A Cold Wind Down the Grey

by Wendy M Wilson

  In Hokitika he made himself known to the constable at the rear gate leading into the stable, and left him in charge of his horse as he went in search of Inspector Broham. But Broham was away from camp; instead he found Sergeant Hickson, the same man whose infant son had died on the day James found George Dobson’s body. Hickson was sitting bent over at his desk writing, a frown on his broad Irish face, his full, fair whiskers brushing his hand as he wrote.

  James offered his condolences. “Sorry about…”

  Sergeant Hickson sat back and gave a brief nod, his lips tight. “What brings you to Hokitika?”

  “I need to hear what Broham has to say about one or two things. But no doubt you…”

  An odd expression crossed the sergeant’s face. James knew there was no love lost between the two Irishmen. Broham was ten years younger than Hickson, who, like James, had arrived at the mid-point of his allotted three score and ten years.

  “I’ve been wondering how this robbery fits in…”

  “The robbery at the police camp?” asked Hickson. “I can probably help you more with that than Inspector Broham could, although…”

  A look of understanding passed between them: Broham would consider himself the most informed person no matter what the case being discussed.

  “Let’s go over to the mess and I’ll fill you in,” said Hickson. “The men aren’t there now—the evening meal is at six—and we can get a mug of tea.”

  They settled at a table with a large mug and a plate of fancy biscuits. The men at the camp lived well. No wonder recruitment was so successful.

  Hickson said, “You know we arrested Constable Carr—ex-Constable Carr—on a charge of stealing weapons and other goods from the camp?”

  “We arrested him up in Greymouth and remanded him down here,” said James, feeling he must correct Hickson.

  “Yes, Yes,” said Hickson. “Thank you for your assistance.” He ran his fingers down his whiskers with a pincer movement. “I became mistrustful of him when he returned from Bruce Bay, on May 7th. I checked his kit, as I’m required to do, and found he was deficient in a pair of grips from his guns. He claimed he’d left them in Bruce Bay, and offered to pay for them…of course I said that wouldn’t be necessary. I reminded him they were the property of the Provincial Government and it was his duty to report the loss immediately to his superior officer. He claimed the prisoner he was escorting turned violent, leading him to forget to report the grips to me. Then he attempted to pass off another constable’s grips as his own. But I knew they weren’t, as they were from a different manufacturer.”

  “Had it happened before?” asked James. “Did he regularly lose his equipment?”

  “No,” said Hickson. “Never. But he wasn’t happy about his position here. He’d already tendered his resignation, but I told him he needed to give three months’ notice. While he was waiting for the time to pass he offered his resignation two more times. His desire to leave was very strong.”

  “He has his wish now,” said James. “When did you dismiss him?”

  “June 9th,” said Hickson. “Before we charged him with the robbery.”

  “And when did the robbery take place?”

  “The evening of May 10th,” said Hickson. He leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling, remembering. “I gave Sergeant Moller a five-chambered Colt to clean on the morning of the 10th of May. Branded on the stock and on the case with a registration number, which I have noted in my book. That evening he asked me if I’d had taken the Colt from his room. And at the same time Constable Bolton, a mounted trooper, reported to me that someone had stolen his revolver and the case, as well as a sword-sling. Constable Bolton said it must have happened between eight and ten in the evening.”

  “And was Carr about at that time?”

  “He was. It was his custom to stay up late, after ten, although the men were supposed to be in bed by ten o’clock. I reported him several times for that. He was in bed at ten o’clock that night, however.”

  “You checked his room?”

  “I went into the mounted troopers’ quarters to enquire about the matter of the missing guns. His room was next to the troopers’ quarters and he heard me talking—heard what I said—and called out, ‘Bolton, I would report the first man I found with them.’”

  “What did he mean by that?”

  “He meant it as a joke,” said Hickson. “That was what I inferred anyway, from his manner of speaking.”

  “A nervous joke, perhaps,” said James. “And not especially amusing. Did you search the camp?”

  “Sergeant White, Constables Bolton, Moller, others, searched the Camp with me for the missing weapons, but before doing so I went into the various rooms and asked the men if they knew anything about them, but was unable to get any clue as to their removal. Carr assisted with the search.”

  “Rather audacious,” said James. “And when were the trousers found to be missing?”

  “At seven the next morning. Sergeant Wilson reported to me that a pair of pants had been taken from the washhouse the night before. A pair of Bedford-cord pants.”

  “Why anyone would want to steal trousers?” asked James.

  “I’ll get to that,” said Hickson. “On the next day another constable, Constable Charles, returned from the Spit and reported the loss of his revolver—a Dean and Adams—as well as his sword, belt and pouch. Some blue jumpers were also stolen, but no one reported their loss to me. All the men have several jumpers and probably didn’t notice they were gone.”

  “And you reported the matter to Inspector Broham?”

  “I did. I also made enquiries with the sergeant at Bruce Bay as to whether Carr had reported the loss of his grips, and he replied that he had not.”

  “The loss of the grips made you suspicious of him,” said James. “But how did you discover he had stolen all the other equipment? And what about the…”

  Sergeant Hickson was in no hurry to get to the point. “Sergeant Dyer, another member of the force here, had been following a man whom Inspector Broham wanted kept under surveillance,” he said. “Dyer watched the target all evening on the tenth. The man went to the Prince of Wales Opera House in company with another man and two women…”

  James sighed. “And who was this man? Why was Broham…”

  “Richard Burgess,” said Hickson.

  James leaned forward, interested now. “Burgess? Burgess was involved in the robbery of the guns?”

  “I thought you knew,” said Hickson. “We did a search of his place, even though we knew he had an alibi for that evening.”

  “And you found?”

  “We found the two revolver cases,” said Hickson. “And as I said, they were branded with the same registration as the revolvers, so we knew they were from the camp. I keep meticulous records…”

  “You certainly do,” said James. “You had him cold…how did you deal with the alibi?”

  “He didn’t steal anything from the camp himself,” said Hickson. “We believe he had one of his associates undertake the theft.”

  “Kelly,” said James.

  “Or Aldridge or Sullivan,” said Hickson. “We took him to trial, and he had Aldridge, or we believe he had Aldridge, set up as a stooge. Aldridge came forward and said the two of them were walking along the beach—Burgess was going with him to look at the wreck of the Maria—and they kicked over some sand and found the cases. Burgess had convinced him that was what happened, although the weapons had been planted there to be found. And then Sullivan came forward, someone whom we did not know was an associate of Burgess, and testified to witnessing Burgess find the cases.”

  “He planned for the worst,” said James. “He went where he knew he’d be noticed—the opera house—and then deliberately had himself arrested with his alibi and his witnesses in place.” The clever bastard.

  “Henry Brunetti from the Golden Fleece saw the two of them—Burgess and Carr—together at his place several times,” said Hickson. “In company with anot
her man named Chamberlain. This all came out later after Burgess was found not guilty. We still have Carr, Aldridge and Chamberlain in gaol, however. Carr even went to the Golden Fleece in his uniform at times. The man deserves to be given a long sentence with hard labour. He’s a disgrace to the force.”

  “And the pants?” asked James. He’d been waiting patiently for the solution to the mystery of the pants.

  “We believe they were planning to rob a bank dressed as troopers,” said Hickson. “Sullivan was going to go in and talk to the bank manager dressed in the uniform, and hold the manager while the others robbed the bank. He’s the tallest—the others were too short to qualify for the force and the manager would have suspected something was up.”

  “Where is Carr now?” asked James. Burgess certainly had an excellent imagination as well as an ability to sway people to the dark side with his discourse. He’d like to talk to Carr, to find out what he knew about the Dobson murder. “You have Carr in gaol still?”

  “Yes,” said Hickson. “As well as Aldridge and Chamberlain…and Wilson, of course, since you remanded him here.”

  “Are they all together?” asked James, alarmed. Prisoners made an art out of exchanging information without the guards hearing them, to the detriment of reliable evidence.

  “Carr and Wilson were together for a few weeks,” said Hickson. “Carr is still here in the Logs…but we moved Wilson out to the new gaol in Seaview. I kept Carr here so I could keep an eye on him. You can talk to him if you wish…he’s generally amenable to talking. I don’t think he’s a natural criminal. He married recently. His wife is a young Irish woman named Mary Reilly. And I believe he comes from a good Scots family. His father is a chemist in Berwick.”

  Outside Hickson led him to four log huts, known collectively as the Logs. Each one had a door with bars, and a small window high up on one wall - for air, presumably, and much too small for a man to squeeze through. “The men committed to trial were in these three huts,” said Hickson, indicating the first three. Now we just use the one hut for everyone, as we have fewer of them.

  “The convicted men as well?” asked James.

  “Those have mostly been sent to Seaview,” said Hickson. “We keep them under a warrant from the bench, and the debtors, lunatics and drunkards here. One hut does us for that.”

  “How many in the hut?”

  “Five at the moment, but we can accommodate up to a dozen,” said Hickson. The hut was about ten feet by twelve. It was a wonder prisoners had enough room to stand, let alone to sleep. “They have half an hour a day for exercise, and the door is left ajar during the day, on a chain of course. They don’t suffocate”

  “I prefer to make use of their time,” said James. “Put them to work on the roads. Why have able-bodied men sitting in a cell doing nothing?”

  “If we do that we take work from honest men,” said Hickson. It was an argument that James had heard before. There was plenty of work in these new towns. No one need go unemployed. And building roads and ditches and telegraph lines meant more people came here, creating more jobs.

  John Aitchison Carr was sitting on the floor of the log hut, his knees drawn up, his head slumped forward, his fingers scratching his scalp hopelessly through his thick dark hair. Prisoners often developed the itch in places like this, with no ability to keep clean, and crowded together with others. There were a handful of other men in the cell who looked at James with dull eyes, some with the wild gaze of lunatics. He could smell them through the door, the fetid smell of unwashed bodies and human waste.

  “Carr,” said Hickson through the partially open cell door. “Inspector James from Greymouth wishes to speak with you.”

  Carr’s head came up, and he stared at them uncomprehendingly from dark eyes under heavy eyebrows. “What?’

  “Inspector James would like to ask you a few questions,” said Hickson.

  “I don’t have anything to say to Inspector James,” said Carr. “Unless he wishes to free me from this hellhole.” He had a cultured voice, almost free of the broad Scottish accent of someone like Mr. Fox. He put his head back on his knees.

  “How do you find yourself in this predicament?” asked James, deliberately vague.

  Carr’s head rose again. “I don’t know. I’ve asked myself the same question. If…when I’m free again I won’t ever be here again, I promise you that.”

  “In the meantime,” said James, “it would help your case if you could answer some questions for me.”

  Carr’s head went down again, and he raised his broad shoulders to block out speech. “My solicitor said not to say anything to you…to any of you,” he said. “And I don’t intend to. You can leave, if you don’t mind.” He sounded as if he was dismissing them from his drawing room, and James smiled. A prison term would straighten him out, but it was a pity that a young man like that had fallen in with such a depraved person as Richard Burgess. He wondered if any of this would have happened were it not for the incomprehensible appeal of Burgess.

  As they slogged back through the mud to Hickson’s office, James asked, “How is Wilson dealing with his incarceration? Is he ready to talk do you think?”

  “He complains all the time and feels very hard done by,” said Hickson. “Seaview Gaol is better than the Logs, cleaner and more spacious—only half a dozen to a cell, with the debtors and lunatics in separate huts—but he’s not happy and insists on his innocence. I doubt you’ll get anything useful from him.”

  “I’ll wait then,” said James. “And see what he has to say at his trial.”

  23

  Greymouth, 1866: Burgess Confesses

  Inspector James returned from Hokitika to find there’d been a new confession. Now it was Burgess who had confessed to the murders, or at least to knowing about the murders, and being present at a convenient distance when they occurred. But he’d thrown the full weight of his near-deathbed confession at the feet of Joseph Sullivan. It was Sullivan, said Burgess, who was the perpetrator; he who had committed all those dastardly murders. Everyone else was innocent. Even Wilson.

  Sergeant Walsh brought him a copy of the confession, published in the Nelson Colonist on August 10.

  “You’ll enjoy this,” he said. “The gentleman has done his best to make Sullivan look like the mastermind of the whole affair. He’s found the Lord and written his confession in ‘his drear dungeon’ settled on his knees in the dark.”

  “I imagine it is rather drear,” said James. “What does he say about the Dobson murder, other than that he didn’t do it?”

  “Describes himself is ‘a guilty wretch who has been brought through the instrumentality of a faithful follower of Christ to see his wretched and guilty state,” said Walsh. “And that ‘through the assurance of this faithful soldier of Christ, he has been led, and he also believes that Christ will yet receive and cleanse him from all his deep dyed and bloody sins.’ Although, of course, he didn’t really commit the bloody sins, according to him.”

  “And what does he say about the Dobson murder,” asked James again patiently. Sergeant Walsh was clearly enjoying the extravagant style of the confession.

  “Let’s see,” said Walsh, scanning through the article…foully murdered…bloody drama…spare the effusion of innocent blood being shed…he has quite a way with words, does Burgess. Now, Dobson, Dobson, ah, here it is…Burgess talks about being in gaol in Hokitika for suspicion of the robbery at the police camp.” Walsh ran his finger down the column. “He was discharged…here’s what he said:

  ‘…I must leave Hokitika for a while, at all events, so with that we proposed going to the Grey. We arrived there on the Saturday, the 26th May. I took up my residence at the Provincial Hotel. Sullivan began drinking, and spent what money he had, which was very little. He left the Greymouth township on the Sunday night, and did not return till the Tuesday following, late in the day.’”

  “Sullivan wasn’t a heavy drinker when I knew him,” said James.

  Walsh continued reading. “Duri
ng this time, Mr. Dobson, the surveyor, was murdered. He came to town, and sent the man Wilson, now charged with the murder in Hokitika of Mr. Dobson, to find me and to go to the Bridge. l went to the Bridge indicated, and there I saw Sullivan. He told me they had made a great mistake in stopping a man whom they took for a banker, but who turned out to be only a surveyor. He said, ‘he was such a nice young fellow, but after we stopped him we could not let him go, so took him off the road about 100 yards, and there I ‘burked’ meaning choked him. He said, laughing, as I was taking him into the bush, ‘did you think I was a banker? Here is all the money I have, some £6 odd.’ He said, ‘I buried him, compass and all—he had a compass with him.’ He has since been found, I believe, by the murderer Sullivan telling where he was buried. Mark the atrocity of his acts. He has since charged an inoffensive man, Wilson, with complicity in the murder, who is as innocent as the babe on its mother’s breast.”

  Walsh stopped and looked at James, who was rubbing his eyes. He was feeling sick. Poor, poor young Dobson.

  “Do you believe all this?” he asked, shaking the paper.

  “Yes, I do,” said James. “The gist, anyway. All he had to do was change one name: he’s replaced Kelly with Sullivan. And, of course, he has made sure he was not on site. Everything he knows about the murder was told to him not by Sullivan, but by Kelly. Sullivan wouldn’t use the term burked. That comes from the London slums. But the actions ring true, I think.”

  “You don’t think he was there when Dobson was murdered?”

  “I think Kelly and Wilson murdered Dobson,” said James. “Witnesses saw two short men, one dark, like Kelly, and one fair, like Wilson. It was probably Kelly who strangled him, but it would have taken two of them to tie his wrists with leather straps, take him into the bush, and hit him around the head with rifle butts. Sullivan may have been up the track looking for Mr. Fox, as he says. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What matters to me is that Wilson is found guilty.”