The Worst Man in the World by Edgar Wallace

Author:Edgar Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
Published: 2020-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

The Master Criminal

First published in The Premier Magazine, London, August 22, 1922

Is there a real master criminal? I doubt it. John Flay was the nearest I have ever met, and it is strange that even in Dartmoor I had never met him, though I helped flog one of his agents and incidentally heard the first mention of his name.

I had not been in Dartmoor long before I was removed to the punishment cells, not as a victim, but as an official, if an orderly can be called an official. Until the second year of my confinement the punishment prisoners were merely insolent or lazy convicts, and in consequence were introduced to the plank bed and carpet slippers. On two occasions we had men who had run amok in the fields, who were brought into the punishment hall, struggling more like wild beasts than men, and thrown into the padded cell. One of these, however, was a genuine lunatic; the second was a brute who had tried to kill a warder, and for him there could be only one punishment. Day after day he went before the Visiting Justices, and I learnt that he had been sentenced to fifteen lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails. But the sentence had to go to the Home Office for confirmation. It was a fortnight later before my warder ordered me to get out the triangle.

One cell in the punishment hall is used as an irons store; the walls are covered with handcuffs and leg-irons, and in the centre of the cell stands a steel triangle, which, with the assistance of another convict, I got out and fastened to the floor. At eleven o’clock the next morning the prisoner was brought out, his hands manacled, and attached to a chain running from a pulley at the top of the triangle. His legs were fastened to two of the steel uprights, and a warder turned a wrench which drew his hands high above his head.

I had never seen a man flogged before, and it was a pretty ghastly experience. I subsequently confirmed, as I then suspected, that the real punishment of flogging is that moment of time before the fall of the whip. The cat-o’-nine-tails in itself consists of a handle about eighteen inches long, covered with blue felt; it is a tremendously thick handle, and wants a man with a very big hand to encompass it. Suspended from this are nine cords, the tip of each being bound about by yellow silk. The warder who administers the flogging stands at a distance from his victim, generally a little to the left, and extends the arm holding the cat until the hanging thongs are within about six inches of the man’s left shoulder. The doctor says “One,” and the flogger brings the whip round his head so that the lash follows roughly the figure eight before it falls. It is this horrible whistling sound which, to my mind, is the devilish part of the punishment.

In flogging you are

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