by Giles Ekins
‘With all due respect, sir, there are others who are involved, I mean those others who were present at the execution – the Governor, Chaplain, warders, the prison populace, all they must all be aware?’
Sir Charles Warren looked at Collingwood coldly, unwilling to consider any potential problems in the task he was setting. Then as though talking to an imbecile – enunciating every syllable – he said, ‘Sir William Billington has been offered and as I understand it has graciously accepted the post of Inspector General of Prisons and Penal Institutions in the Australian Territories. I believe he departs for Terra Australis in about ten days’ time. He will sign securities as to his silence.
Prison officers present at the execution will be transferred to other prisons and other duties, as will those prisoners who found the bodies. Suitable encouragement will be offered for their silence – suitable threat made to those who refuse. The families of the hangmen will be offered compensation. The official line will be that they, the hangmen, were attacked and killed by a deranged prisoner, a prisoner who was subsequently committed to an asylum for the criminally insane. In that regard, one Frederick Parkinson has been transferred from Newgate to the asylum at Bow, he is a dangerous lunatic, much given to furious ranting and violent behaviour and his absence will not be questioned.
The Chaplain, The Rev. Thrift, has accepted a Ministry in the Gold Coast territories of West Africa and fortunately Doctor Rose, so far as we know, had no surviving relatives, his wife and only son dying from cholera some years ago.’ Both Collingwood and Monro winced at Warren’s casual dismissal of the deaths from cholera of Rose’s family. Collingwood’s own wife Lucinda, better known as Lucy, had died in similar fashion fourteen years ago, leaving him to bring up his seventeen years old daughter, his only child, also called Lucy, single-handedly. Warren’s insensitivity was painful and crass.
Warren carried on regardless, not seeing the look that passed between Monro and Collingwood. Having effectively disposed of the problems of potential witnesses, in his own mind at least, Warren spoke again directly Collingwood, continuing to ignore Monro.
‘All your current cases are to be transferred to other officers and you will devote yourself to finding and apprehending, by whatever means are necessary, this villain. You will report directly to Mister Monro here, who will report only to me. Such resources as you require will be made available, but the purpose must be strictly kept to yourself. Do I make myself plain, gentlemen? Monro? Collingwood?’
Sir Charles Warren was not a career policeman, he had been a distinguished soldier with particular experience in Africa and he gave his instructions as though planning a military campaign in the Kaffir War; in which he had fought with distinction and been severely wounded. He was obviously unaware that the means by which most criminals were apprehended was through recognition by witnesses, informers, inquisitive neighbours and most important of all, the ‘nose’, ‘nouse’ and local knowledge of the copper on the beat. To conduct a search where nobody was supposed to know whom to look struck Collingwood as singularly unrealistic.
‘With respect sir,’ Collingwood murmured, ‘I cannot conduct a manhunt without my officers knowing whom it is they are supposed to be hunting, indeed it would be totally impracticable.’
‘Nonsense,’ spluttered Sir Charles, ‘it seems to me, Inspector, that you are merely offering excuses for failure in advance.’
Collingwood thought that Warren was already laying the foundation to cover his position, taking the high ground as it were – ‘Doomed to failure from the start, damned fella never had his heart into it, looking for excuses right from the onset, had my doubts myself, but Monro insisted on it’ – readily shifting responsibility onto the shoulders of others with the greasy alacrity of a politician unsure of his position. Collingwood also noted the slight to his rank.
‘How many officers would need to know?’ Monro asked quietly, with a greater understanding of the problems Collingwood would face.
‘Initially, I can restrict the knowledge to my sergeant, Sergeant Gimlet, and I would also propose to utilise PC Miggs, on a restricted information basis, but eventually, others will have to brought into the picture.’
‘Gimlet? Is he trustworthy?’ And Miggs?’
‘Absolutely, sir, Gimlet has been with me for many years and you could not wish to meet a more reliable man. Miggs has proved to be most adept at working Mister Remington’s type writing machine and he is first class at filing and collating information, a necessary requisite for a search of this magnitude. Also, he typed up the copies of the report and so is already aware of the contents.’
‘So be it,’ said the Commissioner, obviously about to bring the meeting to a close.
‘One further point, sir,’ Collingwood said firmly.
‘Which is?’
‘It may well be that my enquiries could extend beyond the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police.’
‘And?’
‘I cannot conduct enquiries within another Police district without advising that force, without advising the Chief Constable or his Assistant. And I cannot therefore keep the nature of the enquiry secret.’
‘I’ll deal with that as and if it happens. Do not, sir, offer any further premature justifications for your dereliction of duty.’
Sir Charles got to his feet, bringing the meeting to an end. ‘Thank you for your time, Collingwood. Monro here believes that you are the man to find Sinistrari. I hope his confidence in you is not misplaced; I, however, have my doubts. Good-day to you, sir.’
He did not offer to shake hands.
MONRO CAUGHT UP WITH COLLINGWOOD as he walked down the corridor from the Commissioner’s office.
‘Take no notice, Charles, the man is a fool, and more dangerously, a political fool, but do your job and I will protect you as much as I can,’ he said, squeezing Collingwood’s elbow in encouragement.
‘It’s an almost impossible task, sir, to let loose the hounds without telling them they’re hunting a fox.’
‘Aye, it’s the poisoned chalice, all right. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Succeed and Sir Charles will take the glory, fail and he’ll disown you quicker than a workhouse orphan claiming paternity.
Chapter 5
METROPOLITAN POLICE, SCOTLAND YARD, 4, WHITEHALL PLACE, LONDON
CENTRAL OFFICE: CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION DEPARTMENT
WEDNESDAY JULY 6th, 1888
POLICE SERGEANT HERBERT GIMLET STAGGERED SLIGHTLY as he backed into Chief Inspector Collingwood’s office, a quivering edifice of files and papers balanced precariously in his arms, his chin pressing down onto the top of the pile to try and hold it in place. Carefully he turned around, ready to place the papers onto a battered looking mahogany table in the corner of the office.
‘This is all of ’em, I think, Gov’nor,’ he said, tottering backwards and forwards with the pile of documents like a funambulist suddenly overtaken by a dizzy spell.
Slowly he bent over to the table, carefully setting down his slippery burden of papers, holding them in place as though they were a precariously balanced assemblage of rare birds eggs; ready to topple and fall at the slightest quiver or breath of breeze. Slowly Gimlet began to straighten, gently releasing his grip on the pile, lifting his hands no more than an inch or so from the topmost document, spreading his fingers wide in mute appeal, as if willing the papers to behave themselves and stay in place. His lifted his hands away another inch, fingers still spread. Another inch. Another inch more, slowly straightening his back as he did so.
For the first time in a minute or more, Gimlet took a breath, the air whistling loudly in his nasal passages. He nodded at the pile of papers, the victor acknowledging his vanquished opponent, and brushed at some dust and cobwebs clinging to his waistcoat front. As he did so the pile of papers – dockets, reports, documents, files, newspaper cuttings and the other accumulated printed matter – gracefully, ever so slowly, as if encapsulated in gelatine, leaned over and slid in a glissading cavalcade
to the floor. Gimlet leaped for the pile but too late, succeeding only in knocking heavily into the table with his thigh and hastening the avalanche of papers on its way to the floor.
Files split open, spilling papers and letters across the floorboards like giant confetti as reports leapt to freedom and slid beneath the table and other papers sliced across the floor to seek sanctuary beneath Gimlet’s desk. A box file burst its seams, scattering yet more paper, autopsy reports and photographs in all directions as a bundle of newspaper cuttings, tied together with red binding tape, escaped their bonds and came to rest by Collingwood’s feet.
‘Oh, bugger,’ exclaimed Gimlet in a high pitched squeaky voice curiously at odds with his vocation as a police officer, ‘what a mess of confusion this is. Gawd, it’ll take me a month o’ Sundays to sort out this little lot. Sorry, Guv’,’ he added as an afterthought, but not in the least bit chastened. Collingwood would chew him out and no mistake for negligence on the job, but not for an accident like this. Not for a simple accident like this. Surely not!
‘Gimlet, never mind a month of Sundays, never mind a month of ordinary days. We are in the midst of an extremely important, not to say vital, investigation with much of the information we require to conduct such investigation contained within those documents that you have decided to distribute to the four winds. So, be a good chap, get down upon your hands and knees and collect them all together. Have them all sorted out and replaced in their correct domicile by the time you leave. Whenever that be,’ Collingwood said without rancour or the raising of his voice, but Gimlet knew he meant it.
Smiling to himself, Collingwood picked up the bound document he had been reading before Gimlet had his mishap. It was a copy of his investigation report into events at Newgate goal, the same document that Sir Charles Warren had been reading an hour or so earlier.
He briefly skimmed through the document; he knew it by heart, but even so, he felt a compulsion to read it again. He was charged with the tracking down and apprehension of Sinistrari and his Newgate dossier was the initial peg upon which to start his search.
The report was a typed copy of his own hand-written document, one of four copies prepared by his clerk, PC Jaspar Miggs who had developed dexterity with two digits on the Remington type-writing machine recently acquired for the department. It made a thin metallic clatter like crows dancing on a tin roof and Collingwood hated it – would be much happier with the old system whereby a phalanx of clerks laboriously prepared several copies of each document in fine copperplate script. Henry Matthews the Home Secretary, Sir Charles Warren and James Monro held the other copies of the report respectively.
The first section of the report contained a brief summary as to Edward Sinistrari and the crimes for which he had been condemned to die i.e. the murder of four young girls although Collingwood suspected that there could be many more killings; young street girls and runaways whose disappearance had never been reported.
The next section dealt with the actual execution itself, including the report of the Governor, Sir William Billington, which in no uncertain terms placed all the blame on the dead hangmen and making the most of his comment that Dennison had not allowed sufficient drop. Statements from the other witnesses were included, although none of the other statements was as vociferous in laying culpability on the executioners.
Collingwood’s own investigation notes came next. He too concluded that the hanging had been bungled in that Sinistrari had not died at the end of the rope when the trap had sprung.
He quoted historical instances of condemned criminals surviving judicial executions; amongst them Patrick Redmond, hanged in Cork in Ireland who was revived after his execution and John Bartendale hanged in York for felony. Bartendale had actually been cut down from the gallows and buried when passers-by noticed movement in the soil of his grave and unearthed him. He was still alive, although naturally somewhat disorientated. Bartendale was thereafter granted a pardon and lived an honest life as an ostler, much given to recounting tales of his execution and interment, especially when prompted with the offer of an ale or two.
As to how Sinistrari had actually escaped from the confines of Newgate, Collingwood could offer no absolute suggestions but did cite historical precedence of escape from beyond the fifty-foot high walls that encompassed the grim prison that was Newgate. A sailor called Krapps once escaped using the lamplighter’s stepladders and sheets stolen from the prison laundry, others had actually scaled the walls and circumvented the chevaux de frise1 before escaping across the roofs.
In conclusion, he had written, the only sustainable assumption is that that the hanging had not been carried out in the most satisfactory of manners, thus allowing Edward Sinistrari to survive his hanging and recover sufficiently to attack and kill Doctor Pasha Rose, Ernest Dennison and Alfred Jenkins and then affect his escape from the confines of Newgate Gaol by means not yet established.
Although lacking in any substantive facts, the report had been accepted by the Home Office and Collingwood’s superiors in the Metropolitan Police, glad to see the affair quietly wrapped up without too much attention being focussed upon them.
As for Collingwood himself – he did not believe a word of it. There had been cases of a hanged man surviving and recovering, the cases he quoted were authentic and well documented but those hangings had taken place in the days before the introduction of the ‘long drop’. Formerly a felon to be hanged was given no more than a two-foot drop and left to strangle at the rope’s end, with the hangman or his assistant having to jerk on the victim’s legs to break his neck and so bring an end to his suffering.
Then hangman William Marwood2 had introduced the ‘long drop’, a far more efficient method of dispatch. The hanged man drops through the trap, the length of drop calculated to dislocate the spine, affording almost instantaneous death. The possibility of survival from a ‘long drop’ execution was almost non-existent, in fact no such case had ever been recorded – and Collingwood doubted there ever would. As for the theory that the body might have been removed in order to sell it, Collingwood believed that the manner of the killings was very significant.
‘Just suppose,’ he thought to himself, ‘that there had been a conspiracy to abduct the corpse of Sinistrari in order to sell it to a showman or freak-show operator and the hangmen had discovered the plot, perhaps whilst they were taking the body down from the gallows. It would have been sufficient merely to kill them swiftly to ensure their silence However, mused Collingwood, Dennison died in agony, his killer ritually,’ choosing the word very advisedly, ‘his killer ritually castrated him, tore out his tongue, disembowelled him and all but flayed him alive. Doctor Rose was surgically dissected, also whilst alive. These killings took time, a great deal of time. These were not killings carried out in panic in order to avoid discovery. The extreme savagery of the killings, the dread awfulness of the slaughter and the obvious enjoyment in that slaughter goes only to prove that Sinistrari was indeed the killer.’
Billington, anxious to shuffle off the blame for Sinistrari’s escape onto any convenient scapegoat, especially one who was now dead and so could not defend himself, had stressed in his report that the execution of Sinistrari should not have been entrusted to Dennison. Dennison; in Billington’s stated opinion was careless in his work and too inexperienced as a hangman to have been entrusted with the job. Billington, Collingwood surmised with a rueful smile, would have laid blame on the prison cat if he thought there was advantage to it.
Collingwood reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a notebook bound in maroon morocco leather and flipped through the ages until he found the entry he wanted. Just as he remembered – Dennison had carried out more than twenty executions as principal hangman, mostly carried out to the satisfaction of the authorities concerned (the only adverse comments had been made by Billington, not only in relation to executions carried out by Dennison but just about every other Newgate hangman) Dennison had also assisted at almost thirty other hangings. Without doubt, h
e was, or rather had been, a very experienced hangman. Jenkins had assisted at some twenty-three executions, many of them with Dennison as principal.
No, without doubt Dennison had been an experienced hangman and more than capable of handling this particular execution.
However, as expediency and pragmatism were required in this case, Collingwood’s report simply reflected what the authorities wished to hear.
The only other possibility was so far beyond the realms of imagining to countenance; i.e. that a hanged man arose from the dead, killed two hangmen and a prison doctor and then vanished without trace. Nevertheless, that was what Collingwood believed. Believed as surely as he knew that the sun would rise the following morning and set the following evening.
It was his fervent belief, held long before this present incident that Sinistrari was a Satanist. A devil worshipper! A Black Magician! Collingwood believed that Sinistrari was a High Priest of Satanachia. That he had sold his soul to the Devil and that he may even be a High Lord of Satan and that in return he has been given certain powers; possibly powers that enabled him to cheat death. However to suggest such a proposition within the covers of an official Metropolitan Police Report was to invite an immediate ‘suggestion’ that Collingwood take early retirement and confine himself within the safe walls of a Lunatic Asylum.
He recalled the contents of Sinistrari’s house; the foul dungeon where the killings had taken place; the occult books and other artefacts – all leading to the inevitable conclusion that Sinistrari was an adept of the Left Hand Path. In addition, Collingwood had carried out extensive research in the Reading Room of the British Museum, using his Police authority to gain access to forbidden manuscripts not available to the general public.
