Searcher

by T J Alexander

  ‘Old?’ says Martha Perry, looking puzzled. ‘Why, no. She wasn’t old. She would have been just a year or two older then than I am now. As far as I know, little Phoebe – that’s what they called the baby – was her first child.’

  ‘But if you were twelve years old at the time of the trial, then you must surely be no more than twenty years old now.’

  ‘Twenty-one, ma’am.’

  ‘Twenty-one!’ exclaims Adah, half-rising from her seat in astonishment. ‘You mean to say that Sarah Stone was only twenty-one, or a couple of years older? How is that possible? The hand bill that was distributed by the Magistrates Office describes the child-stealer as being aged about forty. And Catherine Creamer, the woman whose child was stolen, walked for miles across London in the company of this kidnapper. How could she have mistaken a person aged little more than twenty-one for a woman of forty?’

  But at that moment their conversation is disturbed by Sally, who flings open the studio door and marches into the parlour, triumphantly brandishing her work of art – a sinuous design of curling branches and leaves interspersed with a mass of strange squiggles.

  ‘Look, a star apple tree!’ shouts Sally, exulting. ‘A star apple tree!’

  ‘My apologies for the interruption,’ says Raphael, looking anything but apologetic. ‘My art student is very enthusiastic.’

  Martha Perry raises her eyes, and for the first time since she entered the room, gives a small smile.

  ‘What a sweet child,’ she says, ‘and so very like—’

  ‘Mrs Perry’s story is extraordinary!’ interrupts Adah, conscious of her own bad manners. She can feel her face flushing, and her heart beats with a mixture of emotions that she cannot wholly understand, but the strongest of which, she realizes, is a rising tide of anger. ‘How could the court have allowed so many contradictions to go unquestioned and so many questions to go unanswered?’

  ‘But Adah,’ says Raphael softly, after Martha Perry has taken her leave, and Adah knows at once what he is going to say, for she has been asking herself the very same question. ‘Catherine Creamer recognized Sarah Stone as the child-stealer. More importantly, she recognized the child in Sarah Stone’s arms as her own daughter Molly. The court record tells us that even before Mrs Creamer saw the infant, she recognized its crying voice as the voice of her lost daughter. How could she possibly have been mistaken? Molly was a twin. Catherine Creamer could see her twin daughters side by side, perhaps not perfectly alike, but very similar. Is it conceivable that she could have mistaken another woman’s baby for her own?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replies Adah slowly. ‘But just think. Catherine was surely desperate to find her child. Her neighbour Lizzie Murray told me that the child who was returned to Catherine seemed gaunt and wasted, very different from the plump baby who had been stolen from Catherine’s arms. I don’t know the answer to this puzzle. But I am sure that the magistrates should have employed a woman Searcher to examine Sarah Stone’s body for signs that she had borne a child. They did not do so. Why did they arrest a woman little more than half the age of the woman they were seeking? Why did they not question the identity of the woman who called herself Elizabeth Fisher? Why did they leave so many questions unanswered? These are people’s lives, Raphael. Whole human lives hung in the balance. How could the officers have treated them with so little care?’

  The Lambeth-Street Magistrates Office

  Samuel Miller spoons the pease pudding into his mouth with his right hand, while his left hand turns a page of his big leather-bound notebook.

  ‘Too much salt today,’ he remarks to his wife Jane, who sits in a corner of the kitchen feeding the baby. ‘It was better the way you made it last week.’ The only response from Jane is a sigh, but her husband, who is used to her sighs, pays no attention. His eyes are fixed on the notebook, re-reading the pages of detailed jottings and diagrams that he has made on the events of the past few days. His powers of concentration block out all distractions, including the snivellings of his daughter Hester, who sits opposite him at the kitchen table, whining and wriggling because she has been told she must stay in her seat until her bowl is empty.

  As soon as he has finished reading his notes for the third time, Samuel closes the book, pushes back his chair, and picks up the bulky bag full of equipment that he has left propped against the wall.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asks Jane.

  ‘To attend to some business. I’ll be back by dark.’

  As he walks through his workshop to the back door, his feet crunching on the wood-shavings that lie thickly over the flagstone floor, Samuel passes the half-finished cabinet that he promised to have ready by last Friday. There was a time, years ago now, when he would have felt ashamed of such unpunctuality: a time when the meticulous task of fitting each joint of wood perfectly, so that there was not the narrowest fissure of space between, was his greatest pride and delight. As a young man, he would spend hours absorbed in the task of studying the grain and colour of different woods – recognizing oak and ash, cedar and mahogany even with his eyes closed, from their smell and texture alone, and eagerly learning exactly which woods to combine into the intricate designs that his customers demanded. But now all that seems petty compared with his greater, more intriguing and more rewarding passion for solving crime and seeing miscreants brought to justice. It is, he often thinks, a craft in some ways similar to cabinet making. It needs the same eye for detail, the same skill in fitting the pieces together into a flawless pattern.

  The summer evening is still light, and Samuel has time to walk as far as Rosemary Lane before nightfall, and to take one more look at the yard of the Two Brewers Inn, where the area’s most recent robbery took place. It has been a warm day, though now the haze is gathering, turning the sky pale grey except to the west, where a thin line of coppery sunset breaks through the clouds, casting its light over the rooftops of Whitechapel. Even here, so close to the heart of the great city, the onset of dusk brings a moment of quiet to the streets after the frenzy of the day. In the Minories and Rosemary Lane, the stallholders are packing up their wares at the end of the day’s trading, their long shadows slanting across the cobbles as they do so. The raucous cries of the vendors have fallen quiet, and the wilder, darker cries of Rosemary Lane by night have yet to begin.

  The Two Brewers is a shabby little inn, just off the main street in White’s Yard. Samuel Miller remembers the days when this place, then known as the Bunch of Grapes, was always filled at night with throngs of noisy patrons, many of them (if the rumours were to be believed) engaged in criminal pursuits. Gambling, prostitution, trading in stolen goods, even the planning of murders, were all said to take place within the smoke-darkened walls of the Bunch of Grapes. The inn was shut down for a while, but then reopened under its new name, soon after the property (according to yet more rumours) was bought by a close relative of the Chief Magistrate, Sir Daniel. But the new landlord has so far failed to make the place thrive.

  The archway at the rear of the inn leads into a courtyard filled with a confusion of empty ale-kegs and mounds of sawdust, and redolent with the smell of stale beer. Two carts stand in the shadow of the inn wall, beneath the upper window through which the thieves apparently gained entry to the premises and broke into the landlord’s cash box. The case is a complicated one, for the landlord insists that the thieves were four of his patrons, who had been drinking in the bar below, immediately before slipping out into the night and scaling a ladder to enter his bedroom and steal his savings. When the alarm was raised, all the other patrons rushed out into the yard in pursuit of the thieves, and now every witness seems to have a different tale to tell of who was in the bar at which time, who fled from the scene and who was in pursuit. None of which is helped, of course, by the fact that most of the witnesses were drunk at the time.

  The story is that one of the thieves concealed a ladder and other tools beneath the carts in the yard, and that he and his fellow conspirators then crept out when the inn was at its
busiest, and used these to gain entrance to the upper window. Samuel has already measured the ladder which was found near the scene of the crime to make sure that it is long enough to reach the window, and examined the marks on the window sill that seem to have been made by muddy boots. The window itself was broken when he arrived on the scene, and the cash box had certainly been forced open. But Samuel does not entirely trust the landlord’s story. There are too many contradictions between his tale and the stories told by other witnesses. So, rather than knocking on the inn door, he uses this moment of gathering darkness to move around the courtyard quietly by himself, re-examining minor details that he may have overlooked before. The weather has been dry. The ground beneath the window is hard, and bears few traces of the crime, but, crouching down and studying the cracked dusty earth with its patches of shrivelled weeds, Samuel spots a couple of glints of light. Small shards of glass have fallen from the broken window above. If the glass was broken from without, most of the fragments would surely have fallen inwards, into the landlord’s bedroom, but if it was broken from within, to make it appear that there had been a robbery …

  I should conduct a small experiment, thinks Samuel, to see how fragments of glass fall when a window is broken. But glass costs money. Where can I find a suitable window to break? Still pondering this problem, he takes out his notebook and carefully sketches the precise position of the glass fragments in relation to the wall. Not, of course, that any of this evidence will ever appear before a court. He knows that his fellow officers, and above all Sir Daniel, consider his methods obsessive and slightly mad. They have a much simpler faith in the power of money and fear to solve all crimes: rewards for information, small gifts to cooperative witnesses, carefully worded threats to the less cooperative. Samuel values his work as an officer far too much to challenge their approach out loud; but he likes to keep his own records, conduct his own little experiments, and reach his own conclusions about guilt and innocence.

  The back door of the inn swings open for a moment, and a woman empties some slops into the yard. She closes the door without seeing Samuel, but suddenly he feels awkward, crouching here in the gathering gloom alone, almost like a common criminal himself. He stands up and quietly slips out of the yard, thinking that he will return briefly to the Lambeth Street office before heading home. He would like to take one more look at that ladder, which is now stowed with other evidence of the crime in the large storeroom at the back of the magistrates’ office.

  As he leaves the courtyard and enters Rosemary Lane, Samuel feels a hand pull the tail of his jacket, and turns to see a haggard female face close to his left shoulder. He can smell the gin on her breath.

  ‘On your own tonight, my dear?’ murmurs the female, as Samuel pulls himself away from her grasp with a shudder, and lengthens his stride.

  His head is still full of the burglary at the Two Brewers. The landlord insists that the gang of robbers included three brothers by the name of Watson, who were all regular patrons of the inn. He claims to have been alerted by the sound of breaking glass and the cries of a servant girl, and to have pursued the three miscreants down White’s Yard. But when Samuel, who was the first officer on the scene, went to the Watsons’ house, perhaps twenty minutes after the crime had been committed, he found the youngest of the Watson brothers in bed in his nightshirt, with his clothes folded neatly on a chair, a candle burning by his bedside, and old Mrs Watson insisting that her son had been in his bedroom all evening. She could, of course, be lying, but the order and calm of the bedroom gave substance to her story, and the candle by the bedside, as he noted, had burnt halfway down, which surely suggests that … Samuel’s reveries are interrupted by the wails of a small, ragged child, standing on a doorstep on the corner of the Minories and weeping pitifully, while a group of four other urchins play in the gutter nearby. For a moment he wonders if he should stop and help the child, but he has more important things on his mind, so he hurries on to the magistrates’ office, where the lamps are already lit by the doorway.

  Early evening is usually a quiet moment in the office. Morning is a time of clamour and chaos, when the citizens of Whitechapel awaken to find their storehouses broken into, or a dead or unconscious body on the corner of their street. The hours around midnight, too, bring a steady stream of calls for help, as the prostitutes and pick-pockets make a handsome trade from the drunken crowds who spill out of the inn doors into the dark laneways north of the Commercial Road. Dusk is normally a lull in the day, but today, as Samuel Miller pushes open the door of the office, he is a little surprised to be confronted by his fellow officer, Moses Fortune.

  ‘Ah, Sam,’ cries Moses, ‘I have been looking for you. There’s a lady and gentleman here as would like to talk to you.’

  He hates being called by the diminutive ‘Sam.’

  The ‘lady and gentleman’, he assumes, will be friends of the Watsons, eager to offer their alibis for the robbery at the Two Brewers. But as soon as he spots the oddly-assorted couple standing in a corner of the small office to one side of the empty courtroom, he realizes that he is mistaken. These two are altogether a different class of person from the patrons of the inn. The woman is about his own age, small and simply dressed, with a grey shawl wrapped around her shoulders, while the man – tall, dark haired, and of indeterminate age – has the air of a gentleman about him, though his jacket is worn at the elbows, and the toes of his boots are scuffed.

  ‘Samuel Miller!’ pronounces the woman, as he enters the room. Her tone instantly brings back to his mind the voice of Mrs Cobbly, the formidable teacher at the dame school he attended as a small boy, who always had the power to leave him quaking in his shoes, despite the fact that he had been one of the school’s quieter and more diligent pupils.

  ‘You may not remember me,’ continues the woman, in the same decisive tone, ‘but you knew my late husband, William Flint, who was Beadle and Headborough of the Liberty of Norton Folgate.’

  ‘Indeed,’ says Samuel in surprise, ‘I knew him well. Such a sad loss. Allow me to offer my condolences, my very deepest condolences, Mrs Flint. He was a fine man, your late husband. A very fine man indeed. Much admired by all who knew him. So thorough in all his methods. I had occasion to call on his help myself – a matter of matching the shape of a crowbar with the marks on a length of stolen piping, as I recall. And to die at such a relatively young age—’

  ‘And this,’ interrupts the woman, ‘Is Mr Raphael DaSilva. He … His uncle was the Liberty’s Overseer.’

  It seems an odd explanation for the gentleman’s presence, but Samuel has no opportunity to question it, for Adah Flint continues, ‘We are here about a crime which you and your fellow officers investigated some eight years ago. The kidnapping of the infant daughter of one Catherine Creamer. A woman named Sarah Stone was arrested and found guilty of the crime. I believe she was transported. You will surely remember the case.’

  Remember? How could he forget? He has pushed the affair into the recesses of his mind so often, and yet it recurs, in the wakeful moments while his wife Jane lies sleeping on the far side of their shared bed, and the cries of the night-watchmen come and go in the street below their bedroom, and the mice scuttle to and fro behind the wainscot. There is surely nothing he could have done to change the outcome of the case. But still it lingers among his ghosts, alongside the look of terror on the face of William Golding, whom he prosecuted for burglary, as the fellow was led to the gallows, sobbing out his protestations of innocence every step of the way …

  ‘Mrs Flint, Mr DaSilva, please take a seat over there. I will fetch a lamp,’ says Samuel.

  This distraction gives him a moment to consider how to respond.

  He returns with the lighted lamp and places it on a side table, from where its fickle flame sends distorted shadows flickering across the wood-panelled walls with their row of dark portraits of solemn bewigged magistrates. In the centre of the row, a large portrait of the chief magistrate Sir Daniel Williams, seated before the silho
uette of the Tower of London, looms over them. The uneven lamplight makes the portrait seem even bigger than it really is. Adah Flint, looking up at the portraits, encounters Sir Daniel’s gaze – not so much a steely gaze, she thinks, but rather one overflowing with self-confidence. The small half-smile above the plump, dimpled chin gives the face of the chief magistrate an air of perfect serenity and self-approbation. This is the face of someone whose power is beyond challenge.

  By contrast, the man who sits before her, his sallow, uneven features half in lamplight and half in shadow, looks the perfect picture of discomfort and uncertainty. Samuel Miller’s head is cocked awkwardly to one side, and he avoids her gaze as he begins, ‘That crime, as you say, occurred eight years ago. Or rather, a little less than eight years, if my memory serves me correctly. Perhaps seven years and eight or nine months, if we are to be precise. And it did indeed take place here in Whitechapel, close to the Commercial Road. Just off the Commercial Road, I should say. The child-stealer lived in Bishopsgate, on the opposite side from Norton Folgate. So if I may say so – if I may be so bold as to say this – it had no direct connection with your Liberty, that is, with the Liberty of Norton Folgate. So, that being the case, it puzzles me a little that the widow of the Liberty’s Beadle – a most respected beadle though he certainly was, and most grateful though I am for the many kindnesses he showed me personally – it puzzles me somewhat that the beadle’s widow and the nephew of Liberty’s Overseer should be asking questions about this case now.’

  ‘It may not have been a matter for the Liberty then, but it has become one since,’ replies Adah, struggling to contain her impatience at the officer’s exasperating indirectness. ‘Another child of Catherine Creamer was found dead on wasteland within the boundaries of the Liberty, and this has made it necessary for us to look at the case again. I am not only the widow of William Flint, but also Searcher of the Liberty. It is in that capacity that I am here today.’