The Detective and Mr. Dickens (3 page)

Other groups yelled and caroused to the tune of parodies of the vulgar Negro melodies of the day:

Oh, Mrs. Manning
,

Don’t you cry for me
.

For I’m goin
’
to hell this morning

My true love for to see
.

As the crowd grew, thieves, low prostitutes, murderous ruffians, and filthy vagabonds of every size and shape and species of wretchedness flocked onto the ground, displaying countless varieties of offensive and foul behavior. Men and women alike fainted in the crush, and were carried out by the constables. Other women, swooning, clearly victims of more than merely superficial liberties, were dragged out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered. As these poor victims passed, the crowd greeted them with hoots of obscene speculation.

As we loitered in the shadow of the gallows, Dickens spotted a reporter from the
Daily News
. The man, pen flying in a small notebook, was conducting an interview. Dickens maneuvered closer, to eavesdrop. The man under interview was of burly composition, wide of shoulder and thick of neck, wearing an unobtrusive brown longcoat of a heavy military cut with round collars lying across his shoulders. Jammed tight on his head was a low, square hat. As the interviewer plied him with questions, the man stood as if sculpted in stone, unmoving, attentive, yet his eyes darted over the crowd, missing nothing.

“Ought to be done inside the walls,” the burly man in the hat was saying as the reporter’s pencil flew. “Look at ’em! Bloodthirsty mob!”

Dickens turned to us: “Who is Axton interviewing over there?”

“Inspector Field, of the Peelers,” Wills answered.

“Good Lord, that’s Field?” Dickens exclaimed, openly excited.

“Who’s that?” Forster harumphed.

“The famous Inspector Field,” Dickens explained in the voice of a ha’penny broadside enthusiast, “the Detective Genius responsible for the apprehension of the Mannings. I must meet him.”

Dickens quickly turned back, and hailed the reporter. The sharp-eyed man’s attention throttled Dickens immediately.
What have we here
? The sharp-eyed man tried to place him.
Tall, urgent, foppishly bearded man interrupts my interview
.

“Young Axton, halloa,” Dickens clumsily intruded.

“Mister Dickens, sir,” the reporter said, recognizing him, and replying respectfully, in fact with a certain amount of awe.

At the mention of that name, the burly, sharp-eyed man’s attention immediately relaxed. His face softened into a congenial smile of recognition as if he were thinking
Dickens, indeed, I want to meet this duck
.

“Working hard tonight, heh Axton?” Dickens moved in, and clapped the startled young man congenially on the shoulder, all hail-fellow-well-met.

“Yes sir, quite sir,” Axton stammered.

The burly man waited, amused.

Dickens froze in awkward silence, as the befuddled Axton groped for his wits. Finally, the young man, realizing that all eyes were upon him, waiting, did what was expected.

“Mister Dickens, sir. Detective Inspector Field of the Metropolitan Protectives.” His introduction complete, young Axton, trailing his pencil and pad, dropped immediately out of existence, and, to my knowledge, was never seen nor heard from again.

Dickens and Field stepped toward each other, and shook hands warmly.

“My great pleasure Mister Charles Dickens, sir. I ’ave read a number of your creations. I ’ave admired your work for many years.”

“And I yours, Inspector Field,” Dickens laughed, as he nodded up toward the sinister scaffolding towering above us.
*

Field didn’t join in the levity. His grim, crook’d forefinger snaked out from under his coat and struck at the side of his eye. “Can’t say I’m too fond of all this,” Field said evenly.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Dickens, taking the cue, also sobered. “It is a barbaric spectacle.”

“That certainly is the case from a philosophic point of view,” Field agreed, “but, from a practical point of view, this is a criminal’s convention. Every thief, pickpocket, gonoph, woman molester, and strong-armer in London is in attendance today, workin’ this crowd.”

“The crowd is getting out of hand,” Forster complained from Dickens’s elbow. “We ought to get back, out of this crush.”

Dickens and Field ignored him.

“Thanks to ingenious men like you,” Dickens said, bestowing the compliment warmly, “Scotland Yard is gaining a reputation.”

“Don’t spend much time there,” Field replied matter-of-factly. “Bow Street Station is my beat. All of the West End to the river’s where I spend my evenin’s.”

I had been watching the man’s incredible darting eyes. Not for a second, though by all evidence the conversation was the object of his full attention, did they cease roaming over the crowd like two swift birds of prey, gliding, waiting for their victim to break cover.

“Excuse me one moment, sir,” Field suddenly brought their conversation to a halt. “I’ve just marked an old friend whose acquaintance I expressly came ’ere to renew tonight.”

With that, Field took off his hat, and passed it once through the air above the heads of the crowd. Within seconds, two uniformed constables in stovepipe hats materialized. “Against the buildin’ in the grey overcoat and bowler,” Field ordered.

Dickens couldn’t take his eyes off of the two constables making their way through the crowd. Coming up, one on each side, they took custody of the designated man easily. The crowd was never aware of the tiny drama in its midst.

“Ah,” Field turned back to Dickens, “now it ’as been a profitable evenin’. I’ve got the man I came for.”

“Who was that?” Dickens asked eagerly.

“’Arry the ’Oly,” Field’s eyes were alive with satisfaction, “one of the most proficient swell mobsmen
*
in all of London. Does ’is best work in well-dressed crowds leavin’ church on Sunday mornin’s. I was sure this would be too promisin’ a ceremony for ’im to decline attendance. I’ve been after ’im for two months. Knocked down an old lady name of Summerson outside a church in Russell Square during a bungled purse snatch. Old lady died later of the shock of it. ’Ee’s been lyin’ low ever since. With good reason. But I knew this would bring ’im out.”

Field was soft-spoken of voice but strangely commanding in tone. His speech had but a lingering trace of the cockney. He chose his words carefully. Even in one of his novels, Dickens couldn’t have invented a more interesting place for the two of them to meet than there in the middle of a ghostly, moonlit night, in the shadow of the gallows.

“Would you join us for some tea, Inspector Field? I would very much like to pursue our conversation,” Dickens said, and went on to explain how our party had accommodations on a nearby rooftop.

“With ’Oly ’Arry taken up,” he answered blithely, “I ’ave time for that. But I must be back on duty down ’ere before the festivities begin.”

With that, we all withdrew to our aerie, and I brewed the tea. We sat in a tight little circle on common kitchen chairs near the edge of the roof, where we had a clear view of the street below all the way to the gallows. Dickens asked Field for the particulars of the Manning case, and that worthy was more than willing to regale us with the story.

He told how Mrs. Manning, originally Sylvia de Roux, of Swiss-French extraction and personal maid of Lady Blantyre, the daughter of the Duchess of Sutherland, simultaneously contracted sexual liaisons with the Irishman Patrick O’Connor, a customhouse officer and stock speculator, and Frederick George Manning, a guard on the Great Western Railway; how she married Manning yet continued to welcome O’Connor in her husband’s house and meet with O’Connor alone in his rooms. Dickens listened to every prurient detail.

Field told how she and her husband found out about O’Connor’s great wealth in foreign railway stocks, and invited O’Connor to dinner; how Frederick Manning purchased a large shovel, and had a bushel of lime delivered to the house; how O’Connor appeared the fatal night, and smoked a cigar on the back porch while talking intimately with Mrs. Manning; how Mrs. Manning led him to the kitchen on the lower level to wash his hands, raised a pistol to O’Connor’s head as he bent over the wash basin, and fired without hesitation; how, when her husband joined her in the kitchen and found O’Connor still alive, he battered him to death with a ripping chisel; how, after they covered the body with lime and buried it in the kitchen beneath two flagstones, they sat and feasted on a goose dinner in the very room where they had murdered and buried the man who was to have been their dinner guest. Dickens never blinked at the utter savagery of it.

Field told how he collected all of the circumstantial evidence which pointed to Mrs. Manning, then went to the house to question the suspects. Dickens hung on every word.

Field was an eloquent, graphic and economical storyteller. No wonder he and Dickens hit it off so well from the very beginning.

“‘Ma’am,’ says I, ‘I work at the customhouse with one Patrick O’Connor, who ’asn’t appeared for work in more than a week. Some friends ’ave said ’ee was last seen on ’is way to dine with you last Thursday night.’

“‘Friends must be mistaken, ’aven’t seen ’im,’ says she.

“’Is landlady says you came to ’is rooms and made ’er let you in last Friday.’ says I.

“‘Landlady is mistaken,” says she, cool as a three-day-old corpse.

“‘Neighbors say they saw man of O’Connor’s description, smokin’ cigar on back porch Thursday even’ last,’ says I.

“‘Neighbors mistaken. Don’t allow smokin’ on the premises. Filthy ’abit,’ says she.

“We went away but when we returned the next day with the writ the Mannings ’ad both fled. That was when I thanked the Lord for givin’ me sharp eyes. The back kitchen was all large flagstones. I noticed a dark damp mark ’ad spread along the edges of two of the stones. We quickly borrowed a shovel, a crowbar, and a boathook in the neighborhood, and took those two stones up. Beneath ’em we found what was left of Patrick O’Connor. That was it. We ’ad ’em. All we ’ad to do was find and take ’em. They’d split up. It took three days, but I tracked ’er to Edinburgh, and took ’er myself. Others took Manning, drunk, in Jersey.”

I could see in Dickens’s face that he was not only fascinated with the story, but with the teller of the tale.

“Int’restin’ study, wot? The Fair Sex. The Innocent Sex.” It was that man Wills, speaking with an almost cockney mumble.

“How could a woman lose all that is womanly, and kill so coldheartedly?” It was my own voice posing that question. I had meant simply to listen and observe, but the question seemed to rush to my tongue.

“I’ve noticed in my experience that the criminal mind don’t seem to know if it ’as been bestowed on a male or a female,” Field answered. “Women are a sticky lot to deal with as criminals. They are generally smarter and more cunning than the low-life men who dominate the criminal classes. They are also ’arder to crack, to scare, to break down with empty threats. They are just all around ’arder, because no man, whether a detective or not, wants to believe that a ’andsome woman can be guilty. But the fact of the matter is that they kill just as dead as any man and they lie even better.”

Thus, I was with Dickens when they first met.

Soon Field had to leave our jolly tea-party, and Leech returned wrist-weary. “Wasn’t that Field of Bow Street Station I passed going down?” Leech inquired.

“It certainly was,” Dickens answered.

“Made a sketch of the two of you shaking hands down below before,” Leech remarked. “God knows what for! All
Punch
will want is the climactical picture of the lady herself walking on air.”

“I must have that sketch, the one of Field and me.” Dickens’s voice was eager.

Morning approached, and nervous anticipation hushed the straining crowd below in the street. Soon a door opened in the wall of Horsemonger Lane Gaol, and Mrs. Manning, followed by her sniveling wretch of a husband, was led slowly to the gallows. Luckily, the espoused murderess did not have to pass through the screaming, spitting, hissing, bestial crowd. The constables, all armed with heavy truncheons, had cleared a path and thrown up barriers to insure the safe passage of the two guests of honor.

Mrs. Manning, always leading, climbed the gallows steps with determination as if hiking up the side of a Scottish loch. Her husband, faint, terrified, had to be helped up the steps by two constables.

“She seems singularly composed, for a woman only moments away from one of the lower circles of Hell,” Dickens said quietly.

The woman on the scaffold turned and glowered at the crowd. She writhed at the hanger which held her hands securely behind her back. Her dark wild eyes flashed. The whole of Horsemonger Lane became still, waiting.

In broken English, at the top of her voice, she unleashed a curse upon the crowd which was both magnificent in its defiance, and comic in its clumsy grasp of the language.