Lawless and the Devil of Euston Square

by William Sutton

  Among Roxton Coxhill’s private effects were found objects that suggested he was on the verge of suicide: prussic acid, razors and drafts of an intensely remorseful suicide note. Let me quote:

  I cannot live—I have ruined too many—I have committed diabolical crimes, still unknown to any living being. I cannot live to see them come to light, bringing me and my late father into disrepute, causing to all shame and guilt that they ever should have known me. I attribute all this to no one but to my own infamous villainy. I could go through any torture as recompense for these crimes. No torture could be too much, but I cannot live to see the tortures I have inflicted upon others.

  These monstrous crimes, it transpired, included fraud and embezzlement to the nth degree. Besides the crimes that Campbell unearthed, Coxhill had defrauded a Wicklow bank, in which he had an interest, of £23,000, oversold shares in the HECC to the tune of £150,000, and represented his assets at thousands when he was in fact in heavy debt. In the end he was preparing to raise money by means of forged cheques. Even had the Prince of Wales agreed to back his venture, as he dreamed, it is hard to see how he could have been saved from ignominy. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. Coxhill was already half-crazed from his opium habit, which Campbell was too naïve to recognise. It almost seemed that Skelton made himself the agent of a greater justice in putting such a punishing end to Coxhill’s despicable grasping.

  Of Nellie, reports differ. The ungenerous say she died in Paris—consumptive, alcoholic, or worse—and that her unborn child died with her. A different report places her in Geneva, living in quiet luxury on roast duck and cherry liqueurs, looking down on Lac Léman from a chalet filled with servants, styling herself a gentlelady widow as she brought up a child whom many suspected to be Bertie’s son.

  Finally, the Professor. Molly made a full recovery and chose to leave London with Campbell and myself. My gallant young husband was hell-bent on leaving the police at first. But I persuaded him that he had a great future, perhaps far from London. We moved to Edinburgh with Molly as our adoptive daughter. She and I took to the place like a shot, and I’m happy to say she married and had a family here. To this day she runs a popular ghost train in the Portobello funfair, delighting children along the seafront with hair-raising stories of her days in the London underworld. Her wish to be buried out in the green fields seems also secure, as we have a plot purchased in Rosslyn Glen, by the chapel there, for us both to lie beside Campbell when our time comes.

  Ruth Villiers Lawless

  National Library of Scotland, November 1911

  SOMETIMES A PERSON GETS DESPERATE

  Final Thoughts of Campbell Lawless, Chief-Inspector, c. 1888

  I picture him still, Berwick, hurtling headlong on the train towards the underground nation he had spent so long in building, smashing into the siding as the waves of oblivion rise around him.

  I kept his hat for a while, thinking it might stand as evidence, should the thing ever come to trial. Until I admitted to myself that such things never come to trial. Like Shuffler at the beginning, so Berwick at the end: the little man never merits an inquest. So I took the hat one day and went with the Professor up to the Regent’s Canal, said a quick prayer and tossed it into the water.

  Even today, so many years later, I cannot excise his image from my mind. My wife has tried to calm the ghost. Darling woman, she asks questions to try and conjure the thoughts away. Don’t you think of him as a lunatic, she asks, and cruel with it? Is it not lucky for all of us that he blew himself up? I do not answer.

  Berwick Skelton was no lunatic. His disappearance has been an incalculable loss to the world. For I cannot shrug off the feeling that, whatever this cruel life drove him to, he was a man much greater than myself. A man with the heart of a lion, with an appetite for people and for life that I will always envy. With integrity, understanding, and vision that fired him to efforts beyond my imagining.

  I recall Worm’s image of the spark that would set off revolutions. I picture Skelton bestriding the continent, reaching down to light the tinder across Europe, to burn away the dead wood and keep warm the hopes of the poor, downtrodden and despised. I suppose I hold him a symbol of the ever-elusive future. A man much greater than myself.

  Could it have worked? I mean if he had stuck to changing the world instead of doing the rights, as Worm put it. Were people all like him, I think it might have. But sadly, people are more like me, plagued with equivocation and uncertainty, not to mention greed and carelessness. Wardle, whom I trusted, even loved, was corrupt as any criminal, while Skelton was vilified as a demon. What does it mean to be a watchman if we are the ones that need to be watched? The years pass so quickly now and all these disappointments merge together: that I never squared things with my father; that I never properly met Berwick. What it would have been to spend some time in that bright company! The one act of Berwick’s that seemed inexplicably barbarous took on a different hue in the light of the revelations that followed. Perhaps evil is not something you are but something you do. In my latter years, I am inclined to pity every poor soul as a fellow sufferer in life’s trials.

  Sometimes a person gets desperate. He gets desperate and he does something that in the normal run of events he would never countenance. Something happens, trivial or world-shaking, and for the rest of his life he can never escape the consequences. Berwick fell for Nellie, and she left him. He was a man with dreams that could have shaken the earth, but those dreams turned to dust. Crushed by carelessness and ill fortune, he set out to create a mythological terror. Condemn him if you wish. I believe I understand him, or at least forgive him. A part of me even wishes he had succeeded. So it is that, sitting here with my good and gentle wife in our Edinburgh home, committing these incoherent fragments to paper, I end with weeping. I miss Berwick Skelton, for all his sins, and I curse the world that drove him to despair. It is poorer without him.

  AUTHOR’S DISCLAIMER

  Although it would be foolish to dissemble that some figures are not intended to bear resemblance to historical figures, the main characters are my invention, and their nonsenses mine. Where I have used real people and events, I have been slovenly in my researches and feel confident that this is reflected in the incongruous intractabilities of the text. I have allowed myself to stretch credulity so far you may find it all just stupid fibs.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Caroline; to Emlyn and to Phil; to Mum and Dad; to Seán, Tom, Caroline and Vikki of the erstwhile Mercat Press; to John, Doris and Nina; to Jason, Noel, Hugh, Mirko, Suzie, Peter, Alice-Rose, Francesca, Shannon, Ruth, Jeremy, Charlie; to Dallas and Victoria, Robin, Shomit and Melissa; to Susan, Pedro, John Milton (in São Paulo); to Kenny Wright, Harry and Frank, Peter and Laura, Jane, Jill and Roger; to Lenny, Mike Greaney, Adrian Odell, Geoff, Lester, Ludo, Jasmine, Tata, TubePrune and victorianlondon.org; to Philip Jeays, Ken Campbell, Philippe Gaulier, Tim Crook and IRDP; to Peter Burnett, Sam Boyce, Thirsty Lunch; to Kay Hadwick, New Writing South, the Portsmouth Writers’ Hub; the ReAuthoring Project; and to Miranda Jewess and Titan Books for revitalising Lawless.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  William Sutton comes from Dunblane, Scotland. He has written for the Times, acted in the longest play in the world, and played cricket for Brazil.

  He writes for international magazines about language, music and futurology. His plays have been produced on radio and in London fringe theatres. He has performed at events from the Edinburgh Festival to High Down Prison, often wielding a ukulele. He teaches Latin and plays accordion with chansonnier Philip Jeays.

  william-sutton.co.uk | twitter.com/WilliamGeorgeQ

  facebook.com/WilliamGeorgeQ | pinterest.com/wgq42

  soundcloud.com/william-george-sutton

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  LAWLESS

  AND THE FLOWERS OF SIN

  WILLIAM SUTTON

  A Foundation for Fallen Women. An automaton chess-master. An impossible theft. As reluctant inspector
of vice, Lawless undertakes a reckoning of London’s nighthouses. This is a shadowy nether world of frayed glamor, hypocrisy and double standards, mesmerising and unspeakable by turns. Lawless is surprised to find himself fascinated by Felix, the forlorn maestro driven by mysterious sufferings to establish this charitable foundation. Nor does the Scotland Yard man foresee the trail his questions open up. From the erotic booksellers of Holywell Street down the darkening passageways of Haymarket, he discovers ever more backstreet cast-offs and casualties of the high-life bordellos, aided by the literary 9.23 Club, the urchins of the Oddbody Theatricals, and the remarkable Miss Skittles, who has seen both sides…

  AVAILABLE JULY 2016

  TITANBOOKS.COM

  LAWLESS

  AND THE HOUSE OF ELECTRICITY

  WILLIAM SUTTON

  The new drawing mistress feels inquisitive eyes upon her as she arrives to take up her post at a country house. Ex-street urchin Molly’s quickwitted candour earns her favour with the old Earl, but the keen-eyed butler sees through her pose of gentility. The House of Roxburgh welcomes a cavalcade of poets and magicians, explorers and scientists. But Molly begins to suspect that darker secrets lurk in the gardens. Who works so late into the night in the menagerie glasshouse laboratories? In London’s East End, a body tumbles from a ship. Sergeant Lawless unearths connections between a newly arrived aristocrat, an unfortunate fire, and a mysterious vanishment. The shadow of European machinations looms over the capital, threatening royals and politicians, but evidence from an accidental blast sends him into the English shires.

  AVAILABLE JULY 2017

  TITANBOOKS.COM

  THE LAZARUS GATE

  MARK LATHAM

  London, 1890. Captain John Hardwick, an embittered army veteran and opium addict, is released from captivity in Burma and returns home, only to be recruited by a mysterious gentlemen’s club to combat a supernatural threat to the British Empire. This is the tale of a secret war between parallel universes, between reality and the supernatural. A war waged relentlessly by an elite group of agents; unsung heroes, whose efforts can never be acknowledged, but by whose sacrifice we are all kept safe.

  “A splendid start to what promises to be a terrific series, making fog-shrouded London come alive.”

  James Lovegrove, New York Times bestselling author

  “Steeped in rich fantasy and Victorian authenticity… not to be missed.”

  George Mann, author of Newbury & Hobbes

  AVAILABLE NOW

  TITANBOOKS.COM

  THE ISCARIOT SANCTION

  MARK LATHAM

  In an alternate reality, the world is in peril. The sky burns with a supernatural fire, demonic entities run amok in the streets, and in the north of England, sinister beings plot to claim a part of the Empire for their own. Young Apollo Lycea agent Lillian Hardwick, and her Majestic partner Sir Arthur Cecil, are sent to expose this plot. To complete their mission they must overcome foes both mundane and supernatural, uncover a Royal conspiracy, and unlock the secret of the Iscariot Sanction. And yet what they find in the industrial cities and windswept moors of the north is a danger unlike anything they have faced before; a threat that will leave them—and the Empire—changed forever.

  AVAILABLE SEPTEMBER 2016

  TITANBOOKS.COM