Abracadaver

CHAPTER

2

THE TWO DETECTIVES, WELL-wrapped in ulsters and bowler-hats, watched the L.G.O.C. knifeboard bus recede in the direction of Cheapside. Then they crossed Newgate Street to the corner of the Old Bailey, too busy finding a route between copious horse-droppings to give much attention to the sombre exterior of the prison.

‘Been inside before, Constable?’

‘No, Sarge.’

‘You’ll find these walls are like a hat-box—all for effect. Inside, it’s built like any of your London hospitals. It’s not the inmates they want to impress, you see. It’s the likes of that solicitor’s clerk over there that shudders at the mention of Newgate. All he sees is a fortress with walls forty feet high. Capital way of keeping a man honest.’

Thackeray looked along the grim facade of rusticated blocks and recesses and recalled a bleak Monday morning fifteen years before, when duty had brought him to that same street. It had been jammed by a crowd of twenty thousand and he had stood among them from first light until St Sepulchre’s chimed eight o’clock. ‘Hats off!’ the cry had gone up. ‘Down in front,’ as the condemned man was escorted to the scaffold from a door in the prison wall. Times had changed; public executions had been discontinued for a dozen or more years, and now Newgate was a hat-box to Sergeant Cribb. But that door remained.

‘This’ll be a routine visit,’ Cribb explained as they approached the governor’s house. ‘I volunteered the two of us for identification duty. The only prisoners in Newgate now are men on remand or awaiting trial. We have to check ’em for previous convictions. Strictly it’s a sergeant’s job, but there aren’t many sergeants with an eye like yours for a jail-bird.’

Thackeray was flattered. Sergeants often complained about the burden of identification parades at Newgate and Clerkenwell. But their boasting when they had spotted an old lag was something to be heard. The lower ranks were encouraged to think sergeants alone were capable of such feats of recognition.

‘You’ll need your own identification,’ Cribb cautioned, as he knocked at the door of the governor’s office. It was opened by a uniformed prison officer, who glanced formally at their papers and admitted them. They waited inside with a clerk who took one hard look at each of them and then returned to his work of sealing envelopes. Above him a clock of a type issued and withdrawn by the Home Office a decade earlier ticked with an occasional snuffle.

In a few minutes the officer returned with two black-uniformed attendants. ‘Warders Rose and Whittle will accompany you, gentlemen. Would you kindly sign the book first?’

They were then escorted through the lodge, which served as a macabre museum, with death-masks of some of Newgate’s more notorious former guests and a wall-display of body irons. A turnkey unbarred an iron-studded oak door and they were led down stone steps into a cavernous passage that Thackeray estimated ran parallel with the Old Bailey. Their steps echoed ahead of them.

The warders, accustomed to this ritual, which took place with different police and prison officers three times a week, were disinclined to talk. They walked a few yards ahead of the two detectives, unlocking gates at frequent intervals and slamming them closed when the party had passed through. Once or twice there was a barred window on the left wall, through which Thackeray saw paved yards and the grey walls of the main prison-block beyond.

‘Ten years ago we were told this performance could stop,’ reflected Cribb. ‘Prevention of Crime Act, 1871. Photography, they said! That’s the way to spot your felon. Put every blasted criminal there is in a studio like a maharajah and immortalise him in half-profile. Bravo for science! And what happened?’

‘It cost too much,’ said Thackeray.

‘Dear me, yes. In his enthusiasm the Home Secretary hadn’t done his arithmetic. In no time at all the photographing was restricted to convicts and habitual criminals, and now you need a special application to the Governor to take a camera anywhere near an old lag. Progress, Thackeray! So three times a week the gentlemen of Clerkenwell and Newgate still show their precious monikers to the Law, and the Law scratches its head and goes through its inventory of eyes and mouths and noses and tries to spot its old acquaintances. Sounds like a parlour-game and ain’t so far from being one.’

Another door was unlocked by a bored turnkey and they emerged blinking into daylight, and crossed a deserted exercise yard, where a circular track of polished pavement had been worn by generations of shuffling boots. The walls bordering the yard looked massive and impossible to scale, but as a precaution iron spikes projected inwards from the top.

The warders approached the building at the top end of the yard, mounted its stone steps and knocked at the entrance. Before joining them, Cribb drew Thackeray’s attention to the gigantic drumlike contraption built on to the top of the block. ‘Revolving fan,’ he explained. ‘Put there by Mr Howard, the reformer. Ventilates the whole interior of the jail.’ His eyes travelled slowly up the full height of the building. ‘Not many windows, you see.’

The unlocking and unbarring completed, they mounted narrow stone stairs and were greeted unexpectedly at the top with, ‘Damn my eyes, it’s Sergeant Cribb!’ from a uniformed warder with a style and presence that wanted only a row of medals and a yard of gold braid to be worthy of the doorman at the Cafe Royal.

‘Cyril Blade!’ responded Cribb. ‘Now where was it last? Don’t speak.’ His fingers snapped. ‘Got it! Holloway, the year before last.’ He turned to Thackeray. ‘If you think Irving’s got a voice, listen to this. What did they inscribe on the foundation-stone at Holloway, Cyril?’

Mr Blade drew a deep breath. ‘May God preserve the City of London, and make this place a terror to evil doers.’

‘Carries conviction, eh?’ said Cribb, savouring the performance. ‘No treadmill here, though, Cyril. Your vocal powers are wasted.’

Mr Blade disagreed. ‘I carry the sound of that blasted shin-scraper in me head to this day, Sergeant. Uncommon cruel, subjecting a man’s ears to that racket twelve hours a day. I asked for a move to the oakum-shed in the end, but they sent me here instead. And the shock I got, Sergeant!’

‘Not so harsh as Holloway?’ suggested Cribb.

Mr Blade clenched his fist eloquently. ‘This is a better home than my old mother made for me, Sergeant. They’re in clover here, I tell you. In clover.’

‘They should be, Cyril. They’re not convicted yet. Are they lined up?’

‘Like a guard of honour!’

‘Good. We’ll see who you’ve got, then.’

Mr Blade ushered them through an open door into a whitewashed room the size and shape of a hospital ward. The difference was clear in the positioning of the beds: sets of bunks in tiers of five were ranged head to foot along the length of the wall facing them. A row of well-scrubbed deal tables and benches had been pushed against the parallel wall to make room for the inspection.

Thackeray realised with misgivings that the hundred and twenty prisoners parading before them in three motionless ranks must have heard everything that was said. They were sized and spaced with military precision, but the effect was spoiled by the uniform: each wore the clothes in which he had been brought to Newgate, so a shooting-coat stood between a greasy spencer and a fustian jacket, and well-shod highlows lined up with clogs and naked feet. Yet there was a uniformity in the eyes of the prisoners, a glassy indifference, a torpor that had brutalised all but a handful.

‘All yours, Sergeant,’ said Cyril expansively. ‘Nobbiest parade in London after the Lord Mayor’s. Cracksmen, sharpers, screevers, macers, murderers and a few doubtful parties that might just be honest gentlemen, or might be as bent as bicycle-wheels. Take a long squint at ’em, and if you can’t find two or three you know, why Lord bless you.’ As Cribb started along the line, Mr Blade added confidentially to Thackeray. ‘-’E’s a very knowing card, is Sergeant Cribb.’

Thackeray followed a yard or two behind Cribb, conscious that the inspection was not the main purpose of the visit. The sergeant stopped briefly three times, putting questions to men he knew well enough to name. Satisfied, he completed the formality and thanked Mr Blade, adding in an undertone, ‘The red-haired customer in the last row wants watching. What does he call himself?’

‘The tall ’un? That’s Percy Crichton-Jones. Arrived this morning.’

‘Is it now? I’ll lay a guinea to a shilling it’s Albert Figg and if it is he’ll be working the three-card trick before the gas goes out tonight. There’s not a smarter broadsman in London. Anyone else arrive this week?’

Mr Blade reviewed his platoon in a parade-ground voice. ‘Them two in the front row came in together: pickpocket and his stall. Him in the second row, four along, is the Bethnal Green killer. That one moving his head—stand up there!—is a blooming magician, if you please. We have to watch him real sharp in the exercise yard in case the bugger flies over the wall.’

‘Magician? What’s the name—Woolston?’

‘I believe it is, Sergeant, though what he calls himself on the stage—’

‘I want to talk with him.’

‘You do?’ Mr Blade quite superfluously raised his voice. ‘Woolston! Two steps forward, march!’

‘In private,’ said Cribb.

‘You shall have a cell to yourselves, Sergeant. Woolston! Step out here at once and fall in behind me. And if anyone else stirs a sinew . . .’

Cribb fell in smartly behind Woolston, and Thackeray behind Cribb, leaving Warders Rose and Whittle facing the ranks. The quartet marched the length of the ward and into a narrow passage flanked by the open doors of a dozen small cells.

‘This one,’ indicated Mr Blade. ‘Sit yourself there, Sergeant. I’ll fetch another chair for your companion.’ When Thackeray was seated, the warder gave Woolston a threatening look, and added, ‘I’ll leave you with him, gentlemen. If he gives trouble, I’m within call.’

The potential source of trouble stood before them in a once-white tie and dusty tails, an expression of mild bewilderment on his face. A slight man in every sense, he was impossible to imagine working miracles at the Royal, in spite of his conjurer’s costume. Possibly the witchery of limelight might have transformed him, but in the harsh illumination of a whitewashed cell he was pallid, pinch-cheeked and about as mysterious as the asphalt floor.

‘On your feet, Thackeray,’ ordered Cribb. ‘Mr Woolston needs the chair more than you.’

The prisoner thanked Thackeray in a thin voice and sat facing Cribb across a small hinged table, supported in drawbridge fashion by two chains attached to the wall. The impedimenta of prison life—Bible, prayer-book and hymnbook, gas-pipe, basin and mug, tin panikin and wooden spoon—were ranged on shelves around them. With some difficulty Thackeray edged into a comfortable standing position at the cell’s end.

‘Mind your elbow!’ cautioned Cribb. ‘If that bedding’s disturbed, Mr Woolston will have the job of folding it all again.’

Thackeray jerked his arm away from a pile of folded matting, rugs and mattress. The cell-beds at Newgate took the form of hammocks slung between rings projecting from the walls. It was a matter of deep concern to warders that the beds were unhooked each morning and folded in the only acceptable manner, square as postage stamps, with straps and hooks arranged ‘Newgate-style’. This and other practical hints on prison life were explained in the Sheriffs’ Code of Discipline on the back of the door.

‘D’you sleep here?’ Cribb asked without much interest. You couldn’t really begin a conversation with a prisoner by talking about the weather.

‘No. In the ward. I spent the first night here, but I got cold. It’s warmer in there with the others.’

‘Says in the Code here that you can regulate the temperature of your cell.’

‘Yes,’ said Woolston. ‘That’s the ventilator on your left. You get three grades of temperature—cold, very cold and who’s for skating?’ The music hall patter, unfunny and expressionless, drew a timely smile from Cribb. There was a momentary flicker of gratification in Woolston’s eyes.

‘Now listen to me,’ Cribb said, the formalities over. ‘I’m a detective. That needn’t mean trouble, though.’

Woolston shook his head. ‘No good. I’ve given all the money I brought to the warders.’

‘Damn you, man, I’m not asking for bribes,’ ejaculated Cribb. ‘I want you to tell me what brought you here.’

‘A police-van.’ Cruelly on cue. The conversation was fast becoming a double act.

‘Very well,’ said Cribb. ‘Let’s begin again. I don’t think you’re a jail-bird.’

Woolston turned his eyes to the wall, like a cow uninterested in the attentions of its milker.

‘Put your hands on the table!’ Cribb ordered. The prisoner obeyed, conditioned to respond to that tone of address. Thackeray looked on in mystification. ‘Neat set of fingers,’ Cribb continued, keeping his temper well in check. ‘I dare say there’s a few miracles you can work manipulating them. What do you call it—legerdemain, ain’t it? I wonder what sort of legerdemain you’ll be doing in Wandsworth if they convict you. Might see what you can do with a pump-handle, of course. Most men manage about five thousand revolutions a day—before the blisters slow ’em down, that is. Then they get a turn at oakum-picking by way of variation. Now there’s an occupation for a man with supple fingers! The blisters you get in the pump-house’ll heal beautiful. It’s your nails and finger-tips that go in the oakum-shed. I remember a violinist. Wonderful player. Had a touch like Paganini—’

‘What do you want to know, for God’s sake?’ blurted out Woolston.

Cribb changed tack at once. ‘What went wrong with your trick at the Royal?’

‘A mechanical failure, pure and simple,’ admitted Woolston. ‘Have you ever seen the trick? It’s a perfectly simple idea.’ As though a spark had been fanned, Woolston’s vitality was kindled as he spoke. His features became animated, his voice earnest and expressive. ‘The woman in the box, you know. You show the audience a large empty box standing on its end. Then you invite your shapely assistant to stand inside. There are openings at the top and the bottom for her neck and feet, so that the audience can study her reactions. You close the box and show them a set of half a dozen or more sharpened swords, weapons that chill their spines just to see them. You then proceed to plunge these vigorously through a number of small holes in the front of the box. It seems impossible that you have not harmed your assistant. One sword would appear to have penetrated her chest, another her middle, another her upper legs and so on. But she does not scream or show any pain whatsoever. So you withdraw the swords and open the box and out she steps as exquisite as when she went in.’ He almost took a bow in the cell.

‘I think I’ve seen the trick, Sarge,’ said Thackeray.

‘Probably you have, my dear fellow,’ Woolston said, now almost gushing in his volubility. ‘It is not original. I’ve seen it done by the famous Dr Lynn and by John Nevil Maskelyne, but they don’t use my method. And of course there are scores of provincial performers using rubber swords or girl contortionists.’

‘Really?’ said Cribb. ‘What’s your method then? You’ll have to explain it in court, so you might as well tell us now.’

Woolston hesitated. An illusionist likes to preserve his illusions, but Cribb’s logic was irresistible. So was the invitation to expound his genius. ‘Very well, gentlemen. My trick is worked this way. You will understand that the audience sees the face of my assistant and her feet and presumes therefore that she is occupying the central part of the box, and that her body too is facing them, and so is exposed to the swords which I plunge through the front.’

‘I would think so.’

The conjurer leaned forward confidentially. ‘Now suppose, Sergeant, that what you believe to be my assistant’s feet protruding beneath the box are in fact only her empty boots. She has withdrawn her feet from the boots—which are several sizes larger, for this purpose—and now she can move her body freely inside the box. It is a simple matter to make a turn to the left without moving the head, so that the body is in profile, as it were, while the head remains facing the audience.’

‘Ingenious!’ said Cribb.

Woolston beamed. ‘However that is not all of the deception. If you will kindly remove your elbows from the table . . .’ Cribb obeyed, half-recollecting Mr Blade’s promise of help in case of trouble. ‘Now, gentlemen, I shall demonstrate. You will see that this table is no more than a flap on hinges fixed to the wall. When it is down as it is now it forms a kind of ledge supported by the two chains. But when I push it up . . . thus . . . it lies against the wall almost on a plane with it. This simple idea was incorporated in my box. Once she was free of the boots, my assistant released a secret flap on her right. She then turned her body—but not her head—and seated herself on the small ledge thus formed. It was not comfortable, you understand, but it gave her the support that lifted her body clear of the points where the swords penetrated. When the trick was done and the swords withdrawn it was a simple matter to replace the flap and slip her feet into the boots. I then opened the box and showed the girl unharmed.’ He straightened his bow tie.

‘Marvellous,’ said Thackeray.

‘What went wrong?’ said Cribb.

Woolston shook his head. ‘The flap collapsed as soon as Lettice rested her weight on it. My first sword missed her by good fortune, but the second went straight through the thick part of her leg, you understand.’

‘Didn’t she warn you?’

‘She may have tried, Sergeant, but it is a feature of the performance that she looks alarmed as I thrust the swords home. If she shouted I could not have heard her for the drum-roll that accompanies the climax of the illusion. Of course, I realised what had happened when the second sword met some resistance inside the box.’

‘So I imagine. What happened then?’

‘Confusion, Sergeant. Deplorable confusion! The curtain was rung down and then rung up again immediately. A policeman climbed on to the stage and a doctor appeared from nowhere. Nobody would open the box for fear of aggravating Lettice’s injury. In my own distress I failed to appreciate that to everyone but me it appeared that she had been penetrated through the stomach. We turned the box into a horizontal position and you would not believe the screams from the audience when one of the boots became detached and fell on to the stage. How they imagined I had severed a leg I cannot fathom. Fortunately, someone had the sense to lower the front cloth and soon a comedian had them singing patriotic songs, while a carpenter sawed open the box backstage. Lettice, of course, was discovered with her leg pinned, and the doctor withdrew the sword and took her in a brougham to Charing Cross Hospital.’

‘Then you were arrested?’

‘Yes!’ said Woolston in a shocked voice. ‘In her discomfort the wretched girl became positively vindictive towards me, and several times accused me of deliberately arranging the injury. It was just too preposterous! I thought nobody would believe such a thing! She wasn’t her normal self at all.’

‘Had you known her a long time?’

‘Eighteen months—which is a confounded long time in the theatre, Sergeant.’

‘Had you quarrelled recently?’

‘Quarrelled? Well, hardly quarrelled. Earlier that evening we had a few wry words together, you might say.’

‘What about?’

‘Her figure, Sergeant. I told her she was putting on too much weight, and she was, damn it. Chocolates and gingerbread, you know. One has no business being overweight when one’s in a box trying to avoid being skewered by half a dozen swords.’

‘Did she object to being told about her figure?’

‘Without going into details, yes. I was right, though, wasn’t I? It seems she was too blasted heavy for that secret flap. It’s odd, though. I thought it would have taken much more weight than that. I check the hinges and supports regularly.’

‘Did you check ’em that evening?’

‘Well, not that evening, Sergeant.’

‘I see. How many people knew the secret of your trick?’

‘Very few,’ said Woolston. ‘The carpenter who made it for me. A stage-hand or two. And Lettice.’

‘And the girl before Lettice?’

‘Oh yes, Hetty. And Patty before her, now you mention it.’

Cribb sighed. ‘Did you examine the flap after the accident?’

‘In the confusion, no.’

‘Pity.’

‘You won’t be able to find it now, Sergeant. No stage-manager keeps useless wood backstage. The whole trick will be firewood by now.’

‘Evidence shouldn’t be destroyed,’ commented Cribb. ‘It’s probably saved. What were you charged with?’

‘Assault. Didn’t you know? But I was told that other charges are to be preferred. The damned girl’s not in any danger, is she?’ he added on an impulse.

‘I believe not,’ said Cribb. He studied Woolston’s face. ‘You wouldn’t have wanted to hurt her, would you?’

The conjurer considered the point. ‘Not at that moment, and in those circumstances.’

Cribb lifted an eyebrow. ‘In other circumstances, perhaps?’

Woolston paused, wary of a trap. ‘Now listen to me, Sergeant. I am a professional illusionist, known throughout the London halls, and that girl was a first-class assistant— magnificent proportions, a wonderful suffering expression and legs she wasn’t coy about displaying. But you have to train a girl, and training’s a matter of discipline, like any form of schooling. Without me, she’d still be just a figurante at the Alhambra on ten shillings a week, taking drinks from soldiers between dances.’

‘She was in the ballet, was she?’

‘Until I rescued her, yes. She has a lot to be grateful for. I lavished hours of my time teaching her to move in that box. Hours, gentlemen.’ He scanned both his listeners for a glimmer of sympathy. Cribb was expressionless; Thackeray plainly regarded packing young women in boxes as no hardship. ‘In the end,’ continued Woolston, unabashed, ‘she knew that movement better than any dance-step she’d ever executed.’

‘More’s the pity she put on weight,’ commented Cribb, nudging the conversation in the direction he wanted.

‘Feckless female! Yes.’

‘Wouldn’t put it beyond a man of your application to teach a girl like that a sharp lesson.’

‘By Jove, yes!’ exclaimed Woolston enthusiastically. ‘A scolding’s no use at all.’ Then, recovering himself, ‘I wouldn’t do anything on stage, though. You don’t think I’d destroy the act for a silly little slut that can’t keep her hands out of a chocolate-box?’

‘What I think ain’t of any consequence,’ said Cribb, who had heard all he wanted, ‘but I’m grateful for your plain-speaking.’ He got to his feet. ‘Well now, Thackeray, we won’t detain Mr Woolston any longer. I’m not much of a sorcerer myself, but if my nose is any guide there’s a pot of Newgate stew being cooked not far from here, and I wasn’t planning to stay for lunch.’