A Coin for the Hangman

by Spurrier, Ralph

  “I’ll do my best, Mr Manley, but I sense this governor’s one of the anti-hanging brigade and he’ll be gunning for you.”

  “Well, fuck him and fuck ’em all.”

  Jim put a hand on Reg’s arm. Things were beginning to get out of control. “Reg, mate, hold up.”

  “How much do I get fucking paid for doing this job? Five guineas and a frigging rail pass. What do I get in return? I’ll tell you what!” Reg was now jabbing his finger at Jim’s chest. “A night in a freezing prison, piss-poor cups of tea and some fucking snooty governor who looks at you as if you’re a piece of shit because you’re doing a job he doesn’t like or want to do or wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “Don’t have a go at me, Reg, I get even less money than you.” Jim felt narked that Reg was taking it out on him. “Let’s just get on with the job, eh.” He nodded to the head warder. “We’ll follow on in a minute.”

  Cummings and the doctor left and the two hangmen were alone in the execution chamber. A weak sunlight now shone through the high window and cast a faint glow across the floor and the trap where Henry’s bagged head remained visible just above the opening. For some seconds Reg continued to stare at the floor, seemingly unaware that he and his assistant were now alone.

  “They want us to do this job but they don’t want to get their hands dirty. Something goes a little bit wrong and there’s all hell to pay. And it’s the poor fucker at the sharp end who gets it in the neck.” He fell silent and Jim waited.

  With a sharp intake of breath, Reg lifted up his head. “Right. Let’s take a look at the equipment.” He walked over to the trap and put his hand on the rope. “Bloody tight enough. Nothing wrong here.” His eyes dropped downwards to the head. “Hold on, what’s this?” He knelt down and looked closely at the noose around the neck. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph what the fuck’s happened here?” Jim peered over Reg’s shoulder.

  “What’s up, Reg?”

  “The bag’s somehow got caught up in the eye of the noose, stopping the rope from fitting tight and snug. Look, I can get my fingers between the rope and the poor bugger’s neck.” Reg ran his fingers behind the rope, pressing them against Henry’s neck. He wiggled them to show how much space there was. Slowly he removed his hand and stood up, steadying himself on the rope. Remaining silent, he stared down at Henry’s inert body. Jim, unnerved in turn by Reg’s outburst and now his silence, stood away, closer to the door, waiting for Reg to join him. Reg mumbled something to himself.

  “What’s that, Reg?”

  “Trying to be too bloody quick, Jim. That’s what it was. I’m sure.” Sighing heavily, Reg stuffed his hands in his pockets and turned away from the trap-door. “Come on, we’ve got half an hour to kill. Let’s go and get that cup of char. We’ve still got the other half of the job to do. Blood from stone, eh, Jim? Blood from stone.” He passed through the doorway and together they headed back to their quarters through the landings that remained eerily quiet.

  Incarceration

  The removal of Henry’s body was completed later that morning. Reg, Jim and the doctor waited in the lower chamber while the prison engineer lowered the hanging rope by a series of pulleys on the overhead beam. Slowly Henry’s body dropped down to be caught and cradled by the three men who laid the rapidly cooling body on a metal table. Reg removed the two leather straps and the hood and placed them in the box he had retrieved from his overnight quarters. They worked in silence, aware of their awful trade. Carefully they removed his torn shirt, Jim pushing up on Henry’s back so that he would sit up, the head now flopping onto his chest and the maroon rope mark around his neck being the only colour glowing under the naked light bulb. The trousers were removed and the doctor reached to take down Henry’s underpants.

  “If you don’t mind, Doc, we’d like to leave our friend a little dignity. Let’s keep them on, shall we?” Reg’s voice faltered a little in the echoing chamber. “He’s paid his dues. We don’t need to strip him bare.”

  A white shroud bag had been placed in the drop chamber ready for the body and now Reg and Jim unfolded it and slid it underneath Henry’s body. Manoeuvering Henry’s feet into the tuck at the bottom, Reg brought the sides of the bag together and, stitch by stitch, from the feet upwards, he began to sew it up. Jim, with a similar bosun’s leather and needle, had begun at the head but Reg snapped: “Leave it, Jim!” And then more conciliatory, quietly, “I’ll do it, thanks Jim. Let me do it.”

  Jim stood back and watched Reg at work closing up the shroud. Something had happened today. It wasn’t just the mess over the hanging. Yes, it was a mistake alright and perhaps Reg was trying to show off by seeing how fast he could do it, but there was something about this one that was different. Odd. It wasn’t Reg – he had been his usual bullish self until he got in the cell with the prisoner. Yes, that was when things changed. It was as if the prisoner had put a spook on Reg.

  Reg was now closing the last few inches of the shroud. Just Henry’s face remained visible. As he reached to pinch the two edges of the cloth together, Reg stopped and looked down on the young face with its closed eyes. This bloke had killed his own mother. Tried and found guilty. No doubt. No doubt. Reg touched the now cold forehead of Henry, delicately pushing a stray forelock of hair to one side. How did this poor sod get to be here? Why would anyone kill their own mother? Taking one last look, Reg hastily pulled together the last pieces of the shroud and sewed it up.

  “OK. Our work’s almost done here, Mr Vine.”

  The prison engineer was now preparing the cheap wooden coffin that had stood against the wall since the execution date had been confirmed.

  Reg and Jim stood back from the slab and took one last look at the shrouded body. Jim heard an exhalation of breath from Reg but didn’t dare to look at him. He sensed Reg bending down to the ground to pick something up.

  “What you found, Reg?”

  He straightened up, turning over something between his fingers before pocketing whatever it was.

  “Oh, nothing really. Just something that must have dropped out of my pocket when I was up there.” Reg indicated the ladder which still stood close by the now empty rope.

  They left by a doorway that led out into a courtyard tucked away close to the centre of the prison. As they stepped outside, a solitary collared dove that had been pecking at some tufts of weeds on the broken tarmac fluttered in panic and rose upwards into the square of sky above their heads. Reg followed the flight of the bird as it rose ever higher, climbing vertically it seemed, on scarcely moving wings until it suddenly swerved and disappeared from sight over the prison rooftop. In his pocket Reg fingered the small white button that had fallen from Henry’s shirt when the doctor had ripped open the shirt.

  “Let’s get out of this godforsaken place, Jim. Quick.”

  Some ten minutes later the hangman and his assistant were at the Front Lodge, signing themselves out on the register.

  “Well, Jim, I’m not sure what the fall-out will be on this one,” he eyed the warder behind the counter who was pretending to work with some papers. “But if we don’t meet up again, it’s been good working with you. I’ll put in a good word, don’t you worry.”

  Jim held out his hand. “Thanks, Reg. I’m sure we’ll work again.”

  Reg shook Jim’s hand and said nothing. As they both turned towards the gate the warder looked up.

  “Oh, Mr Manley, I almost forgot. These are for you.” The warder pushed a box across the counter: it had a string handle but Reg could see it contained some books and a small box. “Mr Cummings tells me that they were left specifically for you. Compliments of the deceased, he says.” There was a smirk to the warder’s voice that Reg found unsettling.

  “What?” Hesitantly Reg took the proffered items in his hand. Then it dawned on him. Oh, fuck almighty, he thought, these were on the table in the condemned man’s cell. Henry’s words came back to him. “You must read it. You must.” Why me, he thought. Why me? He put down his small suitcase and taking
the first black-clothed book out of the box he laid it out on the counter. Flipping open the first page Reg read the opening lines:

  My dear friend,

  I don’t know who you are, and probably, you don’t know who I am. Yet.

  But in three weeks you are coming to this room to kill me.

  Henry’s Diary

  My dear friend, I don’t know who you are and, probably, you don’t know who I am. Yet. But in three weeks you will come to this room to kill me. To this little grey cell with your ropes and buckles and apparatus, your wicked skills, and kill me. You will bind my hands and feet and you will cover my eyes. And then you will drop me from this daylight into oblivion. Brightness falling from the air; this Icarus, crashing to earth. I have a story to tell. Will you ever believe it and what will you do when you have read the truth?

  This is absurd. And this is a mystery. An absurd mystery. Ha! This is a story, this thing, this diary that you are holding and reading now. Like all good detective stories you have to start at the beginning and read through to the end to try and work out who the murderer was. Promise me you won’t peep at the last page! I’d see people in the Boot’s Library in Bath picking up detective novels and riffling through the pages, intent only on reading the last page and finding out who did it. That would annoy me. Maybe they didn’t like surprises but I always wanted to work out how the author was thinking. How they could twist the plot to fool the reader. They had to play fair, mind you. No Chinamen, no occult, no hidden passages, no twins and no poisons unknown to science. Well, you’ll find none of those here. And most importantly, as with the First Commandment of any detective story: the murderer must be someone mentioned in the story. I’ll present it all to you; lay it out for you to see as bright as a shiny new sixpence. And the box that should be sitting next to you as you read this diary holds the clue. Are you strong-willed enough to keep from opening the box until you have finished the diary? You aren’t a last-page reader are you? I hope not. It will be so much more satisfying and by then you will understand, really understand. What you do with what you learn is up to you. But I have to tell you one thing now, right from the start. I am not the murderer of my mother but I know who it was and how it was done.

  I am trying to picture what you may look like. We will only meet for a few seconds, face to face, before you dispatch me forever. As I write these words I suppose you are at home at this very moment. Do you sit by your fire-side, your feet comfortable in slippers, reading the news reports of my trial and wonder if you will be called on to perform your duties?

  “Ah, Henry Eastman’s been found guilty, my dear. Looks as if I shall be in business again very soon.”

  And does your wife say anything? Does she look at you and the hands that have caressed her and wonder at the caresses you give to your victims? The holding of hands, the gentle tap on the shoulder, the intimate touch of the hand on the head as you lower the hood.

  Is someone in the Home Office already typing out a letter requesting your services? Are they putting it into an envelope, running their wet tongue along the gum and pressing the seal shut with their thumbs? What does the typist think as she fixes the queen’s head stamp, oh so carefully, in the top right-hand corner? And what of the postman who pushes it through your letterbox where it drops onto a mat? Does he know who you are and what these little buff envelopes mean? Do you see the envelope when you come downstairs in the morning and recognize the square HM missive and say quietly to yourself: “Ah, I know what this is about.”

  None of this is of interest to me. Believe me. None of this.

  The governor came to see me the day I arrived here at Wandsworth. Was it yesterday? It may have been. I could see he was embarrassed, upset even, but I wasn’t listening to what he was saying. I was leaning with my back against the outside wall, the barred window above my head. He stood just inside the doorway with a warder by his side and as the sun was just at the wrong angle they were squinting into the light towards me across the length of the cell. I had pushed a small table which had been in the centre of the cell into one corner. I did it so that my pencils would rest across the wall and not roll off onto the floor. I was more interested in starting the diary and these interruptions were just annoying. I had asked for a pen and ink but they wouldn’t let me have them. They probably thought I would try and poison myself by drinking the ink or stab myself with the pen nib. Right into the artery at my wrist. Write in my own blood.

  I knew they would take my belt, braces, tie and shoelaces away after the trial. I’d read enough to know how the process works. It wouldn’t do to have the condemned hanging himself would it? Don’t you think that’s funny? So odd. The process, the arrangements, the conventions, the mechanics of it all. Men working mechanically like Chaplin in Modern Times. We had a showing of that in our cinema for Saturday Club back in 1948 – or was it ’49? I watched through the projection window at all the children laughing and laughing and I looked at them and wondered how long it would be before they stopped laughing and found themselves caught up in the machine. How have we stopped being human and allowed the machines to take over? There comes a point where the process takes over and each step becomes automatic and nothing stops as we get closer to the noose and the drop. I shuffle forwards, Chaplin like, pulling and tugging on my trousers to stop them from falling around my ankles.

  I’ve found life so strange. I was a stranger entering into this world and for a while I only saw the innumerable joys of life, but just beneath the surface lay the chaos and tears. I thought it happened somehow as a direct result of my father dying but I realize now there is a permanent desperation in the world. It all became so, what’s the word… pointless? Yes, that’s probably the closest. Leaving life this way makes as much or no sense as any other. The doctor brought me into the world by clamping my head with forceps and pulling me down and now you will send me out by tying my neck and dropping me down. What’s the difference? A life bookended by the forceps and the rope. That’s funny.

  Do you laugh out loud? Tell stories about your profession, standing at the bar of a pub at night, whispering to the wide-eyed about the latest you’ve dispatched? Do you raise the hairs on the back of their necks with tales of the botched and bungled, the stragglers and the weepers, earning yourself a free round with each gruesome story? Or do you creep back to your home, collar up, hat over your eyes, the little suitcase with the tools of the trade tucked under the bed to await the next call, the next buff letter to drop through your door?

  None of this is of interest to me. Not at all. I have moved beyond caring.

  Madeleine Reubens has been to visit me here. She is the only one left that really matters to me. Why would George Tanner, my step-father, come? Why would that dog put his head in the lion’s cage? As you will come to understand when you have finished this diary, that one has a lot to hide. He thinks he is safe now, tucked away in my mother’s – our – shop in the country. Hands in his pockets, a cigarette hanging from his lips, standing on the front step of the shop as he smiles to the passers-by, nodding in recognition but silently despising every single last one of them.

  Madeleine came the first day – last week I think – and I asked her to bring some books from my library at home. I gave her a list of the ones I wanted and yesterday she brought them to me. We met in a separate visiting cell with two warders standing each side of the table between us. I reached out my hand to touch hers, but the warder said, “No touching!”

  We looked at each other and I could see she had been crying.

  She slid the books across the table before slipping her fingers into a handbag, pulling out a small, laced handkerchief and moving it in one continuous movement to her nose. “Oh, Henry, how did all this happen?”

  “This” came out as “zis”. I loved her for her accent as I had always loved her, never forgetting the delicate, frightened girl that had turned up at my school early in 1939.

  She and I spent a lot of time together in those first months of 1939 up to the
summer holidays. Some of the children would taunt me as a “Jew lover”. Even though I didn’t know what a Jew was, it felt that somehow Madeleine and I were being shunned by the others, me because of my size and Madeleine for being whatever a Jew was. This didn’t worry me too much. I had come to realize that I didn’t need the others. Gradually, as the spring turned into glorious summer – do you remember that summer of 1939? – Madeleine’s mood lightened and the dark circles under her eyes disappeared. I would take a beginner’s reading book into the playground and she and I would sit next to each other in the shade of the large sycamore tree, surrounded by the live murmur of a summer’s day, her thin legs sticking out next to mine, her daisy-sandalled feet reaching just below my knees. I would turn the pages of an alphabet book and point to a picture and then say the word underneath. Madeleine would repeat it. Whenever we got to “van” she would pronounce it as “fan” and we would laugh and I would go back to the page with a picture of a Chinese fan on it with the willow pattern design. You know the one, don’t you? As you flick open the fan you can see two lovers meeting on a bridge, being chased by the guards. They escape by becoming birds and look! look! there they are, hovering above, their beaks almost touching. I would point to it and say, “That’s a fan,” and flicking back to the van say, “and that’s a van,” over-pronouncing the “v”. She would look at my mouth intently as I repeated the words: fan, van, fan, van, and she would say fan, fan, fan, fan and laugh and I would look into her beautiful doves’ eyes and want to kiss her, my lovely rose of Pieria.