm. “But how did those fine Bow Street men know where to nab us? Just where to be, and at what hour? Our ‘friends’ helped them, now didn't they?” he bitterly answered his own question, and glared out at the crowd. “Friends like you …

  “Aye, one of our own peached on us… the same as told us about the panney, and what hour the owner would be away. The friend who said, ‘It'll be safe, sure. Take your wife to help! Never mind she don't want to. Take her!’ And her a God-fearing woman, who'd ne'er do such a thing for all her life!” He glanced over at her, and she met his eye, tears still slipping silently down her face.

  The crowd was hushed as well. This was one of the reasons they came—to hear what the condemned would say, though often they were disappointed and the criminals uttered not a word, or were too distraught to speak. But Caleb Smeeton had a kind of guileless loquacity, and even Morton found himself listening without his usual scepticism.

  “A fool they took me for!” Smeeton went on. His head dropped a little. “And a fool I was. But not so simple as I can't see now what was done to me. My so-called friends were closer to Bow Street than to me—” One of the warders had come forward and took hold of the man's arm. As he was pulled back, Smeeton raised his voice for the first time. “Well, take pleasure in your forty pounds, George Vaughan!” he shouted. “And you, lily-white Henry Morton! You murder a virtuous woman today! You too, Jimmy Presley, you murdering bastard!”

  Morton felt Presley flinch beside him, and heard both their names called out in fury on all sides, mixed in with cries of rage against the hangman and the judges, and, over and over, against the despised Runners from Bow Street. The noose was dropped over Smeeton's head and the crowd boiled in indignation, cursing and shoving the constables who held them back from the gallows. Morton and Presley were pushed and jostled this way and that, as though they stood in a surging surf.

  White hoods were drawn over the heads of man and wife; the nooses inspected a final time. The woman collapsed suddenly, her knees giving way, and she was suspended by her neck a moment, before the warders pulled her up. But she was only on her feet an instant before the traps were sprung, and the two figures fell. And hung, silently, side by side.

  Presley stood mute, staring raptly at the slowly spinning bodies. It was long over. Morton reached out and tugged his coat sleeve.

  “Come along, Jimmy,” he said softly, feeling, himself, both sorrow and guilt.

  Half-reluctantly, the young man turned away, and they pushed through the crowd, which was suddenly abuzz with chatter, and even laughter. But neither Morton nor Presley shared in this odd sense of release.

  They went quite a distance before a hackney-coach presented itself. Morton quietly gave the driver the address of the Bow Street Magistrate's Court, not wanting anyone in the crowd to hear.

  The two Runners settled themselves into the poorly padded seats, not saying a word. Morton wondered if Presley was cursing him silently. The young man had pulled his baton from his belt and now sat with it across his knees staring at it quietly.

  The older Runner tried to recall what he'd felt toward Townsend the morning they had made this same journey. He'd not felt anger, that was certain, but then he'd respected Townsend enormously, and still did. He wasn't quite sure that Presley held him in the same regard.

  The boy had to see it, Morton told himself. This was how the criminal classes were kept in check. And how the Bow Street Runners made their living—from rewards for convictions. And some of those convictions led to hangings—too many, some thought. Not near enough, others insisted.

  Presley leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He remained like that for some time, his big hands rising to cover his face a moment, and then falling away.

  “It's an ugly business, Jimmy,” Morton said solicitously.


  “Aye. There they were alive one minute, and dead the next. Limp as rags…”

  “I was talking about our business: thief-taking.”

  Presley reached back and knocked on the small sliding door that separated them from the driver. “I'll step down here!” he called out, and then to Morton, “I'll walk the rest of the way.”

  Chapter 4

  At the Bow Street Magistrate's Court Morton began asking around to discover who had interrupted Glendinning's duel, and was surprised to learn it had been Presley, accompanied by George Vaughan.

  Morton found the two Runners with their faces buried in copies of Hue and Cry and The Morning Chronicle. As he dropped his gilt-topped baton into the umbrella rack beside theirs, the two looked up and nodded.

  “ 'Tis a leisured life these Runners live,” Morton said.

  Vaughan dropped his eyes to his reading again. “Don't go spreading it abroad, Mr. Morton. We'll have the gentry in here wanting our places.”

  “Isn't that the truth, Mr. Vaughan. The envy of the world, we are.” Morton sank into a chair and picked up a Hue and Cry.

  “I hear you took our Mr. Presley out to see a necktie party,” Vaughan said from behind his paper blind.

  Morton did not respond.

  “There's a pair won't be stealing away the living of hard-working shopkeepers,” Vaughan went on.

  Presley kept his face hidden behind his sheaf of paper.

  “No, they won't be doing that,” Morton agreed, and glanced at the first page of his own journal. “I hear I missed a show yester morning out on Wormwood Scrubs…?”

  Presley let forth a small, forced laugh, looking over at Vaughan, who continued to flip through his paper. “A bit of target practice, was all. Pair o' cullies, though. Couldn't hit the stable door if their lives depended on it! And it cost them dear, didn't it, that little stroll on the grass!” He laughed again, but it sounded forced and artificial. Morton wondered what Vaughan had been saying to the young man.

  “Did it?” asked Morton. He had no opportunity to say more, however, as the side door opened and the Chief Magistrate, Sir Nathaniel Conant, strode in, followed by his clerk and several helpers. The early session of Bow Street Police Court had just gone into recess.

  But the “beak” wanted to know about the duel, too.

  George Vaughan was smoothly reassuring. “No blood spilt, my lord, and no harm done. Mr. Presley and I were on 'em before they'd taken up the matter in earnest.”

  Sir Nathaniel Conant leveled a hard gaze at the veteran Runner, but the latter met his eye steadily. “I am informed, Mr. Vaughan, that shots were fired.”

  “Well, sir, if so, it must have happened before we arrived, which I can hardly credit.”

  The Magistrate scowled as he lowered himself into his seat behind the polished satinwood writing-table, a massive man hunched over a delicate stick of furniture.

  “How did you know of it?” he demanded.

  “Mr. Presley received a tidy little warning,” Vaughan said. “An abigail came by—”

  “Who?”

  “A lady's maid, my lord. And Mr. Presley took charge of the matter, promptly found me, and was good enough to carry me up to the Scrubs with him. Most commendably direct, he was.”

  “Who was she?”

  Morton caught just a flicker of a glance from Presley to Vaughan before both men shrugged.

  “Didn't say,” answered Presley. “Nor named who sent her, neither.”

  “And the principals in this affair were…?” Sir Nathaniel looked from one Runner to the next. “Morton? Were you part of this?”

  “Nay,” said Henry Morton. “I was in Whitechapel all morning.”

  “Mr. Vaughan?”

  “A Mr. Halbert Glendinning,” said Vaughan. “Up against our Colonel Rokeby. Seconds: for Glendinning, a Mr. Hamilton. For Rokeby, his toady-man Pierce, as ever.”

  While they spoke, Sir Nathaniel's factotums busied themselves about the chamber. Briefs and order papers were stacked in the cabinets lining the wall behind the Magistrate; the wig was lifted discreetly from his head; a goblet of Madeira was decanted and placed comfortably to hand on the table.

  He sipped his wine. “This bloody man Rokeby's killed five times; isn't that what's said?”

  Morton noticed a look of considerable surprise pass over young Presley's face at this. But then he swiftly composed himself again.

  “At least.” Morton himself quietly answered the question.

  “And you did nothing?”

  “We warned 'em very firm, Sir Nathaniel” was Vaughan's ready retort. “I'll warrant they took our meaning, too.”

  “Oh, aye, I'll warrant they did. I'll warrant there was some handy giving and taking.”

  Vaughan's eyebrows raised as though this suggestion of impropriety impugned his honour.

  Perhaps Sir Nathaniel realised he had overstepped a bound as well. If he was going to make accusations against a Runner they would have to be in a court of enquiry. The Magistrate swallowed again from his glass and one of his assistants whispered urgently in his ear.

  Presley caught Morton's eye and with a small grin rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. The little gesture, Morton realised, did not go unnoticed by the portly man seated behind the table, who then returned his attention to the Runners.

  “No felony was committed,” said Vaughan evenly. “We performed our proper duty.”

  “What was it over, this duel?” the Magistrate asked, ignoring Vaughan's defense.

  “Mere idle talk, sir. Hot words, is all,” replied Presley disdainfully, but Vaughan drew himself up and eyed the Magistrate darkly.

  Sir Nathaniel Conant regarded him a moment, reflecting. “In future, sir,” he said coldly, “when men discharge weapons at one another, you are to arrest them and bring them before this Police Court, as a case of attempted murder. The panel, not you, shall be the judge of the seriousness of the infringement on His Majesty's peace.”

  “As you say, my lord,” drawled George Vaughan.

  There was enough defiance in this laconic response to make the Chief Magistrate hesitate an instant, but not quite sufficient to draw him into further confrontation.

  “There is a complication,” announced Henry Morton. All their eyes went to him. “Last night, the same day as his interrupted duel, Mr. Halbert Glendinning turned up dead.”

  “Cor!” blurted Jimmy Presley. Sir Nathaniel Conant stared.

  “What on earth do you mean, sir, ‘turned up dead’?”

  “I mean, my lord, that he arrived at a social function in a hackney-coach, and he was dead when the footman opened the door.”

  George Vaughan cleared his throat. “I heard he was drunk. Choked on his own puke.”

  It was now the turn of the other three to look in surprise at him.

  “You know of this, too?” demanded Sir Nathaniel.

  “Town's full of it, my lord. I had it from an informant of mine—member of the serving class, but reliable.”

  “Was this person there?”

  “Spoke to one who was, appears.”

  “I admire my brother officer's sources,” remarked Henry Morton a bit sourly, “but I was in Portman House last night myself, and I am less certain the man's death was natural.”

  George Vaughan looked at him wordlessly, but it was evident to Morton that the man was far from pleased to be contradicted. Nor was this the first time the two of them had been at odds.

  “Why?” demanded Sir Nathaniel Conant.

  “There are several suspicious circumstances,” Morton replied. “He had not choked on his vomit, as his mouth and throat were clear of it. He was young and in apparent good health. But more to the point, not only had someone aimed to kill him earlier that morning—our notorious Colonel Rokeby—but he had come to Portman House from one of the worst criminal dens in London. I tracked down the hackney-coach driver who brought him, and the man was frightened out of his wits. Something transpired at this flash house, and I think the
driver knows or suspects something of it. I gave him a bit of time to mull it over.”

  “Which flash house was this?” grunted the Chief Magistrate.

  “The Otter House, Bell Lane, Spitalfields. I think there should be an investigation, my lord, and the coroner called in to authorize a postmortem examination.”

  Sir Nathaniel scowled in distaste. “And what is it you think happened to him, Mr. Morton?”

  “I am not sure, sir, but it seems very likely he was murdered, and it would not be difficult to guess who had this done.”

  The Magistrate eyed him. “Have you a witness?”

  “I have not. Not yet.”

  Sir Nathaniel shook his head. “A man who frequents a house like that,” he remarked, “courts such a fate. And perhaps deserves it.”

  “Lord Arthur Darley, his host, assured me that Glen-dinning was a man of modest deportment, and excellent character, not given to such … practices. The body, incidentally, lies at his house for the moment. I asked him to wait upon our warrant.”

  “What are you suggesting we do?” Sir Nathaniel demanded impatiently.

  Morton drew breath. “I would like to have Sir Benjamin—”

  “Oh, your precious Brodie, again,” scoffed Vaughan with a glance at the ceiling.

  Sir Benjamin Brodie was undoubtedly England's foremost, indeed single, expert on poisons, and had lectured on the subject with great authority in London, as well as at Cambridge. But Henry Morton was the only man at Bow Street who believed that such knowledge could be of use in police detection, and Sir Nathaniel had had only too much experience with the fate of Morton's supposed “evidence” at Sessions Court. Never once had their lordships accepted it, and he'd had to listen to many a stern lecture on its inadmissibility. The simple truth was that there was no reliable test for the presence of even a single kind of poison in a dead body. Quack chemists had completely muddied the waters, rendering any such claims doubtful. Convictions were only ever obtained with direct, corroborating testimony.