The Hangman's Child

by Francis Selwyn

  Sergeant Verity is in receipt of information from an officer of Newgate Gaol. This witness was on supervision when Rann received his last visit from a person claiming to be a workhouse missioner, accompanied by a second person alleging herself to be the prisoner's daughter. Sergeant Verity has the honour to request that Mr Croaker will read the enclosed report upon this incident.

  Sergeant Verity believes the first impostor to be Edward Warren Hawkins, familiarly known as 'Orator' Hawkins, dismissed from his position as an attorney's clerk three years since, following allegations of fraud. Prosecution of this case was dropped on the complaint being withdrawn. The young person now acting as his confederate appears to be one Suzanne Berry, formerly detained at Tothill Fields House of Correction for six months under the vagrancy laws. The means by which two such persons gained access to the prisoners' consulting-room remain to be investigated.

  From further information which Sergeant Verity has the honour to present, gathered by a prison officer present at the visit, a criminal conspiracy of importance appears to be in contemplation by those who sought the deaths of Quinn and Rann. The identities of Bragg, Mulligan, Nash and 'Moonbeam', are known to Sergeant Verity from previous inquiries. Though not lately convicted, Bragg is a violent criminal who served seven years' transportation in his youth for warehouse burglary. Alfred 'Catskin' Nash is known as a 'putter-up', though acquitted for lack of identification in the trial of those indicted for the robbery of Acutt's Linen Drapery, Westminster Road. William Mulligan has been twice convicted of living upon immoral earnings and once for assault and battery. Henry Jenks, a fairground prize-fighter known as 'Moonbeam', was convicted with Mulligan on the last of these charges.

  In the light of the enclosed information, Sergeant Verity further requests that consideration may be given by the Home Office to a stay of execution in the case of James Patrick Rann, while the evidence given against him by Bragg and others is further investigated. Though Detective Sergeant Fowler was able to arrest Rann while the suspect was restrained by Bragg and Jenks, no weapon was found at the time with which the accused could have stabbed the victim. The blood upon Rann's clothing appears solely the result of having been held down upon the wounded man. The information which is now to hand may point to Quinn being murdered by others and the prisoner Rann being victim of a conspiracy to pervert the course of public justice.

  Sergeant Verity has the honour to remain Inspector Croaker's obedient humble servant.

  W. Verity, Sgt., 12 May 1860

  From Deputy Commander Detective Division, Whitehall Place, SW

  Chief Inspector Croaker is in receipt of Sergeant Verity's memorandum of the 12th inst. Mr Croaker takes this opportunity to remind Sergeant Verity that it is not his place to address his superiors as if he knew the business of the Division better than they.

  Inspector Croaker is dismayed that Sergeant Verity is party to the unauthorized passage of confidential information from the prison service. Mr Croaker is communicating his misgivings to the Prison Commissioners for consideration and action. Mr Croaker understands that Officer Babb has been suspended from his duties while disciplinary charges are considered. Should Mr Croaker learn that Sergeant Verity has passed such confidential information to other persons, he will unhesitatingly follow the same disciplinary process.

  Mr Croaker cannot determine why Sergeant Verity should calumniate a missioner who sought to bring the prisoner Rann to repentance. On inquiry, Mr Croaker finds the visitor to have been the Reverend Lewis Maybury, who sailed by appointment on the following day to join the chaplaincy to the English colony in Montevideo. The fact that Mr Maybury can no longer answer for himself in the circumstances is no reason why he should be defamed in his absence. Mr Croaker trusts that Sergeant Verity will think of this.

  The criminal conspiracy which Sergeant Verity alleges appears no more than a chimaera. The characters and records of Bragg, Nash, Mulligan, and Jenks are sufficiently documented in the files of the Detective Police, as they are in 'H' Division, Metropolitan Police, an area in which these men remain under the scrutiny of Detective Inspector Fowler and his colleagues.

  In this connection, Sergeant Verity will have the goodness to familiarize himself with Mr Fowler's promotion and substantive rank before making any further communication.

  Mr Croaker need scarcely remind Sergeant Verity that the prisoner Rann was convicted upon what the trial judge described as the plainest and most conclusive evidence. His Lordship informed the prisoner, upon conviction, that he could offer not the smallest hope that the sentence of the law would not be carried into effect. That advice was tendered to the Home Office. In such circumstances, it is not the policy of the Home Secretary to interfere with the process of the law nor the decisions of the courts.

  In conclusion, Sergeant Verity will oblige Mr Croaker by pursuing his present detachment to the river police with more diligence and effect than has been evident heretofore. The smuggling of tobacco and other contraband from vessels moored at the Thames wharves remains an affront to the commercial probity of the City of London and a criminal assault upon the finances of Her Majesty's Treasury. Sergeant Verity will look to this matter forthwith.

  H. Croaker, Insp. of Constabulary, 13 May 1860

  The dawn cloud broke into a mackerel sky, a blue vault above smoke-grey drifts. Jack Rann looked up at this distant square of light, high above the soaring granite walls of the airing-yard.

  Outside each death cell was a walled space, where a man or woman might walk without supervision. Escape through these yards was the first thought that crossed the minds of the condemned and the last hope that died. In a hundred years none had escaped from Newgate's airing-yards. Three had injured themselves in brief but futile attempts.

  From dusk until dawn, the door from the cell to the yard was locked. By daylight, Rann might walk in the paved area as he pleased. He had learnt every angle of it, every crack in the York paving, like a schoolroom map. It was twenty feet by thirty, the bottom of a towering shaft of polished stone, sixty feet high with its square of London sky. He laid his hand on the surface of the wall. Smooth as glass. No crevice nor crack, not so much as a chip in the stone that a man might work upon, even if the interval between sentence and execution allowed him time. No mortar-gap for the searching fingers, no ledge for the toes.

  He had walked here, day by day, head lowered as if resigned to death and eternity. They would like to see him penitent, if they bothered to look. The pasty chaplain might smile on him. To the turnkeys, he seemed safe enough where he was.

  Lupus had been sure to tell him a tale that Rann had heard long ago. How a poor fool, maddened by his fate, flew at the walls of the yard a few hours before they came to fetter him for the gallows. The terror of the noose, aided by smuggled hessian tied under his boots, briefly defied the implacable sheen of granite. Somehow, the poor devil had got up the angle of the corner to ten, almost twenty feet. He was not halfway to the top, where the razor-honed steel of a cheveau-de-frise would cut his hands to pieces. Defeated, beyond all help, he braced himself in the angle while they watched from below. His strength and resolve failed. He fell back down the shaft on to the stone paving. Perhaps he thought they would never hang a man shattered by the impact.

  An hour later, crying in pain, the bones of his legs splintered, he was carried to the noose on a chair, jeered by the crowd for his lack of pluck. Rann thought of the poor fellow in the cold air of early morning and shuddered.

  A water drop, heard in the quiet night but scarcely audible now, fell by his foot. He kept his head down and smiled. Only when he reached the far side of the sunless yard did he lean his back against the wall. He gazed up at the city sky and knew the dice had rolled. Other men might allow a day or two for making plans. For Handsome Jack, it was now or never.

  Suppose, somehow, he could climb the polished height? Fifty feet above the ground, twenty feet higher than the roof of the death-wards whose wall formed one side of the airing-yard, the revolving cheveau-de
-frise ran round the granite. There was no way over it, under it, or round it. It was a stout wooden pole set with unbroken lines of razor-edged steel blades that would slice off the fingers that clutched it. The blades on the inner side came so close to the wall that they almost scraped the surface. No man would get between them and the slippery stone.

  The device revolved freely. Sometimes in the night he had heard a distant mouse-screech of metal as the wind caught the blades. Even if there were gloves thick enough to clutch its razor fineness, the steel would revolve downwards at the first touch, throwing him fifty feet on to the paving below.

  The builders had done their job well. What then? There was a wooden support for the cheveau-de-frise, running round the wall several feet below it, set as thick with spikes as a hedgehog's back. A man would skewer his hands or tear his fingers on it but he might hold there. Even then, he would still be below the cheveau-de-frise with no way past it.

  Small wonder that the condemned looked at such fortifications and trusted instead to a reprieve. But when the reprieve was refused, a death-watch entered the cell and all hope was gone.

  As he gazed upwards, a seagull glided across the brightening sky and the clocks began to strike. Rann thought of the ocean, the sea-bells that warned of rocks, and longed for such freedom as the white bird's.

  How would a man with nothing but the clothes he wore climb fifty feet of sheer, polished granite? Until that was accomplished, the cheveau-de-frise and the support with its iron spikes scarcely mattered. Small wonder that his gaolers allowed him to 'air' as much as he pleased.

  Like the gleam of a steel-tipped arrow, the morning light struck another falling water-drop. It vanished into the dampness of the paving in the far corner of the yard. High in that narrow corner angle, the commissioners had installed an iron cistern. When Newgate was modernized it acquired a fresh-water supply. Rann measured the height to the cistern with his eye and thought it nearer forty feet than thirty-five. Ten feet more and there was the spiked support rail. A few feet further and the blades of the revolving cheveau-de-frise blocked all progress. Ten feet above that, if a man had wings, he would still find himself marooned on a high wall in the centre of the prison.

  He walked another circuit, trailing his hand on the chill of smooth granite. Where the cistern had been installed, the surface was a little grazed. No more than that. No toehold, no fingertip crevice. Shoe-leather would slip like a skate on ice. In case they were watching him, he walked on. Only one substance might cling to that lightly grazed surface. Shoe-leather would never do it.

  Rann had no wish to be the fourth man crippled by Newgate's walls but his heart beat faster. The judge at his trial, a cadaverous, thin-blooded amateur of pain, had killed all hope of reprieve. Tomorrow, perhaps today, they would put a guard in his cell.

  He stood upright from the wall. Before the mackerel sky had cleared to summer blue, he would be free - or he would be dead.

  The sooner the better. He walked back into the cell and listened. The warders might be in the passageway, though he could not hear them. Lupus and Jessup exchanged little conversation. He sat down on the wooden bed whose mattress he had rolled at dawn and whose blanket he had folded. The spy-hole was shut. Slowly, in case they were watching, he unlaced the stiff prison boots, drew them off, and eased his insteps with his hands. It was not the act of a man planning an escape; only a fool would attempt it in bare feet. As it happened, Rann had known all his life that it was the one way in which it might be done.

  He listened and still caught no sound. Perhaps they were not there. With each death-ward so securely locked and bolted, there must be times when neither guard was present.

  He drew a deep breath, walking slowly and barefoot into the shadow of the yard. Speed would come presently. In the course of his life he had grown wise in the ways of officials and authorities. Escape from Newgate was known to be impossible. Therefore, if Lupus or Babb unlocked the cell and saw him neither in there nor in the yard, the warder would first suppose that he had been taken away by higher authority. The delay while they checked might give him his chance.

  From the tight corner of the granite walls, above which the cistern hung, he could see the cell interior through the open door. If they entered in the next few minutes, he was done for. Better to wait until they had come and gone - or go now? Go now! Go now!

  His skull rang with the thought like a bugle-call.

  He thrust his back into the angle of the wall, hands behind him, testing and moulding against the slight roughness of the stone, grazed by the installation of the cistern above.

  He raised his left leg, braced one bare foot and then the other against the adjacent side of the narrow corner. The softer soles and heels of his bare feet moulded themselves to the surface as boots would never do. Rann had known the knack of it for almost thirty years. For all their cleverness, his captors never considered that the orphan thief had first been a sweep's boy. To climb with hands behind him on one surface, bare feet on the other, body pressed into the corner, was one of the oldest tricks of childhood's trade. The twisting and distortion of the body in such angles made cripples of those who outlived their childhood. Jack Rann had saved himself from that. Put up factory chimneys and domestic flues, he had climbed at last to the very top of an engineering stack, slipped down the far side, and left his master-sweep for an apprenticeship in picking pockets.

  Another deep breath of courage. The moulded suction of the hands and feet held him in the corner of the wall, his feet clear of the ground. His heart stopped as a foot slipped. He lost purchase and found himself standing again. He began once more, lost footing on glacial granite, and tried a third time. Lodged in the narrow corner, he moved one hand cautiously upwards behind his back, took the pressure on it and slowly moved the other. The art of the feet was to move them like claws, one by one. Inch by inch, he was climbing now. The yard was three feet below him at a guess, the cell door still unopened. His hands sweated but held. The York paving was four feet down ... five ... and six. Once he thought he heard the metal ram of a key in a lock. Pressing the bruised granite with all his strength he waited motionless, as though this would make him invisible, but he heard no more. It was another cell, not his. His might be next.

  The art of it was to find patches where the hauling up of the iron tank had roughened the stone. Once, fifteen feet above the yard, he found only a sleek and chilly surface. His hand slipped an inch but he pressed hard and checked it for a vital second, heart beating in his throat.

  He paused to wipe away the sweat from his hands, one by one, on his shirt. Shirt and trousers were all that he wore. He looked down steadily. Twenty feet? Glancing up, he thought the metal square of the cistern was nearer now than the paving of the yard. The narrow features contorted with energy and concentration, as he struggled in the stone angle. For a moment he lost his breath and held still with the practised self-discipline of a roof-top thief. All the same, at thirty, he was already an old man playing a young man's game.

  Beyond the prison, a clock chimed the quarter. Rann was surprised that only fifteen minutes had passed since he stood in the airing-yard, gazing up to where he now writhed for his life against the granite.

  Another breath and a cautious movement of one hand. Thirty feet surely? Above him, an iron rim round the base of the cistern would be in his grasp if only he could stand upright.

  Instead, he pushed his back hard in the angle and worked himself a few inches higher, one hand and then the other, fingers splayed to find the next slight roughness of the stone, right foot and then the left, keeping the pressure even, moulding the soles of his feet for purchase there. Despite the smoothness, he felt that his left foot was bleeding. The stone was chipped sharply here and there by the fixing of the iron supports below the cistern. But the roughness that broke his skin also gave him safety, as he closed his mind to pain.

  At last, he reached up cautiously and touched the iron rim round the base of the cistern, above and to one side.

/>   Rann breathed deep again. With his right hand, he held the cold iron rim, gritted by rust. He steadied himself, feet against the granite. With a sob of breath, he snatched upwards with the left hand.

  His arms ached while he hung there, as though he had been hoisted on a strappado. To ease the pain, a fool would now try to pull himself up the iron flank - and would fall. Dangling from the bolted rim, praying that it had not at some point flaked away, he moved hand by hand to where the cistern met the wall. An angled strut supported it. Those who offered such a perch had thought a man must either fall before he reached the tank or would never get past the cheveau-de-frise above it.

  He drew his left knee up and lodged his foot in the iron angle of the support, taking the weight that had tortured his biceps. Pushing up, he held the top rim of the iron cistern with the grip of one hand and then the other. Using the strength of his foot in the angle, he got his right forearm on the upper cistern-rim. He drew his foot cautiously from the iron bracket, snatched with his left hand and eased his second arm on to the upper rim. By a heave and a kick, he pulled himself on to the ledge of the cistern-cover. He stood on the flat, ribbed metal, his chest against the granite wall. Now he could reach up to touch the spikes guarding the support ten feet below the cheveau-de-frise.

  He listened for movement in the morning stillness of the prison below him and still heard nothing. What had seemed like half an hour on the granite surface was perhaps no more than five minutes. Two sides of the yard away from him, the roof of the death-wards now appeared almost level with his feet. For the first time, he dared to promise himself that he might be free. He felt for the spikes of the support-rail and knew that there must be minutes of pain as the price of life. First, he tore a strip of cotton from the hem of his shirt, tore it again and wrapped half round each hand.