The Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor

Author:Joseph O'Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446435786
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER XXI

THE SCHOOLMASTER

THE FURTHER WICKED DEEDS OF PIUS MULVEY, ALSO KNOWN AS THE MONSTER OF NEWGATE; HIS MOCKERY OF LAWFULNESS AND OTHER DARK MATTERS.

Accounts of the atrocity were published in the newspapers. Most were edited or heavily censored, the details shaded over as being far too gruesome to be placed where women and children might read them. Some articles described his victim as ‘a married man with a family’; others as ‘an officer of great experience’ or ‘a devout Wesleyan and abstainer from alcohol who had entered public service to succour the unfortunate’. No doubt, Mulvey thought, he had been all those things, as well as many others at the same time. The numerous mentions of his charitable work were hardly surprising. There were plenty of leering curs who would throw you a penny mainly because they liked to watch you bow.

His own description was printed too, and just like the dead man’s it was accurate, if incomplete: A cold cunning thug; irreversibly corrupted; a ‘lone-wolf’ who will gorge on the unsuspecting. It did not offend him to be described in such terms. It was nothing he hadn’t thought about himself at some point, and anyway, every story needed its villain and its hero. It was just that this story had two villains, not one. The description applied both to killer and victim.

Posters materialised on the streets of London offering twenty pounds’ reward for his capture or shooting. The sketch which appeared on them showed the face of a murderer, a narrow-eyed, ape-chinned, sneering Beelzebub, but Mulvey could see in it the ghost of his own. The artist had merely done what the ballad-maker does; what is done by the historian, the General and politician, and by everyone who wants to sleep with an easy conscience. He had embellished some details and understated others. You couldn’t really blame him for doing his job.

Sightings of ‘Frederick Hall, the Monster of Newgate’ began to be reported all over the country – in every conurbation except the East End, where the bludgeoning of a prison officer would have won you the Freedom of Whitechapel. It was to his rowdy old quarter that the murderer returned, slipping back into its labyrinths and catacombs. Pius Mulvey of Ardnagreevagh was his pseudonym now.

Every day he stole the newspapers to learn of the Monster’s latest appearance. It was rumoured that he had been seen in the northern wilds of Scotland; in the ghettos of Liverpool; in a graveyard near Dover, trying to smash off his manacles with a blacksmith’s chisel. Six of the poor were arrested for his crime, and embarrassingly for the police, who were already hated by the poor, five of them confessed to it under vigorous questioning (the sixth notoriously escaping from Manchester Prison disguised as the chaplain’s mistress).

Gradually the details of what had happened that night came to be ‘leaked’ to the gutter press. In the guise of condemning their widely read competitors, the quality dailies published them too. The frightful particular of

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