by M. J. Trow
‘Respect?’ Buckley spat. ‘What do you know of respect? I was destined for a career in the church, you know.’
Batchelor knew.
‘And one day I went for a stroll with a girl. She was beautiful, lovely as the dawn, with hair like gold. We held hands and talked. I read her poetry. You know what she did?’
‘No,’ Grand said. ‘What did she do?’
‘She laughed at me. She lifted her skirts and said, “This is what you’re after. Why don’t you get on with it?” I was appalled. I couldn’t believe it. Then she laughed again and told me I was a mummy’s boy and that I’d never be a real man … So I killed her. It seemed so right. So natural. Her lying there in the cornfield with my tie around her neck. Such a pretty neck.’ He shuddered at the memory of it. ‘My mother got to hear of it; that I’d gone with the girl, I mean. Oh, they never found her body, of course. I dumped that in the river, and the current did the rest. No, I’d gone with a girl, my mother said; how could I do that and even think of a career in the church? We rowed. I left and came to London. And I saw them, the Haymarket march past, every day like cattle in the market …’
‘Lambs to the slaughter,’ Grand said.
‘Whatever analogy you care to use, Yankee,’ Buckley spat. ‘They were parading themselves. Just like her. Just like the girl in the cornfield. Laughing at me. And pointing. “Mummy’s boy. Mummy’s boy.”’ He pulled himself up to his full height. ‘So they had to die. Well, you do see that, don’t you? Grand? Jim? Surely, you understand?’
Batchelor had reached his colleague by now, and the man slumped against him, sobbing uncontrollably on his shoulder.
‘I’m trying, Joe,’ Batchelor said, easing the wire out of his grasp. ‘I’m trying. Matthew, can you hail us a cab? We need to go to Vine Street.’
If the mob had been angry at Scotland Yard, it was literally furious by the time it reached Vine Street. It had taken a while to reform, as many of its members had had to pop off to their clubs for a light luncheon while yet others had had to return to the House where a division was expected. Eventually, though, they reconvened at Vine Street Police Station, more vociferous than before.
Tanner, forewarned by a patrolling bobby before he reached the front entrance, had sneaked in through a back way and was lurking in his office, trying to drown out the distant hum and quack of very upper-crust voices losing their tempers. That he was the cause of the furore didn’t make it any easier to bear, and the accusing looks of Hunter and similar underlings were not improving his temper. Coming close to wrapping up two cases in one day was not something with which he was very familiar, and his desk was beginning to look very tidy as he methodically worked his way through the paperwork on the Haymarket stranglings. Hunter was still affronted that Tanner had not arrested Pearson or at least given him a light beating, but Tanner had not got his reputation through blurring facts, and Pearson was just not a contender in the race for first past the gallows as the Strangler. Hunter would just have to grin and bear it. But Tanner was close; he knew he was very close.
Down in the hallway, things were getting ugly. There was nothing nastier than an angry nob. Gentlemen who had not even been named by Batchelor in his article were there, brandishing sticks and shouting oaths. One never knew when a sequel might be on the cards, and peccadillos had the habit of rearing up and biting one on some very unfortunate body parts. The desk sergeant had stuffed some bread in his ears in lieu of anything more suitable and was calmly filling his pipe to while away the time. There was certainly little risk of anyone else coming into the station with the mob of nobs there; he could safely put away his lost dog ledger for the time being.
Buckley was silent in the cab, apart from the occasional wracking sob. There seemed nothing more to be said either to or about him, and Grand and Batchelor sat silently through the short journey, though each held on to a sleeve, just to be sure. The growler had not been keen to take the fare, until he saw the colour of Grand’s money, and the scent of anticlimax was in the air.
At Vine Street Police Station, the first thing that was apparent was that there was definitely something very strange going on. There was a mass of people out on the pavement, lit by the spectral light of the blue lamp over the door. It was hard to see quite what they were so exercised about – surely, news about Buckley had not spread this fast – and Batchelor jumped out of the cab without a thought.
The crowd were chanting something, but he couldn’t quite make out what it was, and so, waving a hand to keep Grand and Buckley in the cab, he stepped closer. The man he stood beside looked vaguely familiar.
‘Bring out Batchelor!’ the crowd chanted. ‘Bring out Batchelor!’
James Batchelor was no more of a coward than the next man, but he also knew the value of valour. He got back into the cab.
‘Look here, Matthew,’ he said. ‘I don’t think this needs both of us, do you? I’ll go back to the Haymarket in this cab – we may need eyewitnesses. Can you manage Buckley alone? He seems quite docile. Aren’t you, old chap?’ he said encouragingly to the journalist, who was now simply staring into space.
‘Really?’ Grand was dubious. ‘How can we even get in?’
The growler leaned down from his box. ‘There’s a side door,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you round – this mob look dangerous to me.’ With a click of his tongue, he urged his horse down the road and into a side street where, sure enough, a smaller door led into the police station. ‘Just knock on there,’ he said. ‘It’s where the peelers come when they knock off. There’s always someone there to open up.’
Batchelor helped Grand manhandle the almost comatose Buckley out of the cab and knocked on the door, before hopping back into the vehicle and urging the cabbie to be on his way.
Grand had to knock several times before the door opened a crack, and a red-cheeked face peered out.
‘Yes?’
‘Ah, yes,’ Grand said. This was not a greeting he had often had to make. ‘I have the Haymarket Strangler here. Is Inspector Tanner in?’
Led up a winding stair, Grand and his captive were taken into Tanner’s office with very little ceremony. Once Buckley was sitting in a chair, bent over like a discarded doll, Tanner leaned back in his seat and looked at him, long and hard. He had seen this man from time to time, scribbling in a pad at the scenes of other peoples’ distress and disaster. ‘Mr Grand,’ he said at last, ‘am I right in thinking that this gentleman is a colleague of Mr Batchelor?’
‘That’s right,’ Grand said, impressed. ‘He is.’
Tanner’s sweet smile crept across his face. ‘Tell me his name in a minute,’ he said. ‘For now, we will refer to him as “Int Newsp” – I think it will serve, Hunter, don’t you?’
TWENTY
Lafayette Baker felt the sweat trickle from under his dress hat that morning and cursed the heat. It was not eight o’clock yet, and the temperature was already in the nineties, the sun burning fiercely down on the gallows with its four nooses hanging in the morning’s stillness. Flies droned around the freshly dug graves, and armed guards lolled on the walkway at the top of the wall.
Boats were chugging, with their black smoke stacks, from Alexandria and Georgetown, and hopeful crowds clustered on their decks, parasols already bright in the morning. Luther Baker fastened his full dress-sword belt and joined his cousin on the ramparts of the penitentiary. ‘Great day for a hanging, Laff.’ The pair watched Christopher Rath, the executioner, test his equipment one last time. Sacks were tied on to the nooses, and one by one the traps were sprung. One little adjustment, one tweak of the twenty-strand rope, and all was well.
‘Mother of God,’ Lafayette muttered. ‘Will I ever get used to that?’ He nodded across the yellow grass below the wall to where Mary Walker rode her horse to the main gate. She was the only female doctor in the Union Army, and not only did she wear trousers under her short skirt, but today she also rode astride, like a man.
Luther shook his head. ‘Not natural,’ he murmured.
/> ‘This is the end of an era, Luther,’ Lafayette said. ‘In more ways than one. I got a telegram late last night from our friend Sala. Grand got the son of a bitch.’
‘The man in the alley? Who was he?’
‘Name of Argyll. Ran a theatre in London. Took up with Booth a while back. Confessed it all before he died.’
‘And what about Grand? He’ll be coming home, I guess.’
‘Maybe yes, maybe no,’ Lafayette said. ‘But whichever way, I’ll be watching him.’
Luther Baker smiled. That was so typically Lafayette. End of an era it might be, but for men like his cousin Laff, the only real end would be a hole in the ground.
By mid-morning the military had all assembled, as had the one hundred ticket holders who had paid a high price to see their President’s killers turned off. The talking was a mutter, muted strangely by the thick walls of the penitentiary and the dumb press of the heat. The sun flashed on the fixed bayonets and cap badges of the guards on the walls. Sightseers hoping for a free show were to be disappointed. They could not even sit astride the parked cannon for the fierceness of the sun on the gunmetal.
Suddenly, screaming started from somewhere in the bowels of the gaol. The Bakers looked at each other and knew who it was. It was Annie Surratt, daughter of the conspirator Mary. Hours earlier, she had thrown herself at the foot of the White House stairs, weeping inconsolably and begging President Johnson to spare her mother. President Johnson had been unavailable.
One by one, the prisoners emerged, blinking, into the sunlight. Mary Surratt, veiled and wearing black from head to foot, hung limply between two guards. A priest walked ahead of her, pausing every few steps to press his crucifix against the woman’s lips. After her came George Atzerodt, his eyes wild and red from crying, then John Herold, trembling alongside his escort, and finally Lewis Powell, tall, unbowed, unrepentant. The others might scream and cry and faint, but he would face the executioner like a man and look him in the eye.
One by one they were helped up the ominous thirteen steps to the gallows’ platform; one by one they were seated on their chairs. Somebody held a parasol over the bowed head of Mary Surratt. Lewis Powell grabbed a straw hat from a bystander and tilted it on his own head, defying anybody to knock it off.
‘Will you look at that arrogant son of a bitch,’ Luther Baker growled, ready, even now, to do the executioner’s job for him with his revolver.
A mustachioed officer stepped forward and read out in a loud voice the order for the execution.
‘Get on with it, Hartranft.’ Lafayette Baker had been standing in the sun for nearly four hours now. He’d had enough. Rath’s men passed along the row on the platform, binding arms, pinioning legs. Then the four were hauled upright and white hoods, gleaming in their innocence, were pulled over their heads. The Bakers could not hear the muted sounds from the gallows, Mary Surratt mumbling, ‘Don’t let me fall,’ and John Herold crying, the hood working backwards and forwards as he sobbed. But they heard, everyone heard, the thick German accent of George Atzerodt under the canvas. ‘Goodbye, gentlemen. May we all meet in the other world.’
General Hancock clapped his hands twice, and at the second clap, the posts were kicked away and the traps crashed down. There was a gasp from the crowd, and one of the soldiers dropped his rifle with a clatter. Powell, with his thick neck, refused to die outright, and he jerked and writhed on the end of the rope. His neck and wrists turned purple, and Rath estimated it took him all of five minutes to pass. Herold’s body struggled against the rope as he desperately tried to take the weight off the noose and the appalling pain in his throat and chest. Atzerodt’s stomach heaved once and was still. As for Mary Surratt, she had shot straight down, to bob and bounce five feet below the platform, and then she did not move at all.
The crowd were ordered away as Christopher Rath’s men let the dead hang for the required half an hour. Solemnly, and with every care to shield his plates from the sun, Alexander Gardner set up his camera on his tripod and recorded the hanging corpses for posterity. The executioner himself was busy writing out affidavits to acknowledge that the pieces of rope and timber he was about to chunk up and sell off had indeed been taken from the execution of the murderers of Abraham Lincoln.
Lafayette Baker swept off his hat, not as any token of sympathy but because the heat demanded it. ‘I don’t know about you, Cousin Lu, but I’m ready for cakes and lemonade.’
The first little gabble of journalists let themselves in to the Telegraph offices that morning and flung coats at the rack. Gabriel Horner, whose eyesight was almost inevitably less acute than everyone else’s, lit the gas and turned to take his seat in the row of elevated desks down the centre of the room. He stopped with a suppressed scream. It was that dream again. He glanced down; he was fully dressed, though slightly awry in the button department. He was awake then. But there, at his desk, sat Thornton Leigh Hunt, his face a basilisk’s, his arms folded against his editorial chest.
As the journalists and other hangers-on came to an ungainly stop in the office’s foyer, on the public side of the gate that kept the hoi polloi and the Fourth Estate separate, Leigh Hunt slid down from Horner’s high stool and approached them, stiff legged with anger that was barely hidden by his expressionless face.
‘Gentlemen,’ he murmured, nodding at them curtly.
Their greetings varied from a muttered, ‘Sir,’ to Horner’s cheery, ‘Morning, TLH,’ which he somehow got past his brick-dry lips.
Leigh Hunt looked, from left to right, along the ragged line of the motley crew that made up the beating heart of his newspaper. There were several faces missing. Sala’s, of course, it being before ten in the morning. Sala was taking liberties as always, but even he could go too far. Batchelor, also, of course. Leigh Hunt had regretted sacking him almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth, but there are certain things that editors don’t do, and recanting was one of them. Buckley – ah, Joseph Buckley, now known, for as long as his notoriety lasted, as the Haymarket Strangler. Thornton Leigh Hunt sighed. God, he loved the newspaper business. A lot more than he loved his wife; he even loved it more than he loved his mistress, though he prayed she never found out. He loved the hum of the presses, the smell of the ink. He loved the scritch of the pens, the smell of the sweat of a journalist with a big story to tell. He loved the money to be made, the cut and thrust of the circulation wars … in a perverse way, he loved what he was about to do as well, although it had kept him awake all night.
He now looked along the line again, from right to left, and smiled a rueful smile. ‘Staff of the Telegraph,’ he said, in sonorous tones. ‘I have been thinking of you, of every one of you, all night long. In the end, I got out of bed—’ he paused to make sure there were no ribald asides, but all the staff were too dumbstruck to speak – ‘and came down here to await your arrival. I was thinking how you all worked with a murderer in your midst and didn’t seem to notice.’
He leaned forward and tapped his nose. ‘Do you know what this is? Well, do you?’ He waited, but the staff, apart from some nervously shuffling feet, were silent. ‘It’s a journalist’s nose. It has let me down. But not half as much as all of you have let me down. What has happened to instinct? Hunches? Gut feelings? Hmm?’
Gabriel Horner cleared his throat. ‘TLH …’
‘Don’t TLH me, Gabriel. You and Dyer are most at fault. You were drinking with the man on all three nights when he went out and horribly murdered those girls. And yet you still didn’t notice. And, worse – you were drinking with Matthew Grand, who is the toast of Washington for having hunted down the last of the Lincoln conspirators. And did you write that up? No, you did not.’ He wiped a strand of drool from his chin and took a deep breath. ‘In view of all this, I have come to a decision. It pains me more than it pains you, but I have to tell you now. It’s no good dragging it out.’ He paused to wipe his brow with a silk handkerchief.
‘He’s resigning,’ Dyer whispered to the inky devil by his side.
The silence was like a velvet pall over the room. It was even hard to tell whether some of the suddenly ex-staff of the Telegraph were still breathing. Gabriel Horner in particular had gone a worrying shade of mauve.
‘I’ll just leave you to clear your desks, then,’ Leigh Hunt said, ‘not forgetting, of course, that all pens, pencils, penknives, paper, ink and sundries are the property of the Telegraph. Miss Witherspoon has asked me to request that you form an orderly queue in her office. Pushing and shoving will result in a fine up to but not exceeding any monies due. Thank you, gentlemen. Good day.’
The silence was broken by the clack clack of the big doors swinging open and shut. George Sala pushed his way to the front of the crowd, a puzzled frown on his face. A team of journalists standing ‘listening’ to their editor; that couldn’t be right. He waved some sheets of paper in the general direction of Leigh Hunt.
‘Thornton, old chap,’ he said, breezily. ‘Here’s my piece on the Argyll scandal. And, of course, on the Haymarket Strangler, it all being wound up in one package, as one might say.’ As he spoke, Sala was shooting furtive glances at his colleagues. No doubt they would tell him what was going on in their own good time.
Leigh Hunt stepped forward and took the sheets from the journalist’s hand. He glanced at them and tore them in half down their length. ‘Too little,’ he said, and then tore them across. ‘Too late. Miss Witherspoon will explain. Good day, George.’
Sala stood there, speechless, and it was, as Gabriel Horner said later on that day as he broached his second bottle of brandy in the Printer’s Devil, the best moment of the whole debacle.