Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (4 page)

*

The house at 5 Clapton Square was filled with stunned family and visitors when, at about two o’clock on Sunday afternoon, the second policeman of the day arrived. Ushered into the parlour, PC Lambert expected the identification of the articles to be a simple but necessary routine. He was wrong. Though the family recognised both the bag and the stick, none of them had seen the flattened hat before. They each swore that it bore no resemblance to Thomas Briggs’ hat – a black topper made of best-quality silk Paris nap, lined in white silk and made by his regular hatter, Daniel Digance & Co., 18 Royal Exchange. There was no question about it: the hat found on the train did not belong to the man lying upstairs.

*

At a quarter to midnight – little more than twenty-four hours after boarding the train at Fenchurch Street Station – Thomas Briggs died. He had never regained consciousness.

CHAPTER 4

Ferreting for Detail

Thomas Briggs’ death meant that, for the first time since the invention of the railway, a murder had occurred on a British train. As the news reached his office across London at 4 Whitehall Place, the Police Commissioner Sir Richard Mayne recognised that his force would be expected to move swiftly and decisively or face the public’s wrath. He believed that he had just the man for the job.

In 1842 – only thirteen years after the establishment of the first five divisions of the Metropolitan Police by Sir Robert Peel – Mayne and his co-chief Charles Rowan had obtained government sanction to create a new species of police inspector. No longer primarily concerned with the
prevention
of crime and without the visible authority of a uniform, these were the first detectives: eight conscientious men were selected, including Stephen Thornton and Jack Whicher. Encouraged by the adulation of writers like Dickens, Britain had broadly allowed itself to be seduced into a belief in the brilliance of these perspicacious, dogged, plain-clothed detectives. Scepticism, though, was growing, and admiration was balanced by distrust as delays and
irresolution from the elite investigators emphasised their fallibility. With this railway murder to solve, their reputation, once again, was on the line.

Commissioner Mayne was now in his late sixties but the running of the Metropolitan Police remained his vocation. Lean and distinguished with sharp cheekbones, a tightly compressed mouth and hawkish eyes,
he was dictatorial
, averse to delegation and prone to abrasiveness. With a single-focus determination that awed his department, Mayne spent his days barking directives: from dictates on expenses and the policing of coffee stalls to instructions on how to wear the new ‘Roman’ helmets and chin straps. Managing resignations, promotions, fines, dismissals and rewards, he was also
fanatical about minutiae
, including the proper management of race meetings, public houses and hackney cabs; every day his spiky scrawl covered multiple pages of internal memoranda designed to keep his force on its toes.

Mayne chose a man he considered
‘brilliant’
to lead the investigation into Thomas Briggs’ death: Detective Inspector Richard Tanner. Like the best in the force, Tanner relied less on superior intellect than on experience, tip-offs and the flat-footed errors of judgement of most of his quarry.
Five foot seven
, with brown hair, piercing blue eyes, a fair complexion and an open face, he had joined the metropolitan force from his home in rural Surrey as a constable in March 1851, aged just nineteen. Within three years he had transferred to
the Chief Office
of the Metropolitan Police in Whitehall Place, backing onto Scotland Yard, and was soon busily nabbing pickpockets, counterfeiters, fraudsters and ‘roughs’.

Tanner – known to his friends and colleagues as Dick – had learned to rely on nods and winks from unlikely quarters, to evaluate tips quickly and to separate malicious gossip from useful information. He had watched the methods of the men in charge, learning how to gather the reports and depositions needed to ‘get up’ cases and make them stick. He gained experience in giving
evidence at trial and stored in his memory a cast-list of receivers, inciters and criminals along with their regular haunts, associates and aliases. As each investigation was completed, his income was supplemented by rewards from the Police Fund and by gifts and gratuities from grateful victims or their families – it was not uncommon to receive an extra five pounds or even twenty (six months’ salary for an ordinary artisan) for a job well done.

Four years before the attack on Thomas Briggs, Richard Tanner had been a junior member of Detective Inspector Stephen Thornton’s team, investigating the notorious Stepney killing of Mary Emsley. The young policeman had been cautious when their suspect – James Mullins – called at his home with ‘information’ about another man. Afterwards, he had also noticed that parcel tape on the suspect’s mantelpiece matched that used on a suspicious package and, by having a bloody footprint cut from the boards of Emsley’s wooden floor, Tanner had amassed crucial evidence that eventually sealed the man’s fate in court. Walter Kerressey had also been a member of that investigative team and the case had given the two men their first in-depth experience of a widely publicised murder.

Tanner was now thirty-one, fresh from promotion to Inspector in the detective branch at Scotland Yard that spring. Married to Emma, he lived in nearby Westminster with her and their two small children. He was energetic and thorough, but the killing of Thomas Briggs was an unusually important case: it could make or break him.

*

Tanner took stock, knowing that progress in the first few days was crucial for morale, momentum and public confidence. At the Bow Division his old friend Inspector Kerressey, along with Superintendent Daniel Howie and PCs Lewis Lambert and Edward Dougan, had already ferreted for detail in the obvious places. Now Tanner pondered the bare facts already known, looking for clues.

First he considered the time of the attack. Dougan had measured the railway line. From Bow Station to the point at which the body was found totalled
1434 yards
. From that spot to the next station at Hackney Wick or Victoria Park was 740 yards. Thomas Briggs had fallen from the train approximately two-thirds of the way between the two stations and, since train guard Ames reported that they had covered that distance on Saturday night in four to five minutes, Tanner could estimate that the assault took place in the
three and a half minutes
from 10.01 p.m. when the train pulled out of Bow Station.

Second, Tanner considered motive. The disappearance of Briggs’ gold watch and chain suggested theft, but the victim’s diamond ring and silver snuffbox had been left untouched and the loose change in his various pockets added up to
almost five pounds
– equivalent to a month’s wages for a skilled labourer. This indicated that the assailant was working alone and in a hurry. But that supposition did not account for how the crime had been committed with such speed and without attracting notice. Despite the valuables left behind, the detective had to accept the idea that perhaps more than one man had been involved.

Tanner then went over the reports of the discovery of the injured victim. Briggs had lain unnoticed between the ‘up’ and ‘down’ tracks for only twenty minutes. Had his assailant meant to throw him from the train into the dark canal as it passed over the bridge, where his body might have eluded notice for hours? If so, had he simply mistaken the correct door? Or had he
meant
for his body to land on the line in the hope that the next passing train would cut it to pieces leading, perhaps, to a supposition of suicide?

The young detective wondered whether there was an obvious suspect. The ticket collector working at Hackney Wick Station on Saturday night had reported a rush among the rowdy crowd of passengers leaving the train at that stop. He described one –
a tall, dark-coated man who appeared to be in a hurry – kicking up a fuss about the delay at the ticket gate. This man’s behaviour might be suspicious. Alternatively, as the engine waited at the Hackney Wick platform for its signal, the state of the empty compartment had gone unnoticed. No one appeared to have seen a bloodied man, or men, but it would have been possible to scramble down the embankment by the station rather than use the stairs, or to jump out of the unlocked carriage from the wrong side, land on the six-foot way and from there
cross to the opposite track
. It was also possible that the attacker – or attackers – had leapt from the moving train between stations, sliding down the steep ridge running to Duckett’s Canal to disappear into the marshes or the crowded slums of Old Ford.

There was one certainty: the crushed hat left in the carriage did not belong to Thomas Briggs. Had it been innocently forgotten by a previous passenger? Tanner believed not. He thought it more likely that the hat belonged to the murderer who, in his keenness to escape, had mistaken Briggs’ hat for his own. If he could track down the person who had worn this hat on Saturday night, Tanner was convinced that he would have the murderer. The question was, how to set about finding the owner among the millions of men in England’s teeming capital city?

His first act was to circulate descriptions of Thomas Briggs’ missing watch and chain to police stations, pawnbrokers and jewellers across London. Meanwhile, Inspector Kerressey’s men were attempting to piece together the banker’s movements during the previous day by interviewing the Briggs family and their associates. Statements had already been taken from Thomas Fishbourne (the ticket collector from Fenchurch Street Station) and from David Buchan, the husband of Briggs’ niece.

Next, Tanner began to draft posters including details of the murder and descriptions of the stolen watch, chain and mistaken hats. Earlier that afternoon,
Henry Lubbock
, senior partner of Robarts, Curtis & Co., had visited the Home Secretary to pledge one hundred pounds in return for information leading to an arrest and conviction. The government had matched the offer so that Tanner was able to offer £200 for information received. Two thousand posters were rushed to print and dispatched to police stations across the capital and throughout the country. By Monday morning they would be hanging on placards and stuck to the walls outside police station houses, omnibus and newsstands and railway termini. The reward – four or five times what a working-class man might expect to earn in a year – was just what Tanner needed to flush out the murderer.

CHAPTER 5

Morbid, Hideous and Delicious

The new week opened to strident newspaper headlines broadcasting an
Atrocious Murder
on the North London Railway
. Every known fact was reported: the contents of Briggs’ pockets, the hat, stick and bag now in police custody, the broken link still attached to the waistcoat buttonhole, the distances and times taken to travel between stations, the serial number of the watch, a description of the missing chain and the names of all attending surgeons at the Mitford Castle tavern. Thomas Briggs was described as a
gentleman
. The
outrageous
act, readers were reminded, had been perpetrated in a
first-class carriage
.

The newspaper reports contained the usual mix of prurience and moral indignation, lingering on macabre descriptions of the pools and spurts of blood and the respectability of the victim. The lightning speed of the attack seemed astonishing. The fact that no one could have come to save him, had they heard Briggs cry out for help, provoked alarm. Each of the reports noted the disappearance of the banker’s watch and chain but, in the welter of detail, there was misreporting too: both
The Times
and the
Daily News
wrote that Briggs’ head had been battered with a
sharp instrument, that his glasses were missing and that his left ear had been severed from his head; it was also suggested that he had been bundled out of the window of the train.

There was conjecture about the number of attackers and whether the murder was in fact a suicide. Doctors, swift to take up their pens to write to the papers, posited that the blood that spurted through the windows of neighbouring compartments was the result of an artery rupturing as the victim was being forced from the train.
Some wondered
whether, as Briggs went to the window to call for help, the door had flown open, precipitating him onto the line. Others suggested that Briggs had opened the train door himself and jumped out in order to escape robbery – a surmise deftly countered by another correspondent who pointed out that
someone
had closed the door behind him.

Most newspapers were quick to remind their readers of
a robbery on the same spot
some years earlier after which the thief had jumped from the train with the intention of escaping through the marshes – only to be captured and sentenced to penal servitude. The coincidence seemed extraordinary. Further, it appeared at least
curious
that the men claiming to have discovered the bloody compartment were fellow clerks in Briggs’ own bank. Whatever their speculations, these reports were printed before Inspector Tanner’s leadership of the investigation had been announced, and they all laid particular emphasis on their belief that the Bow police team headed by Inspector Kerressey were
instituting every possible inquiry
with a view of detecting the guilty parties
. Failing, perhaps, to appreciate its significance, the intriguing intelligence that a broken hat had been found in the carriage and that it was assumed to belong to the murderer,
he having taken
Mr Briggs’ hat in mistake
, came almost as an afterthought.