The Sedgemoor Strangler and Other Stories of Crime

Showmen

“Getting rid of the bodies was never a problem for me, sir. Sure, we got rid of so many I lost count.”

“Sixteen, they said.”

The cracked lips parted and curved. Sixteen was a joke. Everyone knew the official count had been too low.

“You got away with it, too.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Come now, you’re a free man, aren’t you? Thirty years later, here you are, drinking whisky in the Proud Peacock.”

“God bless you, yes.”

“A reformed character.”

“Well, I’m not without sin, but I’ve not croaked a fellow creature since those days. I was wicked then, terrible, terrible.”

“Does it trouble you still?”

“Not at all.”

“Really?”

He roared with laughter. “Jesus, if I thought about it, I’d never get a peaceful night’s sleep.”

Talking of trouble, it had taken no end of trouble to find the fellow. Rumour had it that he was now an Oxford Street beggar — but trying to find a particular beggar in Oxford Street in 1860 was like looking for a pebble on Brighton beach. From Hyde Park to Holborn a parade of derelicts pitched for pennies, pleading with passers-by, displaying scars and crippled limbs, sightless eyes and underfed infants. They harrassed the shoppers, the rich and would-be rich, innocents up from the country trying to reach the great drapery shops, Marshall & Snelgrove and Peter Robinson.

It took a long morning and most of an afternoon of enquiries before William Hare was discovered outside Heath’s the Hatmakers, a lanky, silver-haired, smiling fellow offering bootlaces for sale and not above accepting charity from those who didn’t need laces. “A spare wretch, gruesome and ghoulish,” the court reporters had once called him, but at this stage in his declining years his looks frightened no one. Animated, grinning and quick of tongue in his Irish brogue, he competed eagerly for the money in the shoppers’ pockets.

To listen to Hare trading on his notoriety, discussing his series of murders, was supposed to be “high ton,” the latest thing in entertainment, the best outside the music halls. He was a good raconteur, as the Irish so often are, with a marvellous facility for shifting the blame onto others, notably his partner, Burke, and the anatomist, Dr Knox.

Of course, he had to be persuaded to talk. He denied his own identity when first it was put to him. The promise of a drink did the trick.

Now, in the pub, he was getting gabbier by the minute.

“Did y’know I was measured by the well-known bumps-on-the-head expert, Mr Combe, at the time of the trial, or just after? Did y’know that?”

“The phrenologist.”

“You’re right, your honour. Phrenologist. There’s something called the bump of ideality and mine is a bump to be marvelled at, prodigious, greater than Wordsworth’s or Voltaire’s. With a bump like mine I could have done beautiful things if my opportunities had been better.”

“You made your opportunities.”

“Indeed I did.” The mouth widened into the grin that was Hare’s blessing and his curse.

“You robbed others of their opportunities.”

“That’s a delicate way of putting it, sir.”

“No one murdered so many and lived to tell the tale.”

He almost purred at that. “A tale I don’t tell very often.”

“Unless you’re paid.”

That nervy smile again. In court, all those years ago, the incessant twitch of his lips had displeased the judge and drawn hisses of contempt from the public gallery. The people of Edinburgh had hated him. The grin inflamed them.

It seemed Hare didn’t feel comfortable with his new patron, despite the whisky in his hand. “Tell me, sir, is it possible we met before?”

“Why do you ask?”

“The familiar way you talk to me.”

The nerve of the man — as if his crimes had made him one of the elect.

“You’re notorious, Hare. I know all about you, if that’s what you mean.”

“I bet you don’t, sir, not all. You know the worst, but no one ever told you the best. People shouldn’t believe what they read in the newspapers. The queer thing is, I never planned it, you know. The papers made me out to be a monster, but I was not. It was circumstances, sir, circumstances.” He was into his flow now. “The first one, the very first, wasn’t one of those we turned off. He was an old soldier, a lodger in the house, the lodging house my woman had in West Port. He faded away of natural causes.”

This caused some macabre amusement. “Come now.”

“I swear before God, that’s the truth,” Hare insisted, planting a fist on the table, “Mag and I didn’t hasten his leaving at all. We wanted him to live a few days more. His rent was due. Four pounds. And fate cruelly took him to his Maker before his quarterly pension was paid. How can you run a lodging house without the rent coming in?”

“So the circumstance was financial?”

“You have it in a nutshell, sir. He left nothing I could sell. I couldn’t go up to the Castle and ask the military for his pension. I was forced to go elsewhere for the arrears.”

“By selling the corpse.”

Hare nodded. “With the help of another lodger, my fellow countryman, Mr Burke, whose name has since become a byword for infamy. Sure and William Burke was no angel, I have to admit. But I couldn’t have managed alone. We removed old Donald from his coffin and weighted it with a sack of wood and gave it a pauper’s burial. After dark that evening we carried the body up to the College on the South Bridge, with a view to donating it to science.”

“Selling it, you mean.”

“To recover the rent. All of Edinburgh knew the schools of anatomy couldn’t get enough corpses. At the time I speak of, 1827, there were seven anatomists at work in the city, doing dissections to educate the students, and that wasn’t enough. The dissecting rooms were like theatres, sir, vast places, crammed to the rafters with students, five hundred at a time. Is it any wonder there was a trade in bodysnatching? Not that Burke and Hare rifled graves. Say what you like about us, we never stooped to that. Ours were all unburied. We had this innocent corpse, as I told you, and we went in search of Professor Monro.”

“Why Monro?”

“You have an item to sell, you’re better off going to the top, aren’t you? And here’s a strange twist of fate. We were standing in the quad with our booty between us in a tea-chest when a student happened to come by. I asked him the way to the School of Anatomy. This is where fate interfered, sir. The student wasn’t a pupil of the professor. He was one of Dr Knox’s canny little boyos. He sent us down to Cowgate, to 10 Surgeons’ Square, the rival establishment.” He drew himself up. “That, sir, is the truth of how we got drawn into the web of the infamous Dr Knox. If we’d got to the professor first, the story might have ended differently.”

“Why is that?”

“Because of what was said, sir.”

“By Dr Knox?”

“His accolytes, the people at Surgeon’s Square. We didn’t get to see the old devil that night. We dealt with three of his students. You have to admire his organisation. He had students on duty into the night meeting visitors like ourselves and purchasing bodies, and no questions asked. They paid seven pounds ten. We should have insisted on ten, but we had no experience. The students seemed well pleased with what they got, and so were we, to speak the truth. And then they spoke the words that touched our Irish hearts: ‘Sure, we’d be glad to see you again when you have another to dispose of.’ Ha — and didn’t our ears prick up at that!”

“ ‘Glad to see you.’ Glad to see the contents of your tea-chest, more like.”

A cackle greeted this. “And do you know who those students were that night? They became three of the most eminent surgeons in the kingdom. Sir William Fergusson, Thomas Wharton Jones and Alexander Miller. And here am I, who assisted so handsomely in their education, reduced to begging on the streets.”

“Shall I fetch another whisky?”

“I won’t say no.”

Left alone at the table, William Hare pondered his chances of extracting something more than drink. He had a suspicion the expenses were being met by a newspaper. There was still plenty of macabre interest in the story of Burke and Hare. It was like old times: the law of supply and demand at work again. A paper with an interest in famous crimes ought to be paying him a decent fee for this interview. He might even negotiate a week in a proper hotel.

“Would you mind telling me who you represent?” he asked his companion when he returned to the table.

“Myself.”

“You wouldn’t be from the press?”

“Certainly not. I’m a showman.”

Hare stood up, outraged. “I’m not going into a freak show.”

“Please calm down. I haven’t the slightest intention of offering you employment. This is simply a quiet tete-a-tete over a whisky.”

He remained standing. “What’s the show?”

Dismissively, the showman said, “It’s totally unconnected with this conversation. If you must know, I am employed for my voice, in a circus, acting as interlocutor, lecturer and demonstrator for a travelling party of Ojibbeway Indians from North America.”

If anything could silence Hare, it was a man who spoke for a troupe of Ojibbeway Indians.

He resumed his seat. “What do you want with me, then?”

“I’m curious about what happened.”

“It’s all been told before.”

“I know that. I want to hear it from the lips of the man who did it. Tell me about your method. How was the killing done?”

“For the love of God, lower your voice,” said Hare. “I don’t want the whole of London knowing my history.” He’d suffered enough in the past from being named in public.