The Thief-Taker : Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner (34 page)

“What is your view, sir, of the moral character of Mr. Morton?”

Vaughan took his time answering. Henry Morton studied the man's expression, struck as never before by how obscure a countenance his really was. The eyes deep set, the lips habitually compressed tightly in a small, mirthless smile. Morton had often thought that George Vaughan was mocking his fellow man, that his attitude was carelessly contemptuous of most of humanity. But now he saw it differently: The man seemed to him to possess an air of alert stillness and waiting, of concentration, like some solitary predator of the forest.

“He always had a good name, my lord,” said George Vaughan, and stopped.

“But does that reputation reflect your own opinion, sir?”

Vaughan paused again, seemingly with reluctance. He looked at Henry Morton, and Morton smiled coldly at him.
Tell your lie, sir,
he silently made the invitation. Vaughan's face remained expressionless.

“I never trusted him, my lord,” he replied.

“Why not? What evidence did you have for this feeling?”

“The money he had. Things he let drop. Things the other lads let drop about him.”

Morton loudly broke in. “This is innuendo and hearsay, my lords. Let these others testify if they have something of substance to say.”

Sir Nathaniel pivoted angrily. “Keep your peace, sir, until it is your turn! The panel will judge the admissibility of testimony. This is not Sessions House and you are not a lawyer.”

But Morton knew that his point had registered, and that everyone in the room was aware of it.

“Did you ever witness Mr. Morton committing any irregularity?” now asked Francis Beadwell, the third
Magistrate. He was a thin, quiet man, recently appointed, about whose character or abilities Morton knew little.

“He were too careful for that, my lord,” quickly answered Vaughan.

“Confine yourself to direct answers to the questions, sir,” calmly came back Beadwell.

“I saw nothing specific, my lord, until we searched his rooms these two nights past.”

“Thank you.”

Two other constables were called to testify as to what they had found under Morton's bed. Morton watched them, and concluded that they were not part of Vaughan's mob. This apparently was his technique—the same technique he had used with the Smeeton arrests. He arranged for unsuspecting and fully respectable men to provide an appearance of legitimacy to his operations. Townsend and these constables in this instance, and Presley and Morton himself on the earlier occasion.

Finally, Lord Elgin's private secretary assured the panel that the reliefs found in Morton's rooms were indeed the same as had been stolen from the courtyard of Burlington House.

“Excuse me, sir,” then asked Henry Morton, “but are the pieces you have recovered complete and intact?”

The man glanced at Sir Nathaniel to be sure that he was right in answering questions from the man in the dock. The Chief Magistrate nodded.

“In fact, sir, an element of the smaller fragment appears to be missing.”

“Would it be the image of a woman, sir?” asked Henry Morton. “A naiad with one breast uncovered and one hand raised, holding a wreath?”

The secretary looked surprised.

“Yes. Precisely so.” As he stepped down, Sir Nathaniel Conant turned to Henry Morton.

“We have goods stolen, and appearing later in your possession, sir. We have your own apparent familiarity with these goods, even down to an unrecovered fragment. We have a newspaper notice apparently inviting the owners of these goods to contact your lodgings, presumably with a view to buying them back. Before I lay charges, do you have anything more specific to say in explanation of all this, other than that you are the victim of some monstrous plot?”

“I do.”

“The panel,” Sir Nathaniel told him, “will listen to no further testimonials to your character. The material evidence is so strong against you that no endorsement of your personal virtues would be sufficient to prevent the laying of charges. You must save such witnesses for Sessions House.”

“I agree to forgo any such testimony, my lord.”

“Then what do you have to tell us?”

“I have to tell you that you should arrest and charge Mr. George Vaughan for this crime, not me.”

A stir went through the room. Vaughan's mocking smile broadened a little, while some of the Runners standing about him scoffed visibly. Sir Nathaniel Conant's face remained expressionless.

“Upon what evidence, sir?”

Morton turned away from Vaughan and looked into the faces of the panel members. “I am aware of the exact appearance of a missing part of the marble carvings at issue because I saw it, two nights ago, in the back storeroom of number twelve, Bell Lane, Spitalfields.”

“Where is that missing fragment now, sir?” Sir William asked.

“I do not know. The denizens of that house have doubtless hidden it again, and have burned down the house to protect themselves.”

“This is speculative.”

“Informed speculation, my lord.”

“Why should we not believe that it is you yourself who placed the sculpture there?” Parsons asked.

“The explanation is not brief, my lords,” Morton said, and he described his last visit to the Otter, the fight there, his escape through the tunnel. As he did, however, he spoke only of himself, not yet hinting that anyone had escaped with him.

Beadwell asked the next question.

“You do not claim that Mr. Vaughan was amongst those you confronted in this house. Why are you accusing your brother officer in these matters?”

Morton proceeded, carefully and in detail, to relate his interviews with Wardle and Rudd, particularly with regard to their insistence that there was a Bow Street presence at the Otter. Then he told them about Joshua.

“This man identified the Bow Street officer who controlled the house, my lords,” Morton said. “He identified him by name. And the name he gave was George Vaughan.”

Into the rush of low voices that this produced, Vaughan interjected, sardonically echoing Morton's earlier objection. “Hearsay, my lords. Let this Joshua cove testify.”

“He can't, my lords,” calmly explained Morton. “George Vaughan and his accomplices have done him to death.”

This produced an even louder burst of voices, so that the court clerk had to rap his rod hard against his desktop to restore order.

“What proof have you of such an outrage, sir?” demanded the Chief Magistrate. “What proof have you of any of this, except that you say other folk told it you? Other folk who are not here and cannot testify themselves.”

“Wardle and Rudd can be summoned.”

“That, too, will be a matter for the Old Bailey. If you cannot produce direct, independent proof of your claims, what possible reason do we have to accept them?”

Henry Morton drew breath. “The best possible reason, my lords. There is another witness. A witness who has seen and can tell this Police Court enough to have George Vaughan committed to Newgate a dozen times over.” Now he turned his head in the startled silence and looked pointedly at Vaughan.

The other Runner was not quite impervious to what he had just heard. There was a certain fixity in his look, although the smile remained on his thin lips. Was he thinking, trying to imagine whom Morton might mean? One thing was certain: Morton had George Vaughan's attention now.

“What witness, sir?” demanded Sir William. “Can you produce this person?”

“I can. It is someone these men neglected, whose eyes and ears they probably never once considered as they planned and committed their crimes.”

The three Magistrates regarded him wordlessly. Morton nodded to Arabella, who swiveled round and made a small wave of her hand to Merwin, Darley's butler, at the very back of the room. He disappeared, and returned moments later with Arabella's maidservant Christabel. Together they elbowed their way through the crowded room. Sheltered between them was a small person dressed in a white frock.

Arabella and Louisa had done a magnificent job. The girl had been reborn as a perfect little daughter of the gentry. Her hair, now that it was clean, proved to be a glowing honey colour. Her face shone with excitement, and she tripped forward with a light, childish spring that contrasted charmingly with her elegant muslin dress and reticule.

None of the men standing around Vaughan moved as the three reached the bar dividing the room. Even the clerk sat immobile, as if frozen, gazing open-mouthed. It was the courtly John Townsend who stepped promptly across to open the gate and let them in, even bowing slightly as he did. A few moments more and Lucy was ensconced on the witness stand, where she was given a chair to stand on, for she was too small to be seen over the rail.

Morton looked over at the partner of his escape and smiled encouragingly. He was favoured by a brilliant grin in return. Then she quickly settled her features into an expression of great seriousness, and looked expectantly toward the Magistrates.

“What is her name?” asked the clerk.

“Lucy Hammond!” came the clear, firm response from the girl herself.

Now Morton took time for another brief glance at George Vaughan. The face was still set, expressionless. But the small smile had vanished. Vaughan was watching now with the utmost attention.

“What is her—your abode?”

“I
was
living at number twelve, Bell Lane. But I am visiting now,” she added with a certain complacency, “with friends in Portman Square.”

The incongruity of the two addresses, as much as the poise and confidence with which they were announced,
raised all three sets of eyebrows on the panel again in an almost comical fashion.

“Your age?”

“Twelve,” promptly replied Lucy. Morton noted with an inward smile the rounding upward of this carefully worked-out number.

“Is this… place you formerly lived,” now began Francis Beadwell, “also called the Otter House?”

Lucy looked straight at her questioner to respond. “Yes, si—my lord.”

“How long were you living there?”

“One year and seven months.”

“A maid like this!” now breathed out Sir William. “In such a place! Did she have any… did you know what sort of place it was?”

Lucy turned solemn eyes to him. “A very bad sort of a place, my lord. A flash house.”

Now, however, there was a harsh interruption from the other side of the room. “Ask her what she did there,” George Vaughan said scornfully. There was a low ripple of laughter from the men around him that spread after a few moments into the rest of the room. Male laughter. The clerk rapped with his rod.

“I carried the glasses to the tables,” defiantly replied Lucy. “I cleaned and swept. And…” She faltered as Morton's heart sank. He did not want this, not even if it was to save his life. But they had told Lucy to tell the truth, and this was very precisely what she was going to do. She pressed bravely on. “… and only sometimes, if Joshua thought they were square coves and kindly, I would go upstairs with the gentlemen, and—”

“You need say no more of that.” Sir Nathaniel Conant gruffly prevented her from going on.

Into the hush came George Vaughan's sarcastic mutter.
“Only sometimes…”

“Silence, sir!” The Chief Magistrate turned again to Lucy. He pointed one massive black-draped arm across the room toward Vaughan. “Lucy Hammond,” he rumbled, “did you ever see that man, who just spoke? Did you ever see him in the Otter House?”

Lucy's eyes fixed on Sir Nathaniel. She knew the importance of the question as well as anyone else in the room.

“Yes, my lord. Many times. He was master there.”

“Do you know his name?”

“It is Mr. Vaughan.”

Beadwell came in now. “How do you know he was master?”

“Everyone obeyed him.”

“Did he ever pass a whole night there?”

“Yes, my lord. Many times. He slept in the room at the top of the house.”

“What about the circumstances under which you left that house,” proceeded Beadwell. “How did you come to be in Portman Square? How do you come to be here?”

With no further prompting, Lucy began to tell the story of her escape with Morton. It matched exactly with the narrative Morton himself had provided minutes before, and Morton could sense the Magistrates registering this. He could sense, also, the growing amazement that was filling the whole court—an amazement, almost to the point of wonder, at Lucy's eloquence and self-possession. No matter where she came from, or how true her tale, this was clearly a marvelous child, an accident of nature.

Sir William described in overly elaborate detail the
sculptural fragment that was missing from the Elgin antiquities. Had she ever seen it?

“Oh, yes, my lord. It was part of the swag that Mr. Vaughan had Bill and the others steal from a rich lord. It was kept with the rest of the things they stole in the place under the stairs, until they decided to put some of it in Mr. Morton's rooms.”

“My lord—!” Vaughan broke in scornfully, but Sir Nathaniel held up his hand.

“Peace, sir. You shall have your chance to speak.” He went back to Lucy. “How do you know that they decided to do such a thing? Did someone in the house tell you that?”

“I heard them talking about it, my lord.”

“You were a party to their discussions?” Sir Nathaniel allowed himself a degree of incredulity.

“I was in a little place I had in the room, my lord. They never knew I was there. Other times I heard things when I was carrying their glasses. They did not care what I heard.”

“Who was there when this particular action—the one concerning Mr. Morton—was decided upon?”

“Mr. Vaughan. Bill. Joshua. And…” Lucy seemed to try to remember. “… some of their… friends. I did not know what their names were. There were a lot of men I only saw once or twice.”

Morton finally raised his own voice. “My lords. I believe that this witness can provide extensive information about an entire criminal ring, centered in the Otter House and commanded and organised by George Vaughan. She can tell of thefts arranged, and property sold back to its owners. She can describe abductions, murders, and other crimes arranged and often even perpetrated in that house. Such detailed testimony is
perhaps not necessary for our present purposes. There are two specific crimes, however, I would like her to tell you about, as they would both demonstrate the considerable range of activities practiced by Mr. Vaughan in the Otter, and shed light on two matters currently being enquired into by the Bow Street Office.”