James The Maul and the Pear Tree

The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28861-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

In 1811 John Williams was buried with a stake in his heart. Was he the notorious East End killer or his eighth victim in the bizarre and shocking Ratcliffe Highway Murders? In this vivid and gripping reconstruction P. D. James and police historian T. A. Critchley draw on forensics, public records, newspaper clippings and hitherto unpublished sources, expertly sifting the evidence to shed new light on this infamous Wapping mystery. This true crime novel begins amid the horror of a dark, wintry London in the year 1811. Using elegant historical detection P.D. James and police historian T.A. Critchley piece together new and unpublished sources in an original portrayal of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders. P.D. James, the bestselling author of Death Comes to Pemberley and Children of Men, here explores the mysterious and intense emotions responsible for the unique crime of murder, with authority and sensitivity. Her only work of true crime, this novel uses forensics, unpublished sources and forgotten documents to create a vivid image of early-nineteenth century London and a gripping reconstruction of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders.

P. D. James (1920-2014) was a bestselling and internationally acclaimed crime writer best known for her books starring poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh. She wrote nineteen novels as well as several short story collections and works of non-fiction. Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages, and has sold millions of copies worldwide. Among many international prizes, awards and honours, she received the highest honours in both British and American crime writing: the CWA Diamond Dagger for a lifetime contribution to the genre, and the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award. She was inducted into the Crime Writing Hall of Fame in 2008. Beyond her writing, she worked in the National Health Service and then in the Home Office for over thirty years, first in the Police Department and later in the Criminal Policy Department, and made use of all this experience in her novels. She served as president of the Society of Authors for sixteen years, and was a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of Arts. In 1983 she was awarded an OBE, and she was made a life peer in 1991. She died in 2014.

Autoren/Hrsg.

James, P. D.

Leseproben

ONE

Death of a Linen Draper

A little before midnight on the last night of his life Timothy Marr, a linen draper of Ratcliffe Highway, set about tidying up the shop, helped by the shop-boy, James Gowen. Lengths of cloth had to be folded and stacked away, rough worsted, dyed linen, canvas for seamen’s trousers and serge for their jackets, cheap rolls of printed cotton at fourpence a yard, and bales of silk and muslin laid in to attract the wealthier customers from Wellclose Square and Spitalfields. It was Saturday, 7 December 1811; and Saturday was the busiest day of the week. The shop opened at eight o’clock in the morning and remained open until ten o’clock or eleven o’clock at night. The clearing up would take the pair of them into the early hours of Sunday.

Marr was twenty-four years old. He had been a seafaring man, employed by the East India Company, and had sailed on his last voyage in the Dover Castle three years earlier, in 1808. It was also Marr’s most prosperous voyage. He did not sail before the mast with the crew, but was engaged by the captain as his personal servant. He seems to have been an agreeable young man, conscientious, anxious to please and ambitious to better himself. During the long return voyage this ambition took shape. He knew precisely what he wanted. There was a girl waiting for him at home. Captain Richardson had held out the promise of help and patronage if Marr continued to serve him well. If he came safely home he would take his discharge, marry his Celia, and open a little shop. Life on shore might be difficult and uncertain, but at least it would be free from danger; and, if he worked hard, it would hold the sure promise of security and fortune. When the Dover Castle docked at Wapping Marr was signed off with enough money to start him in a modest way of business. He married, and in April 1811 the young couple found what they were looking for. Property in the riverside parishes of East London was cheap, and Marr understood the ways of sailors. He took a shop at 29 Ratcliffe Highway, in the parish of St George’s-in-the-East, on the fringes of Wapping and Shadwell.

For two centuries the Highway had had an evil reputation. It was the chief of three main roads which ran out of London to the east, following a ridge of firm ground above Wapping Marsh. There had been a road along this bluff since the days of the Romans, and the point where the strand of reddish gravel came closest to the water’s edge (‘red cliff’) had been a harbour from earliest times. But already, by 1598, the year when Stowe published his Survey of London, Ratcliffe Highway had become a ‘filthy strait passage, with alleys of small tenements, inhabited by sailors’ victuallers’. The degeneration had come about in Stowe’s own life-time. Forty years earlier the Highway had run between ‘fayre hedges, long rows of elme, and other trees’ to the hamlet of ‘Limehurst, or Lime host, corruptly called Lime house’. Wapping and all the land bordering the river had been green fields and orchards, much as the Romans had established it, with ‘never a house standing within these forty years’.

There was a particular reason why nobody wanted to build at Wapping, despite the growth of shipping in the Pool of London in Elizabethan times. The hamlet ‘was the usual place of execution for hanging of pirates and sea rovers, at the low water mark, and there to remain, till three tides had overflowed them’. For years superstition and dread had held back the builders, and it was not until the gallows were shifted a little farther down river that the first slums came. Then they spread rapidly over the marshy ground, reaching out to the gallows and beyond, to Shadwell, Ratcliffe, Limehouse and Poplar. Life in these eighteenth-century hovels was savage, and the rattle of a dead man’s chains when the waves surged in on a rising tide was just a reminder of its realities. So too was the twisted street plan of Wapping. The piers and causeways and flights of tide-washed stone steps that led down to the river – Pelican Stairs, King James’s Stairs, Wapping New Stairs – still revealed the skeleton of an ancient maritime village, but it was rapidly disappearing. Dr Johnson witnessed something of the early transition. ‘He talked today,’ Boswell recorded in March 1783, ‘a good deal of the wonderful extent and variety of London, and observed that men of curious enquiry might see in it such modes of life as very few could ever imagine. He in particular recommended us to explore Wapping.’

The whole district was bounded to the south by London’s dark blood stream, the Thames, a wide, busy thoroughfare, alive with shipping.1 There were the great vessels of the East India Company, bulky and formidable as men-of-war, bearing cargoes of tea, drugs, muslin, calicos, spices, and indigo; West Indiamen bringing sugar, rum, coffee, cocoa and tobacco from the Americas; colliers down from Newcastle; whalers from Greenland; coastal vessels; packets; brigs; lighters; barges; ferries and dinghies. The parishioners of Wapping lived their lives against a constant accompaniment of river sounds; the sighing of the wind in sail or mast, water slopping heavily against the wharves, the raucous shouts of bargees and ferrymen. The rich summer smell of the Thames, its sea winds and autumn mists, were part of the air they breathed. Even the shape of the waterfront was created by its manifold associations with the river, and the names of many of the streets expressed their function. Old Gravel Lane brought sand for ballast from the pits of Kingsland to the wharves of Wapping, while Cable Street was the home of rope makers who twisted their cables in the fields through which it ran.

It was from the bustling trade of the river that nearly all the inhabitants, rich and poor alike, drew their life. There were the stevedores, or lumpers, who humped the cargoes from hold to lighter; the watermen, who worked the lighters and other craft which provisioned the vessels as they rode at anchor; the suppliers of rope and tackle; ships’ bakers; marine store dealers; instrument makers; boat builders; laundresses who lived by taking in the sailors’ washing; carpenters to repair the ships; rat catchers to rid them of vermin; lodging house and brothel keepers; pawnbrokers; publicans and others who made it their business to relieve the returning sailors as speedily and completely as possible of their accumulated pay. All, in their different ways, served the needs of the ships and seamen; and it was the sailors, a swaggering, disreputable aristocracy, coming and going with the tides, who lorded it over all. They lodged in cheap houses by the river, sleeping on straw mattresses four or five to a room, their sea-chests stowed between. After months at sea under harsh discipline men came home rich, with thirty or forty pounds in their pockets, and spent it fast – a cosmopolitan breed, thugs as well as gentlemen in the making, one-eyed, one-legged, ex-mutineers, heroes, pirates, Empire builders homing to the greatest city on earth. There was endless brawling between the English and foreign seamen. In October 1811 the Home Secretary wrote to the local magistrates warning them to stop the fighting before someone was killed. Soon afterwards, as if to emphasise this warning, a Portuguese was stabbed to death.

Marr evidently emerged from his encounters with these ruffians of the Merchant Navy as a well-disciplined man. In the few months since he had been in business he had already gained a reputation for industry and honesty. Trade was brisk, and for the past few weeks he had been employing a carpenter, Mr Pugh, to modernise the shop and improve its layout. The whole of the shop front had been taken down and the brickwork altered to enlarge the window for a better display of goods. And on 29 August 1811, a son had been born to increase his joy and fortify his ambition. He could look forward to the day when his shop front – perhaps the front of many shops, stretching from Bethnal Green through Hackney, Dalston, the Balls Pond Road to Stamford Hill and beyond – would bear the inscription ‘Marr and Son’.

The first shop, though, was a very modest start. It was one of a terrace of mean houses fronting on to Ratcliffe Highway. The shop, with its counter and shelves, took up most of the ground floor. Behind the counter a door led into a back hall from which ran two flights of stairs – downwards to the kitchen, in the basement, and upwards to a first-floor landing and two bedrooms. A second floor served as a warehouse to store silk, lace, pelisse, mantles and furs. It was a plain house, saved from drabness by the fine new bay window, freshly painted in olive green. The terrace in which the shop stood was one of four similar terraces that formed the sides of a square. Within the block each house had its own fenced-in back yard, accessible by a back door in the hall. The ground inside the square was common to the inhabitants of the whole block. The terrace on the side of the square opposite to Marr’s shop faced Pennington Street, and here the houses...