Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (11 page)

Inspector Tanner returned to Scotland Yard. He had narrowed his focus to one individual but time was against them. If Müller really was on his way to America then he had a five-day head start and could easily put himself beyond their reach, vanishing into a country steeped in the chaos of a civil war. Someone would have to give chase and, if Müller was caught in New York, then formal papers would be needed in order to request his extradition. Consequently, a flurry of hansom cabs was dispatched across the city by officers at Scotland Yard and, at the Bow Street Police Court in Covent Garden,
a magistrate stood ready
to hear witness depositions at a private sitting. While Superintendent William Tiddey played puppetmaster, choreographing the arrival of the various witnesses at Bow Street that Tuesday afternoon, Tanner arranged for new bills carrying descriptions of Müller to be printed and sent to all ports. Telegraphic messages were sent to Liverpool with instructions for all departing vessels to be searched, just in case he had not sailed with the
Victoria
after all.

Out beyond the City, amid the wheeling seagulls and shrill crowds of the docks, Tanner then sought the porter for the Grinnell Line who confirmed, after being shown the photograph, that Müller had been there several times from Monday the 11th looking for passage. In his office on the North Quay, James Gifford – shipping agent for Grinnell and their vessel the
Victoria
– also told Tanner that the German had been at the quay three times on Wednesday the 13th, first to ask the fare, then to pay and collect a ticket (without bothering to give a false name), and finally to store some parcels wrapped in canvas. Tanner wondered about these parcels. Did they contain the usual items, like soap and bacon, that poor emigrants took along to see them through the voyage? Or might they have concealed a blood-spattered coat and trousers? Tanner also needed to find out whether Müller had actually embarked. The agent was fairly certain: the last time he had seen Müller was on board the
Victoria
just before the ship sailed early in the morning of Friday 15 July.

Hurrying from the docks to nearby Aldgate, Tanner set course for Jewry Street, a dingy alley where several rickety timber-framed houses had survived the Great Fire of 1666 and where thin sunshine lost out to soot and dust from the nearby railway viaduct. He found both Elizabeth Repsch and her German husband Godfrey at home at number 12½

Unlike Hoffa, Elizabeth was able to remember precisely what Müller had been wearing on Saturday 9 July: dark green and black trousers and a dark frock coat. She was sure that on Monday the 11th he had worn the same coat but a different, paler pair of trousers. That day, he had shown her a chain he said he had just bought at the docks for three pounds fifteen shillings, and a ring reported to have cost another seven shillings and sixpence. When Elizabeth admired his new hat, Müller told her that the old one was broken and that he had thrown it into the dust-hole at the Blyths’.

Elizabeth Repsch was most detailed in her statement about
Müller’s new hat. It was of such good quality that even her husband had remarked that it looked like a guinea topper – a hat, in other words, worth an entire week’s wages. Müller denied it, telling them that he paid just fourteen shillings for it a couple of months earlier, but that he had only worn it on a couple of Sundays. Then, when Tanner pressed her about Müller’s old hat, Elizabeth had excellent recall: it was
a plain black beaver
with a merino rim inside and striped lining, broad brown stripes and broad blue stripes edged with black and white
. The lining was so unusual, she told him, that she would recognise it anywhere. Her description exactly matched the crushed hat locked away in Tanner’s office at Scotland Yard.

Mrs Repsch seemed not to be particularly fond of Müller, admitting that she had known him for about two years and that she thought him a bit of a show-off. He had boasted to her (here Tanner heard the echo of Eliza Matthews’ story) that Hodgkinson was sending him to America on an inflated wage, though she said she had not believed it. Did they know Jonathan Matthews? Godfrey Repsch said he had known the cab driver for about eight years but that they rarely saw each other. Tanner did not pursue the connection. The black morning coat that Mrs Repsch had pawned in nearby Minories was preying on his mind. Hoffa now had that ticket and Tanner had already sent a police constable to retrieve it and bring it along to Scotland Yard.

Did the Repschs know what had become of Müller? Godfrey did, since he had seen him off:
I went on board the
Victoria
with him. Everybody that knew him knew where he was going
.

*

As Tanner continued his enquiries during the afternoon of Tuesday 19 July hackney cabs hired by the police were conveying the six central witnesses from Bow, Aldgate, Cheapside, Peckham, Hackney and Paddington to the Magistrates’ Court at 4 Bow Street. By mid-afternoon, Jonathan and Eliza Matthews,
John Hoffa, the silversmith John Death, Thomas James Briggs and the train guard Benjamin Ames were gathered with Sergeant George Clarke of the detective police and Inspector Steer from Paddington, waiting to appear before the Chief Magistrate.

Inspector Tanner arrived with the walking stick, black bag and crushed hat discovered in carriage 69, the cardboard box given up by Matthews and Thomas Briggs’ broken chain which had been surrendered by John Death. He had one new exhibit. The second ticket held by Hoffa in return for his spare suit of clothes had indeed turned out to be for a gold chain also pledged at Mr Annis’ shop in Minories. When this chain was shown to John Death,
the silversmith was ready to swear
that it was the very one that the stranger took away from his shop on the morning after the murder.

Despite its lofty reputation, Bow Street Magistrates’ Court was rather squalid, described by the
Illustrated London News
several years before as made up of
dingy, fetid, close smelling rooms
… the walls greased and stained by the ceaseless friction of the forlorn and ragged groups of witnesses and prosecutors who … lounge about in every avenue
. Established in 1740 on the site of the capital’s first police office and designated its superior magistrates’ court, it had been the locus for committal proceedings of dozens of the most infamous criminal cases in the land, and it handled up to three hundred cases each day. Legions of police and black-gowned lawyers jostled in the hot corridors among swarms of poor men and women either summoned to give statements or arriving with complaints or to make enquiries about missing friends or strayed children. Reporters swarmed around the entrance.

Tanner, his colleagues and the witnesses were soon hustled into a narrow chamber where the Chief Magistrate Mr Thomas Henry would preside over the taking of depositions designed to form the skeleton of the case against Müller. The witnesses’ stories were all repeated. The hat, stick, bag and chains were each
identified and entered as evidence. Each short statement was copied in a court clerk’s bold copperplate, signed by the witness and certified by the magistrate. At six o’clock, several hours after they had begun, Tanner held a warrant for Franz Müller’s arrest and the formal depositions. All that was now needed in order for the documents to be admissible in a United States courtroom was the signature of the envoy extraordinary to the United States and the embellished seal of the legation in London.

Worn out by almost thirty-six sleepless hours, Inspector Richard Tanner finally called in at Chester Square to discuss progress in the case. The Commissioner was waiting – already dressed for the evening’s performance of Gounod’s opera
Faust e Margherita
at Covent Garden. Tanner had already visited the Foreign Office that afternoon to
collect government dispatches
for the acting British consul in New York and passports for two witnesses and two members of the police force. Despite the recent success of sub-sea cables in Europe, the Atlantic continued to defy attempts to
create a line of communication
between the two continents. Within the year
an effective cable
would be in place but, for now, there was no way of contacting the captain of the
Victoria
to confirm her position or whether Müller was still on board, and it was impossible to request the New York authorities to take action on their behalf.

He was aware there was a chance that the Commissioner might depute him to chase Müller across the Atlantic, organise his arrest and bring the suspect home for trial. But
Tanner was caught off guard
by Sir Richard Mayne’s order that he leave within the hour, accompanied by Sergeant George Clarke and the two men still waiting in the cab outside – John Death and Jonathan Matthews. The first ship bound for New York was scheduled to depart the following morning – Wednesday 20 July – from Liverpool. If they failed to catch the express train north that evening, the next boat did not leave until Saturday.

The inspector would be leaving behind several loose threads:
they had still not succeeded in ruling out the involvement of Charles Judd – suspected murderer of Judge Poinsot – nor had they managed to untangle the information given to them by Thomas Lee about the two men sharing the same compartment as Thomas Briggs when his train pulled out from Bow. The responsibility for straightening these worrying uncertainties would not be his; the investigation would go on without him and he knew that it might be months before he would be back home.

By ten to nine Tanner, Clarke, Death and Matthews were hurrying under the massive arch at the entrance to Euston Square Station. Dodging into the Great Hall and swerving through crowds of passengers and piles of luggage, they skirted porters and trolleys to reach the down platform, sweating in the furnace-like heat that thickened under the great iron and glass roof. With a burst of steam, the nine o’clock night express bound for Liverpool shuddered away, gaining speed as it passed slum, factory and suburb. Smoke billowed over its spine and lingered in its wake as the train hurtled into the night, whirling the four men away from London.

BOOK TWO

VOYAGE

CHAPTER 12

Flying from Justice

Müller’s
four-pound ticket
on the
Victoria
was one of the cheapest available for a cross-Atlantic voyage. For an estimated nineteen days he would be cut off from the rest of the world, crammed into primitive, overcrowded steerage accommodation.
Basic weekly provisions
would be supplied to each of the sixty or so passengers, including a pound each of salt pork and beef, the same amount of flour, oatmeal and peas and two pounds of potatoes and bread or biscuits, but the passengers would have to feed themselves, preparing their own meals by boiling the dried peas for three or four hours before adding a little meat to form a watery stew. Sometimes the meat would fall apart and disappear; at others, some rough character would take a fancy to the porridge and purloin it all. The ‘fresh’ water was barely potable; fruit and fresh meat were out of the question.

Müller would have to stand up for himself in the scramble to eat and decency and comfort would be almost impossible: there were few lavatories and hand-basins provided the only means to wash. The shared, windowless cabins were airless and cramped with just enough room for a narrow bunk bed with space underneath to
store travelling trunks which would slide across the floor in heavy weather, crashing against anything in their path. Sickness could spread rampantly – typhus, cholera and dysentery often posed as great a threat to emigrants as shipwrecks – and, as the days passed, it was likely that vomit and unemptied chamber pots would make the stench in passengers’ quarters overwhelming.

With little privacy, lice proliferated, quarrels could flare and the cramped conditions could only be temporarily escaped by remaining on deck. There Müller might shiver in the salt spray as the boat rolled through the swells. If the weather was bad and the boat was caught in storms, he would be forced back inside to suffer the interminable tedium of entrapment alongside his fellow passengers as they contemplated their futures in the New World.

The German had a good lead on Inspector Tanner, but the
Victoria
was an old-fashioned wooden sail packet and it was still possible that her scheduled nineteen-day voyage could stretch to several weeks. Tanner’s vessel, the Inman Line’s
City of
Manchester
, was twice as big – a modern, iron-hulled screw steamer with three mighty boilers powering engines of 400 horsepower. She was expected to cross the ocean in under a fortnight, promising the detective a sliver of advantage. It all depended on the weather. With a fair wind it was possible that Müller could disembark a day before Tanner arrived. If so, the detective’s chase was in vain.

Tanner took spacious second-class cabins which cost seventeen guineas a head, four times more than the price of a ticket on the
Victoria
. With a dining room and a separate deck on which to stroll, he and his companions would have a far more comfortable time of it than their quarry. Even the steerage passengers on the
Manchester
would be better off than Müller on the
Victoria
. She was among the first steamers fitted out to carry them in an acceptable level of comfort, providing warm, well-lit and ventilated rooms, three hot meals a day and washrooms with soap, towels, mirrors and running water, all for a fare of six guineas a
head. It was such a successful innovation that Inman vessels gained a reputation for their size, comfort and speed and, despite the American Civil War, steerage tickets to New York were snapped up weeks ahead of sailing. Some
132,000 emigrants
had arrived in New York in the first six months of that year, thirty thousand more than the year before, many of them lured by the new ease of passage as well as the promise of a thousand dollars for enlisting in the Yankee army. Arriving from all over Europe, Germans represented the largest group of foreigners setting foot on American soil.