stage.’
‘Right, Sarge. He says here “nothing untoward was noticed until Sam Fagan’s third and final song Take it from me she likes it, when he invites the members of the audience to sing with him. For convenience, he has the words of the song written on a large sheet wound on to a roller. This evening he unrolled the sheet as usual and called on the customers to sing up. The first line was the proper one, I wish I could tell you what I’ve seen, but the rest of the song had been shamefully altered by some unknown person and contained certain references to a Gracious Personage I cannot as a loyal subject repeat in an open report. I committed them to my notebook, which Inspector Fredericks has secured in a sealed envelope in the station safe. Unfortunately the eighteen hundred members of the audience had sung three-quarters of the song before they realised the appalling significance of the words. Fagan was thereupon showered with fruit and booed from the stage. It was then that the assault on the stagehand took place.” What do you think the words said, Sarge?’
‘Better not speculate, Constable,’ warned Cribb, ‘but if it’s what I suppose, you can take it from me she wouldn’t like it.’
Thackeray thought it prudent to turn to the next report.
‘This was on the following Monday, Sarge, September 20th. The sword-swallower, if you recall. I think this was downright mean. It must be painful enough pushing a blade down your throat to earn a living, without someone smearing a line of mustard halfway up the blade. The poor cove must have coughed something dreadful.’
Cribb’s hand stole to his own throat in sympathy. ‘Bad enough when a fishbone goes astray,’ he said. ‘Where did this happen? The Tivoli Garden, wasn’t it? Near enough to Charing Cross Hospital, anyway. Now, what reports are left?’
‘The other incidents happened two weeks later, at the beginning of October, Sergeant. There was this—er —misfortune to Miss Penelope Tring, the Voice on the Swing. What a predicament! The constable on duty seems to have been quite well-placed to report it all so accurate.’
‘Damn it, Thackeray, you’re looking wistful. You weren’t at the Royal that night and we can’t stage it all again for your benefit.’
‘D’you think it could have been a pure accident, Sarge, not connected with the other happenings?’ He saw at once that Cribb did not.
‘I can see you got no further than the account of what happened to Miss Tring,’ Cribb admonished him. ‘If you’ll read on, you’ll see that the garment had been tampered with in three places. As soon as it came under pressure—’
‘Unspeakable!’ murmured Thackeray. ‘Quite so. It ain’t surprising she chose to jump off her swing. Landed in the stalls, broke her arm in two places and knocked out one of the audience. Don’t suppose she even felt the pain, though.’
There was a moment’s pause while each detective lamented the mishap to Miss Tring. Cribb made a clicking sound with his tongue and Thackeray contemplatively straightened his shirt-cuffs. Then he cleared his throat. ‘Last of all there’s the accident at the Canterbury on October 9th. If this was deliberate I think we’re after a lunatic, Sarge. The girl in the box could have died. D’you really think it’s connected with the other incidents?’
Cribb shrugged. ‘Can’t say. But if it is, we’re holding the wrong man in Newgate jail.’ His off-hand manner came a shade too readily. Thackeray had a sharp ear for deception.
‘There’s something else, ain’t there, Sarge? You wouldn’t trouble yourself with penny gaff performers getting blushes and broken limbs here and there unless something else was bothering you.’
Cribb responded with a glare, and then produced a folded sheet of paper. ‘This was delivered to Stones End Police Station this morning.’
Thackeray unfolded the paper, a tattered music hall bill for the Grampian in Blackfriars Road. Twenty or more acts were listed, none of any distinction, so far as he could tell.
‘D’you see the rings?’ Cribb asked.
He examined the bill again. The second turn listed was ‘Gleaming Blade—Sensational Redskin Hatchet- Thrower.’
‘Sensational’ was ringed in black ink. Lower down, the word ‘Tragedy’ was similarly marked in a reference to ‘Jason Buckmaster, Tragedy Actor and Rhetorician.’ A third ring had been drawn around the single word ‘Tonight’, which appeared in heavy ornate type at the foot of the sheet.
Thackeray spoke the three words aloud. ‘It sounds like a boast, Sarge. He’s a madman, for sure, this one. What do we do?’
‘Could be just a crank,’ said Cribb, ‘but I can’t take the chance. I’m having everything in the Hall checked for safety, and you and I and four plain-clothes men from Stones End will be there tonight to watch every movement on that stage, from the Japanese gyrist to the transformation dancer. But right now we’re going to see that man in Newgate—if you think I’ve got a case, of course.’
Thackeray thumbed through the reports again, trying to establish a connexion between them. Strange things happened in the theatre; odd coincidences. He scratched his beard.
‘You’ll be detached from all duties at Paradise Street,’ promised Cribb.
‘Educational classes, Sarge?’
Cribb winked, and in a few minutes they left Scotland Yard together.
CHAPTER
2
THE TWO DETECTIVES, WELL-wrapped in ulsters and bowler-hats, watched the L.G.O.C. knifeboard bus recede in the direction of Cheapside. Then they crossed Newgate Street to the corner of the Old Bailey, too busy finding a route between copious horse-droppings to give much attention to the sombre exterior of the prison.
‘Been inside before, Constable?’
‘No, Sarge.’
‘You’ll find these walls are like a hat-box—all for effect. Inside, it’s built like any of your London hospitals. It’s not the inmates they want to impress, you see. It’s the likes of that solicitor’s clerk over there that shudders at the mention of Newgate. All he sees is a fortress with walls forty feet high. Capital way of keeping a man honest.’
Thackeray looked along the grim facade of rusticated blocks and recesses and recalled a bleak Monday morning fifteen years before, when duty had brought him to that same street. It had been jammed by a crowd of twenty thousand and he had stood among them from first light until St Sepulchre’s chimed eight o’clock. ‘Hats off!’ the cry had gone up. ‘Down in front,’ as the condemned man was escorted to the scaffold from a door in the prison wall. Times had changed; public executions had been discontinued for a dozen or more years, and now Newgate was a hat-box to Sergeant Cribb. But that door remained.
‘This’ll be a routine visit,’ Cribb explained as they approached the governor’s house. ‘I volunteered the two of us for identification duty. The only prisoners in Newgate now are men on remand or awaiting trial. We have to check ’em for previous convictions. Strictly it’s a sergeant’s job, but there aren’t many sergeants with an eye like yours for a jail-bird.’
Thackeray was flattered. Sergeants often complained about the burden of identification parades at Newgate and Clerkenwell. But their boasting when they had spotted an old lag was something to be heard. The lower ranks were encouraged to think sergeants alone were capable of such feats of recognition.
‘You’ll need your own identification,’ Cribb cautioned, as he knocked at the door of the governor’s office. It was opened by a uniformed prison officer, who glanced formally at their papers and admitted them. They waited inside with a clerk who took one hard look at each of them and then returned to his work of sealing envelopes. Above him a clock of a type issued and withdrawn by the Home Office a decade earlier ticked with an occasional snuffle.
In a few minutes the officer returned with two black-uniformed attendants. ‘Warders Rose and Whittle will accompany you, gentlemen. Would you kindly sign the book first?’
They were then escorted through the lodge, which served as a macabre museum, with death-masks of some of Newgate’s more notorious former guests and a wall-display of body irons. A turnkey unbarred an iron-studded oak door and they were led down stone steps into a cavernous passage that Thackeray estimated ran parallel with the Old Bailey. Their steps echoed ahead of them.
