Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (45 page)

“And the other?” barked Wardle. “Burnt to death?”

“The burning is simply superficial. He was shot. Shot at close range with a rifle. Here. And here.” He pointed to the head and the groin, both bloody messes.

“A rifle,” I nodded. I had to fight back a wave of nausea. “How did they come to be standing up?”

“Your killer is an odd one and no mistake. This one, see, is embalmed. Rushed job, I’d say, and amateurish with it. The second – I cannot put it delicately – has metal tubes inserted to keep him upright.”

Wardle led me without a word into the public house at the corner of Ossulston Street. He ordered two whiskies and two pints and did not speak again until he had finished the short. “If the press ask, we hint it’s underworld killings. The skeleton thefts wrapped up for good. You send harsh words to Bazalgette. We can’t have more thieving. If the Prince Consort hadn’t been so set on that sewer scheme, I’d have him bloody well shut down.” He shook his head and looked around him.

“What will you do now, sir?”

“Off to Yorkshire for Christmas,” he said. “Not coming back. Go on and dig up secrets, if you want to make sense of it all. I’ll be leaving a recommendation for you, son. You’ll be an inspector yourself one day.”

We fell silent, nursing our drinks. I hid my disappointment. When he bade me good night, I sat there watching him go, holding down my bile, until I headed home in silence.

AFTERWORD

(1863, 1911, 1888)

THE BUGLE – WORDS &?TRAINS – SOMETIMES A PERSON GETS DESPERATE

EUSTON DAILY BUGLE

10th January, 1863

METROPOLITAN TRIUMPH

As the
Bugle
predicted from the start, the opening of the Metropolitan Railway today was an enormous success. Despite a delay of twenty-one months, the public were united in their enthusiasm. Thirty thousand Londoners flocked to the latest in our city’s great panoply of wonders. From nine o’clock in the morning till past midday it was impossible to obtain a place on the upward line.

What a tragedy that the Hon Charles Pearson MP, who endured such derision over the scheme, died before its fruition. How jubilantly would he have looked upon the throng of working men exulting in this new service. The first-class carriages were filled with London’s elite and famous, although there was no royal patronage at last night’s banquet in Farringdon Station, despite the Queen’s predilection for novelty trains. (The Prince of Wales will, however, open Bazalgette’s sewerage works next year, where the fourth of James Watt’s monumental pumps is to be named for the Royal Fiancée, Princess Alexandra.)

Dissonant notes were nonetheless sounded amid the fanfare. Some deplored the crush, like the first night of a pantomime. A few expressed regret that ten thousand were made homeless during construction. Others complained that the sulphurous fumes and flickering gaslight gave the sensation of plunging into unknown and infinite danger. Just two months back, a drunken driver overshot the works in a siding beneath King’s Cross; the Fleet Ditch burst in, drowning workers in sewage; and a hydraulics manager was killed while testing out the system. Since the GWR’s intervention, however, these teething problems have been firmly resolved, and the Board of Safety have withdrawn their concerns.

Another step towards the modernisation of the capital. The Bugle predicts a tremendous impact. There is talk of using wind power or dried sewerage ordure as fuel. Besides the line being built into the Victoria Embankment, lines could be laid along the Regent’s Canal and the bed of the Thames. Such a raft of proposals faces Parliament that, if all the schemes were effected, nearly one-half of the City itself would be demolished, every open space in the metropolis would be given up for the erection of termini with their screaming and hissing locomotives, and we would find ourselves living in a junction yard.

Instead, is not the moment ripe for a glass-covered double-decker thoroughfare spanning the heart of the world’s greatest city, the
Bugle
’s own Crystal Way?

WORDS & TRAINS

Were we right or were we not? They enjoined us to keep silence, cited reputations at stake, and lives to be ruined by scandal, not least those of Campbell’s superiors. One thinks too of Mr Dickens. One thinks of the King, or the Prince, as he was then.

It is fifty years since those dreadful events. Now that all the principal players are dead, Bertie the last to go, I have assembled this memoir. Principally it comprises Campbell’s recollections, written in the 1880s. I have interpolated relevant cuttings, snippets of Skelton’s writings and notes of my own, where gaps needed filling.

For my failure to publish, I make no further apology, except to say that even in this flippant day and age when we are told that anything goes, I preferred to excise references to certain nefarious practices in gentlemen’s clubs and gambling hells, which point to a range of royal peccadilloes that cast unnecessary slurs on the late Edward VII. In my work, I have had occasion to discuss the case with the odd aspiring novelist, but I will now bind the memoir and print a very limited edition, to be discreetly catalogued in the publication libraries, where I pray that some diligent scholar may one day stumble upon our story.

Bertie, as we all know, has presided over an era of change. Many lamented the passing of Victorian standards, but I find something honest about our Edwardian frivolity. They say he loosened our morals with his gambling and mistresses. Yet all were agreed that he loved Queen Alix fondly.

Wardle retired. There seemed no sense in exposing his compromises, but he felt the scandal keenly. He and his wife did not retire to Yorkshire, as planned, but instead set sail for Argentina, where they purchased a thriving plantation, only to be ruined by the abolition of slavery. His son, Charlie – in fact Albert Charles Wardle – found success in Queensland, Australia, though ever in conflict with the authorities as a leader of the fledgling trades unions movement. Campbell liked to hear tell of him, I think he always envied Wardle Junior his great adventure.

Nobody knew at that time about the problems between Catherine Dickens’ father and mother, sparked by another actress. She escaped the broken home by marrying Wilkie Collins’ invalid brother, a desperate move, as they were forced to live in Italy in penurious exile.

Madame Skelton, it transpired, did not lose everything in the destruction of Clerkenwell. She moved to Willesden, dutifully tended by Fairfoul, and became the hub of a thriving community rehoused by Bazalgette. Whether or not Campbell’s plea was responsible for this good fortune, heaven knows.

As for Hester, by the time Campbell returned to the Home for Fallen Women, it was too late. She had hanged herself in her dormitory. She had a pauper’s burial in St Giles in Camden, with not one friend or relative. Campbell was uncommonly upset about it, and erected a small headstone for her at his own cost.

The Nation Underground vanished into thin air. By the time the police unearthed the vault off Battle Bridge Road, the books, furnishings and accoutrements were gone, save for one Tom Thumb chair. I imagine the Worms voted to disband and went off to join other groups; a few, with Campbell’s help, found gainful employment at the Metropolitan Board of Works. How long the wider cells associated with them survived, I do not know, nor how broad their effects, only that Campbell took to reading the international news pages. I remember his amusement at an account of robberies in the style of the skeleton thefts in the Berlin sewers of the late Seventies. If a new generation of Worms had set up there, Campbell did nothing to blow the whistle on it. Sometimes I’d catch him studying reports of riots in Paris or Balkan uprisings. I believe he thought they had a hand in it all. For neither Worm nor Skelton were ever found, and Campbell harboured a notion that one or both of them escaped. After all, they knew those underground passageways as nobody else, and losing your hat is no proof that you have died. It would have pleased him to imagine an aged Berwick heading the 1905 revolution against the Tsar, with Worm marching beside him. The Professor has never said a word, but the glint in her eye suggests she knows something.

Of course, Campbell did not witness Skelton’s most barbarous act, as I did, rending Coxhill on the turntable like a villain of Greek tragedy, and he never quite believed him capable of such a dark deed. Worm’s suggestion that Skelton originally planned to drown hundreds also haunts my dreams. The authorities never let a word of it be breathed; I suppose even those who repaired the tunnel believed the story given out that it was another accident. Exactly two months after Skelton’s attack, two hundred important personages rode on the train to a feast on that same Farringdon platform.

Campbell was fond of telling other stories from his career, but of this case he remained loath to speak. Always one to put on an unwavering front, he was anything but cold. If anything, he felt things too deeply. I urged him to write it all down, as a form of catharsis more than anything else. He would reply with some claptrap to the effect that our words are just trains, moving through the underground passageways of the mind, past things that can never really be named.

I was surprised, then, to find among his papers and case notes when he passed away this long account, neatly filed along with the newspaper cuttings. I dare to hope that he wanted it read, to convey to future generations something of the horror that faced us in those dark times. His final meditation I include hereafter.

I have omitted to mention three of our players.

Among Roxton Coxhill’s private effects were found objects that suggested he was on the verge of suicide: prussic acid, razors and drafts of an intensely remorseful suicide note. Let me quote:

I cannot live – I have ruined too many – I have committed diabolical crimes, still unknown to any living being. I cannot live to see them come to light, bringing me and my late father into disrepute, causing to all shame and guilt that they ever should have known me. I attribute all this to no one but to my own infamous villainy. I could go through any torture as recompense for these crimes. No torture could be too much, but I cannot live to see the tortures I have inflicted upon others.

These monstrous crimes, it transpired, included fraud and embezzlement to the nth degree. Besides the crimes that Campbell unearthed, Coxhill had defrauded a Wicklow bank, in which he had an interest, of £23,000, oversold shares in the HECC to the tune of £150,000, and represented his assets at thousands when he was in fact in heavy debt. In the end he was preparing to raise money by means of forged cheques. Even had the Prince of Wales agreed to back his venture, as he dreamed, it is hard to see how he could have been saved from ignominy. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. Coxhill was already half-crazed from his opium habit, which Campbell was too naïve to recognise. It almost seemed that Skelton made himself the agent of a greater justice in putting such a punishing end to Coxhill’s despicable grasping.

Of Nellie, reports differ. The ungenerous say she died in Paris – consumptive, alcoholic, or worse – and that her unborn child died with her. A different report places her in Geneva, living in quiet luxury on roast duck and cherry liqueurs, looking down on Lac Léman from a chalet filled with servants, styling herself a gentlelady widow as she brought up a child whom many suspected to be Bertie’s son.

Finally, the Professor. Molly made a full recovery and chose to leave London with Campbell and myself. My gallant young husband was hell-bent on leaving the police at first. But I persuaded him that he had a great future, perhaps far from London. We moved to Edinburgh with Molly as our adoptive daughter. She and I took to the place like a shot, and I’m happy to say she married and had a family here. To this day she runs a popular ghost train in the Portobello funfair, delighting children along the seafront with hair-raising stories of her days in the London underworld. Her wish to be buried out in the green fields seems also secure, as we have a plot purchased in Rosslyn Glen, by the chapel there, for us both to lie beside Campbell when our time comes.

Ruth Villiers Lawless

National Library of Scotland, November 1911

FINAL THOUGHTS OF CAMPBELL?LAWLESS,
CHIEF-INSPECTOR, C. 1888

Sometimes a Person Gets Desperate

I picture him still, Berwick, hurtling headlong on the train towards the underground nation he had spent so long in building, smashing into the siding as the waves of oblivion rise around him.

I kept his hat for a while, thinking it might stand as evidence, should the thing ever come to trial. Until I admitted to myself that such things never come to trial. Like Shuffler at the beginning, so Berwick at the end, the little man never merits an inquest. So I took the hat one day and went with the Professor up to the Regent’s Canal, said a quick prayer and tossed it into the water.

Even today, so many years later, I cannot excise his image from my mind. My wife has tried to calm the ghost. Darling woman, she asks questions to try and conjure the thoughts away. Don’t you think of him as a lunatic, she asks, and cruel with it? Is it not lucky for all of us that he blew himself up? I do not answer.

Berwick Skelton was no lunatic. His disappearance has been an incalculable loss to the world. For I cannot shrug off the feeling that, whatever this cruel life drove him to, he was a man much greater than myself. A man with the heart of a lion, with an appetite for people and for life that I will always envy. With integrity, understanding, and vision that fired him to efforts beyond my imagining.