Murder as a Fine Art

by David Morrell

  “Don’t worry about me. I could hardly see anything in the fog, let alone draw it. But I counted at least two dozen reporters out there, so you can bet you’ll be reading about a riot on top of what happened here tonight.”

  The commissioner groaned. “I’ll be hearing from Lord Palmerston for certain.”

  “Things got so rough out there I came back to this damned place.”

  The odor of blood remained strong.

  “Definitely not a job for me.”

  “Perhaps more to drink,” Ryan suggested.

  “A lot more to drink. If I didn’t need the money…”

  “We can use some time in here alone,” Ryan said. “The street’s quiet now. Perhaps some fresh air will help. Or the tavern down the street.”

  “Some time in here alone? You’re welcome to as much of it as you want.” The illustrator quickly went outside and closed the door.

  Commissioner Mayne stared toward the counter behind which the unseen but impossible-to-ignore presence of the shopkeeper’s body made the room feel small.

  “The initials on the mallet. Are you certain they’re J. P.?”

  “Absolutely,” Ryan answered.

  “I was only fifteen, but I remember how frightened I was. How frightened my mother was.”

  “Frightened?” Becker asked.

  “My father never admitted to feeling threatened by anything, but I could sense that he was frightened also.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ryan said.

  “You’re both too young to have been alive then. Day after day, I read everything about them in every newspaper I could find.”

  “Them?”

  “The Ratcliffe Highway murders.”

  As Ryan and Becker frowned in confusion, the commissioner explained.

  Saturday, 7 December 1811

  The events of that night caused a wave of terror throughout England that had never been equaled. Ratcliffe Highway derived its name not from rats but from a red sandstone cliff that dropped toward the Thames, but in 1811, there were plenty of rats nonetheless, and the desperation associated with squalor.

  One of every eight buildings in the area was a tavern. Gambling was commonplace. Prostitutes populated every corner. Theft was so widespread that a fortresslike wall needed to be constructed between Ratcliffe Highway and the London docks.

  Shortly before midnight, a linen merchant, Timothy Marr, asked his apprentice, James Gowen, to help him close the shop, which had remained open to accommodate sailors newly arrived in port with money they were eager to spend. Marr sent his servant, Margaret Jewell, to pay a bakery bill and bring back fresh oysters, a cheap, common food that didn’t need to be cooked. But Margaret discovered that the bakery was closed, as was every place that sold oysters. Disappointed, she returned to the shop, only to find that the door was bolted. As she knocked repeatedly, she attracted the attention of a night watchman making his rounds as well as a neighbor whose late supper had been disturbed by the noise.

  The neighbor crawled over a shared fence, entered through an unlocked back door, proceeded along a corridor, and discovered the body of the apprentice. The young man’s head had been bashed in. Gore covered the walls. The neighbor stepped shakily farther into the shop and gaped at Mrs. Marr sprawled near the front door. Her head had been smashed repeatedly, portions of her brain leaking out. Terrified, the neighbor freed the bolt on the front door. A crowd rushed in, knocking him aside. Among them was Margaret Jewell, who looked behind the shop’s counter, saw the battered corpse of Timothy Marr, and screamed.

  But the horrific discoveries were only beginning. Close inspection revealed that Marr, his wife, and his apprentice all had their throats slit. In Marr’s case, the cut was so deep that his neck bone could be seen. In a back room, the searchers found a shattered cradle and an infant whose head had been pounded, its throat cut the same as the others.

  NO MONEY WAS STOLEN from Marr’s cashbox,” Commissioner Mayne said. “In a bedroom, a ship carpenter’s mallet with the initials J. P. was discovered. Its striking surface was matted with blood and hair.”

  “But…” Becker hesitated, his thoughts in disorder. “That’s what happened here, except that two children were killed, not one.”

  The commissioner seemed not to notice that Becker had violated protocol by speaking before Detective Inspector Ryan did.

  Ryan now spoke. “Ratcliffe Highway is only a quarter mile away. Saturday, December seventh, eighteen hundred and eleven, you said.”

  “Forty-three years ago,” the commissioner murmured.

  “Today’s December tenth, not the seventh, but these murders happened on Saturday night, too, so it’s nearly the same.”

  Mayne nodded. “I was raised in Dublin. My father was a judge in Ireland.”

  Ryan hadn’t realized that Mayne was Irish like himself and had removed nearly all traces of his accent, the same as Ryan.

  “In those days, before the railway, London’s newspapers and magazines were sent via mail coach. Thanks to improved roads, they traveled at an amazing ten miles an hour,” Mayne explained. “As word about the savage murders spread relentlessly, so did the terrified reactions to them. When the mail coaches reached the port at Holyhead, their contents were transferred to packet boats that sailed to Dublin. Before steam, the boats were at the mercy of the wind and storms. Sometimes it took two days for the boats to cross the Irish Sea. My father had political aspirations. The London news was important to him. Reports about the Ratcliffe Highway murders reached him five days after the butchery occurred.”

  The building with its five corpses seemed to contract.

  “Within my father’s memory, within anyone’s memory, so many people had never been murdered at once,” the commissioner continued. “Yes, a highwayman might shoot a traveler at night. Someone passing an alley might be dragged in and stabbed for his purse. A drunken brawl in a tavern might end in someone being beaten to death. But no one could remember three adults killed together, and the child! An infant! All murdered so violently.

  “The news spread from town to town, gathering strength as local newspapers reprinted the details. No one could imagine what sort of lunatic was responsible. Receiving the newspapers five days after the murders, my father told a business acquaintance who visited our house that by then the murderer could have traveled almost anywhere. Indeed, the killer might very well have been on the packet boat that brought the news to Ireland. The killer might even be in Dublin itself. Then my father realized that I was listening at the door and closed it.”

  The house of death felt colder. The commissioner looked at Ryan and Becker with terrible distress.

  “People were afraid to leave their homes. They suspected every stranger. I heard of a wealthy woman who had locks installed on doors within doors in her house. Everyone was certain that every sound in the night was made by the murderer coming for them. Only gradually did the panic subside. But it quickly returned with greater force when twelve days after the first mass killing, there was another.”

  “What?” Ryan asked in amazement. “Another? Twelve days later?”

  “Only a half mile from Marr’s shop. Again in the Ratcliffe Highway area.”

  THIS TIME, it happened on a Thursday,” the commissioner said. “A week before Christmas. A man named John Williamson owned a tavern. A customer hurried toward it just after closing time, hoping to get a pail of beer, when he heard someone shout, ‘Murder!’ The cry came from a half-naked man who hung from an upper window, suspended by bedsheets tied together.

  “The half-naked man was a lodger in the tavern. He fell toward the street, where a night watchman caught him. As the lodger kept shouting, the watchman pounded on the locked front door while a crowd quickly gathered. They pried up a hatch in the sidewalk where beer kegs were delivered. When they charged into the basement, they found Williamson’s body. His head had been bashed in by a blood-covered ripping chisel that lay next to him. His throat was slit. His right thumb had been slashed almost
completely off, apparently when he tried to defend himself.

  “When the crowd ran upstairs into the kitchen, they found Williamson’s wife in a pool of blood, her head pounded in, her throat slit also. A servant girl lay near her, similarly mutilated. The lodger who’d escaped reported that he’d heard a loud noise and crept downstairs from his room to investigate. Close to the bottom, he’d peered into the kitchen and seen a man near Mrs. Williamson’s body. Dreading any sound he might make, the lodger had crept back up the stairs and tied sheets together to climb from the window.

  “News of the slaughter spread everywhere. Fire bells clanged. Men grabbed pistols and swords, swarming through the streets, hunting anyone who seemed even remotely suspicious. One volunteer chased a man he believed was the killer but who was innocent and who pulled out a pistol, blowing off the volunteer’s face. Anyone who was foreign, particularly Irish, was assumed to be guilty.”

  The commissioner paused after the Irish reference, seeming to take for granted that Ryan would understand the terror.

  “Strangers hid and were blamed for hiding. Every window was shuttered. Watchmen were hired to guard houses and then were suspected of being the killer. As the mail coaches transported the newspapers to every community throughout the land, the panic multiplied. Isolated villages armed themselves, convinced that the killer would flee London and pass through their area, leaving more bodies in his wake. I remember being frightened when I overheard one of my father’s friends tell him, ‘We are no longer safe in our beds.’ I read that in London people hurried to churches to beg God for their lives, only to find notices nailed to doors that warned, among us are monsters.”

  “Monsters,” Ryan said.

  “Imagine everyone’s relief when an anonymous source directed investigators to a young merchant seaman, John Williams, who had recently returned from a long voyage and whose tendency to get into fights had attracted attention.”

  “John Williams?” Becker asked, puzzled.

  “That’s right. He rented a room at a boardinghouse a short walk from both murder scenes. A ship’s carpenter had previously stayed there and left a box of tools. Those tools included a mallet with the carpenter’s initials J. P. stamped by a nail into its top.”

  “J. P. The initials on the mallet we found tonight,” Ryan said.

  “You can understand why I’m troubled. The mallet was familiar to the boardinghouse’s owner. He identified it as the same mallet that was found at the scene of the first murders. The night of the second murders, Williams was reported to have acted strangely when he returned to the boardinghouse after news about the killings spread. Someone remembered blood on his clothing, which he claimed was due to a fight in a tavern.

  “Williams was detained and spent Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day in Coldbath Fields Prison, where he waited to be questioned after the holiday. But when the magistrates reconvened and spectators squeezed into the court, expecting to see the presumed killer being brought in for questioning, word arrived that prison guards had discovered Williams dead in his cell.”

  “Dead?” Becker asked in surprise.

  “A suicide. A pole extended across the top of his cell. The jailers used it to air out bedding. Williams had been allowed to keep his clothes and had tied a handkerchief around the pole, hanging himself. But more horrors were yet to come.”

  “That’s difficult to imagine,” Ryan said.

  “The authorities concluded that Williams’s suicide was the same as a confession. A public hanging normally demonstrated what happened to monsters. But that wasn’t possible in this case, so instead, on New Year’s Eve day, his body was placed on a horse-drawn cart. A slanted platform allowed his corpse to be fully in view. The mallet was put into a slot to the left of his head. The ripping chisel lay behind his head. Opposite the mallet, to the right of his head, another object was placed into a slot, soon to have a major role in the ceremony.

  “Spectators gathered as the cart was led along Ratcliffe Highway. Numerous politicians walked before and after it, wanting to be seen by the crowd. The procession came to a halt at Marr’s shop, where the first four murders had occurred. The cart was positioned so that Williams’s corpse appeared to view the scene of his inhuman acts. After ten minutes, the cart was led to the tavern where the second set of murders had occurred. Twenty thousand people lined the streets, watching the procession. They were strangely silent as if stunned by the sanity-threatening crimes that Williams had committed. The only outburst came from a coachman who leapt down and lashed the corpse several times across the face.”

  Ryan’s cheek twitched.

  “The cart halted a final time at the crossroads of Cannon and Cable streets. Paving stones were torn up. A hole was dug. Williams’s body was dumped into it. The object that had been put in a slot opposite the mallet was pulled out. It was a stake.”

  “What?” Ryan asked.

  “A man acting as the equivalent of an executioner jumped into the hole and pounded the stake through Williams’s heart. Unslaked lime was thrown onto the corpse. Dirt followed. The paving stones were hammered back into place. When I heard about this, I asked my father why they used a stake. He told me it was an old superstition, that the stake was the only way to prevent an evil spirit from returning to commit more unspeakable crimes.”

  “And the crossroads?” Becker wondered.

  “Another superstition. If, despite the stake, the ghost of the monster somehow returned, it would be trapped forever, unable to choose which of the four roads to take. At first, the replaced paving stones were uneven enough that travelers could tell where the monster was buried and avoid the contamination of driving over his grave. But gradually the stones became level with the others. Over the years, people forgot where Williams was buried or that he was buried there at all.”

  “I go through that crossroads often,” Ryan said. “I never realized.”

  “Knowing that the terror had ended allowed me to sleep at last without worrying that Williams was outside in the dark,” the commissioner told them.

  “And had it ended? Were there any further murders?”

  “No, there were not.”

  Something in the house made a creaking sound, as if a corpse had moved, but, of course, the noise could only be due to the cold night causing window joints to shrink. Nonetheless, Ryan, Becker, and Commissioner Mayne stared toward the closed door that led to the bodies in the hallway, the kitchen, and the bedroom.

  “The murders here… do you think that someone found an old mallet and hammered the initials J. P. into it to draw attention to the parallel?” Becker asked. A troubling thought made him shake his head from side to side. “Or else… no, that’s hardly possible.”

  “Say what’s on your mind,” Ryan told him. “If you’re going to work with me, I don’t want you holding back.”

  “Could this be the same mallet that was used in the original murders?”

  The door opened, startling them.

  The bearded artist for the Illustrated London News stepped in.

  “Is this yours?” he asked Ryan. He held a newspaperboy’s cap in his hands. “One of the patrolmen found this. He thought it looked like one you lost.”

  “Yes. Thanks.” Ryan pushed the cap down over his head, at last able to hide his red hair. “How long do newspapers keep old issues?”

  “The Illustrated has copies from eighteen forty-two, when it began.”

  “We’re interested in eighteen eleven. And any illustrations that might have been made of a weapon used in a crime that year.”

  “Weren’t any drawings in newspapers back then. We were the first to use ’em. Crime? What crime?”

  “The Ratcliffe Highway murders.”

  “Oh, right, them,” the artist said matter-of-factly.

  “You know about them?” the commissioner asked in surprise. “How? You’re too young to have been alive in eighteen eleven.”

  “Sure. I read about them last week.”

  Becker’s v
oice demonstrated as much surprise as the commissioner’s. “You read about them?”

  “ ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ ”

  “What in blazes are you talking about?” Ryan asked.

  “The Opium-Eater. Thomas De Quincey.”

  “Everyone knows who the Opium-Eater is. What does Thomas De Quincey have to do with—”

  “I sketched him on Friday for our newspaper. His collected works are being published. He’s been talking to reporters so they’ll write about him and get people to buy his books. Undignified, if you ask me. But when was the Opium-Eater dignified?”

  “I still don’t—”

  “ ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ That’s something else De Quincey wrote besides the opium-eating book. Since I’d drawn a sketch of him, I decided I’d read what all the fuss is about.”

  As if to make a point, the bearded man pulled out his flask and tilted it above his lips, finishing its contents. “De Quincey didn’t just write about being addicted to opium. This ‘Fine Art’ thing describes the Ratcliffe Highway murders.”

  “What?”

  “The Opium-Eater went on and on about them. The bloodiest thing I ever read. Gave me nightmares. He piled on so many gruesome details, it’s like he was there.”

  5

  The Sublimity of Murder

  DURING THE 1300S, Paternoster Row acquired its name because monks could be heard chanting the Pater Noster, or Our Father, in nearby St. Paul’s Cathedral. In that century, stores there sold religious texts and rosaries. But by 1854, the street was the center of London’s publishing world. At 6 A.M. (according to the bells at the cathedral, telling the faithful to waken and prepare for church services), Ryan and Becker descended from a police wagon.

  In early light, a breeze chased the fog and allowed them to study the multitude of bookshops on each side of the street. Many were owned by publishers who, during business hours, placed stalls on the street to promote their various offerings. But 6 A.M. on a Sunday morning was hardly the start of business hours, so Ryan and Becker pounded on various doors in the hope that someone lived on the premises.