The Sedgemoor Strangler and Other Stories of Crime by Peter Lovesey

Author:Peter Lovesey [Lovesey, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781885941640
Publisher: Crippen & Landru, Publishing
Published: 2017-03-27T23:00:00+00:00

SHOWMEN

“Getting rid of the bodies was never a problem for me, sir. Sure, we got rid of so many I lost count.”

“Sixteen, they said.”

The cracked lips parted and curved. Sixteen was a joke. Everyone knew the official count had been too low.

“You got away with it, too.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Come now, you’re a free man, aren’t you? Thirty years later, here you are, drinking whisky in the Proud Peacock.”

“God bless you, yes.”

“A reformed character.”

“Well, I’m not without sin, but I’ve not croaked a fellow creature since those days. I was wicked then, terrible, terrible.”

“Does it trouble you still?”

“Not at all.”

“Really?”

He roared with laughter. “Jesus, if I thought about it, I’d never get a peaceful night’s sleep.”

Talking of trouble, it had taken no end of trouble to find the fellow.

Rumour had it that he was now an Oxford Street beggar — but trying to find a particular beggar in Oxford Street in 1860 was like looking for a pebble on Brighton beach. From Hyde Park to Holborn a parade of derelicts pitched for pennies, pleading with passers-by, displaying scars and crippled limbs, sightless eyes and underfed infants. They harrassed the shoppers, the rich and would-be rich, innocents up from the country trying to reach the great drapery shops, Marshall & Snelgrove and Peter Robinson.

It took a long morning and most of an afternoon of enquiries before William Hare was discovered outside Heath’s the Hatmakers, a lanky, silver-haired, smiling fellow offering bootlaces for sale and not above accepting charity from those who didn’t need laces. “A spare wretch, gruesome and ghoulish,” the court reporters had once called him, but at this stage in his declining years his looks frightened no one. Animated, grinning and quick of tongue in his Irish brogue, he competed eagerly for the money in the shoppers’ pockets.

To listen to Hare trading on his notoriety, discussing his series of murders, was supposed to be “high ton,” the latest thing in entertainment, the best outside the music halls. He was a good raconteur, as the Irish so often are, with a marvellous facility for shifting the blame onto others, notably his parner, Burke, and the anatomist, Dr Knox.

Of course, he had to be persuaded to talk. He denied his own identity when first it was put to him. The promise of a drink did the trick.

Now, in the pub, he was getting gabbier by the minute.

“Did y’know I was measured by the well-known bumps-on-the-head expert, Mr Combe, at the time of the trial, or just after? Did y’know that?”

“The phrenologist.”

“You’re right, your honour. Phrenologist. There’s something called the bump of ideality and mine is a bump to be marvelled at, prodigious, greater than Wordsworth’s or Voltaire’s. With a bump like mine I could have done beautiful things if my opportunities had been better.”

“You made your opportunities.”

“Indeed I did.” The mouth widened into the grin that was Hare’s blessing and his curse.

“You robbed others of their opportunities.”

“That’s a delicate way of putting it, sir.”

“No one murdered so many and lived to tell the tale.

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