The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde (11 page)

***

Brodie's funds must have been fading fast. Before even reaching the Continent, and having paid for his sea passage with some of solicitor Walker's ‘lent' twelve guineas, he had written: ‘My stock is seven guineas, but when I reach Ostend will be reduced to less than six.' Somehow, he had found affordable digs for two months in Ostend and was now paying his way to Rotterdam, from where he would save money by taking the cheapest form of transport. The
trekschuit
horse-drawn canal sailboat was packed with goods and passengers like modern buses and, travelling at a horse-trotting speed of about 7km an hour, took many hours to cover what are today seen as short distances. In this case, the 84km trip from Rotterdam to Amsterdam took thirteen hours, with two hours spent crossing Delft on foot and changing again at Leidschendam, Leiden, Haarlem and Halfweg. At least it was faster than walking, and on his 10 June arrival, with his heavy trunk, at the (still-standing) Haarlemmerpoort, the end-point of the network's service, Brodie was greeted by two Jews who had made it their business to guide new arrivals into town.

Where, he asked them, could he find a bed for a few nights? They directed him to an alehouse with lodgings, towards the harbour area but within walking distance, though he must have hired a cart to get his trunk there too. The pub's name was the Lommer (the Shadow) and it was crouched in an alleyway called Zoutsteeg just off the boat-busy central artery of the Damrak. Once he got there, made a deal with the landlord and heaved his trunk upstairs to his room on the first floor, with its pair of windows looking out into the lane, he must have thought he had made it, that he would be like the proverbial needle in a haystack for any pursuers now.

The last thing he expected within a few days of settling in was a hard, threatening knocking on the door of his ‘impossible to find' refuge.

***

While being generally wary, Brodie probably had no suspicions that he had been followed. But within a few days Daly was in Amsterdam too, after linking up with the British ambassador in The Hague, Sir James Harris, to whom application for Brodie's arrest had been formally made. The Irishman quickly became acquainted with the two Jewish
trekschuit
receptionists who had helped the arriving Brodie, asking them if they could – in the name of the law – establish his whereabouts now. The Scot and his black trunk were described to them and recognised, and in return for a few loose coins, they walked the Irishman to the Lommer and left him there to complete his business.

When the landlord told him that the person he wished to speak to was in the room just above, Daly bounded upstairs – and that was when the knocking began.

Brodie froze, thought it wiser not to speak and so reveal his presence to his loud visitor, rolled quietly out of bed and tiptoed over to the room's only cupboard, secreting himself behind his own well-diminished collection of clothes (‘My wardrobe is all on my back, excepting two check shirts and two white ones, one of them an old rag … my coat, an old blue one, out at the arms and elbows … an old striped waistcoat, and a pair of good boots'). He was surely mouse-quiet, but there must have been small bed-spring noises and door creaks that encouraged the door-knocker, for he hammered again and again, harder and harder – until deciding to let himself in. A quick glance around the room was all he needed before throwing open the cupboard door and revealing its cowering tenant.

‘How do you do, Captain John Dixon alias William Brodie!' he boomed. ‘I must ask you to come along with me.'

The no-longer-elusive Deacon, stunned into silence by this sudden development, considered making a fight of it. But despite having sported a pair of pistols in his darker career, he had never really been one for physical resistance or violence, and why would he start now in a metaphorical as well as a physical hands-up situation? Apart from which, he did not feel in the best of health.

So he went quietly, allowing himself a deep sigh of disappointment, and gathered together what clothes he could, before being hustled down the stairs past an astonished landlord.

If his fate had not been quite unredeemable before his desperate flight from Edinburgh, it certainly looked to be well and truly sealed here – ‘looked' being the operative word, for the ever-clever William Brodie, still with an enigmatic smirk on the edge of his mouth, was never going to lose faith in his own ultimate survivability. Not even when they put a noose around his neck.

***

Does Brodie's alehouse refuge, de Lommer, still exist in Amsterdam? It appears not. There is no such pub now by that name in the Zoutsteeg, though a modern successor may occupy its building. Someone from the 1780s would barely recognise the area today, however. The Damrak, from which the narrow alley runs at right angles, was a footpath-edged Venice-style major canal packed with wharves and a forest of the masts of light cargo-carrying vessels serving the city and its food processors and suppliers. The name Zoutsteeg itself – Salt Alley – gives an obvious clue to the trade that was carried on there, while other, parallel, lanes boast other give-away labels, such as Haringpakkersteeg (Herring Packers Alley). And it is certainly not quite so romantically picturesque today.

The major change came in 1875, when the Damrak was drained, filled in and covered over as a wide, traffic-carrying thoroughfare thrusting boldly between the Central Station (now fronting the old harbour) and Dam Square; so that today it is overflowing not just with cars, bikes, buses and clanging trams but with thousands of polyglot tourists thronging its wide pavements and staring in bewildered wonder at a positive kaleidoscope of souvenir shops, risqué museums, bureaux du change, hotels, Flemish patate frites vendors and even more souvenir shops selling everything from jolly painted clogs and brollies through sunglasses and baseball caps to orange football-themed T-shirts and phallic salt cellars – reminders that all this is only few hundred metres from the vastly more vivid vulgarity of the Red Light area a stone's throw behind the big street.

That said, its immediate opposite flank is a deal more sober, a brief island of sheer respectability dominated by the big square buildings of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and the exclusive Bijenkorf department store that breathes Dutch prosperity (a fact of which this writer was made familiar when his son, preparing for a funeral, was delighted to acquire a black shirt in its ‘sale' for a ‘fantastically discounted' seventy euros).

From the Damrak, walking the Zoutsteeg's 100 paces to the busy parallel shopping street of Nieuwendijk and looking upwards to imagine which of the close-up buildings might have housed our legendary runaway, you see – among the side-by-side little shops selling
broodjes
, raw herring, tobacco and Chinese massages – the remnants of an ancient chimney plaque with some barely legible lines which, if he had asked a local for a translation, might have alarmed Brodie. Its Dutch words ‘De rook kan elk te kennen geven/De kortheid van het aardsche leven' mean in English ‘From smoke we are to learn/The shortness of our earthly life'. The area's whole impact is circus-like – brash colours, loud street organs, ubiquitous tacky souvenirs – not unlike the tourist-attracting piped-up Royal Mile in Edinburgh.

It would have been reminiscent of Edinburgh, too, for William Brodie – for different reasons in his different age. Here then, too, were dark alleys between buildings like the Scottish capital's dark closes, and he could, under different circumstances, have felt comfortable in this vaguely familiar environment of his tavern lodging. As it was, he barely had time to avail himself of some of its other comforts and find a contact to identify a ship to take him to the New World – and his new life – when he heard that fateful first knock on his door.

***

There are today (as a matter of superficial opinion) three possible candidates for the relevant building that housed the Lommer and our fugitive in Zoutsteeg. One is a small, two-storey coffee shop called Kadinsky, at the far end of the alley, crowded on the ground floor with tightly packed clientele and a certain atmospheric pungency. Its timeless Dutch shape and relatively low physical standing tell of real age, as do the weather-beaten bricks of its walls. But while conceding that the upstairs office floor could have been a lodging room in times past, its female owner, on hearing the Brodie story, feels the place was probably too small to be a self-respecting criminal's refuge. ‘If I'd been him,' she says with a smile, ‘I'd have chosen a bigger place to get lost in.'

Another possibility is a bigger tavern, halfway up the lane, where the barman resists the urge to be fascinated, saying simply: ‘This used to be a tobacconist.' But the best candidate is probably the Oporto, an old brown pub housed at the start of the alley in a taller, three-storey building of the bolder Golden Age type that has clearly enjoyed a relatively recent renovation. It also has a female proprietor, an Englishwoman called Fran, who says, ‘As far as I know, the pub goes back to the 1880s but I suppose another inn could have been here under another name before that.'

Two regular customers are Scots house-painters keen to confirm their adopted pub's historic credentials after seeing evidence of some vintage with their own eyes. They recall doing décor work there during which they discovered, under a few more modern roof panels, some age-mottled wood marquetry of animals and plants. ‘To us, that means this is sure to have been the place,' they say. Aye, maybe, as they say in their home town of Airdrie; Fran, meanwhile, says the pictures are from the pub's nineteenth-century inauguration, pointing out ‘more like them' just behind the bar.

In the absence of utterly convincing evidence and the city archives' inability to help – despite the enhanced capacity of a newly installed computer system – the reader is invited to make a choice. In any case, Brodie didn't have much of a stay here, and it wasn't much of a walk to his next berth. Which was not, as he expected, aboard some fine big ship heading for that fast-growing American city that, until a century before, had been called New Amsterdam. It was a mere 260 steps away to the then the Stadhuis, or town hall (now the Royal Palace), at the head of Dam Square, where he was to be ensconced immediately in a cell below street level.

***

It is not hard to imagine Brodie's exchanges with Daly as they set out on that short, fateful and near-final stage of his continental journey. There would have been a familiarity about his new Irish companion and, as they paused briefly on leaving the pub, Brodie might have asked him: ‘Have I not made your acquaintance somewhere?' After disclosing that he they had almost met a few days before before at the vintner's place in Ostend – and receiving a non-committal but thoughtful ‘ah' – let's assume Daly removed his prisoner's cravat and wrapped it tightly around his wrists.

‘Sorry, captain. Can't be too careful with a precious commodity like yourself. They tell me you can be a bit of slippery customer.'

‘But how, pray, did you find me? I was unaware of a single soul following me.'

‘I did not strictly follow on your tail, my friend, rather on your trail. Slippery snails leave a trail that glistens quite bright if they have no care to disguise it. I witnessed my landlord advising you to make haste for Amsterdam, and though you had a head start, I had merely to ask after you along the route.'

‘Ugh, 'tis not a pretty picture you paint of me.'

‘If I may venture to say so, sir, you have painted an ugly picture of yourself. But you would not deny, would you, that you are a singularly distinctive character? We Celts tend to be somewhat conspicuous in civilised society at any time. And especially so, I would suggest, when on the run from the powers of the law.'

‘Indeed. I cannot deny it.'

‘Well, if you ask me, you would be wise also not to deny the extent of your crimes.'

‘Indeed, you may be right again, my friend. But where are you taking me?'

‘You'll see.'

The rest of the short walk to Dam Square was probably taken in silence as the great, rectangular, multi-windowed Stadhuis building loomed up before them. And within minutes, Daly had shown his papers of authority and Brodie had been bundled away.

It is not recorded whether he was clapped in leg or wrist irons, but there would have been a good Dutch thoroughness about the definite turning – and further storage – of his cell key. He might have studied it with an experienced eye, but he would have realised there was no way he was going to unlock himself from this.

Having safely handed over his valuable captive, John Daly wasted no time in finding himself a ship to set out for British shores to claim his well-earned reward. So sure was he that there would be no need for further action in this now-concluded commission.

Perhaps not from him, but other relevant actions were being frantically undertaken. The Amsterdam Archives of Sheriffs and Magistrates record the following (as translated from the old Dutch):

On the 25th of June 1788 Mr Henry Pye Rich, Consul & Agent of His Royal Majestry of Great Britain, gave the Head Officer a written request with the following content: The undersigned… requests immediately that the person of William Brodie, accused of committing a flagrant and important robbery in Edinburgh, Scotland, be held securely in custody at the cost of … [signed] Henry Pye Rich.

The archives also guaranteed ‘detective' Daly his place in history by stating that ‘the named William Brodie was apprehended by a certain John Daly of Ostend in a house called de Lommer in the Zoutsteeg, and was taken from there to De Boeijen [the prison cells in the basement of the town hall]'. But most importantly, the archives have on record the official request of the British to the Dutch for ‘possession' of Brodie. Kindly translated for this book by Dutch writer Marco Daane – a long-interested researcher of the case – it goes like this, with the warning from him that ‘of course it is in an anachronistic kind of language with lots of angles and curves in the sentences':