Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (12 page)

*

As the two ships ploughed towards America the mood at Scotland Yard was buoyant and, in Tanner’s absence, his co-chief – Detective Inspector
Frederick Adolphus Williamson
– assumed control. Jonathan Matthews’ revelation on Monday evening had injected new life into the flailing police investigation and there was plenty more legwork for the police to complete, but Tanner knew that the case was in good hands: fondly known to his men as ‘Dolly’, Williamson was a man of dry good humour and shrewd common sense.

In case the
Victoria
should dock in Ireland, Williamson asked the constabulary office at Dublin Castle to instruct all ports to conduct searches. Next, dispatches were sent to all Crown representatives in Germany requesting information on Müller’s background. Once he had briefed the press on Wednesday morning, Inspector Williamson travelled to Clapton Square to urge one of Thomas Briggs’ sons to go to New York in case their father’s hat or watch should be discovered on the suspect. Leaving the family undecided, he then turned towards the station at Hackney Wick, hoping that Townsend, the ticket collector on duty on 9 July, would be able to identify the impatient, black-coated man at the ticket gate that night as Müller, which would fix their suspect at the scene of the crime. But Williamson was
disappointed.
When Townsend saw Müller’s photograph
, he denied ever having seen him before.

Müller’s former lodgings were now the focus of intense police scrutiny. As the witnesses were engaged at the Bow Street court on Tuesday, Inspector Steer and Superintendent Tiddey had been at
16 Park Terrace
. Outside, the dust-hole was emptied bucket by bucket and its contents sifted for evidence. Inside, they scoured the first-floor back room in which Müller had lodged. On the face of it there was little sign that Müller had left anything behind apart from the Walker hat box and the slipper already in their possession. Nothing on the shelves, on the small mantel over the empty hearth, or under the lumpy mattress; no discarded papers and no discernible signs of blood on the tatty strip of carpet or on the boards.

The small fireplace had evidently not been used for some time. Inspector Steer knelt in front of it. Leaning sideways and twisting his head in order to push his arm right up to the shoulder into the chimney, his hand brushed against something soft. Casting around, he caught hold of a piece of material and withdrew it. Stiff with large spots of what looked like dried blood and dirt, the material appeared to be the
torn sleeve lining
of a man’s coat and seemed to have been used to clean a pair of shoes before being shoved up the chimney. Steer sent the material straight to Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor at Guy’s Hospital for analysis. Taylor, sometimes called the ‘father of British forensic medicine’, was a chemist and toxicologist at the forefront of an emerging science; his opinion was increasingly sought by the police in the investigation of bloody crimes, and Steer knew he would set to work fast.

Meanwhile, Superintendent William Tiddey set out to piece together the complicated
jigsaw of the pawnshop transactions
made by Müller in the days before the
Victoria
sailed. John Hoffa had told Tanner that although Müller had seemed to have had enough money for his passage during the week of 4 July, his last
few days in London were spent in a desperate scramble for cash. By working out how Müller had come up with the money for his fare, Inspector Williamson hoped to uncover more clothing or jewellery to link him to the crime.

Hoffa had given Mrs Repsch a suit of clothes to pawn for Müller, and received two pawn tickets issued by Mr Annis in Minories. One was for a black coat, already retrieved but bearing no marks of blood, or indeed any signs of having been involved in a struggle; both sleeve linings were intact. The second ticket was for the gold chain also retrieved by the police and identified by John Death as the one he had given in exchange for Mr Briggs’ on Monday the 11th.

Tiddey discovered that another of Müller’s co-workers at Hodgkinson’s tailors, John Henry Glass, had also helped Müller. Unlike Hoffa, Glass said that he was unaware that Müller had money prior to 9 July but he did have some idea of how Müller had raised cash during the week before he sailed.
Glass told Tiddey
that
on Tuesday, 12th July last, he came to me in Mr. Hodgkinson’s shop about 4 o’clock in the afternoon. He offered me a gold watch. He said if I would not buy it he had not money enough to go to America
. The watch was one Müller had worn for months, but Glass could not afford it. Suggesting that Müller come back the next day, Glass told Tiddey that
he did come about 9 o’clock … and he and I went together to a pawnbroker’s, named Barker. I forget the name of the street
.

Barker’s was in Houndsditch, an extension of the Minories bordering the eastern edge of the City. Here, Glass paid one pound to redeem a gold chain that Müller had pledged weeks earlier. Jumping on an omnibus, the two then travelled several miles west to Cox’s, a broker in seedy Prince’s Street off Leicester Square, where they
pawned the watch that he had offered me the day before, and the chain that I had just got out of pawn, for £4. Müller took the money.

Glass gave his friend five shillings for the ticket. Both caught
a ’bus back as far as Bank where Glass went back to work and Müller headed directly to the London docks. In total, Glass had outlaid one pound, five shillings, but he was now in possession of goods worth more than the four pounds. Even if he could not come up with the money to redeem the items himself, he could always sell on the ticket at a profit.
It was a good deal for both men
.

It was disappointing for Tiddey that his enquiries had failed to turn up any new items of clothing – a frustration compounded by the fact that when he went to recover the pawned watch from Cox’s it turned out not to be Thomas Briggs’ old-fashioned chronometer. Nevertheless, the policeman’s piecing together of Müller’s various deals had not been profitless. The police had now recovered three gold watch chains: Thomas Briggs’, the chain given in exchange for it by John Death, and Müller’s own cheaper chain, worth a fraction of the others.

It was also striking that, like his silk hat, the dead man’s watch remained unaccounted for. Without a chain with which to attach it to a waistcoat, was it likely that Müller would have kept hold of it?

On Tuesday morning,
The Times
had
alarmed its readers
with reports that the police investigation was at a standstill. Twenty-four hours later, following Inspector Williamson’s briefing, their tone had changed and the front pages of the dailies broadcast with confidence
The Discovery of the Murderer
.
London and all the world
, wrote
The Times
,
will be thankful that such a clue has at last been found to the track of the murderer of the late Mr Briggs as to leave no doubt that the miscreant will be brought to justice
. With a great surge of relief, the long, narrow columns of all the broadsheets were again full of the unfolding story, picking over the details of the previous day’s police activity.

CHAPTER 13

A Fabric Built of Straws

So far as the papers were concerned, Francis (as the papers called him) Müller was
the actual murderer
. The story was already dramatic but the police chase promised to be intoxicating. Müller might temporarily have escaped, but the detectives and leading players in his proposed downfall were pursuing him at full tilt on a steamer which, wrote
The Times
,
barring accidents
, will reach America at least four days before the sailing vessel that conveys the villain
.

International affairs had also moved forward. Those same Wednesday papers covered details of
a truce
between Denmark and her German aggressors in anticipation of the opening of peace discussions in Vienna. But the German name on everyone’s lips was not Otto von Bismarck – the militaristic Prussian ‘Iron Chancellor’ proposing to redefine the power balance of Europe – but Müller, a twenty-four-year-old, thought to be from
a Cologne family of gun-makers
.

Müller was variously said to have been indignant at losing his own watch and chain in a brawl with a woman and to have arrived back at his lodgings on the night of 9 July
much confused
and speaking of an accident in the City in which his ankle was injured.
According to the representations of Matthews’ friends
, wrote the
Daily Telegraph
, the man was morose and fond of drink. Some reported that he had been violent and savage towards his fiancée – Matthews’ sister-in-law – others that she had branded him
a murderer in intention.
Hitherto, the nameless suspect described by the Death brothers had seemed innocuous with his slim build and his pale, whiskerless face. Now it seemed that he was
a man of
great resolution
and singular energy
[with]
… a character for extreme violence which caused him to be disliked by his friends. His forehead was low, his cheek-bones prominent and his general expression of face somewhat forbidding.

The gold watch chains, the crumpled hat, the thoughtlessly discarded cardboard jewellery box, the injured ankle and Müller’s flight on the
Victoria
added up, according to the
Daily News
, to sturdy
links
in the chain of circumstantial evidence
pointing to Müller’s guilt. That these ‘facts’ might also be coincidences, and that none of them provided direct proof of the actual crime, seemed unimportant. In the eyes of police and press, the accumulation of so much detail against the German simply cornered him.

Nowhere was the power of circumstantial evidence put more succinctly than by the barrister Robert Audley – hero of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s recent novel
Lady Audley’s Secret
– as he confronted his guilty aunt. It was, he told her,
that wonderful fabric which is built of straws
collected at every point of the compass … infinitessimal trifles
[on which]
may sometimes hang the whole secret of some wicked mystery … a scrap of paper; a shred of some torn garment; the button off a coat; a word dropped incautiously … A thousand circumstances so slight as to be forgotten by the criminal, but links of steel in the wonderful chain forged by the science of the detective officer
. But there were also those who were uncomfortable with the fallibility of this kind of evidence. While the majority of newspaper readers were already
swayed by the strength of the details so far known about Müller, others took note of small inconsistencies and alternative suspicions that allowed room for doubt. One or two reporters reminded their readers of the inquest’s finding that threats had been made against Thomas Briggs over his refusal to sanction a loan. Though they also wrote that
the individual alluded to
is a man in a respectable position, and his threat is believed to be simply one of those idle menaces in which disappointed people sometimes indulge without any intention to carry them into execution
, the implication remained that no one could be quite sure.

Almost hidden among the columns devoted to Müller’s supposedly proven menace was
another worrying detail
about the boy who, on Saturday 9 July, had seen a flustered man at Stepney Station entering the carriage in which an old gentleman sat, supposed to be Thomas Briggs. The boy’s account touched on a confusion that none of the detectives had solved. What readers did not yet know – because the police had not revealed it – was that there were several others telling the same story.

*

Inspector Williamson was beginning to be unsettled by other people’s doubts. Tanner had interviewed James Gifford – the agent of the American New York Packet Company – at the docks and, when the agent had seen the photograph of Müller, he had been certain that this was the man to whom he had sold a ticket for the
Victoria
. Now, though, Gifford was not so sure. A couple of Germans called Phillip Wetzell and Wilhelm Müller had recently wanted tickets for New York on the
Cornelius Grinnell
, due to sail on Thursday, and Gifford now thought that one of them bore a strong resemblance to the photograph shown to him by Tanner. The men had refused to give their addresses, but had let slip that they lived in the neighbourhood of Victoria Park.

If Gifford had made a mistake, then it was probable that Inspector Tanner and his witnesses were in pursuit of the wrong
man. Could they have been mistaken? Franz Müller’s name was on the passenger lists for the
Victoria
and Godfrey Repsch said that he had gone on board. Exasperated, Inspector Williamson put Superintendent Daniel Howie on the track of the two new German suspects.

Williamson was also alarmed by a report from the chief constable of the central police station in Sunderland, Colonel Hogg. On Tuesday the 19th a nervous young man calling himself Franz Müller – described as about twenty years of age, five foot five, fair and with no moustache or whiskers – had asked a local shipping agent for a three-pound ticket on the
Charmer
, bound for Singapore. When the agent later read the name and description of the suspected murderer in the shipping gazette he had called the police. Colonel Hogg had subsequently uncovered evidence that this suspect had behaved oddly during the previous handful of days, refusing to leave his lodgings, and Hogg had become alarmed. The
Charmer
had already left port. Hogg asked Williamson for advice on how to proceed.