Gallows Thief

But fifteen guineas! He could afford a meal now. A meal, some wine and an afternoon of cricket. It was a tempting vision, but Sandman was not a man to shirk duty. The job of being the Home Office’s Investigator might be temporary, but if he finished this first enquiry swiftly then he might look for other and more lucrative assignments from Lord Sidmouth, and that was an outcome devoutly to be wished and so he would forgo the meal, forget the wine and postpone the cricket.

For there was a murderer to see and a confession to obtain.

And Sandman went to fetch it.

In Old Bailey, a funnel-shaped thoroughfare that narrowed as it ran from Newgate Street to Ludgate Hill, the scaffold was being taken down. The black baize that had draped the platform was already folded onto a small cart and two men were now handing down the heavy beam from which the four victims had been hanged. The first broadsheets describing the executions and the crimes that had caused them were being hawked for a penny apiece to the vestiges of the morning’s crowd who had waited to see Jemmy Botting haul the four dead bodies up from the hanging pit, sit them on the edge of the drop while he removed the nooses and then heave them into their coffins. Then a handful of spectators had climbed to the scaffold to have one of the dead men’s hands touched to their warts, boils or tumours.

The coffins had at last been carried into the prison, but some folk still lingered just to watch the scaffold’s dismemberment. Two hawkers were selling what they claimed were portions of the fatal ropes. Bewigged and black-robed lawyers hurried between the Lamb Inn, the Magpie and Stump and the courts of the Session House that had been built next to the prison. Traffic had been allowed back into the street so Sandman had to dodge between wagons, carriages and carts to reach the prison gate where he expected warders and locks, but instead he found a uniformed porter at the top of the steps and dozens of folk coming and going. Women were carrying parcels of food, babies and bottles of gin, beer or rum. Children ran and screamed, while two aproned tapmen from the Magpie and Stump across the street delivered cooked meals on wooden trays to prisoners who could afford their services.

‘Your honour is looking for someone?’ The porter, seeing Sandman’s confusion, had pushed through the crowd to intercept him.

‘I am looking for Charles Corday,’ Sandman said, and when the porter looked bemused, added that he had come from the Home Office. ‘My name is Sandman,’ he explained, ‘Captain Sandman, and I’m Lord Sidmouth’s official Investigator.’ He drew out the letter with its impressive Home Office seal.

‘Ah!’ The porter was quite uninterested in the letter. ‘You’ve replaced Mister Talbot, God rest his soul. A proper gentleman he was, sir.’

Sandman put the letter away. ‘I should, perhaps, pay my respects to the Governor?’ he suggested.

‘The Keeper, sir, Mister Brown is the Keeper, sir, and he won’t thank you for any respects, sir, on account that they ain’t needful. You just goes in, sir, and sees the prisoner. Mister Talbot, now, God rest him, he took them to one of the empty salt boxes and had a little chat.’ The porter grinned and mimed a punching action. ‘A great one for the truth was Mister Talbot. A big man, he was, but so are you. What was your fellow called?’

‘Corday.’

‘He’s condemned, is he? Then you’ll find him in the Press Yard, your honour. Are you carrying a stick, sir?’

‘A stick?’

‘A pistol, sir. No? Some gentlemen do, but weapons ain’t advisable, sir, on account that the bastards might overpower you. And a word of advice, Captain?’ The porter, his breath reeking of rum, turned and took hold of Sandman’s lapel to add emphasis to his next words. ‘He’ll tell you he didn’t do it, sir. There ain’t a guilty man in here, not one! Not if you ask them. They’ll all swear on their mothers’ lives they didn’t do it, but they did. They all did.’ He grinned and released his grip on Sandman’s coat. ‘Do you have a watch, sir? You do, sir? Best not take anything in that might be stolen. It’ll be in the cupboard here, sir, under lock, key and my eye. Round that corner, sir, you’ll find some stairs. Go down, sir, follow the tunnel and don’t mind the smell. Mind your backs!’ This last call was to all the folk in the lobby because four workmen, accompanied by three watchmen armed with truncheons, were carrying a plain wooden coffin out through the prison door. ‘It’s the girl what was stretched this morning, sir,’ the porter confided in Sandman. ‘She’s going to the surgeons. The gentlemen do like a young lady to dissect, they do. Down the stairs, sir, and follow your nose.’

The smell of unwashed bodies reminded Sandman of Spanish billets crowded with tired redcoats and the stench became even more noxious as he followed the stone-flagged tunnel to where more stairs climbed to a guardroom beside a massive barred gate that led into the Press Yard. Two turnkeys, both armed with cudgels, guarded the gate. ‘Charles Corday?’ one responded when Sandman enquired where the prisoner might be found. ‘You can’t miss him. If he ain’t in the yard then he’ll be in the Association Room.’ He pointed to an open door across the yard. ‘He looks like a bleeding mort, that’s why you can’t mistake him.’

‘A mort?’

The man unbolted the gate. ‘He looks like a bloody girl, sir,’ he said scornfully. ‘Pal of his, are you?’ The man grinned, then the grin faded as Sandman turned and stared at him. ‘I don’t see him in the yard, sir,’ the turnkey had been a soldier and he instinctively straightened his back and became respectful under Sandman’s gaze, ‘so he’ll be in the Association Room, sir. That door over there, sir.’

The Press Yard was a narrow space compressed between high, dank buildings. What little light came into the yard arrived over a thicket of spikes that crowned the Newgate Street wall beside which a score of prisoners, easily identifiable because of their leg irons, sat with their visitors. Children played round an open drain. A blind man sat by the steps leading to the cells, muttering to himself and scratching at the open sores on his manacled ankles. A drunk, also in chains, lay sleeping while a woman, evidently his wife, wept silently beside him. She mistook Sandman for a wealthy man and held out a begging hand. ‘Have pity on a poor woman, your honour, have pity.’

Sandman went into the Association Room which was a large space filled with tables and benches. A coal fire burnt in a big grate where stew pots hung from a crane. The pots were being stirred by two women who were evidently cooking for a dozen folk seated round one of the long tables. The only turnkey in the room, a youngish man armed with a truncheon, was also at the table, sharing a gin bottle and the laughter which died abruptly when Sandman appeared. Then the other tables fell silent as forty or fifty folk turned to look at the newcomer. Someone spat. Something about Sandman, maybe his height, spoke of authority and this was not a place where authority was welcome.

‘Corday!’ Sandman called, his voice taking on the familiar officer’s tone. ‘I’m looking for Charles Corday!’ No one answered. ‘Corday!’ Sandman called again.

‘Sir?’ The answering voice was tremulous and came from the room’s furthest and darkest corner. Sandman threaded his way through the tables to see a pathetic figure curled against the wall there. Charles Corday was very young, he looked scarce more than seventeen, and he was thin to the point of frailty with a deathly pale face framed by long fair hair that did, indeed, look girlish. He had long eyelashes, a trembling lip and a dark bruise on one cheek.

‘You’re Charles Corday?’ Sandman felt an instinctive dislike of the young man, who looked too delicate and self-pitying.

‘Yes, sir.’ Corday’s right arm was shaking.

‘Stand up,’ Sandman ordered. Corday blinked in surprise at the tone of command, but obeyed, flinching because the leg irons bit into his ankles. ‘I’ve been sent by the Home Secretary,’ Sandman said, ‘and I need somewhere private where we can talk. We can use the cells, perhaps. Do we reach them from here? Or from the yard?’

‘The yard, sir,’ Corday said, though he scarcely seemed to have understood the rest of Sandman’s words.

Sandman led Corday towards the door. ‘Is he your boman, Charlie?’ a man in leg shackles enquired. ‘Come for a farewell cuddle, has he?’ The other prisoners laughed, but Sandman had the experienced officer’s ability to know when to ignore insubordination and he just kept walking, but then he heard Corday squeal and he turned to see that a greasy-haired and unshaven man was holding Corday’s hair like a leash. ‘I was talking to you, Charlie!’ the man said. He yanked Corday’s hair, making the boy squeal again. ‘Give us a kiss, Charlie,’ the man demanded, ‘give us a kiss.’ The women at the table by the fire laughed at Corday’s predicament.

‘Let him go,’ Sandman said.

‘You don’t give orders here, culley,’ the unshaven man growled. ‘No one gives orders in here, there aren’t any orders any more, not till Jemmy comes to fetch us away, so you can fake away off, culley, you can—’ The man stopped suddenly, then gave a curious scream. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No!’

Rider Sandman had ever suffered from a temper. He knew it and he fought against it. In his everyday life he adopted a tone of gentle deliberation, he used courtesy far beyond necessity, he elevated reason and he reinforced it with prayer, and he did all that because he feared his own temper, but not all the prayer and reason and courtesy had eliminated the foul moods. His soldiers had known there was a devil in Captain Sandman. It was a real devil and they knew he was not a man to cross because he had that temper as sudden and as fierce as a summer storm of lightning and thunder. And he was a tall and strong man, strong enough to lift the unshaven prisoner and slam him against the wall so hard that the man’s head bounced off the stones. Then the man screamed because Sandman had driven a hard fist into his lower belly. ‘I said let him go,’ Sandman snapped. ‘Did you not hear what I said? Are you deaf or are you just a bloody God-damned idiot?’ He slapped the man once, twice, and his eyes were blazing and his voice was seething with a promise of even more terrible violence. ‘Damn it! What kind of fool do you take me for?’ He jerked the man. ‘Answer me!’

‘Sir?’ the unshaven man managed to say.

‘Answer me. God damn it!’ Sandman’s right hand was about the prisoner’s throat and he was throttling the man, who was incapable of saying anything now. There was utter silence in the Association Room. The man, gazing into Sandman’s pale eyes, was choking.

The turnkey, as appalled by the force of Sandman’s anger as any of the prisoners, nervously crossed the room. ‘Sir? You’re throttling him, sir.’

‘I’m damn well killing him,’ Sandman snarled.

‘Sir, please, sir.’

Sandman suddenly came to his senses, then let the prisoner go. ‘If you cannot be courteous,’ he told the half-choked man, ‘then you should be silent.’

‘He won’t give you any more lip, sir,’ the turnkey said anxiously, ‘I warrant he won’t, sir.’

‘Come, Corday,’ Sandman ordered, and stalked out of the room.

There was a sigh of relief when he left. ‘Who the hell was that?’ the bruised prisoner managed to ask through the pain in his throat.

‘Never laid peepers on him.’

‘Got no right to hit me,’ the prisoner said, and his friends growled their assent though none cared to follow Sandman and debate the assertion.

Sandman led a terrified Corday across the Press Yard to the steps which led to the fifteen salt boxes. The five cells on the ground floor were all being used by prostitutes and Sandman, the temper still seething in him, did not apologise for interrupting them, but just slammed the doors then climbed the stairs to find an empty cell on the first floor. ‘In there,’ he told Corday, and the frightened youth scuttled past him. Sandman shuddered at the stink in this ancient part of the jail that had survived the fires of the Gordon Riots. The rest of the prison had burnt to ash during the riots, but these floors had merely been scorched and the salt boxes looked more like mediaeval dungeons than modern cells. A rope mat lay on the floor, evidently to serve as a mattress, blankets for five or six men were tossed in an untidy pile under the high-barred window while an unemptied night bucket stank in a corner.

‘I’m Captain Rider Sandman,’ he introduced himself again to Corday, ‘and the Home Secretary has asked me to enquire into your case.’

‘Why?’ Corday, who had sunk onto the pile of blankets, nerved himself to ask.

‘Your mother has connections,’ Sandman said shortly, the temper still hot in him.

‘The Queen has spoken for me?’ Corday looked hopeful.

‘Her Majesty has requested an assurance of your guilt,’ Sandman said stuffily.

‘But I’m not guilty,’ Corday protested.

‘You’ve already been condemned,’ Sandman said, ‘so your guilt is not at issue.’ He knew he sounded unbearably pompous, but he wanted to get this distasteful meeting over so he could go to the cricket. It would, he thought, be the swiftest fifteen guineas he had ever earnt for he could not imagine this despicable creature resisting his demands for a confession. Corday looked pathetic, effeminate and close to tears. He was wearing dishevelled but fashionably elegant clothes; black breeches, white stockings, a frilled white shirt and a blue silk waistcoat, but he had neither cravat nor a topcoat. The clothes, Sandman suspected, were all a good deal more expensive than anything he himself possessed and they only increased his dislike of Corday, whose voice had a flat and nasal quality with an accent that betrayed social pretensions. A snivelling little upstart, was Sandman’s instinctive judgement; a boy scarce grown and already aping the manners and fashion of his betters.

‘I didn’t do it!’ Corday protested again, then began to cry. His thin shoulders heaved, his voice grizzled and the tears ran down his pale cheeks.

Sandman stood in the cell doorway. His predecessor had evidently beaten confessions out of prisoners, but Sandman could not imagine himself doing the same. It was not honourable and could not be done, which meant the wretched boy would have to be persuaded into telling the truth, but the first necessity was to stop him weeping. ‘Why do you call yourself Corday,’ he asked, hoping to distract him, ‘when your mother’s name is Cruttwell?’

Corday sniffed. ‘There’s no law against it.’

‘Did I say there was?’

‘I’m a portrait painter,’ Corday said petulantly, as if he needed to reassure himself of that fact, ‘and clients prefer their painters to have French names. Cruttwell doesn’t sound distinguished. Would you have your portrait painted by Charlie Cruttwell when you could engage Monsieur Charles Corday?’

‘You’re a painter?’ Sandman could not hide his surprise.

‘Yes!’ Corday, his eyes reddened from crying, looked belligerently at Sandman, then he collapsed into misery again. ‘I was apprenticed to Sir George Phillips.’

‘He’s very successful,’ Sandman said scornfully, ‘despite possessing a prosaically English name. And Sir Thomas Lawrence doesn’t sound very French to me.’

‘I thought changing my name would help,’ Corday said sulkily. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Your guilt matters,’ Sandman said sternly, ‘and, if nothing else, you might face the judgement of your Maker with a clear conscience if you were to confess it.’

Corday stared at Sandman as though his visitor were mad. ‘You know what I’m guilty of?’ he finally asked. ‘I’m guilty of aspiring to be above my station. I’m guilty of being a decent painter. I’m guilty of being a much better damned painter than Sir George bloody Phillips, and I’m guilty, my God how I’m guilty, of being stupid, but I did not kill the Countess of Avebury! I did not!’

Sandman did not like the boy, but he felt in danger of being convinced by him and so he steeled himself by remembering the warning words of the porter at the prison gate. ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘Eighteen,’ Corday answered.

‘Eighteen,’ Sandman echoed. ‘God will have pity on your youth,’ he said. ‘We all do stupid things when we’re young, and you have done terrible things, but God will weigh your soul and there is still hope. You aren’t doomed to hell’s fires, not if you confess and if you beg God for forgiveness.’

‘Forgiveness for what?’ Corday asked defiantly.

Sandman was so taken aback that he said nothing.

Corday, red-eyed and pale-faced, stared up at the tall Sandman. ‘Look at me,’ he said, ‘do I look like a man who has the strength to rape and kill a woman, even if I wanted to? Do I look like that?’ He did not. Sandman had to admit it, at least to himself, for Corday was a limp and unimpressive creature, weedy and thin, who now began to weep again. ‘You’re all the same,’ he whined. ‘No one listens! No one cares! So long as someone hangs, no one cares.’

‘Stop crying, for God’s sake!’ Sandman snarled, and immediately chided himself for giving way to his temper. ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered.

Those last two words made Corday frown in puzzlement. He stopped weeping, looked at Sandman and frowned. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he said softly, ‘I didn’t do it.’

‘So what happened?’ Sandman asked, despising himself for having lost control of the interview.

‘I was painting her,’ Corday said. ‘The Earl of Avebury wanted a portrait of his wife and he asked Sir George to do it.’

‘He asked Sir George, yet you were painting her?’ Sandman sounded sceptical. Corday, after all, was a mere eighteen years old while Sir George Phillips was celebrated as the only rival to Sir Thomas Lawrence.

Corday sighed as though Sandman was being deliberately obtuse. ‘Sir George drinks,’ he said scornfully. ‘He starts on blackstrap at breakfast and bowzes till night, which means his hand shakes. So he drinks and I paint.’

Sandman backed into the corridor to escape the smell of the unemptied night bucket in the cell. He wondered if he was being naïve, for he found Corday curiously believable. ‘You painted in Sir George’s studio?’ he asked, not because he cared, but because he wanted to fill the silence.

‘No,’ Corday said. ‘Her husband wanted the portrait set in her bedroom, so I did it there. Have you any idea how much bother that is? You have to take an easel and canvas and chalk and oils and rags and pencils and dropcloths and mixing bowls and more rags. Still, the Earl of Avebury was paying for it.’

‘How much?’

‘Whatever Sir George could get away with. Eight hundred guineas? Nine? He offered me a hundred.’ Corday sounded bitter at that fee, though it seemed like a fortune to Sandman.

‘Is it usual to paint a portrait in a lady’s bedroom?’ Sandman asked in genuine puzzlement. He could imagine a woman wanting herself depicted in a drawing room or under a tree in a great sunlit garden, but the bedroom seemed a very perverse choice to him.

‘It was to be a boudoir portrait,’ Corday said, and though the term was new to Sandman he understood what it meant. ‘They’re very fashionable,’ Corday went on, ‘because these days all the women want to look like Canova’s Pauline Bonaparte.’

Sandman frowned. ‘You confuse me.’

Corday raised suppliant eyes to heaven in the face of such ignorance. ‘The sculptor Canova,’ he explained, ‘did a likeness of the Emperor’s sister that is much celebrated and every beauty in Europe wishes to be depicted in the same pose. The woman reclines on a chaise longue, an apple in her left hand and her head supported by her right.’ Corday, rather to Sandman’s embarrassment, demonstrated the pose. ‘The salient feature,’ the boy went on, ‘is that the woman is naked from the waist up. And a good deal below the waist, too.’

‘So the Countess was naked when you painted her?’ Sandman asked.

‘No,’ Corday hesitated, then shrugged. ‘She wasn’t to know she was being painted naked, so she was in a morning gown and robe. We would have used a model in the studio to do the tits.’

‘She didn’t know?’ Sandman was incredulous.

‘Her husband wanted a portrait,’ Corday said impatiently, ‘and he wanted her naked, and she would have refused him, so he lied to her. She didn’t mind doing a boudoir portrait, but she wasn’t going to unpeel for anyone, so we were going to fake it and I was just doing the preliminary work, the drawing and tints. Charcoal on canvas with a few colours touched in; the colours of the bed covers, the wallpaper, her ladyship’s skin and hair. Bitch that she was.’

Sandman felt a surge of hope, for the last four words had been malevolent, just as he expected a murderer would speak of his victim. ‘You didn’t like her?’

‘Like her? I despised her!’ Corday spat. ‘She was a trumped-up demi-rep!’ He meant she was a courtesan, a high-class whore. ‘A buttock,’ Corday downgraded her savagely, ‘nothing else. But just because I didn’t like her doesn’t make me a rapist and murderer. Besides, do you really think a woman like the Countess of Avebury would allow a painter’s apprentice to be alone with her? She was chaperoned by a maid all the time I was there. How could I have raped or murdered her?’

‘There was a maid?’ Sandman asked.

‘Of course there was,’ Corday insisted scornfully, ‘an ugly bitch called Meg.’

Sandman was totally confused now. ‘And, presumably, Meg spoke at your trial?’

‘Meg has disappeared,’ Corday said tiredly, ‘which is why I am going to hang.’ He glared at Sandman. ‘You don’t believe me, do you? You think I’m making it up. But there was a maid and her name was Meg and she was there and when it came to the trial she couldn’t be found.’ He had spoken defiantly, but his demeanour suddenly changed as he began to weep again. ‘Does it hurt?’ he asked. ‘I know it does. It must!’

Sandman stared down at the flagstones. ‘Where was the house?’

‘Mount Street,’ Corday was hunched and sobbing, ‘it’s just off …’

‘I know where Mount Street is,’ Sandman interrupted a little too sharply. He was embarrassed by Corday’s tears, but persevered with questions that were now actuated by a genuine curiosity. ‘And you admit to being in the Countess’s house on the day she was murdered?’

‘I was there just before she was murdered!’ Corday said. ‘There were back stairs, servants’ stairs, and there was a knock on the door there. A deliberate knock, a signal, and the Countess became agitated and insisted I leave at once. So Meg took me down the front stairs and showed me the door. I had to leave everything, the paints, canvas, everything, and that convinced the constables I was guilty. So within an hour they came and arrested me at Sir George’s studio.’

‘Who sent for the constables?’

Corday shrugged to suggest he did not know. ‘Meg? Another of the servants?’

‘And the constables found you at Sir George’s studio. Which is where?’

‘Sackville Street. Above Gray’s, the jewellers.’ Corday stared red-eyed at Sandman. ‘Do you have a knife?’

‘No.’

‘Because if you do, then I beg you give it me. Give it me! I would rather cut my wrists than stay here! I did nothing, nothing! Yet I am beaten and abused all day, and in a week I hang. Why wait a week? I am already in hell. I am in hell!’

Sandman cleared his throat. ‘Why not stay up here, in the cells? You’d be alone here.’

‘Alone? I’d be alone for two minutes! It’s safer downstairs where at least there are witnesses.’ Corday wiped his eyes with his sleeve. ‘What do you do now?’

‘Now?’ Sandman was nonplussed. He had expected to listen to a confession and then go back to the Wheatsheaf and write a respectful report. Instead he was confused.

‘You said the Home Secretary wanted you to make enquiries. So will you?’ Corday’s gaze was challenging, then he crumpled. ‘You don’t care. No one cares!’

‘I shall make enquiries,’ Sandman said gruffly, and suddenly he could not take the stench and the tears and the misery any more and so he turned and ran down the stairs. He came into the fresher air of the Press Yard, then had a moment’s panic that the turnkeys would not unbolt the gate that would let him into the tunnel, but of course they did.