Damn His Blood (18 page)

In Droitwich Heming soon gained a reputation as the local rogue. He toured the nearby villages begging cider from farmhouse kitchens, fishing for part-time work and selling goods on the black market. Earlier in 1806 Heming had even knocked at the door of Oddingley rectory, desperate for a mug of cider. Mrs Parker remembered the little man who greeted her at the door much like a modern-day door-to-door salesman. He went on to tempt her husband with an offer on a quantity of malt at the rate of ‘6d. a strike under the regular price’
⁶
and at the far more generous ‘Tewkesbury measure’.

The profits Heming made from selling black market goods proved to be an important supplement to his more steady income as a skilled carpenter and wheelwright. One account of Heming had him, just a few months before Parker’s murder, assisting Mr Smith, a brush maker from Worcester, to fell a good-sized coppice near Droitwich. However, before the job was satisfactorily completed Smith had received a letter informing him that Heming was selling a number of the harvested poles to Captain Evans, which he had no authority to do. Smith had instantly sought Richard Heming out at the Red Lion in Droitwich and threatened to have him sent to gaol. Only after Heming claimed that he had intended to settle for the poles separately did Mr Smith let the matter drop. And the evidence suggests that this was not an isolated incident. In Droitwich it was rumoured that Heming had begun a second career as a thief,
⁷
with local gossip fixing his name to a number of unsolved robberies.

Heming had joined the ranks of the misty Georgian underworld, a concealed society of beggars, petty thieves, sharpers, rustlers, dossers and cheats; a class of entrenched criminals who festered in gloomy, unseen corners. His ability to source such a wide variety of products suggested that he may have had links with the smuggling gang at Trench Wood. Perhaps he was the resident of the robber’s den discovered in 1805, less than a year before? No proof of this was ever presented to the authorities, but a report in
Berrow’s Worcester Journal
as far back as March in 1801 records, ‘Committed to our house of correction
⁸
by the Rev. Arthur Onslow … of Worcester, Richard Heming, on suspicion of stealing out of the building of George Brooke at Kinlet, an iron mattock, a chisel, several boards and other things.’ Whether this was our Richard Heming or not is once again uncertain as Kinlet lay almost 20 miles and a good day’s walk to the northeast of Droitwich, but the details fit with the pattern in his behaviour.

Whatever scrapes with the law Heming had endured in the past six years, in the early months of 1806 he was at large in Oddingley, continuing his eccentric lifestyle: begging cider, bothering villagers, appearing from behind hedgerows one moment before vanishing into byways the next. Shades of Heming’s character can be found in
Great Expectations
, in the wretched biography of the convict Abel Magwitch, who confesses to Pip shortly after his appearance that he spent many years in his youth ‘Tramping, begging, thieving,
⁹
working sometimes when I could, though that wasn’t as often as you may think … bit of a poacher, bit of a labourer, bit of a wagoner, a bit of a haymaker, a bit of a hawker, a bit of most things that don’t pay and lead to trouble’.

Heming’s was a capricious existence that might have brought him notoriety and certainly did not win him friends. When he approached William Colley, one of Oddingley’s most hardbitten labourers, in the middle of May, asking whether he could borrow his horse for a trip to Eckington – a riverside village in the south of the county close to his mother’s home at Bredon – Colley flatly refused. His decision was reflective of local opinion: ‘Heming was a bad one,’ Colley later said.

Throughout early June sightings of Heming intensified. He would loiter in Barnett’s meadows, engaging labourers in conversation when they passed. Susan Surman saw him regularly when fetching the cows down to Pound Farm for milking. ‘For three week previous to the murder,’ she claimed ‘night and morning he used to walk up and down the meadow called the Middle Wash Pool. He came I thought to court me; he had made quite a path in the mowing grass and it leads to no place.’

Surman’s suspicions were not based on mere vanity. There was little obvious reason for him to be lurking in the lanes when he could be working elsewhere. To her he was a perplexing stranger and his attentions were unwelcome. At some point before the murder she had complained to John Barnett that this odd man was ‘detaining’ her in the fields. Perhaps this was too cryptic for Barnett, who rather than investigate the matter further ‘scoffed’ at her. He used the episode as an excuse to tease Surman, referring to this mysterious man as her ‘sweetheart’.

And Heming did not just cut a suspicious figure, but also a notable one. ‘Heming used to dress in a dark blue coat, red handkerchief and corduroy breeches,’ Surman recollected, a fact which in itself was odd. During harvest most labourers donned smock frocks, airy linen overgarments that were easily washed and mended – over loose-fitting breeches – which combined to keep them cool as they worked under the summer sun. But Heming’s coat was reported over and over again in eye-witness accounts. At once it seems clumsy, heavy, uncomfortable and intriguing, its spacious pockets a possible home for any number of hidden objects.

In the early nineteenth century Britons relied on greatcoats from October to April, not just for warmth but also for their other function – as something like a portable suitcase. They were especially popular with artisans, who had to haul their tools about from job to job, but they weren’t just limited to the lower classes; even the great Dr Johnson preserved an air of his humble beginnings by sporting a greatcoat long after he had become a national celebrity. In Boswell’s
Life of Dr Johnson
the author wrote, ‘Upon his tour,
¹⁰
when journeying, he wore boots, and a very wide brown cloth great coat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio dictionary.’

Why should Heming have persisted with his coat in May and June? It must have had a purpose. Was he making use of its deep pockets to carry his carpentry tools – chisels, hammers and measuring rules – about the county? Was the coat merely a faithful travelling companion to protect him from sudden turns in the capricious Worcestershire weather? Or did the long blue coat have a more sinister purpose? Did Heming need a bulky overcoat to conceal a weapon as he prowled the hedgerows and lanes? John Chellingworth, the labourer who had left Oddingley heading south before dawn on Midsummer morning, had recently seen Heming ‘carrying a bag with something in it like a long stick’ – ‘It seemed long enough for a gun,’ he mused later.

A romanticised lithograph of an English gentleman out snipe hunting with a flintlock shotgun from
Ackermann’s Repository of Arts
, 1809

The need to conceal this gun perhaps explains why Heming persisted with the greatcoat in the late spring and early summer. The round hat that Lench and Giles observed on the day of the murder may also have had a sinister purpose – to shield his eyes as he lowered the shotgun and took aim. Brought together, these objects leave a powerful portrait of Heming the murderer. As John Lench explained to James Tustin as they raced towards Pound Farm earlier that evening: it was the man in the long blue coat.

On Midsummer evening Reverend Pyndar did not yet have evidence from Susan Surman, Joseph Colley
⁴
or John Chellingworth. But Colwell’s account was sufficiently detailed and certain for the magistrate to presume that Heming was the man they were after. It was time to cast his net. At around 8 p.m. he dispatched George Lloyd – the father of Sarah Lloyd – to the home of Richard Allen, a constable in Droitwich. Pyndar’s instructions were simple. He was to search Heming’s home, and if nothing was found, to keep a watch upon the property throughout the night.

Allen and Lloyd reached Heming’s house at around 9 p.m., ‘enquiring’ tentatively of Elizabeth whether Richard was there. She replied that he was not and nor had she seen him since early that morning. The constable thanked her and slipped across the street and into the shadows.

Elizabeth Heming was many things that Richard was not. She was assiduous and level-headed, carefully recording his business accounts in a ledger and managing the family’s income. She was not unduly concerned by the constable’s first knock. Her husband’s lifestyle was erratic and it was not unusual for him to be away from home at any hour. On Midsummer night
¹¹
she had her mother to keep her company and help watch her elder two daughters as she nursed Harriet, her two-month-old baby girl.

Half an hour later Allen knocked again, and Elizabeth repeated that she had not seen or heard from Richard. The constable returned for a third time at 10 p.m., and Elizabeth, growing uneasy, begged him to tell her what had happened.

Allen informed her that Reverend Parker of Oddingley had been murdered at five o’clock that afternoon, that Richard was the chief suspect in the case and that there were seven constables scouring the county for him. He requested permission to search the house, which she immediately granted. Finding nothing, he left.

Allen then widened his search. He called at several other properties in and around Droitwich during the few hours of darkness that night. One was particularly notable. It belonged to Charles Burton, Elizabeth’s younger brother. Burton and Heming had evidently been close, but his house was searched without success.

The hunt for Heming was gathering pace in other quarters too. At Oddingley Reverend Pyndar ordered the clerk John Pardoe and Edward Stephens, a labourer, to ride to Worcester and have a handbill printed with both the butchers’ and Colwell’s descriptions of the murderer.

One possibility was that Heming had bypassed Worcester altogether and headed towards Bredon, where he might find protection from his family and old friends. With this in mind, John Perkins and Thomas Colwell were ordered to take the road south, accompanied by George Day, Parker’s servant, who had just returned from Worcester. Pyndar was making best use of the scant resources he had available to him, coordinating the community which had seemed so useless only hours before. Perkins lent Thomas Colwell a nag and George Day took Parker’s horse, and as the sun set over Oddingley on Midsummer Day the three men headed out of the village. They passed the church and Netherwood Farm and then crossed the parish boundary towards Worcester, the same route that Pritchard and Chellingworth had taken much earlier that day.

The men arrived in Eckington, just north of their intended destination, in the early hours of Wednesday morning. There was no sign of Heming. At 4 a.m., as the sun rose, they searched his parents’ home at Bredon’s Norton but found nothing. On their way back to Oddingley in the morning ‘they made every enquiry
¹²
on the Road, but could get no intelligence of Heming, except that he had been seen at Whittington [a small village on the outskirts of Worcester] that night and had a Pint of Ale’.

Once again, Richard Heming had vanished.

CHAPTER 9

Droitwich

Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire, 1783–1806

LOOKING WEST FROM the edge of the escarpment that hung over Oddingley, and from the outer canopy of Trench Wood, villagers could watch over the variety of lanes and pathways that cleaved through the parish and out across the vista. Beyond Smite Hill, just out of view, was the bustling coach road, turnpiked in 1714, that ran between Droitwich and Worcester. Passing through the village were Oddingley Lane, Netherwood Lane, Church Lane, Pineapple Lane and Hull Lane. Then there were by-paths, bridal ways, drovers’ roads and farmers’ tracks, some of them well defined and worn bare, others overgrown and almost impassable for anyone but those with the lightest feet. Just to the north of the village the ancient saltways radiated out from Droitwich, jutting south towards the nearby villages of Sale Way and Sale Green.

This labyrinth of rural pathways was replicated right across the surrounding countryside, and confused Pyndar’s hunt for Heming. Everyone knew their own favourite route, their own ingenious shortcut. And if he hadn’t already vanished into Worcester’s anonymous streets or the waiting door of a stage coach, then Heming’s mastery of the roads and lanes would offer him his finest hope of eluding those who chased him.