SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman (2 page)

McCaffery's reverie ended as the detail marched into the barrack field.

"Prisoner and escort, stand fasti Detail, forward march! Quick time!"

The regiment was drawn up on three sides of the field, as the brigade-major began to read out the court-martial finding and sentence, confirmed by the commander-in-chief at Delhi. McCaffery had heard it all before. It was irrelevant to his present preoccupation.

Sergeant-Major Hayward finished distributing muskets to the firing party, two guns at random loaded with blank powder, so that no man should bear the certain guilt of murdering a comrade. Then a bearded officer, who was a stranger to the regiment, approached Colonel Collins and saluted. The colonel returned the salute with exaggerated precision and said,

"Your prisoner, sir
I"

In the little group that hid McCaffery the provost-sergeant lifted a mug of something warm and sweet to the lips of the condemned man.

"Get this down, lad," he said gently.

McCaffery wanted to refuse, but the contents of the mug seemed to be burning in his throat before he could speak. The actors in the grotesque melodrama then began to move with a brisk punctiliousness. The stranger pinned a little square of white cloth to McCaffery's left breast, like a medal, while the provost-sergeant strapped the man's wrists behind his back.

"Head up," said the officer, with sharp disapproval.

"Be quiet," said McCaffery, fumbling for words. "Be quiet, will you? I want to think."

Another voice, calm but ringing loud, came from a distance.

"Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live . . ."

A file of soldiers, who had acted as a human screen, were marched smartly away and McCaffery saw for the first time a white wooden box lying by a short trench. It was not twenty yards away.

"He cometh up and is cut down like a flower . . ."

McCaffery's mind began to wander in the misty stupor induced by the hot rum. Why had the little bitch lied? Quickly! Why? Why? Faster and faster, the padre unrolled the cadences of the living man's burial service.

"He fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay . . ."

Before he clearly understood what they were doing to him, McCaffery was pushed to his knees on the white coffin. Another second and a black band over his eyes closed him from the sunlight.

"Firing party, present!"

From the edge of the field, in an instant of great stillness, he could hear the chatter of sparrows. He swayed as the twelve muskets came up to a level. The signal was the drop of the officer's arm, so that the condemned man should not hear the order and twist out of aim. The arm went down. But in the instant before the volley of bullets came, the men in the barrack field heard McCaffery give a wild cry. Whether it was a final protest, or a curse on them all, they never knew. To Corporal Alfred French it sounded as if, on the verge of eternity, Thomas McCaffery had solved the riddle of a lifetime and had only the fraction of a second to tell the world. The shout itself meant nothing to Corporal French, as it drifted away across the dry echoes of the field, and faded in the hot, distant plains. "Take her . . . ! "

The last reverberations blended with the sharp, sputtering burst of eleven rifles. The firing party looked pale as any sick parade and one of the men had dropped his musket and collapsed. McCaffery's body was knocked sideways by the force of the bullets and fell at full length. The birds were silent, and for a long second not a man moved. Then the anonymous officer marched smartly towards the body, for the hands and feet still twitched in muscular spasms. He drew his Manton pistol, but before he could use it, all movement in the shattered chest of Thomas McCaffery was extinguished.

McCaffery's final cry upset Colonel Collins, who complained angrily in the mess-room of the condemned man further dishonouring the regiment by "screaming like a damned girl when they shot him."

Corporal Alfred French was puzzled by that final cry. "Take her!" Take who? And where? The girl Jolie, presumably.

That evening, French spoke to Charlie Dalby, a gentleman-ranker of ten years' service. More ranker than gentleman, French thought. However, he asked Dalby what had become of the girl in the McCaffery case.

"Too late, Frenchy!" chortled Dalby. "Too late
m' boy!
Gone to England. Goin' to be looked after by a charitabl
e old couple. Make a pretty littl
e horse-breaker, I dare say. Dammit, Frenchy! Don't mean you fancied the little whore yourself? Eh?"

Alfred French walked slowly away and considered the facts again. Then he considered the charitable old couple. Charitable old couples might send money to India for the relief of distress. But they did not, as a rule, bring raped half-caste girls all the way to England to live in their own homes. French found Sergeant O'Sullivan.

"Yes, Fred French, I recall exactly how we found 'im and the girl. No, Fred French, I ain't going to tell no one the prime bits of the story unless someone is going to moisten my bleeding throat with a quart of that Hodgson's India Pale. Why, 'ow 'andsome of you, Fred French! As I was saying, this bunch of natives tells us about the shindy, like, and off we go. Takes five, ten minutes. Just as we gets there, the poor little doxy starts squealing like she's got a bayonet in her bum . . ."

"It didn't start till you got there? The shindy didn't start
..."
"Not that we heard."

"Then how did the natives who fetched you know it was going to happen?"

" 'ow should I know?"

"They bloody planned it, that's how," said French angrily. "They faked the whole lay to put McCaffery in the salt box."

"Don't you go saying that, Fred French! Not unless you want to end up head over your heels in regimental excrement! Faked! I saw that bugger McCaffery! Bloody near killed the lot of us I Yes, and you should have seen this lovely little tit he'd got with him! Listen! She'd got her bubbies all tilted up, real ladylike, and she'd got an arse like a marchioness. She had her drawers half off and you could see . . . 'Ere, Fred French! Where yer going, Fred French?"

Alfred French was a slow writer. It took him most of the night by the light of penny candle dips to produce a laboured but faithful statement of McCaffery's case. He read it through for the last time and thought about it. Several years earlier, in the mud and drizzle of the ravaged hillside at Inkerman, a sergeant of the Rifle Brigade had stumbled doggedly through the brushwood and the mist to drag back two wounded men from the Russian bayoneting. One man, a cornet of dragoons, had been so savagely and repeatedly stabbed that he bled to death as his rescuer carried him on his back. The other, Private Alfred French, was less severely wounded and had lived to earn his corporal's stripes after the fall of Sebastopol.

Alfred French decided that a man who would risk his life to save two comrades in that manner was a man to be trusted with McCaffery's case. In slow, deliberate script, he addressed his statement to Sergeant William Clarence Verity, late of the Rifle Brigade and now of the Private Clothes Detail, Metropolitan Police "A" Division, Whitehall Place, London.

2

Sergeant William Clarence Verity of the private clothes detail, Whitehall Office, presents his compliments to Inspector Croaker. Sergeant Verity has the honour to request that Mr Croaker will read the attached paragraph from the
Morning Chronicle
of the 11
th inst., "M
ilitary Execution in the Punjab
' and the enclosed letter from Alfred French, Corporal of
Her Majesty's 77
th Regiment, now under orders for Allahabad.

Sergeant Verity has the honour to request that Mr Croaker or his superior officers may authorise a further investigation into certain circumstances attending the death of Private Thomas McCaffery. The man McCaffery had, to Sergeant Verity's knowledge, served two terms in Horsemonger Lane gaol for picking pockets. Both sentences were attended by hard labour upon the treadmill. Last autumn, previous to going for a soldier and sailing with his regiment to Bombay, McCaffery had been a companion
of
Edward Roper, a person
of
a criminal reputation.

Ned Roper is known to Sergeant Verity as a man once prosecuted, but acquitted, on charges of receiving. Until last year he was the proprietor of a betting office in Fitzroy Square and known on racecourses as one of the Swell Mob. He has been engaged in the management of houses of ill-repute in the neighbourhoods of Regent Circus and the Waterloo Road. He is spoken of among low women and gamesters as "one of the flyest flats in the village." He acts for the putters up of robberies who can thus remain outwardly respectable.

Sergeant Verity hears that Ned Roper has several times boasted to street girls of making £500 in a year by criminal conspiracies. He is thought to have benefited by £200 or £300 as an accomplice in frauds upon insurance companies perpetrated up to 1850 by Walter Watts of the Olympic Theatre.

During the last summer, Roper associated with McCaffery and was liberally supplied with money from an unknown source. After a drunken argument in the Grapes public house, Southwark Bridge Road, McCaffery swore that he and Roper had been paid to commit the greatest robbery of modern times. Two weeks later, after a similar affray, McCaffery boasted in the presence of a constable that he and his friends had a plan to rob the Bank of England and every bullion merchant in the City of London, which plan must infallibly succeed.

McCaffery, when sober, denied this boast. He was taken into custody and committed to Clerkenwell prison for a short period for disorderly conduct. While in the House of Detention, he exhibited great fear for his life. It appeared
that he had betrayed the confi
dences of his associates and that they had promised to revenge themselves upon him. After his release, he was not noticed by the police again and it was later learnt that he had enlisted at Gravesend in a regiment which was already under orders for India.

Sergeant Verity also begs to state that a young woman
of
a bad reputation, answering both the name and description
of
the girl Jolie, was taken
up
in Lang
ham Place in March 1856, upon a gentleman complaining
of
her to a constable.

In conclusion, Sergeant Verity is
of
opinion that a crime
of
considerable significance may be in contemplation by conspirators
of
resource and experience.
If
such men contrived the death
of
Thomas McCaffery in India, Sergeant Verity believes the proposed felony must relate to property
of
the greatest value. Sergeant Verity therefore respectfully begs that orders be given for the pursuit
of
fuller investigations.

Sergeant Verity has the honour
to
remain Inspector Croaker's obedient humble servant.

W. Verity, Sgt.
25th
of
May, 1857.

Inspector Croaker presents his compliments to Sergeant Verity, and is in receipt
of
Sergeant Verity's request
of
25th
of
May instant.

Mr Croaker cannot help expressing surprise that Sergeant Verity should think fit to address his superior officers in a manner as
if
he knew the business
of
the Division better than they. It appears
to
Mr Croaker that Sergeant Verity would best serve his own interest by
satisfactory completion
of
those duties already allotted to him. Upon consulting the defaulters' sheet, Mr Croaker observes that Sergeant Verity has been paraded twice in the past twelve months, once for insubordination and once for an assault upon a member
of
the public. Mr Croaker hopes that Sergeant Verity will reflect upon this.

However, Mr Croaker has carefully perused the letter from Corporal Alfred French and the paragraph from the
Morning Chronicle.
This is not a paper which Mr Croaker normally has the pleasure
of
reading. Mr Croaker is bound to say that, even were it his privilege to do so, he could find no fault whatever with the verdict and sentence in the case
of
Private Thomas McCaffery.

McCaffery was not convicted in respect
of
any offence against the young woman, Jolie, nor was the girl a material witness. However, Sergeant Verity must be aware that her evidence, such as it was, appeared abundantly supported by Surgeon-Major Fitzgerald. No positive proof exists to identify this unfortunate young woman with the street-walker to whom Sergeant Verity refers. Even
if
there were such proof, a common prostitute in a case
of
violence is no less entitled to the protection
of
the law. Mr Croaker trusts that Sergeant Verity will remember this in future.

Mr Croaker is disturbed at the apparently easy terms upon which Sergeant Verity associates with low women and others
of
the criminal class, and the reliance he seems to place upon their evidence. The man Edward Roper is a person whose earnings may possibly accrue from gaming or prostitution. He stands convicted
of
no crime, however. Mr Croaker is dismayed that Sergeant Verity should regard a threat by Roper or McCaffery to rob the Bank
of
England as anything but a drunken boast.