Person or Persons Unknown (36 page)

Bailey would have to protect him against the fury of the mob. I was determined to lend him my help in this, and so I pressed on, gaining step by step.

We ran the length of Fleet Street. I was close upon Mr. Bailey and a few others, when something altogether strange occurred. I had but for a moment taken my eyes from the object of the chase when, as I looked back, I found I had lost him completely. I was not the only one. Mr. Bailey slowed, as did the three or four others with him. I caught them up. More followed behind me.

We were just at the site of the old Fleet River Bridge. A proper bridge it had been until, but a few years past, the river had been arched and paved over all the way to the Thames; it was now not much more than a rise in the road. It was here the fugitive had disappeared. The men stood panting, looking in all directions. I went to Constable Bailey.

“Jeremy!” said he, startled, when I tapped him on the back. Fighting to catch his breath, he managed to tell that there could be no doubt that the man we had pursued was the Covent Garden murderer. “He was seen in the act in an alley off Catherine Street — ” He took a gulp of air. “I left Constable Cowley with the body and joined the chase.”

“Where could he be?”

“No idea … He … he was lost once on the way … then seen again. He cut him who tried to hold him and escaped … right down the Strand.”

“Who is he? Do you know him?”

“Never got close enough to — ” He broke off, having got his bearings at last. “Where are we?”

“The end of Fleet Street.”

“At the old bridge, ain’t that it?”

“Why, yes, sir.”

“Then could there be only one place he had got to. Come along.”

I followed him through what was now a growing crowd; they milled about, muttering, grumbling, and quite without direction. He led the way down Fleet Market, which ran the course of the old river as far as Holbourn, and as he went he kept his eyes cast down to the ground. There, among the shuttered stalls, he found what he sought — a trap door situated tight in the street with paving stones all about it. He looked up at me and nodded, having tried it just enough to know that it would open without resistance.

“Jeremy, you see that woman over there with the lantern? See if you can bring her over without causing much notice.”

I went to her and recognized her from the Garden, a greengrocer from whom I’d bought in the past. She acknowledged me.

“Terrible thing, ain’t it, young sir? He do seem to have got away.”

“Well, we shall see,” said I. “Perhaps you could step over this way? Constable Bailey would like to speak with you.”

“With me?”

“Just for a moment.”

She nodded and made no argument as I brought her to Mr. Bailey.

“Madam,” said he with a polite bow, “I am Constable Benjamin Bailey of Bow Street.”

“I reco’nize you,” said she.

“I have need of your lantern.”

“You’ll not have it. It’s my on’y one.”

As if to make plain her refusal, she swung the lantern round and held it behind her back. Yet she did not walk away.

“Madam,” said he, “it is only for to borrow, and if it is not returned, you may have a better one from Bow Street.”

“A better one?”

“Larger, anyway. You have my promise on that.”

“Well…” She hesitated. “Awright.” And she handed it over.

He took it, a small hand-lantern that in truth shed little illumination, and handed it to me. Then he threw open the trap door and let the light shine below. I heard the flow of water.

‘it ain’t much,” said he, “but I be damned if I’ll go down there with no light at all. I left my lantern with Cowley. Now, Jeremy, I’m going to climb down there — it’s the Fleet River is what it is — and when I reach the last rung on the ladder, you hand me down the lantern. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” said I.

He pulled out both pistols and handed me one. Then he took his club and clamped it between his teeth. Holding one pistol in his hand, he fitted himself carefully through the trap door, found the ladder with his feet, and began his descent. Then did I come to a most impulsive decision. Laying down pistol and lantern, I tore off my fine bottle-green coat and tossed it to the woman who watched all quite fascinated.

“Take this coat to Bow Street,” said I to her, “for I am going down there, too.”

Mr. Bailey shook his head emphatically, unable to speak for the club in his mouth, yet I followed him down. I hooked the lantern with the thumb of my left hand; only so was I able to proceed with the pistol in my right. I went down as careful as could be, yet when I descended below the level of the ground, and the mephitic odor of the river rose about me, I was near overcome. Whether my hand or my foot slipp)ed, I know not, yet I landed with both feet and a splash into the water below. I held tight to the lantern, but in righting myself with my other arm, I wet the pistol.

It was quite like I had jumped into a chamber pot. Thank God, it was not over my head, but high enough. The water was well above my waist, nigh to my chest. To Mr. Bailey, who was much taller, it came only at waist level. He sloshed over to me, club and pistol now in each hand.

“Let’s be thankful you didn’t douse the lantern,” he whispered. “You’re down here, so let’s proceed. Before you hit the water, I heard splashing up in the direction of Holbourn. Come along. You hold the lantern high.”

There were now no sounds of splashing, no sounds of any sort except for the soft scurrying of rats. I looked about and detected movement on a kind of shelf that ran along the narrow course of the river on either side. We moved down its center w here it was deepest. Though the Fleet was a sewer, it was also a river, and we struggled somewhat against its current.

Along the way, at intervals of about three rods, there were large columns on either side, abutments which supported the arches overhead. It became evident that it was behind one of these that Mr. Bailey expected to find our quarry. He slowed at each one, and was most especially watchful, directing me silently to swing the lantern left and right to illuminate the dark shadows at the far side of each of these columns.

So we had come to ten or perhaps a dozen of these but, more importantly, had just left one behind us. when close to our rear I heard a sound, though not a great one. and I whirled about. There, no more than six feet away, was the figure of a man, rising from the water. He stumbled towards me. I got my pistol up and fired point-blank. It flashed weakly, misfiring from its dip in the water. Yet he faltered before he lunged at me with his hand forward — though I cannot say I saw it, I knew somehow that it must hold a knife. I leapt back and to my left, away from Mr. Bailey, and the blade did miss me. though by no more than the width of three fingers. At just that moment Mr. Bailey delivered him a great clout on the back of his neck: it should have laid him low. but it did not. He turned to the constable, and jabbed with the knife in his direction, which left his hand exposed. Mr. Bailey brought his club down upon his wrist, knocking the knife from his grasp down into the water. Still he came forward like the madman he was. seeking to overwhelm that much larger man with no more than his bare hands. His back was to me. I struggled forward against the current, thinking to bring down the pistol barrel upon him. Yet before I quite reached him, Mr. Bailey delivered one final, skull-crushing blow to his head. The man fell flat into the water and sank beneath it.

”Jeremy,” cried the constable, “are you safe? Did he cut you?”

“No, I’m right enough. He missed close, though.”

Mr. Bailey tucked away his club, still holding the unfired pistol: then did he reach down to retrieve the body of our assailant. He felt about ‘He ain’t here.” said he.

“The current,” said I. “the current must have moved him. ‘

I went splashing back, searching with my feet and finally came in contact with the body about six feet or more from where he had fallen. I planted my foot firmly and held the body in place.

“Here he is.” I called.

Together we lifted him from the water. I held the lantern to his face, yet the wet hair that obscured his features made it impossible to make them out. Mr. Bailey put his hand to the chest for a long moment then shook his head We had no choice but to drag him back between us the way we had come.

As we pulled him along. Mr. Bailey remarked: T don’t know was it my blov^ to his head, or drowning that killed him.” After a bit he added: Think of drownmg in all this piss and shit”

‘He swam below in it to get behind us.”

‘Desperate men do desperate things. Or so Sir John says.”

Some minutes later. I made out the dim shaft of light from the open trap door through which we had descended into this hellish place.

“He went at you first Jeremy, because you had the lantern. The pistol misfired from the wetting I gave it falling off the ladder. All I could do was jump away from him.”

“Aye. but you kept hold the lantern. In the dark he might have cut me proper. I couldn’t have done without you, lad.”

Somehow, pushing and pulling, we managed to get the inert form up the ladder to the surface. I who had done the pushing, emerged last of all. To my surprise, a group had gathered m anticipation of our return, among them constables Cowley and Picker. They paid me little attention, for they had laid the body out upon the pavement and had pushed back the hair. Two good-sized Bow Street lanterns were held over him. Uneasily, I looked carefully at those peering down at the dead man and noted the absence of the woman to whom I had entrusted my beautiful bottle-green coat. Yet before I could worry overmuch about it, I heard the constables exclaiming.

“By God, Mr. Bailey,” said young Cowley, “look who you brought up. It’s the medico, that one who was an Army surgeon!”

“Damn me if it ain’t! See here, Jeremy, it’s Amos Carr!”

I pushed forward and saw, to my amazement, that Mr. Bailey was right. It was indeed Amos Carr.

There was great surprise and no little consternation when it was bruited about Covent Garden that Dr. Amos Carr was the perpetrator of those bloodiest homicides. Sir John Fielding himself was shocked quite beyond belief until he did order a search of the doctor’s apartment and surgery which resulted in grisly discoveries that incriminated the medico ex post facto. There were bloodied clothes discovered in his wardrobe, yet worse was found in a cabinet in his surgery: there in a glass of gin discolored slightly to a brown tint were found two eyeballs — the missing eyes of Libby Tribble, as Gabriel Donnelly attested.

Mr. Donnelly also helped Sir John gain some understanding of what had turned Amos Carr in such a devious direction. He explained that Dr. Carr had the pox, which Sir John had, of course, not known; and further, that in the last stages of that dreadful disease the brain is sometimes infected with results quite unpredictable. It could be, he suggested, that Dr. Carr, perhaps for good reason, believed himself to have been infected by a prostitute, and that his diseased brain urged him to take revenge upon this unfortunate class of women. Had he not been spied in the act of mutilating the corpus of his third victim, he would probably have continued upon his murderous course as long as he lived (which, considering the advanced state of his disease, might not have been so very long). As later quoted to me by Mr. Donnelly, Sir John’s comment upon all this was that, absent any other explanation for those otherwise incomprehensible crimes, he would have to accept Mr. Donnelly’s, for there could be no doubt that Amos Carr was the man hauled out of that sewer, nor of the incriminating nature of the gruesome evidence found in his place of dwelling.

As for me, save for the tribute paid me by Mr. Benjamin Bailey, I received little praise for accompanying him down into the Reet. Mr. Donnelly, who was among that group gathered round the body of Amos Carr, chastised me for having put myself in environs so insalubrious. And once the constables had done marveling at the identity of the corpus, they stood well away from it and from Mr. Bailey and me, for the odor of the sewer offended them. They were greatly dismayed when their captain ordered them to carry the body away.

Lady Fielding would not allow me upstairs until I had bathed and changed my clothes. She sent the necessaries down with Annie who held her nose in appreciation of my befouled state. Yet I did as told, off in some dark comer, washing well with soap as I shivered in cold water. As I did so, Mr. Bailey gave his report to Sir John. When he had concluded and I was fit once more for human society. Sir John took me aside and told me that it was “a brave and foolish thing” I had done and suggested that next time I was tempted to act on impulse I was to take a moment to consider the potential dangers.

He mentioned, too, that I might be entitled to some share of the ten-guinea reward for the second murderer, but I told him I wanted no part of it. I said Mr. Bailey had done all; that I had merely held the lantern and kept out of his way. That seemed to satisfy him. In the end, however, the constable did share his reward with one Albert Mundy, carpenter by trade; Mr. Mundy it was who’d spied Amos Can-bending over his last victim and ripping at her body with his knife and then did raise the hue and cry. There was general agreement that he was entitled to something, though certainly no more than the three guineas he got.

The good woman who did our wash was summoned next day, and she did look most doubtfully at my best breeches and shirt which I had, the night before, tossed upon the back privy to dry. They were stained and stinking and gave little promise of ever coming clean. Thus much she said, but pledged herself to do what she could. I gave her what words of encouragement I could, saw her on her way, and then set off for Covent Garden to find what had become of my bottle-green coat.

I found the greengrocer where she had always been in the past, settled in her stall, lustily calling out the quality of her stock to all and sundry. As I approached, I saw no sign of the coat. Since I had brought with me her lantern, I had thought to make a fair trade of it. I could but wonder why, failing to bring my coat to Bow Street as I had asked her to do, she had also failed to bring it to her stall. Surely she did not suppose I could have forgotten about it.

I presented myself and said to her rather sternly: “I have come with your lantern.”

She left off her shouting and regarded me somewhat in disappointment. “I thought I was to get another in its place — bigger.”

“Only if this one was lost.”

“Well …” She shrugged and took the lantern from me.

“Where is my coat?”

“Ain’t it been brought to you?” She turned away in a manner a bit shamefaced, or so it seemed to me.

“No, it has not.”

She sighed. “Here’s the truth of it, young sir. Soon as you went down the hole, a young fella comes up to me, and he tells me he is your friend, and he will keep the coat for you. I tell him no, that I’m to take it to Bow Street, and what does he do then but grab at it and says that he will take it there. Well, I held on awrighl, and he gives me a great shove, and I lands on my arse and lets loose your fine coat. By the time I got to my feet, he had got away, quite disappeared into the crowd, he did. I went after him, lookin’ for help, and who did I come upon but a constable. I started to tell him how that fella said he was your friend just took your coat and ran, but all he wanted to hear about was why I had it, how you and the other constable went down into the Fleet. He would have naught but I show him the hole. Then another constable come along, and I showed them both. They fell to arguin’ amongst themselves as to whether they should follow you down and give help. That was when I walked away and went home to my bed.”

There was little I could say. Her story had the ring of truth. And had I not wondered how Constable Cowley and Constable Picker happened to be there waiting for us when we emerged from that foul underworld?

The disappointment must have been plain in my face, for she did touch my arm consolingly and said: “I’m right sorry, young sir. My on’y hope was p’rhaps he truly was a friend of yours and would return it, though I could not imagine that such as you would have that sort for a friend.”

“What sort was he? Could you describe him? Had you seen him before?”

“Oh, you sees so many here in the Garden, wanderin’ about. He never bought from me, of that Fm sure, else I’d remember him. He was about your size, Fd say, but older ‘n you, and he had a right nasty look on him — why, I was doubtful of him right from the start.”

“Was he well-dressed?”

“Not a bit of it. Not shabby, mind, but the coat he wore weren’t near so grand as that one you gave me for safe-keepin’.”

Fd held some faint hope that Bunkins might have taken the coat, though I could in no wise imagine that he would treat a woman so rude. And since joining Mr. Bilbo, he was as finely dressed as any young gentleman you might meet in Vauxhall Gardens. Nor could any say that Bunkins had a nasty look. No, not Jimmie Bunkins.

“I am right sorry it happened so,” said she.

“I believe you,” said I With a shrug, I thanked her and started off on my way to Bow Street.

It seemed my coat had been seized by a common thief who had first tried simply to cozen her with a he. That evening I sought out the two constables in question, and they confirmed the greengrocer’s story. I wrung an apology from each that they had considered the stolen coat to be of so little moment. Their apologies, of course, helped little to retrieve my coat.

At my next opportunity, I brought up the matter to Bunkins and Constable Perkins. That came as we walked together part of the distance from Mr. Perkins’s stable-top dwelling off Little Russell Street before parting to our separate destinations. I told them what the woman in Covent Garden had said of the thief, and attempted to describe the coat to them.

“But,” said I, remembering, “you’ve seen it, Mr. Perkins. Do you recall? I was wearing it that day we walked together and discovered the body of what we took to be the Raker’s first victim.”

“Ah, so you were,” said he, “and a handsome coat it was. As I remembers it, ‘twas green.”

“Dark green,” said I, “bottle green, they call it.”

“Dark green, is it?” said Bunkins. “And does it have white trim?”

I looked at him in surprise. “Indeed it does — about the pockets and the buttonholes. Have you seen such a coat?”

“It might be that I have,” said he, “and worn by a joe you know, old chum.”

“Oh? And who might that be?”

“Why not see if we can find this partic’lar joe? We may then find your toggy, as well.”

And so Bunkins, saying nothing more, remained with us past that point on our walk where by custom he would have left us for the grand house in St. James Street wherein he dwelt with Mr. Bilbo and his company. We had not gone far thus together when he suggested that perhaps he and I might go round about the regular route to Bow Street and lake a turn for Bedford Street.

“But you, Mr. Perkins,” said he to the constable, “I

reckon you must be on your way. Duty calls, as they say.”

“Duty don’t call for near an hour,” said Mr. Perkins, overmastering a wry smile. “But as a constable I’m ever obliged to see stolen property returned to its rightful owner. You wouldn’t be trying to be rid of me, now would you, Jimmie B.?”

“Oh no, sir,” said Bunkins, all offended innocence. “How could you think such?”

Thus together did we three go round about to Bedford Street. Though I had asked no questions of Bunkins, I had a good notion of who it was in Bedford Street might be wearing my good coat. And all that the greengrocer had told me of the thief supported my present suspicions.

When we reached our destination, Bunkins told us to wait as he entered the first dive we came to. The street was not near as filled as it soon would be; those leaving work for home tended to avoid it due to its bad repute. I noted that Mr. Perkins, keeping silent, was casually engaged in buttoning his coat; when he had done, the red waistcoat he wore (which marked him as one of the Bow Street Runners) was no longer visible. Bunkins emerged from the place, shaking his head, and we went on to the next, which advertised itself as a grog shop, and then on to the next, a tavern so-called. It was not until we found ourselves waiting before the fifth of these low places that Mr. Perkins chose to speak.

“I’ll stay well back from things,” said he. “But I want you to remember what I taught you, and you’ll be fine.”

I, who had grown more tense as we had moved from one dive to the next, took heart from what Mr. Perkins had said: I had been taught; I was ready.

Bunkins appeared at the door; he beckoned us inside.

Mr. Perkins held me back. He took his club and tucked it into my belt right at the small of my back.

“Don’t use it unless you’ve a call to,” said he to me.

And so we went inside. Mr. Perkins left me and went to stand at the bar. I went to Jimmie Bunkins, who had reentered the place. He said nothing but simply pointed. It was near as dark as it was outside in the first hour of night. An oil lantern bumed at the bar, a fire blazed in the fireplace, and there were candles alit at the few tables where drinkers sat. Thus, with so little illumination, it was not altogether easy to locate him I sought. As it happened, I heard him — that silly, whinnying giggle — ere my eyes had penetrated the gloom to the rear of the room. For yes, there he was, sitting at a table with four of his fellows — Jackie Carver.

I could not make out at such a distance, and in poor light, if the coat he wore was mine, and so I moved towards him, threading a path through the tables. Bunkins followed. As I approached. Carver saw me, recognized me, and left off his chatter. By the time I reached his table, I had seen the coat well: bottle-green it was, with white trim, and unmistakably my own. All eyes at the table were upon me as I took my place close before him and waited.

“What do you want?” asked he. with a most theatrical sneer.

“My coat,” said I.

“Your coat?” He laughed his little giggle. “This here’s a man’s coat. Last time I saw you, you was wearin’ women’s duds, makin’ out you was a bawd. You got no right to wear a man’s coat.”

This caused hilarity among his table-mates. While he sat smirking, the rest fell into great guffaws; one of them, a villainous-looking fellow of about thirty, pounded the table with glee. All the rest in the place had fallen silent. The barkeep moved towards us.

I waited until the laughter had subsided. “Nevertheless, I want it.”

“Well, you’ll not have it.” He stared hatefully up at me from his place at the end of the oblong table.

And then, to break the contact with his eyes, I reached my right hand before him and snapped my fingers. His eyes shifted involuntarily to them, as I knew they would. And in one swift, planned movement, I grabbed his ear with my left hand, twisted it, and pulled up. He had no choice but to rise, or have his ear torn off. When he was halfway to his feet, I gave a great push to his head and released my grip. He fell back in a clutter against the chair and the wall but managed to keep upright. The others at the table were too shocked by this event to do more than look wide-eyed from him to me. Then did he reach behind him as if to draw his knife, yet allowed his hand to remain there as a threat.