The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (22 page)

“Oh, don’t mind me. I have known the life very well.” He was led into a small, low-ceilinged room, and at once he could see a pregnant woman lying quietly upon a mattress.

“My wife, sir, is almost due. Do excuse her if she doesn’t get up. It’s Mr. Leno, Mary, come to visit us.” She turned her head, and tried to rise. Dan Leno went over to her quickly and touched her forehead; she was burning with fever, and Leno looked across at her husband in alarm. “The doctor has given her some physic,” he said in a lower voice. “He says that it’s quite natural at her stage.” But, even as he spoke, he seemed about to weep again.

With that quickness of thought and perception for which he was remarkable upon the stage, Leno now decided to act. “Would you be terribly offended,” he said, “if I ask my own doctor to call? He is only around the corner, in a manner of speaking, and he has experience with childbirth.”

“Oh yes, sir. If you think he might be able to assist her.” Only now did Leno take in the rest of the room where, to his surprise, he saw some old playbills and song sheets plastered upon the walls. “These are my special items,” the young man said. “I could never part with them.” Here were pictures of Walter Laburnum, Brown the Tragedian (No Matter!) and the Great Mackney; even as the young woman sighed upon the mattress,
Leno could see the song sheets for “The Ticket of Leave Man” and “Bacon and Greens.” “And this is a little memento of Grimaldi himself.” He showed Leno a playbill in a corner of the room which announced in large black capitals that “Mr. Grimaldi’s Farewell Benefit Will Be Performed on Friday, 27 June, 1828, with
A Music Mélange
to Be Succeeded by
The Adopted Child
and Concluded with
Harlequin Hoax
.” Leno went over and touched it with his finger: this must have been the occasion when Grimaldi announced that “eight and forty years have passed over my head, and I am sinking fast.” But there, next to this bill, was one which astonished him. It was crudely printed, on paper which had already turned yellow, and it announced “Still Champion of All Champions, Dan Leno, Vocal Comedian and the World’s Champion Clog Dancer. One Week Only.”

“That was at the Coventry,” he said. “Quite a little while ago.”

“I know, sir. I found it on the wall of a junk shop, if you’ll pardon the expression, along the Old Kent Road. I snapped it up at once.”

So at least in this small room Joseph Grimaldi and Dan Leno had been formally united. He looked around again at the young woman suffering upon her narrow mattress, and saw above her the song sheet for “She Never Complained, Except When We Were Wed.” “I must leave you now,” he said. “I can go at once to my doctor.” Quietly and gently he left another sovereign on a small deal table before following the young man out of the room. “May I take your name, as well as your address,” he asked as they came out into the dark yard. “He will need it.”

“Chaplin, sir. Harry Chaplin. Everyone knows us here.”

“A good old stage name.” He put his hand on the young man’s shoulder for a moment. “He will come to Mrs. Chaplin presently, then. And once again, good-bye.” Leno left Clare Market and, on his way back to his house in Clerkenwell, he left
an urgent message about Mrs. Chaplin with his family doctor in Doughty Street; it could be said, in fact, that he had managed to save the unborn infant’s life.

From that day in the Reading Room of the British Museum, Leno became obsessed with Grimaldi; he snatched up any material he could find, and had only recently come across De Quincey’s essay on pantomime in which Grimaldi is described as “the epitome of scream without speech.” He had read the essay until the end, as he sat in his chair in the drawing room, and only when he reached the last page did he extinguish his lamp and climb the stairs to his bed. That was why, on the following morning, the book on the side table was turned to the next essay in this volume by De Quincey—it was the essay entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” just as Detective Inspector Kildare noticed when he came to question the funniest man on earth.

There were very good reasons for the policeman’s visit although, naturally enough, he was also curious to meet the great Dan Leno. He was taken into the drawing room, which his wife had filled with wax fruit and wax flowers, ormolu clocks under glass and heavily embroidered cushions; Kildare had barely entered the room when he tripped on the edge of a thick rug. “People often do that.” It was Leno’s characteristic voice but when the police detective turned, half-expecting to be greeted by some outlandish creature caked in stage grease and makeup, he saw only a neat and dapper little man who put out his hand in welcome. “Mrs. Leno is a rug fiend.”

It was a week after the murder of the Gerrard family in the Ratcliffe Highway, and Dan Leno had been expecting the visit; Mr. Gerrard had once been his “dresser” at the Canterbury and several other halls before entering the millinery business, and Leno had maintained a friendship with him ever since. There
were other curious factors, however, which connected Leno to the murders committed by the Limehouse Golem. Jane Quig, the first victim whose body had been found on the stone steps at Limehouse Reach, had told a friend that she was “off to see Leno” in his new pantomime and had boasted—falsely, as it turned out—that she was “acquainted with ’im.” The next connection was more peculiar still; Alice Stanton, the prostitute murdered beside the white pyramid of St. Anne’s, Limehouse, was found to be wearing female riding gear with a small linen tag attached to the inside collar bearing the name of “Mr. Leno.” It occurred to the police detectives of “H” Division that the Limehouse Golem might have been trying to kill Dan Leno himself, and was approaching him through these surrogates, but the possibility was soon dismissed as too fanciful. The true explanation was revealed, as we have seen, when they discovered that Alice Stanton had been in the habit of buying secondhand clothes from Gerrard himself, who in turn received them as “cast-offs” from his old employer. So it was that Alice died in the costume of the female jockey from
Humpty Dumpty
who rode “Ted, the Nag That Wouldn’t Go.”

“This is a very interesting story, sir.” Kildare had already noticed the volume opened at the first page of “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”

Leno picked up the book, and glanced at it. “I haven’t come to that one as yet. Does it interest you particularly?” He gave a sharp look at Kildare and, for a moment, thought that there was something rather peculiar about him.

“It concerns the Marr murders, sir. By some coincidence they were committed in the same house as—”

“The Gerrards?” Leno looked at the first page of the essay in genuine horror. “What a dreadful thing.” He turned the pages and read, quickly, that “… the final purpose of murder is
precisely the same as that of tragedy.” “It is like some Greek piece of business,” he said. “Those Furies or whatever they were called.”

“Not Greece, sir, but London. We have our own furies here as well.” Kildare could hardly believe that this was the same man who could fill a theater with laughter. “Could you tell me now about your connection with the Gerrard family?” Leno recounted the details of his association with his erstwhile dresser, although all the time he was more concerned to question Kildare about the state of the police investigation.

“Tell me,” he said after he had completed his story. “The newspapers say that there were no survivors, but I still have a faint hope that you might have found one of the little children …”

“Oh no, sir. They were all destroyed. Can I speak confidentially to you?”

“Of course.” Leno took the detective’s arm, and led him over to a heavily curtained window.

“One member of the family did survive.”

“Who was that?”

“Mr. Gerrard’s sister, sir. She was sleeping in the attic story at the time of the killings, but she was not found until the alarm was raised. She had taken laudanum for a toothache.”

“So she saw nothing?”

“Not as far as she is aware, but there is still a chance. She has been frightened half out of her wits, and at the moment makes precious little sense to me or to anyone else.” Kildare had paid this visit to Clerkenwell with no great determination to cross-question Leno or his family; he already knew that the comic had been performing on the stage of the Oxford at the time of the Gerrards’ slaughter, and that he had been similarly engaged at the time of the other murders. All London was aware of the fact that Dan Leno worked the halls six nights a week. But Kildare
had come to him as an observer rather than as an actor; he was shrewd enough to realize that Leno was the one man who would notice the smallest tone or detail in his encounters with other people. That was why he now changed the course of the conversation. “Can you recall if Mr. Gerrard ever seemed unaccountably nervous, Mr. Leno?”

“No. Not in the slightest. He was busied over some new gowns when we last met, and we merely exchanged pleasantries.” He did not mention the fact that he had rehearsed his new singing and dancing number for the family—it seemed too bizarre a scene to recall now. “Frank Gerrard had a lovely feeling for cloth.”

“Did he have any enemies?”

“Not in the theater. Hall people have their jealousies and their rivalries, but it’s all very mock-heroic. In any case most of them drink too much to remember if they bear any grudges.” He may have been referring here to his own reputation as something of an “old sock” or “blotting paper”; when Leno drank, he drank wildly and incessantly until he woke the following morning without a care in the world. He knew that, in his drunkenness, he would enact many of his familiar stage characters—but he took them to such fantastic and elaborate lengths that even his closest friends could not keep up with him. When he woke up, in a strange chair or upon an unfamiliar floor, he felt as much at peace as if he had performed an exorcism. “No,” he went on. “We never do the dirty. Besides, Frank was a very good dresser.” He brushed a piece of thread from the shoulder of Kildare’s coat, and the policeman opened his eyes very wide for a moment before recovering himself.

“There is something most peculiar I wanted to tell you, Mr. Leno. It concerns that essay you were reading.”

“I haven’t read it yet. I told you.”

“No, I believe you. I am not accusing you of anything whatsoever.
But the odd thing is that the murderer must have studied it before he killed your friend. There are too many resemblances for it to be entirely natural.”

“So you think he may have been a literary man?”

“An educated man, certainly. But perhaps he was an actor playing a part.”

“With this terrible thing as his promptbook?”

Kildare did not answer directly, but watched as Leno tossed the book onto the carpet. “I once had the pleasure of seeing you in the spoof version of Maria Marten.”

“Oh yes. That
Red Barn
number was years ago.”

“But I can still recall the way the killer grabbed you around the throat, and almost throttled the life out of you. Didn’t he then split you open with a razor?”

“It was a she. It was all very gory in those days.”

“But you see, this is my point. This murderer, this Limehouse Golem as they call him, seems to be acting as if he were in a blood tub off the Old Kent Road. Everything is very messy and very theatrical. It is a curious thing.”

Leno reflected for a few moments on this particular vision of the crimes. “I was thinking the same myself only the other day,” he said. “Much of it doesn’t seem real at all.”

“Of course, the deaths were real enough.”

“Yes but, as you say, the atmosphere surrounding them, the newspaper paragraphs, the crowds of spectators—it’s like being in some kind of penny gaff or theater of variety. Do you know what I mean?” Both men remained silent. “Can I see the woman who survived? Can I visit Miss Gerrard?”

“I’m not sure …”

“Let me talk to her, Inspector. She knows me. She has seen me on the stage and, I suppose, trusts me. Perhaps I will be able to coax some details from her which your methods could not discover. People tell Dan Leno everything, you know.”

“Well, if you wish it. I need all the assistance I can muster.” So it was quickly settled and, on the following morning, Dan Leno was driven to a lodging house in Pentonville where Miss Gerrard had been secretly placed by the police; it was thought that she might at some stage be able to recognize the voice or tread of the Limehouse Golem, so it was considered necessary to protect her from the idle attentions of the newspaper reporters.

“Well, my dear Peggy,” Leno said as he was ushered into her room. “This is a very bad business.”

“Very bad indeed, Mr. Leno.”

“Dan.”

He watched her as she slowly moved her head from side to side, as if she did not like to stare at one spot for too long. She was generally a stout and well-made woman but, in the bleak light of the lodging-house window, she became almost ethereal. “There was no noise coming from them, Dan. Nothing at all. Otherwise I would have come down. I would have stopped him.” It was clear to Leno that she was not to be diverted from her memories. “It’s the little children who should have been spared, Dan. He could have taken me. But not them. They were just like the babes in the wood.”

“Lost in the forest dark and drear, I see a figure coming near.” It was one of the first roles he had performed as an “infant wonder” and, as he recited the verse, he experienced the horror of the Gerrard children for a moment. “That’s the beauty of the pantomime, Peggy. It is believed only while it is being performed. In real life things are a bit harder, you know. And I suppose that’s what we try to do in pantomime. Soften the hardness just a little.”

“You make them laugh, I know. But nothing can make me laugh now.”

“No, I don’t believe it could. At times like this, Peggy, I am at a loss for words. Truly I am.”

“Never mind it, Dan.”

“But I do mind it. I wanted to comfort you by telling you how I feel. It is all so absurd. So senseless.” He could find only the most frail and timid words of comfort now, whereas on the stage he could have delivered a great tirade of sorrow before spoofing his own grief. “It will be all right,” he said. “Everything will be all right.”