The Maul and the Pear Tree

by P. D. James

  The policeman surveyed the corpses by the dim light of his lantern. Already the air seemed tainted with a sickly sweet smell of blood and brains. He searched systematically, thrusting the lantern under the counter, behind the door, into shelves, in every dark place where the murderers might have flung their terrible weapons. But apart from the ripping chisel he found nothing. Nor, it seemed, had anything been stolen. In Marr’s pocket Horton found five pounds, and there was loose money in the till. Then he went downstairs to the kitchen, where the dead child lay in his blood-soaked cradle. But that search, too, was fruitless. Whoever had sliced through the baby’s throat had taken the knife away with him.

  It remained to search the upper floors. Joined by Olney, Horton crept cautiously upstairs and stood on the landing, alert and listening, where Murray had so recently called to the young couple in their bedroom. Their door was still open. Taking a firm grip on his truncheon, Horton went in. The bed was undisturbed. Beside it stood a chair, and resting against the chair, the handle upwards, was a heavy iron mallet, or maul, such as ship’s carpenters used. The handle was covered with blood, and on the iron head the blood was still wet, with hairs sticking to it. The murderers must have dropped the weapon and fled, disturbed by Margaret Jewell’s ringing. Nothing had been stolen from the bedroom either. A drawer contained £152 in cash.

  Horton carried the maul downstairs gingerly. The sight of it caused the crowd in the shop to shrink back. Setting his lantern on the counter the policeman examined the weapon. The iron head was shaped rather like an anvil, the thick end, now horrible with blood and hair, flattened to drive nails into ships’ timbers. The narrow end, which tapered to a point about the diameter of a sixpence, was used as a punch for driving the nail in deeper beneath the surface of the wood. Here was the first clue. The end was seen to be broken at the tip.

  Someone else, meanwhile, had discovered other clues. Two distinct sets of footprints led away from the back of Marr’s house. The carpenters had been at work in the shop that day and the impressions contained traces of blood and sawdust. Evidently the murderers had escaped over the fence at the rear and made their way across the enclosed ground at the back. A man from Pennington Street confirmed it. He lived next door to an unoccupied house at the corner of Pennington Street and Artichoke Hill. Soon after the first alarm was given he had heard a rumbling in the empty house, and ‘about ten or twelve men’ were heard to rush out of it down Pennington Street. It was a fair inference that the gang had fled down Old Gravel Lane, where they disappeared.

  Sometime before dawn Horton returned to the River Thames Police Office with the maul; and there he discovered three men already in custody. They were Greek sailors, seen loitering near Marr’s house, and one had spots of blood on his trousers. These were the first of many to be arrested in similar circumstances, picked up on the slightest suspicion, or none. The sense of horror, and especially a feeling of outrage at the murder of the baby, rapidly infected the whole community with a sort of mass hysteria which at first battened on foreigners. The Greek sailors were brought before the River Thames Police magistrate, John Harriott, but they were able to produce an alibi to prove that they had just come up from Gravesend and were discharged.

  So already, soon after daybreak on Sunday morning, within a very few hours of the murders, much had been accomplished. A police officer had searched Marr’s house and found the bloodstained maul with its distinctive mark; it had been established that nothing had been stolen; two sets of footprints had been discovered; the likely route of escape had been plotted; and three men had been arrested and brought before the magistrate. The impression gained is that there existed in London eighteen years before the Metropolitan Police were established in 1829, an organised, if rudimentary policy force, trained and equipped to react swiftly to events. Such an impression would be false.

  The primary responsibility for the fight against crime in the parish of St George’s-in-the-East was saddled firmly on the Churchwardens, Overseers and Trustees of the parish vestry, who were required by laws going back to the Middle Ages to go through the annual ritual of conscripting persons to the part-time, unpaid offices of High Constable and Constable. These offices, though honourable, were irksome. The constables, up to a dozen of whom might be appointed every year, were responsible for setting the nightly watch, inspecting it, charging prisoners, and bringing them before a magistrate in the morning. After a hard day’s work tradesmen and artisans had neither energy nor inclination for arduous and unrewarded public service; and by long custom they could avoid it, either by paying a ten-pound fine to the parish or by paying a deputy to act for them. Most of these deputies were corrupt, and many served on for years.

  Under the control of the constables (or their paid deputies) the parish of St George’s-in-the-East also employed thirty-five night watchmen at two shillings a night, together with a Night Beadle to supervise them. The watchmen’s duty was to call the half-hours from nine o’clock at night until four in the morning, and to ‘apprehend, arrest and detain, all malefactors, rogues, vagabonds, disturbers of the peace, and all persons whom they shall have reason to suspect have any evil designs, and who shall be loitering or misbehaving themselves’. That is what the local Act said, but the watchmen saw their job differently. For them it was the easiest way they knew of earning fourteen shillings a week plus perquisites. Between their rounds they sheltered in little watch-boxes which, according to a contemporary account in The Examiner, were ‘only a common piece of charity, considering what poor, superannuated creatures inhabit them, and what fogs and rains will often last a whole night’.

  These parish watchmen were invariably old. Most were employed on other work during the day, but were no longer physically strong enough to undertake hard manual labour; so they took on the night work to supplement a necessarily low wage. According to a Mr Jenkinson, of Charterhouse Square, there was a further reason of public – or rather, parish – policy why only old men were employed. ‘I have heard that some years ago the parish of Covent Garden tried the effect of employing young men as watchmen,’ he confided delicately to the Home Secretary, ‘but were obliged to abandon it on account of the connection which subsisted between them and the Prostitutes, who withdrew them from their Duty while Depradations were committing.’ But the old men were little more effective. They may have been too senile to be tempted by prostitutes, but they were also too weak and ineffectual to be a threat to burglars. What was evidently required was a body of strong, energetic and honest young men impervious to the sexual wiles of women, a species which, even had it existed, was unlikely to be attracted to the job or the pay of a parish night watchman.

  The Home Office papers contain a description of the job as one watchman saw it at the time. Thomas Hickey had been employed in five metropolitan parishes, and the rackets he reported were the same in each. A favourite trick was for a watchman to accept a bribe from a burglar (often a close friend) to arrest some stranger for a trifling matter such as loitering, take him to the watch-box, and keep up an argument long enough to enable the burglar to rob the chosen house and get away. Then when the constable came along to charge the arrested person he and the watchman would undertake to drop the charge for an agreed sum. ‘Then Mr Watchman and Mr Constable, to give you, Sir, the Phraise, divide the Bit.’ Hickey and his friends also had experience of the wiles of prostitutes. ‘Another Great Evil is the Unfortunate Females who from Actual Necessity parade the Streets late at Nights, they poor Creatures for their Personal Safety are obliged – I say obliged – to have a Protector, better known by the name of a Bully or a Flash Man – pardon this Language Sir – who are Noted Thieves – the Unfortunate Female from meeting with interruption from the Watchman is obliged, and is often planned, to Call him from his Bait to treat him with some Gin – this is never refused and answers the double purpose of giving her Freedom to prowl about and her Pall an opportunity of Breaking open a House or robbing the Unwary Passinger.’

  A watchman was not allowed t
o stray from his parish without permission from a neighbouring constable, and stories are common of old men looking benignly on while burglars ransacked a house across a road that formed a parish boundary. Frequently, however, they simply dozed through the night in a drunken stupor. The tools of the trade, beloved by generations of cartoonists, were a lantern (or ‘lanthorn’) and a rattle. The lantern was a heavy iron contraption encrusted with layers of tar and grease. The rattle served as little more than a rallying call to criminals, a fortissimo accompaniment (to quote The Examiner again) to the ‘old time-cracked and weather-cracked voice that seems to call the thieves together to rob where they please’.

  No one could expect this meagre parish force, even when supplemented in winter by twenty-four ‘night patrols’, to prevent murder; and the idea of using it as a detective agency would have been ludicrous. However, it was not the only agent of the law in the parish where Marr lived. Behind it (though not in charge of it) was a local bench of three magistrates at their Public Office at Shadwell. This was one of seven such Public Offices created in 1792. The statute might have been called the Anti-Corruption Act, for it finally swept away from Middlesex the disgrace of the old ‘trading justices’, who for upwards of a century had run justice as a highly profitable business. Having bought their way on to the bench they openly took whatever bribes they could get to buy thieves out of trouble, ran protection rackets with brothel keepers and blackmailed with the threat of imprisonment any who dared to oppose them. Sometimes they encountered rascals more clever than themselves. A confidential report to the Lord Chancellor spoke of ‘One Sax, a justice near Wapping; very poor and scandalous; lately a prisoner of the King’s Bench for debt; now skulks about in blind ale houses about Tower Hill and Wapping and takes affadavits at a little ale house near the Victualling Office’. But few justices sank as low as this. They had only to open up shops near their courts to make an excellent living by imposing surcharges of ten or twenty per cent on all goods sold to thieves and prostitutes as the price of immunity from prosecution. The object of the 1792 Act had been to replace these enviable little businesses by courts modelled on the pattern Henry Fielding had established fifty years earlier at Bow Street, where for half a century justice had been administered fairly. The magistrates in the seven new Public Offices were each paid £400 a year (later raised to £500) – enough, it was hoped, to put them beyond the reach of temptation.

  But the solution of one problem created another. The only qualification laid down for the appointments was one that applied to the magistracy generally: a person had to have a private income of at least £100 a year, so that he need not be a tool of government. The new jobs were filled, as was usual at the time, by patronage. By 1811 (to quote The Examiner again) ‘A number of persons, with whom their patrons are at a loss what to do, and who have neither time nor inclination nor any one requisite for the duties which they ought to perform, are seated in the Public Offices, to the great annoyance of themselves and injury of their fellow-subjects…. One of them would be writing novels, another studying politics, a third immersed in divinity, a fourth speculating on the girls that went by, a fifth gnawing his pen for an unfinished couplet and a sixth playing the fiddle over a life of Dr Johnson.’ The Poet Laureate himself (‘The poetical Pye,’ said Walter Scott, ‘was eminently respectable in everything but his poetry’) was one of the magistrates, and all were enthusiastic literati – ‘An offender might be taken up at a theatre conducted by one Magistrate, for creating a riot at a play written by another, and be brought before a third who criticises it in a magazine.’ The magistrates might be considered by day, the writer summed up, ‘what the watchmen are to us by night – poor creatures entirely out of their places, and of no use but to those who plunder us’.

  The three Shadwell magistrates, Robert Capper, Edward Markland and George Story, had their Public Office in Shadwell High Street, and from there they were supposed to cover the six densely populated parishes of Shadwell, Wapping, St Anne’s (Limehouse), St George’s-in-the-East, Ratcliffe and Poplar. To help them they (like each of the other Public Offices) were authorised to employ not more than eight police officers. These men wore no uniform and had no badge of office or equipment of any kind. They formed, in effect, a tiny, isolated police force of which the magistrates were in personal command. Each police officer was paid twenty-two shillings a week, but this was in the nature of a retaining fee. It was expected that the men would undertake jobs for private individuals, track down suspected criminals and recover stolen goods for an agreed reward. By these means the police officers earned as much as £100 a year over and above their nominal salaries. Relations between them and the parish constables and watchmen were deeply hostile; the parish force regarded the little band of police officers as spies, whom they were reluctant to help in any way. They were animals of the same genus, a magistrate declared, but ‘the one is the natural enemy of the other’. This was inevitable, as they were competing for the same perquisites, and they served different masters.

  Charles Horton, the police officer who searched Marr’s shop, was not one of the Shadwell men. He belonged to yet another organisation, and one more recent, even, than the Public Office at Shadwell. The River Thames Police Force, with its Police Office at Wapping New Stairs, had been set up by statute in 1800. Its purpose was to protect the valuable cargoes and ships at anchor in the Pool of London, and although it was authorised to employ five ‘land constables’, as well as forty-three water men, its operations were ordinarily confined to the river. But the man who had been in charge of the force ever since its inception, John Harriott, was no ordinary man. To understand his part in investigating the crime it is necessary to glance at his background.

  Harriott joined the Navy as a boy and sailed to the West Indies. He was shipwrecked off the Levant, then served under Admiral Pocock at the taking of Havana and again at the capture of Newfoundland. When peace came he enlisted as first mate in the Merchant Navy, lived for some time with the American Indians, then suddenly re-appeared in the East as a soldier, where he was acting chaplain and Deputy Judge Advocate. Sent to quell a refractory rajah, he sustained a matchlock wound in the leg, sailed off to Sumatra and the Cape, then after a spell in the wine trade settled down to farm in Essex, where he became a magistrate. In 1790 the farm was destroyed by fire. Harriott emigrated to the United States, returned after five years to England, and then (in 1798) helped Patrick Colquhoun to plan the River Police, with its headquarters at Wapping. He had been the magistrate in charge of the force ever since its inception. In 1811 he was sixty-six; a flamboyant, brave, crafty old buccaneer, a founding father of the first British Empire, type-cast for the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson.

  Yet Harriott’s memoirs show him to have been more than the conventional buccaneer. He was a man of astonishing energy and versatility. No subject was alien to his fertile and inquiring mind. He was something of an amateur theologian, always ready to speculate in print on the existence of God and the efficacy of the Sacraments; an inventor of considerable engineering ability, although some of his schemes were more ingenious than practical; a humanitarian who was one of the first to expose the evils of private lunatic asylums, and a philosopher whose mind, speculating on death, was ‘elevated to a mental satisfaction far beyond what language can express by the experience of transferring the putrefying remains of his first two wives, his father and a number of his infant children to a tough oak coffin’, while tidying things up for his own reception. Moreover, he was a practical moralist whose advice to his sons embarking for the East Indies, ‘at a time when the passions will become strong and the warm climate will increase a desire for gratification’, deserve better than to be buried in the now rare pages of Struggles through Life (3 vols. 1815).

  These, then, were the arrangements for policing London in 1811. Out of a total population of just over one million, about 120,000 people lived in the City; and here alone in the Metropolis was a properly organised system of government, and the money to pa
y for an efficient nightly watch. The urban sprawl outside the City boundaries was divided into fifty separate parishes, each like a tiny independent state, whose only common rulers were, remotely, the King and Parliament. Each parish was governed by its own vestry, comprising the Churchwardens, Overseers and Trustees; and between them these parishes employed about 3,000 parish constables and watchmen. Scattered among the parishes, but in no way set in authority over them, were the seven new Public Offices, each with its quota of three magistrates and eight police officers. These, too, were independent units. Down by the river there was the Thames Police Office to look after the shipping. And finally, primus inter pares, there was the prestigious Bow Street Office, where there were also three magistrates and a corps d’élite of sixty Bow Street Runners, whose operations, however, were normally confined to patrolling the main highways that led into London. Under this system – or rather lack of it – there was no regular focal point, and no one was answerable to anyone for anything. Animosities and jealousies were endemic, and it was a point of honour not to exchange information.1 The Home Secretary could use his authority to order the temporary loan of Bow Street or Thames police in an emergency, but any other mutual aid was inconceivable.

  Nearly eighty years later, when Jack the Ripper set about his midnight butchery a little to the north of Ratcliffe Highway, some 14,000 Metropolitan policemen drawn from all over London failed to solve the crimes. In 1811 the forces available in Ratcliffe Highway to detect and apprehend the murderers of the Marrs comprised: one Night Beadle, one High Constable, one Constable, thirty-five old night watchmen and twenty-four night patrols employed by the vestry of St George’s-in-the-East; three magistrates at their Public Office in Shadwell, with their eight police officers; and an inquisitive old adventurer, Harriott, with a force of River Police and five land constables.