A Killing Too Far

by Andrew Wareham

  “Perhaps I can persuade him to work for me, Jacky.”

  “Easy, Mr Sam. Nick did say you was ‘is sort of employer, good wages and cash without asking any questions.”

  “Good. I have a job that will suit his ideas of amusement, Jacky.”

  Nick showed himself at the White Horse two days later. Sam spoke to him for a few minutes and handed over ten guineas, making it clear that was for expenses only.

  “Pay will be five times as much, Nick. Twenty guineas wages, here and now. Thirty more when we are done. I shall want you to be available to me in future as well, Nick, if you are interested, that is, for I shall not attempt to constrain you. For now, off you go and I shall see you in Stafford in three days from now.”

  Nick gave his happy grin, promised to be there when he was required; for that amount of money he must be given the sort of work he liked, he said.

  “At the Bear and Ragged Staff inn, Mr Sam. I’ll take a carrier’s cart in the morning and I will be waiting all expectant like, ready for a day of fun and gig, when you come off the stage from Birmingham.”

  It seemed likely to Sam that the road from Stoke would be watched and that his name and face should be known; the owners of livery stables would have been paid to report any lone riders coming into town. A passenger dismounting from a stage from the south should be unnoticed; Nick, on a common carrier’s cart, would be ignored, too poor to be bothered with. He rode out that afternoon, over the moors and then on the long road towards Chesterfield before sending his horse back in the care of a padding groom and taking the stages round in a southward circle to bring him finally, surreptitiously into Stafford from the opposite direction to Stoke.

  Nick was lounging in the bar area, a glass to hand, almost full, Sam noted. He was sober. Sam took a room for a couple of nights, paying up front to the landlord’s satisfaction. Nick joined him upstairs a little later.

  “Pankhurst’s place be on the High Street here, Mr Sam. Not two minutes’ walk from the inn. He lives convenient in rooms above the shop, Mr Sam. Big place it is. Missus and two grown girls and three boys, all there with him, Mr Sam.”

  Sam noticed that Nick was better spoken and far more respectably dressed than when he had assisted at the brothel; he evidently chose to fit in with his company. Sam suspected he had been born to parents with an amount of money. He would not ask Nick who or what he was – it was none of his business. There was a tinge of London to his voice, Sam thought; presumably he had come north for his health.

  “Is there a watchman?”

  “Not that I saw, Mr Sam. None in this town would disturb Mr Pankhurst’s sleep, I should imagine. He would be happy in his little castle, sir.”

  “’Castle’?”

  “An Englishman’s home is his castle, sir, as is well known.”

  “So it is. We shall show that to be an error tonight, Nick. Have you patronised his store? Does he sell oil of any sort, do you know?”

  “Lamp oil, Mr Sam; the sort they bring down from the shales in Lancashire, where it is said to ooze from the ground and needs but to be cleaned of dirt before it may be used. It comes in barrels from which quart jugs can be drawn off. I went so far as to buy three-farthings-worth myself so as to see what is where.”

  “Well thought, Nick! I have no doubt we can put that to good use later tonight. I have my tinder box to hand.”

  “And I mine, Mr Sam.”

  “Good. Do you carry a pistol as well as your blades, Nick?”

  Nick smiled his best, showing fine white teeth in his open, amiable face.

  “Nay, Mr Sam. I so much like to be close to my little friends when I make a new acquaintance. Pistols do keep one to a distance, or so I feel.”

  Sam thought he was mad, an utter lunatic, but felt it wiser not to say so.

  “Midnight, I think?”

  “A good hour for the business, Mr Sam; in keeping with tradition, one might say. The back door to the inn here is kept open for the benefit of clients who wish to amuse themselves elsewhere for a few hours before coming back to their beds. There is a night man, in the nature of things, but a shilling will keep his eyes closed to us. I have explained, one might say, the virtues of silence, in terms of profit and long life both; he would appear to be one who learns quickly.”

  “Again, well thought, Nick. I have a feeling that you could be very useful in my permanent employment, if you so wished. I need a man who can think for himself, and as well carry out little tasks for me.”

  Nick thought that might be an excellent idea – a little cottage with perhaps a young lady installed might be just the thing for him.

  “A settled existence, Mr Sam, for I have wandered much in the past ten years since first I took up my little friends. I find that am not quite so young and fancy free as I was, sir. To put down roots, sir, a noble concept!”

  They left the inn separately in mid-evening, spending a couple of hours being seen in other respectable drinking houses and making enquiries about the most likely houses of ill-fame to occupy the night before coming together, apparently coincidentally, in sight of the alley behind Pankhurst’s store.

  “A night watchman at the rear perhaps, Nick?”

  “I shall walk the alley, stumbling in drink, Mr Sam,” Nick whispered back.

  Sam dropped to one knee in the shadows, choosing a slightly cleaner portion of the cobblestones, and watched as Nick made his progress into the alley, up to its end and back.

  “Neither sight nor sound, Mr Sam. No dog, either.”

  “Then let us discover the villain’s rear entry, Nick.”

  “Not generally a habit of mine, if I may presume to be so vulgar, Mr Sam! Enough of this wit, sir – let us to business!”

  Sam did not understand – he had heard nothing funny; he chuckled, however – he would not wish to offer gratuitous offence to Nick. Reflecting, he decided that all he would ever offer Nick by way of disagreement would be a pair of pistol balls, ideally from behind.

  There was a back door to the store and house, well locked and barred, as was to be expected. The windows were equally secure with external bars bolted on. Sam laughed – here he could see the humour.

  “Damned fool, he is, Nick. The bars are vertical but have horizontal cross pieces to hold them.”

  “Like a ladder, Mr Sam. I shall see what the window directly above is like.”

  A simple sash, open an inch to let in fresh air.

  They climbed together, eased the window up and Nick rolled across the sill and over to the bed, grabbing the sleeping boy he found there and quickly slitting his throat.

  “We cannot have him disturbing the whole house now, can we, Mr Sam?”

  “No, Nick. I intend that none shall survive the night in any case.”

  “Much the wiser move, sir.”

  “Go through all of the rooms, Nick.”

  “My pleasure, sir.”

  Sam stood in the passage, pistols drawn in case of disturbance from the servants’ quarters above stairs. Nick entered the rooms in turn, silent as the grave, delaying only seconds in each.

  He came out of the largest room confirming there had been a couple sleeping there.

  “All gone, neat and tidy, Mr Sam. A pity we have no spare time tonight; both of the girls were well grown, sir. A few minutes of idleness might have been entertainingly occupied, but we cannot dally on tonight’s business, sir, more’s the pity - no time for more than a quick feel. Down to the shop now, Mr Sam?”

  “Downstairs, Nick.”

  Sam fought down the urge to vomit – killing was one thing, he thought, but Nick was truly sickening in his ways. The man was mad, lunatic, perverse beyond belief.

  “Best we should open the back door, Nick. We want a way out for ourselves.”

  “Well thought, Mr Sam! The pleasure of a fire must be delayed, I fear me, but only for a minute or two.”

  They came to the shop floor, saw that the windows to the front were shuttered and bolted in place, which was convenient as no li
ght could escape to alert the street. Sam took the stub of a candle from his pocket and lit it with much fumbling with flint and steel – he had never been handy with a tinder-box. A little of peering around and they spotted a lantern behind the counter, kept no doubt for when the shopkeeper had to enter the storeroom to the rear.

  “The barrel of lamp oil is just here, Mr Sam, under the shelves at the back of the counter.”

  Nick showed Sam the small barrel and then lifted it through to the front of the shop.

  “Did you see anything of the storeroom, Nick?”

  “No, Mr Sam, the door was well closed when I was here.”

  Sam checked the door, found it pulled to but not locked. There was another full barrel of lamp oil inside. He dropped the barrel to the floor, hit it with a hatchet taken from a rack of tools to the side. The oil slowly flowed out over the wooden floor and under the racks and benches and the sacks underneath them.

  “A goodly amount of wood to hand, Nick. A hardware store, they told me, but unless I am much mistook, there is tobacco here, and those small barrels contain rum by the smell.”

  “Naval stores, Mr Sam. No doubt misappropriated from a chandler to the Navy and brought well inland to a safe town where they can be sold unrecognised. I was a month or two at sea, as a boy, sent off from my parish, but I did not like the life and took my leave when we came into Chatham.”

  Sam could not imagine that would have been an easy trick; he chose not to ask Nick exactly how he had managed it. Presumably the magistrates had been the cause of sending him off to sea.

  “A small keg here, Mr Sam, with bronze bands, suggestive of gunpowder, sir. Sold to the hunting and shooting men, one must think, sir, and to farmers who kill vermin.”

  “Take it through to the staircase, Nick. It should spread the fire upwards, with a little of luck.”

  “Cleverly thought, Mr Sam! A most excellent notion, sir!”

  Sam looked about the racks of tools, came up with a long crowbar which he took to the backdoor and its lock. He drew the bolts back and ripped the lock off, let the door sag open a couple of inches, put the bar down by the threshold, in case the door proved reluctant to open when they came at the run.

  “Ready, Nick?”

  “A moment, if you would be so very good, Mr Sam… That looks much like the cashbox… Yes, indeed… No vast sum, but better in our pockets than left to waste, sir. ‘Waste not, want not’, my dear, sainted Mama was used to say. Was she to look down on her son tonight, she could not but approve that he remembered her maxims.”

  Sam was inclined to doubt the degree of approbation the old lady might express for all of Nick’s actions that night. He wondered whether he might not be better advised to put a ball through his head than to bring him back to the White Horse as a trusted henchman – he was clearly a loony… but a useful one.

  “Better take ourselves away, Nick. We must not delay too long.”

  “True indeed, Mr Sam. Time is indeed of the essence, or so they say. There is a sheet or two of brown wrapping paper here, sir. Your candle to its edge now… flaring prettily, let us just place it to the oil-soaked timber here… See the flames spread, sir! Let us be gone!”

  They scuttled to the back door, pushed it closed behind them, wedging it with the crowbar so that inconvenient servants might not escape, and trotted into the shadows and up the street. They had reached the inn before there was any cry of alarm in the street. Ten minutes and they joined the landlord and his wife who came down to the front to discover what was happening.

  “Fire, it would seem, host, in the main street.”

  They agreed it seemed so and kicked the potboy out from his sleep under the bar counter to see what the case was. He trotted out and returned at the gallop.

  “Mr Pankhurst’s as is, Master! There be flames all over, so there be, and they say as ‘ow there ‘as bin bloody girt bangs inside, like what it was the barrels all a-blowin’, sir. The shop and all the bloody ‘ouse be on flames what is a ‘undred foot ‘igh, Master.”

  That was too good a sight to be missed and they all went out to see for themselves.

  Sam stood in the crowd and gravely watched the fires licking out of every window that remained. He shook his head with the others as the roof fell in a few minutes later, the internal walls burned through or blown down by the explosions, they imagined.

  “Lamp oil, old Pankhurst did sell, I know for certain-sure, sir,” the onlooker next to him said.

  “That would explain how the fire has taken such a hold of the building, no doubt,” Sam replied.

  There was a sudden great flare from the rear of the building and another series of explosions.

  ‘Rum barrels’, Sam thought, but said nothing.

  The word was passing through the crowd that the shop had been firmly locked and barred and that none had been rescued as a result.

  “Man and family and servants, must have been better part of a dozen inside, sir. An Act of God, we must say.”

  Sam gravely agreed, though thinking that it was an inappropriate term for Nick.

  “Wooden houses, sir, with thatched roofs, so dangerous to the occupant. Better far to build in brick or stone.”

  Sam agreed again; a stone-built house would have resisted the flames, lasted far longer.

  “Was this man a leading shopkeeper of the town, sir?”

  “Ay, sir, he was at that… Second only to good Master Bottomley, him what lives out at the Big House now, since Squire died and he took it over not three years since. Strange that were, sir, one day Squire ‘as all in ‘is own possession; the next, poor old feller is as dead as they come and wife and children is out on the street and Bottomley be inside as master. What ‘appened to Mrs Squire, no one ever did tell to me, but they didn’t ‘ang about around these parts, that was for sure. Mr Bottomley passed his old store acrost to Mr Pankhurst, so that ‘e ‘ad two places of his own to run, and set ‘imself up for a gentleman in Squire’s place. Ain’t no bugger ever asked the whyfore of it, neither, not for not wanting ‘is throat cut, like you might say.”

  Sam thanked the man for his enlightening words and made his way back to his room at the inn; he had a suspicion that he might well have destroyed the wrong target. No doubt the next few days would make it clear, but it might well be the case that Pankhurst was no more than the lieutenant. A pity if that was so, for they would have small chance of burning out Mr Bottomley – he would certainly keep a watch at his house now.

  “What now, Mr Sam?”

  “The stage, I think, Nick, and a quiet journey south before we hire job horses to take us back to Stoke at a proper place well distant from here.”

  “Might it be as well to hire in Stafford, Mr Sam? Let the message trickle back to this Bottomley that we had been here, as you might say, sir?”

  Sam sat back and thought for a few minutes. It was possible that the unknown Mr Bottomley would simply presume that his lieutenant had died in an ordinary house fire. Wooden houses that were lit by candles and oil lamps and heated by open wood, or increasingly coal, fires caught alight with distressing frequency. As literacy spread, so people read in bed by the light of a single candle, often enough dropping off to sleep with the candle still burning next to a straw-filled mattress or pallet; others were tempted by a last pipe of tobacco before sleep. Fire brigades were to be found only in the biggest cities, and they relied on hand pumps and buckets, their water supply a well or local stream. In the poorer areas of town the most common response to fire was to pull down the houses on either side so as to prevent a spread of the flames. The death of Pankhurst and his family might simply be written off as a nuisance, a not uncommon accident.

  It might well make sense to be sure that Bottomley knew exactly why and how his people had died. Retaliation had to be overt if it was to be effective.

  If Sam made Bottomley aware that the death of Pankhurst was no accident, how might he react?

  Would he be frightened into making peace or angered into pursuing war?<
br />
  “What do you think he’ll do, Nick?”

  “Buggered if I know, Mr Sam! Perhaps he will run away in a panic, like. Perhaps he will try to kill us all. Whichever, it will be a good joke.”

  “Perhaps. We shall go down to the livery in the morning. Break our fast and then take horse. I shall tell the ostler that we have achieved all we wished in Stafford. If we have to come here again, we shall make, as you might say, a bigger splash in their very small pond.”

  “Elegantly expressed, Mr Sam. I might cut the throats of his lads, so as to drive the message home, one might say?”

  “No. Better not. It might upset the Sheriff and the Lord Lieutenant and that sort. We do not want a battalion of Militia coming to Stoke with arrest warrants.”

  “A point indeed, Mr Sam. Perhaps I might trim the nose and ears of just one, to leave a token of our passing through?”

  “No. It could cause offence. The message should be that we prefer a peaceful existence, if possible. If any are to be trimmed, as you so elegantly express the procedure, then it should be Bottomley, or one of his kin, perhaps intercepted when riding out. That for another day, if he will not behave as a Christian gentleman should.”

  “I shall hold you to your pledged word, Mr Sam! It might be a most amusing task.”

  They chose the largest livery stable, close to the market square and in sight of the many stallholders and their customers.

  “Two good horses and a padding groom, for Stoke, if you please.”

  The padding groom would accompany them on his own horse and lead the animals back to Stafford. Most stables would only let out their best mounts on condition that they were accompanied.

  “For Stoke, you say, master?”

  “Yes. We have done all we intended in Stafford. We much hope we will not need to return. Are you owned by Bottomley?”

  “Mr Bottomley has a part share in the stables, sir.”

  “I suspected that he might. Do tell him that Sam from Stoke was here overnight.”

  “Sam from Stoke.”

  “Yes. Me. In person and still angry.”