The Great Stink

by Clare Clark

  XXIV

  The inspector in charge of the investigation into Alfred England's murder had refused to enter the room in which William was to be interviewed until the prisoner was placed in restraints. He could not risk the lunatic becoming violent during questioning, he had said, pushing up his spectacles with a spinster's pinched distaste. And so once again William placed his arms into the sleeves of the straight-waistcoat and allowed Peake to tighten the straps. The waistcoat pulled painfully against his damaged ribs but he bit his lip and did not flinch. His stomach fluttered and the saliva rose in his mouth. He could still taste the extraordinary elation that had filled him when he first wrote the letter, the hope that had filled him when he sneaked it to Peake. Peake would take it to Polly. He would be free. His hopes had not been in vain. There was to be an investigation. He would be exonerated, apologies would be made. Naturally enough the police were constrained by procedure in these matters. He would not refuse the straight-waistcoat if they required it. In all matters he would be the very model of cooperation, of courtesy. This was his one chance. He would not squander it. If this interview proceeded favourably, if he could persuade the detectives of the veracity of his story, he would be free. His hands trembled with the effort of holding the anticipation in check.

  At the police officer's instruction, another attendant set out a table and chairs for the inspector and his two associates and, towards the back wall, so that the space loomed emptily between them, another lower chair for the prisoner. William waited quietly, Peake at his side, keeping his gaze straight ahead. He forced himself to breathe quietly, evenly. Inside his skull his mind twisted and flailed, exhilaration wrestling with gloom, apprehension with conviction, seasoning his saliva with their powerful flavours, but William remained perfectly still, his face impassive, breathing in and out, slowly and calmly, the breath of an innocent man, a sane man. The waistcoat caused his hands to touch behind his back. Working to keep his face steady William clenched his fists, digging his nails into his palms, and bore down with all his strength upon the frantic roiling in his head. He had to think clearly. One by one, he stabbed his thoughts like settled bills on to the spike of his spine.

  He had told the truth in his letter. Stab.

  He had witnessed a murder but he had not committed one. Stab.

  The fear and confusion had oppressed him till he had thought himself mad, had wished himself mad, even, but he was not mad. Exhausted, frightened, but not mad. Not mad. Stab.

  He had been acquainted with Alfred England professionally but he had no reason to wish him dead. Stab.

  There had been another man in the tunnels that night. Stab.

  And William was certain he knew who. Stab.

  But he fumbled then and immediately the clamour began again in his head, not just voices now but image after image of Hawke's face the day that William had tried to speak with him of the Abbey Mills contract. Hawke had known then that England was dead. Weeks before they found the body, Hawke had known. And he had set William up to take the blame. I fear that your problems with Mr England may be just beginning. Hawke had smiled then, knowing what would follow. The bitterness flooded William then and it took all his effort to keep his face blank. It would do him no good to make accusations now, he knew that well enough. He bit his lip, concentrating on steadying his breathing. If he was steady all would be well. Regular in his habits, steady, disciplined, methodical in his problem-solving. Methodically he resumed his inventory.

  He would do all that he was able to assist the police with their investigation. Stab.

  When Polly understood she would no longer look at him with those eyes. They could begin again, somewhere far from the city, far from the sewers. Stab.

  He must not lose control. Stab. Stab. Stab. DO NOT LOSE CONTROL. There was no glass in the asylum but he knew what he must look like to the freshly laundered detectives, with his blistered face and his unkempt hair and his shoulders wrenched behind him in the grip of the straight-waistcoat. They had dressed him as a lunatic. They wanted him a lunatic. The fear prickled his unwashed scalp. If he was to struggle in the waistcoat, even for a moment, they would have him guilty. But he was innocent. In an English court of law a man was presumed innocent until proven guilty. And he had not yet been so much as arrested. There would be questions but William would be offered the opportunity to give his answers. These men held no grudge against him personally. They sought the truth. He had only to stay calm, to speak only when spoken to and then with courtesy, considering each question with care and answering each one gravely, directly, and they would see that he was one of them, a professional man, an honest man, no more a lunatic than they were themselves. The British constitution respected the rights of every man, at least when he was a man of standing and of character, a respectable man as he himself was, or had been, until so very recently. He had only to retain control, to behave as a sane man would behave, and to speak the truth. Justice would be done.

  Slowly, almost ceremoniously, the police officers took their seats, the inspector at the centre. The inspector removed his hat and smoothed his hands over his wiry grey hair, for all the world as if it were a judicial wig. Then he pulled his spectacles further down his nose so that he might study William over their rims. He scrutinized him for a long moment and then abruptly, recalling himself, he pushed his spectacles back to the bridge of his nose and brought his gaze back to the papers in front of him. Pressing his lips together disapprovingly, his eyes down, he gestured at Peake to escort William to his chair. Restrained as he was with his arms behind his back William could only perch upon its edge. The inspector straightened his papers and looked up.

  'Let us begin.'

  The policeman at his right hand leaned on his notebook, licking his pencil expectantly. William tensed, waiting for the first question. He could see a slice of pale blue sky through the dirty window, a bird wheeling carelessly on the breeze. Calm, care, courtesy. He had pretended to swallow his chloral this morning but, when Vickery moved away, he had turned his head and let it drain from his mouth into the straw of his mattress. Perhaps he should have taken it, he thought suddenly. Perhaps it would have quietened the terrible thrashings in his head. He moved his tongue nervously in his dry mouth, his fists still clenched behind his back. His stomach pitched. Calm, care, courtesy. Think carefully before you speak. Be reasonable, thoughtful, polite. Do not lose control. When the inspector leaned forward, William cocked his head in an attitude of attentive cooperation. But the inspector did not ask a question. Instead he muttered something to the detective on his left. The man nodded and went to the door.

  There was a pause, the sound of low voices, and then Vickery entered the room, followed by the asylum physician with the heavy eyebrows whose name was Pettit. They did not look at William. The inspector gestured at them to take another pair of chairs that had been set for them close to the table. The five men nodded at one another. From his chair across the room William watched them and the fear twisted in his throat. His stomach tightened, his bowels turned to water. In all of them, in varying degrees, he saw severity and censure and disgust and, in the twist of the mouth of the policeman with the pencil, something close to salaciousness, but in not one of the faces around the table was there the faintest trace of curiosity.

  The inspector directed only one question to William during that interview, and it demanded of him only that he confirm his name and place of residence prior to his incarceration in the asylum. For the remainder of the hour that he was present in the room he outlined the case against the prisoner, occasionally requiring confirmation by Vickery or Pettit of a point of detail. Various gentlemen attached to the Metropolitan Board of Works had been extremely helpful in constructing the case against the prisoner. Of course much of it was already proven. May's presence in the asylum was more than enough proof for any jury of the prisoner's unsound mind. The prisoner had known the dead man. He had confessed in writing, and here the inspector thanked Pettit for his bringing the letter to Scotland
Yard's attention, to being present at the murder. What was more, there was clear evidence of motive. Mr Hawke, May's superior at the Board, had testified to frequent violent arguments between the prisoner and the victim. Both men had threatened the other. On one occasion Mr Hawke had been obliged to intervene to prevent a fight. Would Dr Pettit confirm that the prisoner was indeed a violent man?

  Pettit did not hesitate in agreeing. Why, only recently Mr Vickery had been forced to resort to brute force to bring one of his attacks under control, was that not true, Mr Vickery? Yes, that was absolutely true, Vickery agreed emphatically, keeping his back turned firmly to William's chair. May had proved to be one of Vickery's more difficult charges. Vickery was also able to confirm that the prisoner had numerous marks upon his arms and thighs consistent with knife wounds and a murderous struggle. In fact, Vickery added, striking the table to add emphasis to the words, it would not come as a surprise to him to discover that England had not been May's first victim, given the age of a number of the scars.

  There was a universal intake of breath then, a shifting of bodies yet further away from the part of the room in which the prisoner sat, without expression. No, Pettit confirmed, of course there were no plans to release May from the asylum, although there had been suggestions that he might in time be placed in a county institution when the Board's patience and benevolence came to its inevitable end. Since arriving at the asylum he had shown no interest in his surroundings, spending the vast part of every day without moving from his crib. In Pettit's professional opinion, the prisoner's insanity was advanced and well-established. He had reassured the Board that there was no danger of the prisoner ever being well enough to leave full-time medical care.

  And what of the letter? In it the prisoner made claims of innocence. Was that simply deviousness or was such delusion consistent with his lunacy? Pettit sighed. It might be either, he conceded. It was possible that the prisoner, in his madness, believed himself innocent. In a case such as this one, where the prisoner himself had confessed to suffering from blackouts, where delusions of an advanced and violent nature had been witnessed not only in the asylum but beforehand, in the prisoner's place of employment, he might have no recollection of committing the murder. Pettit had come across such cases before. He had even encountered lunatics who, in the fevered heat of their imagination, had insisted upon fixing another man with the crime, so that they might more effectively ease themselves of the burden of their unacknowledged guilt. But had there not been discovered amongst the prisoner's papers at Greek-street a notebook in which the prisoner himself acknowledged that he might indeed have committed the crime? There could be no more unreliable witness than a lunatic. The most important thing, therefore, Pettit stressed, was to give the prisoner's own accounts no credence whatsoever. The police were to pay no need to anything that the prisoner claimed, however strongly he pleaded his case. His testimony was quite worthless.

  Newgate being temporarily closed as a result of a chronic outbreak of dysentery, William was taken directly to a prison-ship moored at Woolwich, a massive and verminous hulk that had previously been used to transport convicts to the American colonies. There he was to await trial. Despite the concerns of the detectives, who were unnerved by the prisoner's outburst as they concluded the interview, his straight-waistcoat had been removed before he left the asylum, Pettit being unwilling to subsidize the penal system with contributions of his own. Instead they secured his hands in heavy iron cuffs. The windowless transport to Woolwich contained a heavily barred cage into which he was locked. Immediately upon arrival at the ship, leg irons were fastened around his legs. Although they were not to be chained together until William reached his cell, they made walking difficult. William concentrated his attention on shuffling his feet forwards a few inches at a time, allowing himself to think only of the uneasy balance in his feet, the pain in his shins. It was a relief to have so firm a purpose. The noise and the stench on the main deck were overwhelming. There were scores of narrow cells running along each side of the ship and yet more like a spine along its centre, each intended to accommodate a single prisoner but in many cases the prisoners were expected to share. Men roared and cursed and rattled at the doors of their cells as William passed, accompanied by three attendants. The voices pelted him like rocks, from all directions. William stared ahead of him, refusing to hear them. Some of the prisoners were secured by their arms which were passed through holes in the walls of their cells and secured on the other side by iron handcuffs shaped into a figure of eight so that they were required to kneel or lean against the ship's side. Another was held in the open corridor. At first it appeared that he was stooping to retrieve something he had dropped but on closer inspection it was clear that his neck was fastened to an iron bar while his feet were secured in a kind of stirrups. He attempted to spit at the gaolers' legs as they passed but his mouth could summon up only a wisp of saliva. Automatically, as though his arm was simply conforming to prison regulations, one of William's escorts delivered the prisoner an equally unconvincing strike across his shoulders with the flat of his hand. Their business completed, the procession moved on.

  At the end of the main deck, William was bundled into a metal cage suspended upon a system of metal ropes and pulleys. It was too small to hold them all and only two of the guards squeezed in with William, nodding at the remaining warder to slam the door closed. There was a jerk, so that William stumbled forwards, and then the cage began slowly to sink downwards. The darkness grew thicker, the stench stronger. The cage descended past another deck without stopping before, with a startled groan, it jolted and stopped. The door was dragged open once more and William pushed into the gloom of a deck buried deep in the ship's belly. There he was placed in a cell much smaller than the ones on the upper deck, a space perhaps the size of a large press. It being in the centre of the ship there were no windows and the air tasted foul and used up. It itched in William's hair as though it were jumping with lice. There was no crib, no chair, nothing save a bucket in one corner and a little straw upon the floor. When his leg irons had been fastened by chains to iron rings upon its rusting wall the gaolers locked the door behind them and left. William stood in the centre of the cell for a long time after their footfalls had faded. It was quieter down here, the clamour from the upper decks muffled in the coagulated air, but it was not the tranquil hush of empty space. Instead it quivered and pulsated like a simmering soup, its bubbles occasionally bursting into cries or snarls of fury but most of the time issuing no more than a malodorous vapour of exhaustion and misery. William had a sudden impression of thousands of other men crammed together, piled one upon the other, each one nailed for eternity into his coffin of a cell. Thousands of men buried alive, sucking at what little air remained. He mustn't think like that. He mustn't think at all. If he allowed himself to think —

  Determinedly William took a step forward so that his hands touched the door. Then he turned round. The chains that fixed him to the wall clamped painfully around his legs, pressing the irons into his flesh. He turned back again, staring at the floor. Beneath the small iron trap in the cell door the plank floor was worn into a shallow trough by the ceaseless tread of feet. The sight of it clenched his heart into a fist. He closed his eyes. Without the chloral his head was clear and without pain. Sounds were crisp. Very slowly he slid down the wall into a squat. He had to preserve his energies. He would have a lawyer, they had told him that. It was his right. Together he and the lawyer would get him out of here. He was innocent. It was Hawke who knew what had happened to England, Hawke who had somehow conspired to frame him for the killing. William was innocent. He was. Wasn't he?

  XXV

  The lawyer assigned to William's case was a nervous young man named Sydney Rose. After a long pupillage punctuated by extended periods of enforced leave during which his father could not be prevailed upon to settle his fees and during which Rose occupied himself with agonizing over his aptitude and suitability for a career in the law, he had finally been admit
ted to the Bar. William was his first client.

  Although he came from a family that had for generations managed to obscure the extent of its financial difficulties beneath a determined veneer of respectability, Sydney Rose was not a man of prepossessing appearance. He was very thin with the fine colourless hair of a new baby and, although he was not particularly tall, he had legs and arms of unnatural length which, in the absence of much in the way of central government, had become adept at operating quite independently of one another. Rose responded to their unpredictability with a kind of startled deference. Indeed the young lawyer gave the impression of being in a state of almost permanent discomposure. He had a prominent Adam's apple that scraped against his collar when he swallowed, which was often, and protruding eyes with pink rims and eyelashes so pale that they were barely there at all. When he was nervous they bulged. His hairless cheeks had the blue-white pallor of skimmed milk. Only his hands were red, raw-boned and large, with bitten nails and savagely scrubbed knuckles. His suit was clean and tolerably pressed but it had been sewn for a man of more regular proportions and his wrists projected from the cuffs like knobbly flag-poles from which his red hands hung awkwardly, as if discomfited to find themselves so publicly displayed. To ease their embarrassment he had a tendency to clamp them behind his back as he spoke, gripping them together so tightly that they became redder and rawer still. When even this became too much for them they took refuge in his pockets, which the tailor had set inexplicably low in the seams of his trousers. Even accounting for the length of Rose's arms, this gave him a hunched and furtive look. It did not inspire confidence.

  The detectives made no attempt to disguise their contempt when Rose first came to them to discuss the case. To their mind the case was open-and-shut, the Sessions no more than a formality. The gangling lawyer with his bulging eyes and his scarlet hands they dismissed as the cheapest means available to the Crown of conforming to the mandates of due legal process. They allowed Rose less than half an hour, giving one word answers to his questions while their fingers tapped restlessly upon the table. As for evidence that they might rely on in court, they were able to produce only a slim Manila envelope of papers for his inspection, comprising statements from two men at the Metropolitan Board of Works, a Mr Hawke and a Mr Spratt, and a further two men at the Hounslow asylum, a Dr Pettit and a Mr Vickery. There had been other evidence recovered, they conceded, but it had been misplaced. When it became available they would provide copies for Mr Rose's reference. Less than half an hour after his arrival Rose found himself once more on the street.