Harriott was standing nose to nose with his constable at this moment, and could smell the cheap rum on Horton’s breath. Horton, on the other hand, could smell the expensive brandy on the magistrate’s, and realized even through the fog of his own head that the old man was himself more than a little drunk. Horton’s eyes were wide and Harriott could see that it was only by a rigid effort that his constable was containing himself. It was the self-control Harriott had seen before, and again he is rather awed by it, by its ability to hold the man’s emotions down even at the height of passion and with alcohol swilling round his brain.
There was a long, long pause, during which all they could hear was the crackle from Harriott’s fire and, outside, the gentle lament of an ignored cat. Even the ships, the dock, the mighty river were silent. Just two men in a room with a fire, encountering infinities of evils.
Eventually, Constable Horton spoke.
“Am I to understand, sir, that this investigation is over?”
Harriott’s passions had, once more, been spent, and the old creeping tiredness came over him again. He could no longer bear to stand. He sank back down into the sanctuary of his old chair. With a great heaving sigh, he prepared himself to face duty once more. The germ of an idea had entered his head.
“No, indeed it is not, Horton. No indeed. Let me catch my thoughts for a moment. And for God’s sake, man, sit down and stop swaying so.”
Horton sat down, and the old magistrate gazed into the dying flames of the fire to consider things. He saw immediately that the death of this John Williams would prove to be immensely useful to the Shadwell magistrates. It provided them with a ready suspect who was pleasingly unable to defend himself, and no doubt witnesses were already lining up to provide telling testimony as to the poor dead man’s evil soul.
The only thing that would stop this procedural juggernaut in its tracks would be the discovery of the so-called “Henry Morgan” and the complete unmasking of his plot to fit out the Zong and sail off on a slaving trip. Also, this plot would have to be tied in—tightly, evidentially tied in—to the two sets of killings. Could that even be done? And under the noses of the Shadwell magistrates, who believed (or would shortly believe) that the case was closed?
And all this time, another concern, one bedeviled by damned compromise: while all this was going on, the normal business of the River Police was being neglected, both by him and by Horton. On the one side, his duty to truth (and, he thought to himself, perhaps to poor John Williams), on the other, his duty to trade and his paymasters.
He decided.
“This is what we must do,” he says, still looking into the fire. “You must continue your investigations. You must seek to prove the connection between the so-called ‘Morgan,’ the Zong, and the murders, we must take what we know and then we must show it to Graham, and then leave the thing be. And while you do that, I must formally and publicly renounce an interest in the case and return to River Police business. And you, Constable Horton—you need to quit your post. You will formally cease to be a waterman-constable while carrying on this investigation. Any work you do on the case can thus be taken as your own and nothing to do with the River Police. I must protect the office at all costs. Do we understand each other?”
He looked at Horton. The constable had fallen asleep, his mouth open, breathing silently. John Harriott smiled, wrote a note to Horton which he placed on the constable’s chest, and went to bed, with instructions that the man sleeping in the drawing room was to be left undisturbed.
And now it is the morning after, and he faces a thick head and the unpleasant prospect of returning to his normal duties while Horton is out there, speaking to who knows who. But first, he must make his peace with his wife.
So the hungover John Harriott, moving slowly and carefully, begins to prepare for the New Year.
New Year’s Eve rises like a cold flannel in a bucket of water, and already at sunrise the crowd is gathering. The body of John Williams has spent the night in the so-called “black hole” of the Roundabout, the watch house at St. George in the East, down at the end of Ship Alley. The open dead eyes of Williams have stared meaninglessly into the darkness of the black hole, into which his body had been dumped. Above them rose Hawksmoor’s fearsome architecture, stern and atavistic.
It has been light for perhaps an hour when the high constable arrives with his grubby entourage, bringing with them the vehicle that is to be used to display Williams on his journey through the streets to his final place of unrest. It is a vehicle into which much thought has gone: a cart with a platform which inclines downward from front to rear, to allow whatever is placed upon it to be clearly seen by anyone walking behind. Williams is dragged from the black hole of the watch house and laid on this inclined platform, his head at the higher end. He is wearing blue pantaloons and a white shirt with frills open almost to the belly. His eyes remain open.
The paraphernalia attached to the platform shows a strong narrative as well as visual sense, and no little imagination. The maul, which Horton had recovered from the house on Ratcliffe Highway and which had occupied the center of the investigation for so long, was attached to the platform on one side of Williams’s head. On the other was the ripping chisel found on the counter of the Marrs’ shop, its presence in the shop still unexplained. Above the head is fixed a crowbar, found next to Williamson’s body in the King’s Arms. Next to it, without need of explanation, is a sharpened stake.
The honor guard for this little carriage of horrors consists of the head constable and headboroughs of Shadwell, the Superintendent of the Lascars, and an extraordinary number of constables, almost three hundred of them, most of them armed with cutlasses. It is an army which is to accompany John Williams through the streets of Wapping.
The carriage and the procession leaves the grounds of St. George’s and creeps out onto Ratcliffe Highway, where the crowds are waiting.
Some constables, and the Superintendent of the Lascars, tense themselves as the carriage enters the corridor made by the crowd down both sides of the Highway. Hands move toward cutlasses, and violence is anticipated. But nothing happens. The crowd is, as near as is possible in the metropolis, silent. As the carriage makes its way westward down the Highway, to stop outside Timothy Marr’s shop, the crowd is simply there. The display of the Monster, here at last before them, has stilled their chatter. They stand in awe and wonder at the Monster, the man whose knife cut through the throats of babies, girls, women, and men. If one of the mighty ships in the dock were to disgorge prancing tentacled creatures over the walls the crowd would barely notice.
As the cart stops outside the Marr residence, the motion of its halting causes Williams’s head to loll to one side, as if turning away from the scene of his crime. A constable climbs onto the cart, takes Williams’s head in his hands, and firmly turns his eyes back toward the shop. Look at this, the action says. Look at what you did. For ten minutes the cart stays in one place, and the crowd remains silent. No weeping or wailing. No public displays. The display is all there on the cart: the Monster and his instruments.
Eventually, the cart is turned around and is walked back eastward along Ratcliffe Highway. It turns right and southward into New Gravel Lane, down to Pear Tree Alley, where Williams had lodged. Then it goes back into New Gravel Lane to stop for another ten minutes, this time in front of the King’s Arms. And here some real anger is expressed. A hackney coachman who has stopped nearby unfurls his whip and lashes it, three times, across the upturned face of the Monster, cursing loudly and audibly. The crowd sighs and continues to watch.
The cart goes on, north up New Gravel Lane, then left and westward along Ratcliffe Highway again. Then north up Cannon Street to a crossroads, where Back Lane crosses the road north to Whitechapel. A hole has been dug here, but not a grave: it is only three feet wide and two feet long. The cart is stopped alongside, and some of the constables grab the Monster’s body and shove it, limbs and head mixed together, into the hole. Another constable grabs th
e sharpened stake from the platform and with a monstrous cry jumps into the hole with the body and shoves the stake into the chest of the dead man, using the maul itself to drive the stake in.
At this scene of sudden and passionate violence, the crowd erupts at last, screaming and shouting its rage and frustration at Williams’s escape from justice. Quicklime and then soil is poured down onto the body of the Monster, and finally paving stones are relaid over the hole. Williams is no more, and will live on only in the memories and fury of the mob. The crowd disperses, the taverns fill up, and the prostitutes prepare themselves for a sharper beating than normal from their inebriated, enraged clientele.
Horton waits for the crowd to disperse. It takes several hours. Before long, only two people are left: Horton and a watchman he recognizes vaguely (it is Olney), weeping gently into his flask of gin. A third man, a tall young man in a long coat, watches Horton from the window of a boardinghouse overlooking the street, but the constable does not see him. Horton steps onto the paving stones above the resting place of the Monster. His head carries the aching memory of last night’s ale and rum, and his mouth is dry and dissolute. He is still wearing yesterday’s clothes and even now Abigail is once again anxiously awaiting his return.
He stands for a moment, his hands in his pocket, watching his feet on the paving inches above the damned body of the Irish Fiend. He can hear Olney crying just down the street. Then he turns and leaves, passing Olney as he heads south into the Highway and the future.
Olney follows him. After a few moments, the tall young man appears on the street. He waits while the other two disappear around the corner and onto the Highway, and then he also goes to stand over the resting place of the Irish Monster. Like Horton before him, he looks down to where his feet meet the pavement. He takes something out of his pocket and flicks it into the air such that it lands, with a hefty metallic crack, directly beneath his feet. It is a Potosí piece of eight. He admires his handiwork for a moment, smiling as if in memory of other offerings. Then he too leaves that place.
BOOK 4
Ablass
We in the country here are thinking and talking of nothing but the dreadful murders, which seem to bring a stigma, not merely on the police, but on the land we live in, and even our human nature. No circumstances which did not concern myself ever disturbed me so much. I have been more affected, more agitated, but never had so mingled a feeling of horror, and indignation, and astonishment, with a sense of insecurity too, which no man in this state of society ever felt before, and a feeling that the national character is disgraced.
Robert Southey, letter to Neville White, December 1811
JANUARY 1812
At the urging of a desperate and cornered Home Secretary, in the New Year Aaron Graham takes up the case of the Ratcliffe Highway murders. The vicious slaughter of some frankly ordinary folk in the East End has, to the great surprise of the Right Honourable Members of His Majesty’s Government, become a matter for debate within the Mother of Parliaments herself. Political firing squads are beginning to line up. The random perambulations of the Shadwell magistrates are starting to look comical and incompetent, and who, after all, is responsible for those magistrates? And what does this show of foolishness say for the safety of all Londoners? If monsters are abroad, does the current Home Secretary have a prescription for dealing with them?
Surely, think all those who are still thinking, surely there was more than one man involved in these murders? What of the sounds of men fleeing the scene of the original murders? What of the witnesses who saw two men fleeing the scene of the King’s Arms? What of the double sets of footprints across the wasteland behind that benighted inn?
In the second week of the New Year, the Home Secretary formally orders the Shadwell magistrates to give up their prime piece of evidence—the bloodstained, awful maul—and pass it to Graham, who opens up an investigative office at his own headquarters in Bow Street and begins interviewing witnesses, many of whom had already been interviewed by the Shadwell magistrates, in their own fashion. Shadwell’s papers regarding the case are all transferred to Bow Street. And in the Commons itself, the Home Secretary, his back to the legislative wall, introduces a motion to establish a committee to investigate the need for a reform of London’s policing. It is, as everyone who is anyone knows, a classic case of buying time.
Graham is assiduous in his fresh investigations and Harriott, at last, is properly involved in the case, advising and cajoling behind the scenes while the Shadwell magistrates return to their offices, fuming. Graham (like Harriott) is convinced that at least one man must have been Williams’s accomplice in the murders, perhaps even two. His suspicion (like Harriott’s) falls on Cornelius Hart, the carpenter who had been working on the spruce little Marr shop on the day of the murders and whose ripping chisel was discovered on the counter of the shop. On the 13th of January, Hart is arrested by Graham’s officers and kept for questioning.
His is not the only arrest. Four days later, the same William Ablass who had been interrogated by Shadwell is arrested by Graham’s officers and, like Hart, is kept at Bow Street. He is officially suspected (only Harriott and Graham know of the unofficial sniffing around being conducted by Charles Horton) on the basis of fresh testimony from the mercurial Mrs. Vermilloe, the landlady of the Pear Tree boardinghouse whose evidence was primarily responsible for the assumed guilt of John Williams. Her husband, the man who had originally identified the initials on the maul, is still in his cell in Newgate jail.
Ablass had been released by the Shadwell magistrates when he claimed not to have known Williams and had produced an alibi from a woman he claimed was his wife. Mrs. Vermilloe asserts that he did, indeed, know him, and pretty well. They were often seen together. And it is shown that the woman concerned is not his wife at all, and is prepared to say pretty much anything to anyone in return for a jug of gin.
And Ablass has a limp, a very pronounced one. Several witnesses had seen two men, a tall man and a short one, leaving the scene of the Williamson murders, the taller of them with a limp (this evidence had been used to incriminate John Williams himself, who also had a limp but was, in fact, rather short).
Within days Ablass himself becomes a stick with which to beat the weakened government. Long Billy is discussed in Parliament itself.
Hansard record of proceedings in the House of Commons, 31 January 1812 [edited]
MOTION RESPECTING POLICE MAGISTRATES.
Sir F. Burdett expressed his regret, that he had not received the note of the right hon. gentleman opposite (Mr. Ryder) respecting his Order on the subject of Police Magistrates . . . What had they been doing in the late examinations which had taken place of persons who were supposed to have been concerned in the murder of Mr. Marr’s family? What had they been doing, but endeavoring to make men, whom they had ever so little reason to suspect, say that which might criminate themselves? This inquisitorial power they had been in the habit of exercising daily, and what right had they to inflict the punishment which they had inflicted on persons brought before them? What was now the situation of that unfortunate person who was in confinement on suspicion of being concerned in the late murders, Ablass? What was he kept for? Why was he put in chains, immured in a dungeon, and called upon every day to criminate himself? It was stated in the daily prints, that the only circumstance against him was, his inability to account for a quarter of an hour of his time the night on which one of the murders was committed.
Mr. Secretary Ryder assured the hon. baronet, that he had not the slightest suspicion of his not being at the House on Tuesday or Wednesday, or he should not have brought forward his motion on either of those days . . . But the hon. baronet had said, there were many improper appointments of police magistrates; he wished the hon. baronet would come boldly and manfully forward with his charges, and not state them in that narrow, pitiful way, without stating the particular charge, or naming the particular individual . . . he must take it for granted, that there were circumstances sufficie
nt in the opinion of the magistrate, Mr. Graham, to justify and call on him to commit the individual. What reason was there then to impute any improper conduct to Mr. Graham? Instead of any imputation, in his opinion, he was deserving of public approbation and thanks.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer observed, that there never was a motion brought forward in that House with less grounds to maintain it . . . As to the severity which was asserted with respect to Ablass, there were circumstances of suspicion which led the magistrates to believe that he was on a given time at a given place; they did not require of him to criminate himself, though if he could have given a satisfactory account of himself during that period, the case would bear a very different complexion, and the magistrates would not have acted properly if they had not given him an opportunity of accounting for that time. The individual who put an end to himself to evade justice was taken up on mere suspicion; would the hon. baronet say he ought not to have been detained?
While Burdett, Home Secretary Richard Ryder, and the First Lord and Prime Minister Spencer Perceval plow their parliamentary furrow, Aaron Graham receives John Harriott as a welcome visitor at his house in Great Queen Street. Harriott arrives a little early, and waits for Graham in the drawing room of the finely decorated house. He reads that day’s edition of The Times, from which any discussion of the recent events in Wapping is absent. There is an odd extract from the recent book by General Sarrazin, reports of a capture of a French frigate in the Adriatic, disagreements over the maintenance of law and order in Nottingham, where there have been recent riots, and a single sentence on the King who “continues much in the same state.” In the paper’s daily Law Report there is one story with which he is familiar, that of George Bicknell and Bob Barney, notorious street robbers and brothel keepers, whom the Shadwell magistrates have just sent down for six months.
The English Monster Page 31