Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (10 page)

City streets were pitted with small workshops competing to fulfill demand for fancy shirting and coats but even in decent shops the pay was low and the hours either irregular or tediously long.
Seventy-two-hour working weeks
were common. Eyes were strained in the dim lights, fingers were roughened by needles and bodies ached as they bent over the
twenty thousand stitches
needed for every handmade shirt. It was an insecure, shifting, seasonal profession and it fed on a floating population of workers. If Franz Müller had planned to travel to America, his decision was probably determined by the season. Parliament would soon end for the summer and the wealthy were already streaming from the capital: summer business was always slack.

As he waited, Tanner considered the fact that a gold chain worth three pounds represented between three weeks’ and one
month’s wages for even a thriving journeyman tailor. The cost of the cheap beaver hat bought by Matthews for Müller added up to several days’ pay while the guinea-each silk toppers favoured by bankers were more than a week’s salary – well beyond his normal reach. The tailor sought by Inspector Tanner was clearly worldly enough to walk into Death’s shop without drawing undue attention to himself and yet canny enough to dodge and survive in the underbelly of the city.

In Park Terrace, the two-storey, narrow terraced houses were still and the street was deserted for the five long hours of the detective’s vigil. In the dawn chill a low mist hung over the grass in nearby Victoria Park. Signs of life began: doors slammed behind porters leaving for work at their docks warehouses and barrow-sellers setting out to restock their carts.
At six o’clock
Tanner saw movement at the windows of the dingy cottage at number 16.

Interrupting Ellen Blyth and her husband George, a messenger in the City, in the scramble to get seven children ready for the new day, Tanner entered the narrow hallway of the house. Unused to police visits, the family was startled.

Mrs Blyth answered his questions unhesitatingly. She confirmed that their
two small upstairs rooms were generally let
in order to supplement the tight family income. A young tailor, about twenty-three or twenty-four years old, known to them by the name of Franz Müller, had lodged in the first-floor back room since late May,
paying four shillings a week
. Currently, the room was empty.
Müller had given proper notice
and left for America on the previous Thursday – 14 July – five days after the attack.

Tanner’s volley of questions came fast. Mrs Blyth answered that she was fond of Müller; she had known him a good year before he came to lodge with them and had
always known him to be
a quiet, inoffensive, well-behaved young man
.
I had plenty of opportunity of judging of his temper in every respect, he used to take his meals with us – he did so on the Sunday – he was of
a very kind and humane disposition
. Müller had, she said, left home on Saturday 9 July at about eleven in the morning. When she and her husband went to bed twelve hours later
he had not come home then, he had a latch-key. I did not hear him come in that night.
The next morning – Sunday – she saw him
between 8 and 9 o’clock – he breakfasted with us. He stopped at home during the day, and in the evening he went out with me and my husband, and came back with us. Yes
, she repeated,
he spent the day with us on Sunday.

It was crucial to Inspector Tanner to discover exactly what Müller had been wearing on both Saturday the 9th and Sunday 10 July.
I am sure of the trousers he wore on the Sunday
, said Ellen.
They were the same as those on the Saturday
. Her husband, George, added that
it was about the 7th that he hurt his foot
.
It was hurt by a cart running up against it and from that time he wore a slipper, up to the Sunday. He wore a slipper on the Sunday morning and I went out with him on the Sunday for a walk in Victoria Park, and my wife went with us.
Limping around the park that Sunday, Müller might have passed just yards from the place where Briggs’ body had been found on the line by the Duckett’s Canal bridge. Tanner also noted that the German’s foot had not been so badly hurt that he had been forced to rest on a bench.

Handing the detective a single slipper that had been left behind in his room, Mrs Ellen Blyth said she had noticed nothing out of sorts with her lodger on Sunday: he was
in his usual cheerful spirits
all day. She had not heard of the murder for several days and then it had never crossed her mind to link it with Müller. Asked whether the German owned a chain, she told Tanner that on the evening of Monday 11 July Müller had come in with a friend of his called John Hoffa. In the course of their conversation Müller had shown her a new gold watch chain. He seemed pleased with it, though she confessed that she had not taken any particular notice.

The two young tailors, she said, were very often together – in fact, during the week following the murder Hoffa had shared Müller’s room between Monday and Wednesday, not having rent for his own lodgings. As far as she knew, Müller had left London for New York on a ship called the
Victoria
. He had sent her a letter, dated Saturday 16 July, posted by the ship’s pilot when he had left the ship at Worthing on the south coast. Taking the letter down from the mantelpiece, she passed it to Tanner. He read:
On the Sea, July 16, in the morning.
Dear Friends
, I am glad to confess that I cannot have a better time as I have; if the sun shines nice and the wind blows fair, as it is at the present moment, everything will go well. I cannot write any more, only I have no postage. You will be so kind to take that letter in
.

Mrs Blyth now remembered that when Müller first arrived to live with them he had brought a long black box containing his clothes and another, cardboard, hat box. The hat box was still in his old room. Tanner followed Ellen upstairs. There was the box, bearing the name of a maker: Walker of 49 Crawford Street, Marylebone. In every other respect Müller’s room was stripped and empty. They were several days too late.

CHAPTER 11

Tuesday 19 July 1864

Six days after the attack on Thomas Briggs, Müller’s ship had sailed with the tide, passing through the East Dock into the Shadwell Basin and out to the Thames. Following the curve of the river to its estuary it had turned south, skirting the coast; by the time he wrote to the Blyths on Saturday, the
Victoria
had cleared the shoulders of the Downs.

Was it possible that a guilty man would make no attempt to cover his tracks? Was his carelessness with the hat and jewellery box, his parading of the new chain and ring and his openness about his plans a sign of his innocence or his stupidity? Was his foot really injured days before the murder as he had told Eliza Matthews and the Blyths, or had it been hurt as he leapt from a moving train?

Half an hour after leaving Park Terrace, Tanner arrived at the lodgings of Müller’s friend, twenty-seven-year-old journeyman tailor John (or Johan) Hoffa, who confirmed that he had worked with Müller at Samuel Hodgkinson’s business in Threadneedle Street and that Müller had worn a slipper on his injured right foot between Thursday 7 July (two days before the attack on
Thomas Briggs) and the middle of the following week. Hoffa was insistent that Müller’s departure had been planned rather than precipitate. Anyone who knew his friend, he said, had been told about his plans to leave for America for at least a fortnight before he boarded ship.

When Tanner asked about Müller’s finances, Hoffa said that his friend had been working at Hodgkinson’s for about six weeks up to 2 July and that he had seen him several times with enough money to pay for his ticket to America. During the week before he left, Müller had stitched some new shirts for his planned voyage and earned a little extra money by helping Hoffa with some contract work. On Saturday 9 July both he and Müller had worked at the house of Godfrey Repsch, a German contract-work tailor at 12½ Jewry Street, Aldgate, a narrow court in the labyrinthine streets near the eastern edge of the City. When Müller arrived mid-morning, he had changed into a pair of old trousers and slippers and worked on his shirts until the light grew too dim to continue. At about a quarter to eight he put back on the trousers he had arrived in – Hoffa was not able to describe them – pulled on a dark frock coat and left. Wearing a boot on his left and a slipper on his injured right foot he told Hoffa that he was heading to Camberwell to visit his sweetheart. Hoffa imagined that he had taken
an omnibus over London Bridge
from one of the stands either on Gracechurch Street or on King William Street, right by the bridge.

Inspector Tanner had already noted the proximity of Müller’s workplace in Threadneedle Street to Briggs’ bank in Lombard Street: the two grand thoroughfares were linked by numerous alleyways and lanes that cut through behind the Exchange. Müller’s lodgings in Old Ford also put him within a short walk of the Duckett’s Canal bridge where Briggs’ body was found. This new piece of information – that Müller had journeyed south by omnibus on the night of Saturday 9 July – reinforced the detective’s sense of the odd congruence of the two men’s
movements. Camberwell in the south adjoined the neighbourhood of Peckham, where Briggs had travelled that same evening to dine with his niece. The omnibus routes to each destination differed but they also intersected: on their return to the City both bus routes converged at Borough High Street and both crossed London Bridge.

Müller was not destitute. He had relatively stable work and good lodgings. But while Thomas Briggs had devoted his working life to Robarts, Curtis and worn the uniform of the British banking elite, Müller seemed to have drifted between employers and displayed a vanity that encouraged tastes well beyond his means. Inspector Tanner had to consider whether the tailor’s aspiration might also have bred resentment. Had Briggs’ black bankers’ bag and gold watch chain caught the poor tailor’s eye? Had the attack, as some papers surmised, been premeditated?

According to Hoffa, Müller had been to the London docks on the morning of Monday 11 July. Dodging out of the City past the Tower of London, the sail-makers’ shops, rope suppliers and tinned-food grocers, slipping through the main entrance to the western docks with its fortress-like brick walls twenty feet high, Müller would have joined teeming crowds of seamen, labourers and job-seekers. The docks were a world of noise, moored with more than three hundred vessels and filled with the clatter of cranks and hydraulic lifts, the creaking of the rigging, jabbering warehousemen and touting porters. Assailed by the fumes of rum, then the sick stench of hides and the thick fragrances of coffee, tobacco and spice, Müller had – according to Hoffa – searched the North Quay and found the office of Grinnell & Co. who were offering cheap passage to America on an old-fashioned sailing ship called the
Victoria
, due to leave for New York at the end of the week. Four pounds was more than he earned in a month and Hoffa told Tanner that Müller returned from the docks claiming that he did not have enough money for a ticket and asking his friends for loans. He assumed that Müller had spent all the money
he had seen him with the new chain and ring his friend was now wearing and, when he asked him about it, Müller said that he had just bought them from a man at the docks. Knowing that Müller owned an old watch given to him by his father, Hoffa wondered why his friend did not pawn that for the fare.

By midweek Müller was still trying to raise enough money for his ticket and, on Wednesday the 13th, he sent Mrs Repsch to Hoffa’s work to ask for help. Hoffa gave her a spare set of his own clothes to pawn for twelve shillings and received in return two separate pawn tickets. These were for goods she had already pawned for Müller at Mr Annis’ shop in the Minories: a dark frock coat for six shillings and a chain for more than a pound. To Hoffa it had seemed like a good deal.

Pawnbrokers were normally the haunts of the desperate and tailors like Müller, surrounded by affluent City men who represented unattainable financial freedom, were fodder for their business.
Close to seven hundred pawn shops
were established within a radius of ten miles from the Royal Exchange, each of them averaging five thousand pledges a month for bundles of clothes, tarnished jewellery, furniture, linen, plate or anything that might raise enough to bring temporary relief in hard times. Announcing themselves with three brass balls above the door (popularly known as ‘swinging dumplings’) or a painted sign with three red balls on a blue background, some brokers were respectable; more often they were dirty money-lending shops in shadowy side streets. Their stock hung in the rafters or was heaped in ramshackle cases: silver teaspoons, watches, doubtful rings, prayer books, neckerchiefs, strings of coral or remnants of silk or satin – even children’s shoes.

Pawnbroker business was conducted quickly. Bundles were received over the wooden counters in return for the short-term loan of cash representing perhaps half the value of the item. Two tickets were made out by hand, each with a description of the goods and the (often false) name of the customer. One was
attached to the articles which were wrapped in brown paper and stored and the other was given to the seller until payday or a windfall allowed for it to be redeemed. Anything left unclaimed beyond its due date was sold.

For the inspectors of the Metropolitan Police, these shops were part of the common round of detective work and Tanner was determined that all Müller’s recent transactions must be investigated. He wanted to find Thomas Briggs’ missing gold watch and to trace it back to his suspect, and he wanted the coat pawned by Mrs Repsch. Whoever murdered Thomas Briggs would have had blood on his clothes. Had Müller worn that coat on the night of the attack? The Blyths were certain that he had worn the same clothes on Saturday and on Sunday, a suit with no obvious sign of having been recently and rapidly cleaned. But if the black coat turned out to have bloodstains overlooked by the Blyths it would link Müller to the assault on Thomas Briggs.