Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (8 page)

Over the weekend, the cheap papers gnawed avidly at the story and the unsparing nature of the attack excited general expressions of horror and indignation. This
foul and brutal crime
, committed in the very centre and heart of our civilisation
– wrote one paper – was
the most horrible … ever to disgrace this country
. Newspaper readership had grown fast during the nineteenth century, revolutionised by the new steam presses, cheaper paper, mass distribution through the rail network and the abolition of the newspaper tax in 1855 that caused their prices to fall.
The broadsheet newspapers catering to the middle classes had a
combined daily circulation
of almost half a million copies, while the weekend penny press – such as the
Penny Illustrated Paper
,
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper
and
Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper
– sold perhaps three million copies a week. Since the first ‘trial by newspaper’ of the murderer John Thurtell in the early 1820s, newspapers had long discovered that printing the details of scandal or violent crime and its investigation could make them fortunes. Alongside speculation, they habitually printed all the salient details of ongoing inquiries, reporting on evidence given at preliminary examinations and inquests in coverage so fulsome that when the Home Office instructed barristers to take on the prosecution of a capital case they often referred their lawyers to the newspapers for
details of the brief
. Thus, the penny press fuelled an appetite for the minutiae of murder quite out of proportion to its incidence, profiting from a hunger for the sensational, while they also played an important role in
driving the general increase of literacy
, spreading the reading habit of the age to a working class previously deterred by the high price of books.

On Saturday, Thomas Briggs’ local newspaper, the
Shoreditch Advertiser
, carried reports of the discovery of the body of a partly buried and decapitated child, deaths from fire and an attempted poisoning in Clerkenwell. Briggs’ murder was not the only suspicious or criminal death, but what made it different was his stolid middle-class respectability and the mysterious disappearance of his assailant. In each of these other cases, a suspect had been taken into custody within days or even hours. By comparison, the railway murder was glaringly unresolved.

On Sunday,
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper
used the murder to revisit the ongoing debate about capital punishment. If Briggs’ murderer was caught, tried and found guilty then the punishment would be death by hanging and the paper was strident in its anti-hanging stance
.
The public mind
, it wrote,
is, unhappily, seldom
left at rest free from the horror created by the record of some foul and brutal crime, committed in the very centre and heart of our civilisation
.
No sensation novelist has yet invented a scene half so thrilling by its brutality and its blood as that which was enacted last Saturday night … Society’s sense of security is utterly shaken
.
Lloyd’s
maintained that this crime was a proof that hanging did not deter the robber from adding bloodshed to the list of his transgressions, arguing that murder was often the only means by which thieves could hope to escape.
The great safe-guard society has against the increase of such miscreants is the efficiency of the police, not the severities of
[London’s public hangman]
Calcraft
, it averred.
Certainty of punishment is the most efficient suppressor of crime, not severity of punishment
.

The papers lapped up the story but Tanner’s investigation was losing momentum. Late on Saturday evening he pressed the Police Commissioner to order a careful scrutiny of all hospitals, surgeries, workhouses and prisons in the search for a man with fresh injuries. He organised new handbills to be printed containing a further description of Thomas Briggs’ missing hat in a desperate effort to elicit more information and he pressed his men to speed up their investigation of other fragile leads. One was particularly striking. A man called Tomkins had visited Bow police station to report that a friend of his claimed to have passed Briggs’ carriage on Saturday 9 July and to have spoken with him through the window.
Tomkins reported
that his ‘friend’ – a man called Thomas Lee – was certain that two other men had been in the compartment and that he could describe them.

The police generally distrusted anyone unwilling to present himself in person, but Inspector Kerressey dispatched one of his constables to interview Mr Lee at his comfortable villa on King Edward’s Road, South Hackney. When that constable returned to the police station, he repeated to Superintendent Daniel Howie a story that had about it something of the ring of truth.
Thomas Lee admitted
that the reason he had not come forward was
because he had been visiting a lady in Bow on the evening of 9 July and, since he was married, he feared drawing his family into a scandal. It appeared that he and Briggs had become acquainted while commuting from the City and had frequently shared a compartment as far as Hackney. On the night of the attack Lee said that he had seen Briggs in a carriage at Bow Station at about ten o’clock. Stopping at the window to wish him goodnight, he noticed that the banker was
sitting with his back to the engine
. By his side was a man apparently tall and thin and opposite him a thick set man with lightish sandy whiskers with his hand in the loop of the carriage, and the hand seemed to be a large one. I saw this man particularly
,
as the light from one of the gas lamps on the platform was full upon his face
. He had not seen Thomas Briggs again. After conversing for a couple of minutes, Lee had entered a second-class carriage for the journey home.

Tanner had to consider whether this statement was important. It made sense to assume that such a fast and brutal act had involved more than one person. Possibly, it backed up the police suspicion that their prime suspect was the man convicted of theft a handful of years before on that same part of the railway line, since one of that convict’s known accomplices fitted the description of the customer at John Death’s shop on 11 July. Lee’s statement also correlated with separate sightings of a tall, angry man leaving the station at Hackney Wick and with reports of a red-faced, whiskered fellow hurriedly examining the faces of passengers at Bow.

As dusk fell on Sunday evening news came that the criminal they’d been attempting to find had been traced: but he had died several months previously, putting him squarely out of the picture. Tanner was left with the description of two menacing men in the company of Thomas Briggs on the night he was murdered, and the diminishing chance that he would be able to track them down.

CHAPTER 9

Something to Tell

As the police investigation entered its second week it was getting warm, the second day of a heatwave that would last a fortnight. Untreated waste from neighbourhoods not yet connected to Bazalgette’s new sewerage system flowed freely into the River Thames or festered in domestic cellars. The capital was enfolded in fetid stink. Costermongers struggled to keep the fish on their barrows fresh enough to sell; flowers, fruit and watercress wilted on the market stalls and milk was quickly turning sour. A haze of dust and grime hung over the sweating city.

At Scotland Yard there was a long list of unanswered questions. Was the blood on the clerks’ hands and trousers an indication of their innocence or complicity? To whom did the crushed hat belong? What had become of Thomas Briggs’ hat and watch? Would the murderer or murderers strike again? What real chance did they have of finding new suspects in the jungle of the capital now that more than a week had passed? Inspector Tanner was unsettled by the dawning possibility that the man who had exchanged Briggs’ chain at John Death’s shop had falsified his accent in order to throw them off course. Perhaps he
was not a foreigner after all. Could the police afford to change direction? Their lack of progress was dispiriting, but the detective held firm to his belief in patience.

All across London, police divisions followed up fantasy sightings, tip-offs and distractions. Police in Westminster checked out a suspicious Swiss who had been seen by his landlady making himself a new set of clothes. In Peckham they were on the heels of a man who had boasted of having a fifty-pound watch and who had offered to bet anyone in the tavern that the murderer would not be caught. In Clerkenwell a man of about thirty, five feet eight inches, with carroty whiskers, a long black coat, black hat and white walking stick was the subject of police enquiries. In Clapham, a hansom-cab driver reported driving a customer wearing dark clothes and a hat, carrying a large cane and wearing an apparently false moustache. As the passenger struck a light during his journey, the gleam revealed a double-barrelled pistol tucked into his coat pocket. The news put the local police on high alert.

On Monday morning – 18 July – a boy called at the Bow police station asking to see Inspector Kerressey. He, too, claimed to have travelled on the same train as Thomas Briggs. When it arrived at Stepney the lad had noticed
a tall, dark man getting in and out of carriages
as if he was looking for someone, and the boy was certain that he got into a carriage where an old gentleman was seated. It was the third reported sighting of a tall, dark, agitated fellow on the train that night, but all efforts to trace him had been fruitless. The man had simply vanished.

*

Tanner and Superintendent Daniel Howie shouldered their way through the crowds outside the Prince of Wales tavern in Hackney for the reopening of the inquest. Within moments of their arrival, the coroner had them all on the move again as his clerks herded the jurymen and witnesses across the road to the
more commodious space of the parish vestry hall. Even here, a disconsolate gaggle was left at the door as all the available public seats were swiftly filled.

The jury was re-sworn. First, Dr Toulmin, Briggs’ relative and doctor, presented
the post-mortem results
, pointing to diagrams and holding up a human skull while describing the triangular cranial fractures and severe haemorrhaging within the brain. Attributing the fracture and depression of the left temple bone to the effects of the fall from the train, Toulmin repeated his conclusion that the fracture near the ear and the wounds on the vertex of the skull had been inflicted by a blunt instrument.

Little was expected of Briggs’ niece Caroline Buchan, and spectators shuffled in their seats waiting for someone more interesting. She confirmed that her uncle had been sober when he left Peckham. Then she began to describe
threats she thought her uncle had received
from a man to whom he had refused a loan. A thrill ran through the assembly at the unexpected revelation. Swiftly, the coroner ordered Caroline to withhold the man’s name.

Before the next witness could be called, the jurymen were herded back outside by a clerk and the public were left to stew as the thirteen men followed the coroner along busy Mere Street, processing towards the nearby railway station where they climbed the steps to the platform. There, in the rising heat, the blood-drenched carriage in which Thomas Briggs had been attacked stood waiting for their inspection. Brought up from Bow that morning, it was surrounded by police guards.

Inside, the carriage was hot and airless, the stale air rancid. The upturned cushions, the floor matting kicked to one side, the many splashes of dried and darkened blood both inside and out were just as Ames had previously described. The group waited as, one by one, each juror entered, took in the detail of what lay before him and then descended again from the carriage. The dismal scene presented powerful evidence of struggle and brutality, erasing any suspicion that Thomas Briggs’ death could
have been suicide. What it could not tell them was what exactly had occurred, nor how a man with murderous intent had been able to take his place in the first-class compartment without drawing attention to himself.

Leaving the train carriage to its frustrating silence, the jurymen retraced their steps back to the vestry hall. Eager attention was focused on the next two witnesses, Harry Vernez and Sydney Jones. Public speculation about the two bank clerks’ involvement in the crime was rife but, as they gave their version of events for the first time in public, both men adhered to the story that they had been returning home from a boat trip on the River Lea on Saturday 9 July when they discovered blood in the compartment. Following their testimonies, a railway official at Hackney Station was sworn and corroborated their tale: he had seen the two arrive at the station only minutes before the train drew up at the platform. The clerks were off the hook.

Only one other new fact slipped out, almost in passing. The victim’s son, Thomas James, told the coroner and jury that two IOUs, signed by David Buchan, had been found in his father’s pocket book. Thomas Lee’s new evidence would have thrown suspicion elsewhere but, in spite of the fact that his statement supported others taken by the police, Lee had not been called.

*

As the ninth day of the police investigation drew to a close, near the lowering bulk of the Great Western Railway terminus in Paddington a hackney carriage driver stopped to water his horse at the stand outside the Great Western Hotel. One of about
five thousand metropolitan drivers
of four-seater hackney ‘cabs’ licensed to take private passengers for fixed fares, this cabman was poor – he rented rather than owned his horse and its four-wheeled, bright-red-painted carriage.