Leaning against the wooden panels of the Jolly Sailor, somehow so reminiscent of a grand navy ship, Horton can feel the dull itch in his back, his skin’s memory of the fifty lashes he’d received as a member of that mutinous crew, a not-so-jolly sailor at all, and that other itch of guilt that rises from the knowledge of why there were only fifty lashes, of what he’d done to secure a second chance. That guilt is under the skin, and that itch is sharper.
The newspapers had stirred the pot of outrage at the mutiny in 1797, and they were assiduously doing the same now. The ghoulish crowds had been rolling down the Ratcliffe Highway since yesterday, when news of the Marr murders had hit the London papers. The Times and the Chronicle, in particular, have hooked attention (and sold a fair few extra copies, Horton wagers) with their painting of these murders as the worst, most depraved atrocity ever to unfold within the benighted confines of the sprawling city of London, the biggest city the world has ever seen and without any doubt the wickedest. Horton had only to walk a few hundred yards along Old Gravel Lane to the inquest, from the lodgings he shared with Abigail in Lower Gun Alley, but that was enough to show him that the Great Public Leviathan was up and out of its chair and scooping down the atmosphere with a gigantic spoon. He saw gentlemen buying drinks for watermen in the hope of gaining some precious nugget of colorful local insight (the watermen very happy to oblige, concocting elaborately invented tales of local evils), while the refined ladies who’d come along with them gazed with fierce fascination at the Wapping whores. Murder and horror, it appeared, were greater social levelers than anything Messrs. Danton and Robespierre had managed in France.
The locus of this great chattering crowd is not this inquest. There is something far more visceral and appealing available further down the Highway, where the bodies of the Marrs have been laid out in their house. Anyone can get in to see them. Horton passed the house this morning, and going in found the landing chockablock with gawping ladies and wailing boardinghouse keepers. The house stank of the mob and, increasingly, of the days-old bodies of the Marrs. Timothy Marr, whose freshly painted wooden shopfront was now notched and battered, would have been beside himself.
And while the crowds have gawped and the newspapers have thundered, the patchy apparatus of policing has been busy squabbling with itself. In the last twenty-four hours an especially technical word has been passed around between the panicked officials of Shadwell and the Home Office: jurisdiction. The murders happened in the parish of St. George in the East, which is in the district covered by the Shadwell magistrates. Yet the river magistrate, John Harriott, in a flurry of his old energy, has seized the moment and the initiative, even though he is only technically responsible for crime on the river. Never one for pettifogging, Harriott has decided that the murders are so serious that all London’s magistrates need to involve themselves. Neither the Home Office nor Shadwell quite agree.
Thus the evening after the murders Harriott had arranged for a handbill to be printed and distributed, offering a £20 reward for information about the perpetrators of the Marr murders (this, Horton would say, in the absence of anything resembling an investigation of the murders). The handbill has enraged the Shadwell magistrates, who have done nothing so deliberate themselves, what with old Story still reeling around talking about the end of days. His two fellow magistrates, Mr. Markland and Mr. Capper, complained bitterly and directly to Ryder, the Home Secretary himself. Harriott has long been the grit in the eye of the Home Office, the lunatic gentleman-farmer-sailor-soldier who follows no man’s rules, who makes it up as he goes along, the very definition of a maverick. Harriott is detested in the corridors of Whitehall power, and Ryder, who inherited Harriott along with all the other little annoyances of his post, shares that detestation. So, while the bodies of Timothy Marr and his family lie on their beds in the tidy little house on the Highway, the servants of the public who are supposed to be investigating their deaths are quite busy enough, thank you, arguing about who does what.
This jurisdictional jousting is one reason for Constable Horton to make his way into the inquest—Shadwell’s inquest—with care, seeking the shadows and avoiding the glances of the Shadwell magistrates who are already here. But now John Harriott arrives, and he makes no such acknowledgment. He thunders into the Jolly Sailor in much the same way as he had thundered into Moghul fortresses in India. The faces of the attending Shadwell magistrates see him and show their annoyance, but Harriott ignores them and takes up a seat in the front row of chairs. Horton, in his shadows, smiles to himself. Good man.
Harriott’s defiance today is well earned, for despite the squealing of Shadwell and the Home Office it is becoming clear that all London’s magistrates are indeed going to be involved in the Marrs’ murders, whether or not they care to be. Suspects are pouring in to all seven magistrates’ offices in the city, and the Home Secretary has been heard to mutter that if there are so many murderers in London’s streets, why is there anyone still living? Throughout the metropolis, handbills are going up, descriptions of potential murderers are being circulated, the usual suspects (normally Irish, Jewish or Portuguese, or some exotic mixture of the three) are being rounded up by constables and police officers and magistrates who prefer to trawl for criminals rather than discover them.
While all these suspects clog up the arteries of London’s stuttering policing systems, the Shadwell magistrates have been forced to write to tell Ryder that, in effect, the Shadwell office has paradoxically nothing to go on. Despite this, the Home Secretary, steadfast in his determination that the proper forms will be observed, has formally chastised Harriott and ordered the old man to assist Shadwell at their own instruction and to stop, at all costs, issuing handbills which are only likely to cause more fool’s errands. Harriott has written a suitably groveling response this morning—“vexed with myself . . . run me into an error . . . discretionary powers were limited . . . I will take special care to keep my zeal within proper bounds.”
The lack of evidence, the debates between the offices, the rogue handbill: all of these have made the issue of the maul, the only apparent piece of concrete evidence in the case, all the more vexed for Harriott and Horton. Gently, ever so gently, Harriott has introduced the idea that his officer had removed a key piece of evidence from the Marr household immediately following the murder, well before any Shadwell officers arrived. With his relationship with the Home Secretary somewhat on edge, Harriott has been forced to play a little politics himself, speaking informally to the Shadwell magistrate Charles Markland and offering to make it clear that Shadwell, not the River Office, made the great breakthrough in the case and would claim the credit for it with the Home Office.
The nature of the breakthrough is pleasingly dramatic, more than enough to keep the Home Office satisfied for a few days. Before handing the maul over, Constable Horton made careful sketches of the maul, a thankless task given the devilish material on its face, but one which Horton accepted gladly, as it gave a chance for closer inspection. Wiping away some of the blood and the matter on the flat, mallet end of the tool, he had felt a warm surge of excitement as two letters were revealed in the face of the maul: “JP,” the shapes crudely hammered out in dots into the metal.
This is the information which Shadwell has been allowed to claim as its own (although, as Harriott said, it would probably lead to the arrest of everyone within a mile of the river with those initials). But it is also information which Horton has been allowed to chew on, a nugget to be shared down on the streets.
While Harriott has busied himself with fending off the politicians and consuming inordinate quantities of humble pie, his Constable Horton has been plunging into the twilight world of ramshackle boardinghouses which cluster in and between the bottom ends of Old and New Gravel Lanes, in search of “JP.”
These ramshackle houses are where the sailors dwell, in the gaps between voyages, sequestered in tiny rooms, their entire worldly possessions stuffed into heavy old sea chests which they place at their feet while s
leeping. Men of every nationality are squeezed into an endless succession of uneven rooms, stinking of gin and sometimes wrapped around a female, either a professional woman or a lovelorn sweetheart who has been pulled into the boardinghouse upon the sailor’s return before being thrown back out into the world again when the sailor runs out of money and flees back to the forgiving, anonymous ocean.
Constable Horton’s twilit activities do not constitute what John Harriott would have understood by “looking into it,” because this is not how policing is done. For Harriott, a police force is about protection, not detection. His original plans for the Thames River Police were predicated on a police force observing the river, and making arrests when said observations led to information about individuals or, more often than not, when a police officer witnessed a crime directly (at the time of the formation of his Police Office, Harriott reckoned there were 11,000 people involved in pilfering on the river, so witnessing a crime directly was not uncommon). The idea of going out and discovering criminals, of foraging around within the chaotic connections of the dock and the river, is as alien to John Harriott (and, indeed, to almost all the other London magistrates) as a Napoleonic code of rights and wrongs.
In the day and a night since he started his investigations, Constable Horton has so far failed to discover who “JP” might be, but he has discovered something else. Several sailors in Wapping knew of Timothy Marr by reputation. He had served on the East Indiaman the Dover Castle. One sailor (an ancient one-eyed man from Norfolk, with a single tooth and, of all things, a small, blond-haired daughter, with no sign of a mother or anyone to care for her when the old man went back to sea, as he surely would) claimed that Marr had made enemies, and had developed a reputation as a belowdecks stool pigeon. When Horton pushed him, the sailor had little to add, and Horton saw that this was something the sailor felt rather than understood. Somewhere, a story had taken root that Marr was on the side of the officers and not of the crew, and such a reputation was hard to shift. Horton understands that only too well—the itch beneath his skin again.
From the back of the room Horton can see that Story, still the senior Shadwell magistrate, is working himself up to confront old Harriott, but then there is a flurry at the entrance to the room, and the coroner, John Unwin, appears, followed by the inquest jury. All are men, and all are pale and grim-faced. Most look at the ground, avoiding anyone’s eye. They have come back from visiting the Marr household.
The jury take their seats, and Unwin commences proceedings. Horton knows the man well—he is solid and steady, a stickler for process, like all good coroners.
First the surgeon, a Mr. Salter, lays out the medical facts, in neutral tones taken from anatomy textbooks and read out from a thick leather-bound ledger, within which, Horton wonders, must lie the terrible details of many more deaths. Mrs. Marr: left side of the cranium shattered, temple-bone destroyed, wound from jaw to ear, wound at the back of the ear. Mr. Marr: nose broken, bone at the base of his skull fractured, wound over left eye. James Gowen: skull smashed open and the brains spread down his neck and the adjacent wall. The baby, Timothy Marr the younger: the artery in his neck slashed from the mouth downward and other marks of violence on the face. Across the room, John Harriott, who has seen ships wrecked on English rocks and women carried away by tigers, feels his eyes moisten and the old wound in his lame leg tighten as the descriptions are read out. Constable Horton has no such reaction. The facts are the facts. They help to bring the picture into focus, that is all. The itch has gone.
The only other witnesses are those that Harriott himself helped to interview at Shadwell, on the day after the murders: Margaret Jewell, the neighbor John Murray and the old watchman, Olney. The girl speaks calmly but almost inaudibly, and Horton is impressed by her self-possession, in such stark contrast to the raw-eyed young teenager on the pavement outside that benighted house. And Murray adds a new element to his story: that he heard a raised voice from the Marrs’ home around midnight which sounded either afraid or angry, and could have been either a woman’s voice or that of a boy. Olney, who seems to have been replenished by the jugs in the alehouse downstairs, embellishes his tale with his own detail: that the maul, which Horton had brought out of the house, was “running with blood.” Story looks across at John Harriott at the mention of this evidence, but the old man takes no notice.
The coroner asks for the jury’s verdict, and it is given: willful murder, by person or persons unknown. The jury and the clerks make their way back downstairs, the clerks in particular looking terrified about what awaits them in the street. Constable Horton stays put for the moment, waiting for the Shadwell magistrates to head back to their own offices, wishing to avoid any kind of confrontation, and notices Harriott doing the same. Story looks like he might be about to say something, but the descriptions of the bodies have had a chastening effect on the man. A horrified look is frozen in his face, and in the end he gives John Harriott a wide berth. The landlord of the Jolly Sailor, all the jollity blown out of his sails, begins to sort out the chairs and the tables, and Horton walks over and sits beside the old magistrate. He says nothing, waiting for Harriott to speak.
Some color is coming back into the old man’s cheeks, which had gone white with the evidence from the surgeon. He has placed his chin on top of his hands, which are folded on top of his walking stick. He stares into a middle distance, only glancing up to acknowledge Horton as the officer sits down. Eventually he speaks, his chin remaining on his hands.
“Monstrous descriptions, Horton. Monstrous. I barely know of anything the like of them.”
“Indeed, sir. The attack on the babe seems particularly inexplicable.”
“Unless they killed it to silence it.”
“Possibly. But something strikes me, sir.”
“What would that be?”
“No shouts, sir. Two adults and a boy killed, but not one of them raised a shout, apart from the one Murray thinks he may have heard. How was it done so quickly?”
The question would seem blasphemous and shocking to a Shadwell magistrate, but Harriott is sturdier than that.
“You have a theory?”
“Not in the least, sir. But it is odd.”
“Hmm. What next?”
“Well, sir, the Shadwell magistrates have apprehended someone I would like to know more about. Mr. Pugh, a carpenter who was working on the shopfront and interior. They think he may be the owner of the chisel found in the store. I thought I might go along and listen in. I have had no luck in tracking down the owner of the maul.”
“Hmm. We should perhaps avoid attending any further interviews at the Shadwell office. Is there not someone who can give you information about the interview with Pugh?”
“I can find someone, sir.”
“I’m sure you can. That is likely to be better, I feel.”
“Yes, sir.”
Constable Horton stands, nods at the magistrate, and leaves. Harriott waits a little longer as the last few stragglers depart. Among the last to leave is Unwin the coroner, who raises his eyebrow when he catches a glance of Harriott before nodding grimly at him and leaving. Like all nods between Englishmen, this one carries an enormity of meaning. We are sailing in uncharted waters, it says.
DECEMBER 1564
“There’s some of the bastards there!”
The blue-green waters of the great African estuary had almost certainly never heard a Welsh accent before that fine morning. Morgan Tillert yelled the words with all the excitement of a poor starving serf discovering a nugget of gold in a mountain stream. Men rushed to the rails of the Tiger to see what he had seen, and Hawkyns himself appeared immediately on the aft deck, immaculate and calm despite the heat.
There, on a spit of land in the great estuary, a crowd of black figures was looking back at the ship. They had been fishing in the river, several dozen of them, but now they gawped at the Tiger and the Swallow, the two smallest vessels in the Hawkyns fleet, which had made their careful way into the river estu
ary the day before.
For a moment, the two groups stared at one another. On board the Tiger there were several seconds of tense silence. But then Hawkyns barked an instruction, his officers began ordering their men into the boats, and the deck was awash with activity, as if an enemy vessel bent on war had come alongside. Billy joined dozens of shipmates as they clambered into the various forms of armor which had been left in piles on deck since the previous day, ready for just this discovery.
None of the men, Billy included, had any doubt as to what Tillert had meant when he’d first shouted his alert. They knew what they were there to do, even if it had never been declared by Hawkyns or by any of his officers. Nods and winks and knowing guffaws were all Billy had seen and heard, but as the voyage had continued it had become more and more obvious what their target was. The chatter belowdecks had been excited: black gold was what they were after. The kind of gold that walked itself onto a ship, and off it again. And now here it was, staring back at them, apparently struck dumb and just waiting to be herded away.
Within minutes five boats were making their way across the immense blue-green estuary toward the spit of land which, as they approached, resolved itself into an island separated from the main riverbank by a narrow stretch of water. Billy’s boat was the first to feel the sandy riverbed as the island rose up to meet it. The sailors clambered out, clumsy and stupid in their great metal costumes. There was a simple instruction from the second mate, a vicious bastard from Birmingham named Watson: “Catch as many of them as you can, lads. If you have to kill a few to get at the rest, well, are we Englishmen, or are we not?”
The English Monster Page 8