Damn His Blood (23 page)

Pyndar’s letter galvanised Ward. After visiting the mayor he called on the collector of customs, who in turn issued an order that all boats were to be searched before they were allowed to leave dock. ‘If he is in the city or neighbourhood and should attempt to quit the kingdom by way of this port, I have every reason to believe that he will be taken, Ward noted, adopting a similar tone to Read in London. He signed off his letter ‘in great haste’, promising Pyndar, ‘Everything will be done, I hope, that can possibly be done.’

There were reasons for Pyndar to believe that Bristol was Heming’s target. There had been a sighting of him south of Worcester, near Pershore, close to the Cheltenham and Gloucester road, and Pyndar had also heard that Heming was involved with a notorious smuggler who lived near his old home in the Tewkesbury area. This smuggler, Pyndar learnt in a note from a Worcester resident, had contacts in Gloucester and Bristol, where many of his goods passed through the port. ‘That the course of his flight is towards that part of the country is highly probable,’ the note concluded.

The letters from Bristol and London had been written on the same date, Friday 27 June, and the fact that they had been penned in such different quarters of the country was testament to Pyndar’s swift action. But although he had dealt with the two most obvious destinations there were still many other routes of escape that remained open. Portsmouth and Liverpool both operated enormous ports, and just to the north of Oddingley and Droitwich industrial towns like Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stourbridge offered anonymous urban havens.

On that same Friday Pyndar’s thoughts were temporarily distracted from the investigation as he stepped beneath the thick oak porch into Oddingley Church for Parker’s funeral. John Perkins and George Banks were among the mourners, but there were few other farmers and no representative from Worcester Cathedral. Parker was honoured, though, with a burial in the heart of the church, in the chancel, a little to the left of the pulpit and under the warm light of the tall stained-glass windows. His grave had been prepared that morning by Joseph Kendall, a stonemason from neighbouring Crowle. It bore a short inscription that made no reference to his murder: ‘Sacred to the memory of the Rev. George Parker. Late rector of this parish, who departed this life, June 24, 1806, Aged 43 years.’

After the service finished Joseph Kendall witnessed a disquieting incident. Kendall was a respected tradesman from neighbouring Crowle. He occasionally took jobs in Oddingley parish and only a few months beforehand had replastered the church walls for Parker. Once the funeral had concluded and the congregation left, his final job was to close and seal the crypt, and the stonemason had waited patiently at the rear of the church as the mourners filed out. But before Kendall rose to complete his task, there was a fleeting moment when there was both an empty church and an open grave. Kendall explained what happened next, ‘I saw George Banks
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there. As soon as the corpse was put in the grave, George Banks came and looked at it and laughed … He made a good deal of fun of it and seemed as though he was pleased that the parson was dead.’

Kendall was appalled by Banks’ behaviour, and though he did not inform Pyndar about it directly may well have mentioned it to his workmen when he returned to Crowle that afternoon. Shortly afterwards the magistrate received a note from Kendall: ‘This is to say that John Bridge an apprentice of mine heard Mr Evans abuse the Rev. Mr Parker a short time before his death and Thomas Perkins a workman of mine heard the same when they were repairing Oddingley Church. – Joseph Kendall, Crowle.’

This was an important moment. While everyone in Oddingley knew about Parker’s quarrel with the farmers, there is little evidence to suggest Pyndar was aware of its extent. Buried within the parish were all the stories of drunken meetings, swearing and brazen threats. That a stonemason from a neighbouring parish was among the first to volunteer information is revealing. Oddingley, like any parish of its kind, was bound tightly together by ties of personal loyalty, decades-old friendships and blunt common sense. The farmhands knew that there was little alternative to working for the farmers, and villagers like Susan Surman, Sarah Lloyd and James Tustin would have been enormously reluctant to speak out against their employers, something which might well have cast their families into unemployment and distress. An employee who sided with the authorities against their employer also risked social stigma: being branded a snitch, turncoat, rascal or mischief-maker – a person better to be avoided.

Kendall, who lived outside Oddingley and had a wider pool of customers, clearly felt he could risk speaking out against Captain Evans – there is a hint of disrespect in his note when he refers to him as ‘Mr’ instead of ‘Captain’ – but his evidence was compromised by his failure to inform the magistrate about Banks’ behaviour after the funeral. Pyndar’s task, therefore, was a delicate one. He had to coax information from wary or unwilling subjects, record testimonies that were better not written, recall conversations that were better not had. Pyndar could offer to cleanse a person’s conscience and he might appeal to their sense of moral right, but he could afford them very little protection from the consequences of their actions.

John Perkins, though, was willing to talk. ‘Capt. Evans said there is no more harm in shooting Mr P. than a mad dog,’ he told Pyndar on Thursday morning as the two men walked from St James’ Church back up to Oddingley.

Perkins’ evidence tallied with what Pyndar had learnt from Kendall, and it stirred him to further action. Over the next few days he sought out various villagers beginning with those who he knew or felt were most likely to reveal something. He carefully recorded interesting points from these meetings, dividing his scraps of parchment into halves and then quarters, underlining key points, jotting down supplementary questions, striking out factual inaccuracies and wondering out loud. Studying these documents at a distance of two centuries you can glean a sense of Pyndar’s brain beginning to tick and a theory beginning to crystallise as his quill is applied with more or less pressure, as it stops for a second to be dipped into the ink or when a firm cross denotes a puzzling dead end.

Pyndar met Clement Churchill and Joseph Colley, two labourers who told him a little of what they knew, but not all. Churchill could have recalled the scene in Church Farm on Midsummer Day and Colley could have recounted the damning toasts in the Red Lion. Neither man did, but they both – in separate interviews – explained how they had heard John Barnett claim that ‘he would give any man five guineas that would shoot Mr Parker’. The consistency between their accounts is striking. Colley’s evidence matched Churchill’s almost word for word.

‘Last Saturday month I observed to Mr Parker that I was surprised that he was not afraid to go out at night for fear he should be knocked on the head,’ John Pardoe, the parish clerk, informed Pyndar shortly after. Edward Stephens, a friend of Pardoe’s who had travelled with him to Worcester on the night of the murder, corroborated this. Stephens also mentioned that Pardoe had told him that he’d heard Thomas Clewes say, ‘he wished somebody would blow the parson’s brains out’. It later transpired that Pardoe had been afraid to mention this as Clewes owed him £20 – a sum he was worried he might lose if the farmer was ‘taken up and hanged’.
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These six men’s evidence suggested to Pyndar that the farmers who had quarrelled with Parker had finally determined to have him killed. All the evidence fitted. He already knew about the curious meeting between Barnett and Evans at Church Farm on Midsummer night, and he knew that the farmers had been unwilling to join the chase. This was reinforced when Betty Perkins volunteered further information on Sunday 29 June, telling Pyndar how Mrs Barnett had forbade Tustin from joining Mr Hemmus in pursuit of Heming. She included Tustin’s claim that ‘his mistress would not let him go, or he would have gone in a minute’. Underneath the account Pyndar noted, ‘This all happened before I got there.’

Pyndar had held suspicions against Barnett and Evans from the very start, and by the weekend after the murder they were beginning to harden. There was a definite connection between Captain Evans and Heming; the tithe dispute offered a motive; the reported threats proved that at least three men – Evans, Clewes and Barnett – bore malice towards Parker; and there was also Barnett’s failure to join the manhunt.

But there were reasons for the magistrate’s initial reluctance to pursue the farmers. Heming was a well-known rogue and mischief-maker, and the possibility of him killing Parker for material gain could not instantly be dismissed. Equally, there is no evidence that Pyndar was aware of how bad relations in Oddingley had become. Tithe disputes were relatively common, and George Parker was an unusually proud man. It is possible that he shielded the embarrassing details of his arguments from his friend and peer in the neighbouring parish. So to immediately conclude that the farmers had plotted to have him killed would have been extraordinarily bold. And by committing himself to such a theory Reverend Pyndar was accusing several notable and respectable parishioners of being accessories to murder. That he shied away from this until he had the necessary evidence is wholly understandable.

Evans and Barnett were among the chief subjects of conversation when Pyndar met several other magistrates at an emergency meeting at the Crown Inn in Worcester, one of the city’s largest coaching inns, over the weekend. Their aim was to devise a new strategy to ensure Heming’s capture and they agreed to several new measures. They decided to advertise a reward of 50 guineas to anyone providing information leading to Heming’s arrest. They also initiated a private fund, to which friends of Parker and other interested locals could subscribe. And finally Pyndar was urged to appeal directly to the home secretary, Earl Spencer. The magistrates hoped that a successful petition for a government reward might result in the great financial and moral might of Parliament swinging behind their investigation.

Rewards had formed a significant part of the state’s strategy to apprehend criminals for more than a century.
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The payments were generous and widely advertised, intended to involve the wider public in the judicial system. They encouraged men to act as vigilantes who assisted magistrates and constables by performing tasks such as tracking down felons, following up on tip-offs and providing steady, lengthy surveillance of an area: tasks that overworked and geographically constrained parish officials simply did not have the means to do. Citizens performing these activities had been rewarded with monetary payments since the reign of Charles II.
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Rewards comprised the second key string of the justice system. They were offered when a suspect had outrun the hue and cry or vanished undisturbed from a crime scene. By the mid-1750s advertisements for criminal suspects – handbills and increasingly newspaper announcements – were so prevalent that the profession of thief taking or bounty hunting had sprung up in response. In 1748 and 1749 the British treasury paid out the vast sum of £206,000 in statutory and other rewards to such individuals, the two highest payments alone totalling £4,600 and £6,500, easily enough to support a person in a lavish lifestyle for the rest of their lives.

More recently the offering of vast sums had been somewhat abandoned by the government, which was inching towards an independent police force on the Bow Street model. But such a paradigm shift would not be achieved for many decades yet, and in many criminal cases advertising a substantial reward was still seen as a natural step.

At Oddingley Pyndar had already enlisted the support of a professional thief taker, a man named Baker from Droitwich. Little is known about Baker’s background or circumstances, only that John Perkins had been sent to fetch him by Pyndar on the Thursday morning. Once briefed the two men had headed to the narrow lane which ran between Oddingley and Droitwich. ‘We went and watched at a new Barn
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belonging to a Mr John Nash of Newland, which was very near the foot-road,’ Pyndar recalled.

The home secretary received Pyndar’s letter on Monday 30 June. The magistrate had included a brief description of the attack and a copy of the handbill. Although the case’s detail was unusual, it was a typical request. Spencer dealt with it astutely, perhaps considering Parker’s killing an unnerving portent in a country battered by more than a decade of war and revolutionary unrest. He rebuffed the petition for an official reward, informing Pyndar that the government only stretched to such measures when the Crown’s property had been damaged or stolen. In other ways, though, he offered his total support. Spencer promised to insert an extract of the handbill in
The Hue and Cry
(matching Read’s offer from Bow Street several days earlier), and as a further incentive he made the Crown’s usual offer of an official pardon to anyone involved in the crime, ‘except for those who committed the principal deed’.

Earl Spencer was an able administrator and a man of some experience. As first lord of the Admiralty he had been heavily involved with wartime policy and had been in the thick of the successful efforts to defuse the naval mutiny of 1797, which marked one of the very lowest moments in Britain’s struggle. Almost a decade on, Spencer was still in the political vanguard. His response to Pyndar was carefully worded and stuck tightly to protocol. If Parker’s murder weighed heavily upon his mind, there is no surviving record of it.

Spencer’s response would not arrive in Worcestershire for several days, but in Oddingley Pyndar was closing in on his suspects. Captain Evans and John Barnett, the two men with most questions to answer, had spent the last few days attempting to restore their standing in the parish by throwing their support behind the manhunt. Evans had called at the other farms, petitioning their masters to contribute to a local reward fund, while Barnett had ordered Tustin and Thomas Alsop, two of his most senior and physically fit farmhands, to comb Trench Wood for any sign of Heming. ‘It was said that he was in the wood and some relations took food to him,’ Alsop remembered. The hundreds of acres of woodland, carpeted with long grass, gorse and broom, and covered by a thick summer canopy, would have provided him with a perfect hiding place. Armed with Barnett’s shotgun, they searched for three to four hours but did not find anything, and in either excitement or exasperation Tustin fired the gun at a tree as they headed home.