Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (22 page)

Müller’s return was the subject of bar-room conjecture and breakfast-table postulation and a flood of correspondence from all parts of the country addressed to both the police and the Home Office was once again unleashed. At the Worship Street Police Court north of the City, another shabby drunk had been brought before the magistrates to answer claims that he was Müller’s accomplice. Standing five feet nine or ten inches tall with straight red whiskers and a wiry frame, the man was said to have bragged
we were hard up
; we wanted money; we went to Fenchurch Street, waited there … and took two first class tickets to Hackney Wick … I struck him twice; Müller struck him three times
. It did not take long for the Bow police to discover that the man, named George Augustus King, could not have been involved. He had been
seen drinking
in the Mitford Castle tavern from eight o’clock on the evening of the murder.

During the afternoon of Thursday 15 September, twelve days after setting out from Manhattan and more than eight weeks after he had left Liverpool in pursuit of Franz Müller, Detective Inspector Richard Tanner stood on the deck of the
Etna
as it approached Cape Clear, forty miles off the southern coast of Ireland.

CHAPTER 21

The Appearance of Guilt

As the
Etna
hove into sight at half-past two on the afternoon of Thursday 15 September, the telegraph station at Cape Clear alerted the authorities to her impending arrival. At eight-thirty the crowds gathered on every available lookout around Queenstown harbour cheered as a bright light shot up in the far distance and broke into a shower of embers. The
Etna
, as all ships were compelled to do, had
signalled her approach
.

An hour later the sea-swell was silvered by an almost-full moon. Steaming slowly towards Roche’s Point, the ship passed the convict fortifications of Spike Island and the government storehouses before reaching its anchoring point outside the harbour. A steam tender took on the mail and thirty-five of her 205 passengers. Only one reporter (from the
Telegraph
) was allowed to jump on board.
Within twenty minutes
, the ship had resumed her course for England.

Having secured the opportunity for an exclusive interview with Detective Inspector Tanner, the
Telegraph
’s reporter made his way directly amidships and spent the next few hours closeted with him, listening as he related the details of their weeks in New
York, the facts of the arrest and the charged atmosphere of the Chambers Street court hearing. The next morning British newspapers alerted their millions of readers that Müller was expected to arrive in Liverpool that afternoon. Fearing unruly crowds, Tanner planned to keep Müller on board until Saturday morning when they would make their way quietly to Lime Street Station and the nine o’clock express to London.

As the
Etna
entered the Mersey estuary
Müller changed
into clean linen and his better clothes. To his threadbare light trousers, dark coat and waistcoat he added a black silk tie with white spots, a plain white collar and a gold stud. Combing his hair and donning a light, broad-brimmed straw hat procured by Inspector Walter Kerressey, he carefully packed up his few belongings and prepared to present himself as favourably as possible.

The Liverpool steam tug
Fury
got alongside the
Etna
off the Formby lightship at about half-past nine on Friday night, ferrying a small force of four detectives and two chief police officers. Passengers and crew crowded the side of the ship as Müller was led, without handcuffs, onto the deck and across a wide plank thrown between the two boats. This might have been his moment to attempt an escape and the
Telegraph
reporter, watching their every move, noticed that
the detectives stuck to him like leeches
, but Müller made no show of resistance. He shivered in his thin clothing, his hands in his pockets. Otherwise he appeared unconcerned as he stood on the deck of the tender, hemmed in on all sides by the Liverpool police.

In the dim light, thousands were crowding around the great landing stage, but the small boat steamed in the moonlight towards the north end of
Prince’s Pier
instead. A dozen or so spectators had already gathered there and several hundred more had rushed down from the landing stage, making a dash for the waiting police vehicles and shouting for
Müller the murderer
. To distract them, several officers entered a police cab and drove off. At the same time, Tanner told Müller to take his arm – confusing
the issue of which of them might be the prisoner – and they struggled forward, falling into another police carriage as it was rocked by the surging rabble. It swayed and threatened to overturn. Müller was shaking. Then it lurched forward, racing away from the yells and shouts and leaving the rest of the Liverpool police, Clarke, Kerressey, Matthews and Death to follow in their wake.

At the main landing stage hundreds held their ground, refusing to believe that they had missed the arrival of the notorious criminal. Others began to make their way into Liverpool, towards the Central Police Station in Dale Street where Müller, hustled through a private entrance to the side of the building, was now settled in an inner room, with a plate of bread and butter and a tankard of bitter ale. Outside, all were turned away. Surrounded by officers, sergeants and constables, Müller was rattled. From time to time he raised his hands to mask his face until Tanner cleared the room of everyone but the prisoner’s guards.
A ramshackle bed
was made from five chairs pushed together, with a pile of books as a pillow; Müller carefully removed his boots, collar, coat and neckerchief and folded them neatly to one side before resting.

The sensation of the Müller story ensured that, throughout the night and into the morning, all the roads around Lime Street Station were gridlocked. In order to evade them, Tanner and his group rose early and slipped unseen from the police station at half-past seven in the morning, heading for Edge Hill Station further down the line. There they waited in a private room for the arrival of the nine o’clock express. Müller had regained his sangfroid and was even reading accounts of his capture in
Once a Week
; pointedly polite to everyone around him, he shook their hands and thanked them for the kind attentions he had received. At the sound of braking wheels and simmering steam, conversation was interrupted. Crossing the platform with a hurried step, the London police and Müller stepped into a reserved second-class carriage while, behind them, the door was slammed shut
and locked. In London, Inspector Williamson and his men at Scotland Yard were preparing for the train’s arrival at the Euston Square terminus, drafting constables to control the expected throng of spectators and determining the route of the police van from there to the Bow Street cells.

The morning papers wondered at the man’s exemplary behaviour, and speculated about the trial. There were eight sessions a year at the Central Criminal Court and the next was due to begin on the following Monday – too soon for Müller’s case to be heard. He still had to be formally identified by witnesses before the coroner in Hackney and the inquest jury had yet to reach its verdict on the cause of Thomas Briggs’ death. If, as expected, the death was judged unlawful and if the jury considered that there was enough evidence to point to Müller as the murderer, then he would be sent to the magistrate at Bow Street in order to be committed for trial.

If Müller was remanded, time would still be needed for the prosecution and defence to marshal their arguments. The GLPS let it be known that they would employ the most learned and eminent serjeant, or Queen’s Counsel, that could be found. Some said that their solicitor, Thomas Beard, had obtained a great deal of evidence favourable to the prisoner, including an alibi for the night of 9 July.
Much depended
on what Müller had to say for himself, and it was unlikely that a trial would be scheduled before the October sessions. Meanwhile, echoing the position taken by the
Telegraph
a month earlier, several papers were beginning to argue for British fair play. Accepting that an accumulation of facts appeared to support the assumption of Müller’s guilt they also considered that
if he had been an innocent man
he could not have acted more openly. The probability is that the police have got hold of the right man
, it wrote,
but still it is quite within the limits of possibility that a mistake has been committed.

Reynolds’s
agreed
that
several other papers have unceremoniously usurped the functions of a jury and seem to think that
Müller’s trial thereby is a more useless and superfluous ceremony
. Even those convinced of Müller’s guilt were alive to the vagaries of circumstantial evidence, remembering the hundreds of cases in which the appearance of guilt had condemned a man to hang only for evidence to emerge – too late – of his innocence. Uppermost in many minds was
the recent case of a traveller
found shot dead by the side of the road with his pockets plundered. A wretched tramp with bloodstains on his clothing had admitted to the theft but insisted that he robbed the body when it was already dead. Nobody had believed him and he was summarily convicted and hanged. Later, a man convicted of another murder confessed to the killing.

Everyone had their favourite tale of misguided capital justice, but some feared that the errant nature of this particular kind of evidence might be used by Müller’s defence team to baffle justice. People still fretted that Müller could not have acted alone in those vital three minutes between Bow and Hackney Wick stations and that a violent accomplice was still on the loose. Others wondered whether a single new fact, hitherto unknown or undreamt of, might cause the chain that currently bound him to fall away, leaving him free.

CHAPTER 22

A Very Public Ordeal

Throughout both Thursday and Friday nights, hackneys, drays, barouches and wagons crammed the approaches to Euston Square Station, clanking hooves and grinding wheels mixing with the shouts rising from the thick crowd of pedestrians. If the behaviour of the public in New York and in Liverpool was anything to go by, vast crowds of spectators, whipped into a frenzy of anticipation by the sensationalist reporting of the mass-circulation weekend newspapers, could be expected wherever a possibility of catching sight of Müller existed. This fact was likely to make both politicians, police and the middle classes extremely uneasy, for mobs were fickle: sometimes loud but peaceable in their craving for public ‘entertainment’ but occasionally rampaging, aggressive and criminal. Windows might be smashed, carriages overturned or children trampled; within the heaving crowds lurked drunks, fraudsters, pickpockets, thieves and worse.

Earlier in Victoria’s reign, as the economic progress of the nation polarised the inequalities between the rich and the poor, riots had become a signal of inflammable class tensions and the
working classes’ demands for political reform. During the late 1830s and ‘hungry 40s’, as food prices rose and revolutions broke out in much of Europe, real fear had grown among those in power that a popular revolt was imminent. When the Lords refused to pass a new Reform Act extending the vote to more of the male middle classes in 1831, turmoil broke out. When the Act was finally passed a year later, it did not entirely halt demands both to reform corrupt electoral districts and to allow votes for all men over twenty-one. Anger grew with the passing of a harsh new Poor Law in 1843; demonstrations for better working conditions among the poor and starving became increasingly violent.

The constituency of these crowds was no longer confined, as in the first two decades of the century, to the local or to the working classes: the revolutionary language of the Chartists during the 1840s had, rather, united the discontent of both the lower-middle and the working classes, countrywide. When Friedrich Engels worked at a branch of his father’s Manchester cotton mill between 1842 and 1844 he noted such appalling conditions among the workers and such
demoralised … debased … selfishness
in the bourgeoisie that he concluded that an uprising was imminent:
it is too late for a peaceful solution
. The classes are divided more and more sharply, the spirit of resistance penetrates the workers, the bitterness intensifies …
As the 1840s drew to a close, fearing the ‘poison’ of the French Revolution, the government struggled with a threat of radicalism that had the potential to burst out of control.

In the event, the repeal of the Corn Laws (which had held the price of corn artificially high) in 1846 did much to draw the sting of proletarian fervour. Rising employment and wages, improvements to scandalous factory working conditions and falling food prices during the early 1860s all somewhat appeased the mobs, though occasional, violent agitation for reform would continue until the Second Reform Act of 1867, which doubled the number
of English and Welsh adult males allowed to vote. Even then, 60 per cent of males would remain unfranchised, harbouring a grievance that would rumble well into the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the taint of revolutionary aggression remained attached to the congregation of mobs, and the criminal element endemic in any large crowd made them deeply unsettling in their unpredictability. The publicity surrounding Thomas Briggs’ murder and the capture and repatriation of Müller was likely to ensure the congregation of thousands wherever the prisoner appeared.