The Incendiary's Trail Read online

  ‘No matter. You have the skills we seek. Our witness statement describes a man with a perpendicular scar crossing his left eye: a working man wearing a cap and knee breeches.’

  ‘That describes innumerable men in London – if he is still in London.’

  ‘The scar narrows our search. You presumably have intelligence of the criminal classes. Do you know of such a man?’

  ‘No. But I may know where to ask.’

  ‘You are to find this man and bring him to the nearest watch house. There he will be handed over to Detective Sergeant Williamson, who is handling the case.’

  ‘And thereafter I will be free.’

  ‘You will remember that the conditions of your release are dependent on you providing us with information about yourself.’

  ‘You know my name. I was born in this city in the parish of St Giles and spent time as a sailor in the South Seas, hence my tattoo and the lash marks you have seen. I recently resettled in London.’

  ‘That is hardly a biography, Mr Dyson. How do you come to live in Manchester-square? From where do you draw your income? Why do your neighbours know you by different names? Why have you documented fires in the city and who is the man you seek? Why were you so reluctant to speak when you were captured? The questions multiply!’

  ‘I see no necessity for you to know these things. My usefulness to you is not affected by the answers and you know it.’

  ‘Call it curiosity, then. We are not about to release a man who may be a greater criminal than we already think you to be. Are you an incendiary?’

  ‘I am not. I take an amateur’s interest in crime and catalogue it as another man might pin butterflies to a board. I may compile a monograph on the subject.’

  ‘I see. And who is the man you appear to be seeking? You need not look so confused. We discovered the book in your study: that handwritten book in which you have documented your researches. We have been looking through it and discerned that you are looking for a man: an incendiary, a man who seems to have no address but the entire city itself. Who is this man?’

  ‘My researches have demonstrated that a single man may be responsible for many of the fires in London. If I am able to find him, I will be happy to turn him over to the police. In the meantime, it is an idle hobby of mine.’

  ‘A hobby? It seems more like a mania.’

  ‘It is a hobby. Might not one man’s hobby seem an obsession to another?’

  ‘And what of your income? How is it that you – a retired sailor, if we are to believe you – have such wealth?’

  ‘You saw the diamond about my neck. It is the last of many precious stones I acquired during my travels – enough to make me self-sufficient when diligently invested. That is enough. I agreed to pursue your man to the best of my ability, not to sell you my soul. As long as I am in your custody, he is free. When he is in custody, I will be free.’

  ‘You will see in Sir Richard’s letter that you are to be engaged until the case has been concluded to the satisfaction of the police. The scarred man is our only suspect at present, but if he proves—’

  ‘Wait. Am I to understand that I could be under obligation to the police as long as this case remains unsolved?’

  ‘We are hoping that your role will lead to its rapid resolution. If you wish to be free, you will do all in your power to bring the perpetrator or perpetrators – whomever they may be – to justice as quickly as you can.’

  ‘I see I have little choice. You will have considered, of course, the possibility that I will simply flee my obligation and disappear?’

  ‘Naturally. But the cost to you would be too great. You would have to flee this city. You would lose your home and possibly your wealth. You would be a fugitive. Alternatively, you could do what is required of you and consider it little more than a minor irritant. Your letter from Sir Richard is your guarantee.’

  ‘And my alternative is to be tried for crimes for which there is no strong evidence. Perhaps I should wait for justice to take its course.’

  ‘I believe I can promise you that you will be found guilty,’ said Inspector Newsome. ‘This choice of action is your only one.’

  ‘It seems I am compelled to agree.’

  And so – to expedite the story – the man calling himself Noah Dyson was released from Giltspur-street. He returned home in the company of Mr Bryant (Inspector Newsome’s man) and Benjamin; he changed his clothes, and within half an hour was in the eastern districts in pursuit of the scarred man and his own eventual freedom. Though he did not know Mr Bradford from his description, he did indeed know whom to ask.

  Let us not imagine, however, that he was at all trusted by the police officers merely because they held a noose above his neck. Mr Bryant stayed with Benjamin until Noah returned, and other more covert measures had been put in place to ensure complicity in the agreement.

  TWELVE

  I need hardly describe the public phrensy that attended the capture and trial of Mr Bradford towards the end of that week. Sir Richard Mayne had caught his murderer, and the Metropolitan Police enthusiastically released a version of the story so that the newspapers could glut themselves on the already infamous case. Sketches of the bully – looking variously brutal and bemused depending on the artist – appeared in the Times, the Illustrated London News and the Observer, not to mention the broadsheets being sold by patterers on every street corner of the metropolis. As might be expected, many of these scandal-mongering sheets emphasized sensation at the expense of verity. The following – by my own hand, and written for the common taste – is a finer example than many of the less literate specimens abroad at that time:

  CUT-THROAT MURDERER CAPTURED!

  Will hang at Newgate

  The Lambeth murderer of the two-headed girl ElizaBeth has finally been captured by the fearless men of the Metropolitan Police! Mr Harold Bradford, a sometime boatman and coal-whipper of the Parish of St Paul, has been charged with the murder and will hang at Newgate on the morning of Monday October 14th.

  Upon interrogation at the hands of Inspector Newsome of Scotland Yard, the prisoner revealed the horrible details of his crime. With his razor in his hand, he stalked the pre-dawn streets of his victim as the Highlander stalks the blameless deer. Insensate with an indiscriminate lust to kill, he tried different doors along the night-time streets, passing slumbering residences like the Angel of Death. What mark on their doors saved them from his blade is not known, or why the ill-fated door of ‘anatomical performers’ was the one he stopped at.

  Like a shadow, he passed through the dark and silent hallways and stairways of that house . . . until he came upon his victim: an innocent girl born with two entirely different heads joining her body via two separate necks. Did she have a moment to utter a final prayer as the steel sliced into her flesh? Did a childish cry of outrage escape her lips? Did her four eyes, as the life passed from them, meet the two of her killer? Only Harold Bradford can answer these questions, and he may take the answers to his tomb.

  With his hands be-gored and his murderous intent slaked, he crept from the building and back to the twisting streets where men of his kind lurk and boast of their crimes. There, the murderer – walking among those who were reading with horror of his exploits – remained at liberty, until the intrepid men of Scotland Yard sought him out and brought him to justice. He will meet Mr Calcraft soon enough.

  We know the facts of the case to be somewhat different. After Noah had delivered the bully to a watch house, Inspector Newsome had been notified and had arranged to interrogate the prisoner. Mr Williamson had also been summoned, the questioning had taken place and the guilt of Mr Bradford had been satisfactorily decided upon. In rapid succession, his fate had been sealed by a judge and Newgate gaol was to be his temporary home until the day of his execution.

  The public had naturally attended every step of the process, for the ‘Lambeth Murder’ had eclipsed even that of Daniel Good in the popular imagination. The streets were animated with the cry of the patte
rers and the brisk trade in their broadsheets. The murderer himself had become evil incarnate, walking invisibly among the innocents of London, likely to strike again at any moment. It was the very motivelessness of his crime that evoked the common fear. Not for theft did he kill, nor jealousy, nor any explicable reason that might give hope to those who barred their doors at night. What manner of monster was it who would slaughter for no reason and how many more like him peopled the midnight streets?

  They could not know, of course, that the murderer was the simple, red-faced Bully Bradford, that lumpen instrument of a darker force, who was a murderer only by ineptitude. In the nightmares and fear-thrilled narratives of the milliner’s girls, the magdalenes and below-stairs gossips, he was Death himself. Murder itself had stalked the back alleys during that period of his brief liberty, and the murderer was the demon in every shadow.

  In such times, it is the writer who emerges triumphant. The literate clamour for information of the crime: its details, its effects, its investigation. The illiterate look to the patterer for their lurid narrations and fanciful elaborations: the poetry of Mr Bradford, his true confession, his final letter to his poor mother in which he thoughtfully delineates every horrific image of his crime. And it was men such as I supplying the lines, feeding the hunger for information and the thirst for sensation.

  For Sir Richard Mayne, the Metropolitan Police was covered with glory – but there were others for whom the case was far from closed. Indeed, another crime was already smouldering, set alight by a spark from the first: the murder of Mary Chatterton.

  Two such horrific murders had seldom occurred in rapid succession, and the metropolis was soon to be a-fire with the news of more murder, the fear of murder, the anticipation of murder. Yes, Bully Bradford had been captured, but his impending execution and the grisly details of his crime had created an insatiable appetite for the macabre and violent. Mary Chatterton’s death had come like a welcome meal to feed that hunger.

  Unlike poor Eliza-Beth, whose appearance was so rare as to be something worth paying for, Mary was known to many – and feared by more. She was a ‘character’ whose name – at least wherever London’s smoke drifted – was as well known as Nelson. There were street girls who might not know Her Majesty the Queen herself if they met her outside the King’s Arms, but who revered ‘Mother’ Mary Chatterton as a greater monarch. Those of them who could read would have seen the following in the Times.

  MURDER AT HAY MARKET

  Shortly after three o’clock on Wednesday morning, Mary Chatterton, proprietor and resident of a night rooms in Haymarket, was found murdered. The discoverer of the crime, just moments after its commission, was Sergeant Williamson of Scotland Yard.

  The likely killer has been described as being of average height, wearing a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his face, and a scarf covering his mouth and nose. His clothes were of a black colour. No sign could be found of him following a brief search of the area.

  The murderer entered the parlour of Miss Chatterton by a rear door, and was glimpsed by one of her attendants. Over the next hour or so, Miss Chatterton was shamefully and brutally mistreated before her throat was cut. There is no evidence of theft and no motive has yet been discerned.

  Sergeant Williamson said, ‘The recent arrest of Mr Bradford is a warning to all murderers that the Metropolitan Police will not rest until the criminal is brought to justice. The investigation is proceeding at this moment.’

  It was not only the gin shops and penny gaffs that were animated by the news. There were men in private clubs and men in robes of one sort or another who paled when they read of the murder. Certainly, Mary was dead, but the nature of her murder and the liberty of the murderer was something to bring pallor to the cheeks of those men with secrets – men, more to the point, who had the ear of Sir Richard Mayne. The police commissioner was informed personally by a number of them that the capture of this villain was of the utmost priority.

  As for Mr Bradford, he was safely ensconced in the ‘Stone Jug’ to think about his crime. Though gaol was an occupational risk for men of his sort, he could not help struggling with the enormity of his situation. In a very short time, he would be standing at the gallows with many thousands of eyes staring at him and Mr Calcraft fitting the noose to his neck. Perhaps people would throw fruit and harsh words, as he himself had done at many a hanging. This, even more than the fear of death, was what filled him with fear and turned his legs weak: to stand before all those people and bear their derision. It was not dignified! He would be humiliated! He would be nothing! People he knew would be there and see him trussed like a chicken ready for death. For a man who had lived his life unknown in the alleys and darkened drinking dens of the east, there was horror in becoming the sole focus of an entire city. It would be akin to nakedness.

  The fact of his actual hanging was, at this stage, too enormous for him to adequately conceive, mortality being too abstract a concept for the lumpen bully that he was. Illiterate, godless, unmarried and childless, he had never contemplated the nature of his existence, nor its end. For men of his ilk, time never stretched further than the next fair. It would come to him soon enough – sooner than he would like, and yet very much too late.

  And we should also not overlook the fact that the murderer of Mary Chatterton held that very same edition of the Times in his sulphurous grasp, smiling as he read of Sergeant Williamson’s earnest promises of early capture. The very thought of the city’s constables searching fervidly for a man whose face was entirely covered but for his eyes was enough to make any criminal smile – even if he burned with anger at the new attention cast in his direction by the capture of Mr Bradford.

  The bully would tell the police whatever they wanted. True, he did not know enough about his sponsor to bring the police to his door, but now the name of ‘General’ would be abroad, and soon enough they would know his real name. That was a nakedness he feared more than any other – one that he could not hide.

  He had indeed learned the identity of Eliza-Beth’s father. Mary Chatterton had told him in her final, gasping, bubbling moments of agony – as he knew she would. Not only that, but while searching her writing desk for any correspondence with Eliza-Beth, he had discovered a most invaluable piece of information tucked away between tawdry love letters: a finished but unsealed and undated letter from Mary to the father of their child, informing him of his paternity. The address was written on the envelope. So the old strumpet had thought about the man during her long years of harlotry. It was, perhaps, the one pure love she had kept in her corrupted heart: a pressed flower that affected the blush of life whilst long dead.

  So the General had posted Mary’s letter to its addressee, intending that he receive it as if from her. And he had also sent one of his own a day later, a deft and subtle note saying only what was necessary and building upon the inevitable reaction to the letter from Mary. It was enough to instil fear in the recipient:

  Dear Sir

  I am the murderer of Mary Chatterton. It is only courteous that I introduce myself. Before you think about acting and revealing my letter to a third party, perhaps you would first like to reflect on its purpose.

  I wonder if the death of Mary had any personal meaning to you? You were, after all, an ‘acquaintance’ of hers some years ago – approximately the same number of years that the two-headed girl Eliza-Beth had attained before she, too, was murdered. Indeed, I spoke at some length with both ladies and they both, in their own way, had something to say of you. The latter kept a memento of you, which I think perhaps you know of.

  I believe that you perceive my meaning. Shortly, I will contact you in person to see how our shared information can be of benefit to us both. Do not try to locate me in the meantime, for it will end badly for you.

  Sincerely,

  Your Observer.

  Who was the father of Eliza-Beth and how did he react to these letters? Assuredly, he did not react well. The letter from Mary opened a wound that had long ago heal
ed over. She had been a different woman then: a pretty girl over-impressed with the big city and the attention she could garner. The news of a daughter, a girl – that girl – at once sickened and saddened him. If it was true. If it was not some grubby hoax. He knew by now that the mother was dead. She had meant nothing to him for decades, and now – in a rush – she and a child were thrust back at him as corpses.

  He felt that everyone was looking at him, that everyone knew. He heard their whispers: There is the man who had a child with Mary Chatterton, the Haymarket whore. There is the man whose child was a monster, slain among other monsters. The gutter newspapers would make him famous and drag him into the mire of gossip and calumny if they knew his identity. Innocent as he was, they would besmear him with the infamy.

  Thus, the second letter set his blood running cold. Who was this man observing him and what did he know? It could all be an elaborate joke, but it did not feel so. It felt as if his life was under a glass and that the eye above him was the sky itself.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Nothing, Ben! Nothing! I could smell his presence there – that sulphurous, infernal whiff – but the shop was quite abandoned. He will never set foot there again.’

  Noah stared fixedly from his study window to the street below as Benjamin poured tea from a silver pot.

  ‘I have never been this close,’ he continued. ‘It’s as if he is taunting me, as if he knows I am searching for him and gives me glimpses just to play with me. It would be like him.’

  The Negro caught Noah’s attention with a guttural cough and proceeded to make a series of brief but complicated gestures with his hands, describing shapes in the air with his paler palms and punctuating the words with fine finger movement. He raised his shoulders interrogatively in conclusion.

  ‘Yes, yes – you are right. He has no idea I am even in the country. At least, he has no reason to know. It is only my fancy and my anger that make it seem otherwise. You know I am not like you, Ben. I cannot forget. I will not forget.’