The Star of the Sea (35 page)

He began to present for his duties earlier than was required of him, to stay in the yard as long as the warder would allow. Often as he worked he would think about his mother, an old saying she would come out with when times were hard at home. No mountain exists which may not be defeated. Jesus will show you the way across.

For two months he considered the problem of the wall, without realising that already he had the means of solving it in his hands. And then it occurred to him. Quietly; simply. Like the click of a key in a complicated lock.

It was a Sunday night in February of 1841. Most of the empire was at peace. Its Queen was celebrating the first anniversary of her marriage, for which instance of happy incest the Padre was conducting a service of thanksgiving. Almost every guilty soul in Newgate attended. The chapel was resounding with gratitude to God.

There is a fountain filled with blood,

Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains.

He waited, the thief, and he listened to the singing: the prisoners murdering the hymn. The duty guard that night was the flogging Scotsman. It was a blessing Prisoner Hall had truly not expected.

Moloch opened the gate with a key on a chain and Mulvey followed him into the yard. Dusk was falling; everything was golden. The windows of the cells were glimmering with fire. A blackbird was drinking from a puddle in the cobblestones and he cocked a head at the invaders as though he resented them.

The previous morning the treadmill had jammed, as Pius Mulvey knew it would. A nail dropped into its workings had seen to that. Carefully he opened the maple-wood panel that housed the cog-works and pulleys at the base. He unhooked the filthy drive-chain
from the teeth of the gears. It was heavier than he had imagined. About twelve feet long.

‘What do you think you’re at?’

Mulvey looked up at his saggy-jowled abuser. An odd thought came into his mind. He wondered if the man might somehow know what was going to happen to him, if perhaps he had awoken early that morning with a vague premonition of pain and doom. Had he wondered, as he bade farewell to his wife, if this were the last time he would say goodbye to anyone? Had he felt as he walked into Newgate Gaol, as his hundreds of broken victims must have felt, and as Mulvey had felt on numberless occasions, that the sun was already going down on his life: that the moment had come for hope to be abandoned?

‘Sir, the Governor asked me to oil the chain, sir.’

With that single lie Mulvey’s escape was effected. His shadow had already broken free from his body and flapped away over the long-studied wall. Lying to a guard was punishable by two months in the basement, in a cell little bigger than a coffin. The one thing he knew was that he would never see that cell. He would go over the wall or they would unskiver his corpse from it. But he would not wake up in Newgate tomorrow.

‘Oil, you say?’

‘Sir, yes, sir. Has to be oiled, sir. Or it won’t work, sir.’

‘He didn’t say nothin about oiling to me.’

‘Sir – I won’t do it if you say so, sir. If you clear it with the Governor, sir. I don’t want to get into no trouble, sir. He seemed very adamant, sir.’

‘Adamant?’

‘Sir, yes, sir.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Sir, it means keen, sir. That he wanted it done, sir.’

‘Sharp, aren’t you, Mulvey?’

‘Sir, I don’t know, sir. If you say so, sir.’

‘Sharp for the grovelling bastard of a diseased Irish bitch. What are you?’

‘Sir, a grovelling bastard, sir.’

‘What was your mother?’

‘Sir, a diseased Irish bitch, sir.’

‘Well stop lazing, you pimple of mange, if he’s so bloodied adamant. We all know you’re never done annointing his arse.’

Moloch walked away and looked up at the sky. Mulvey quickly slipped off his boots. The blackbird ascended with a flutter to a ledge. The men in the chapel were singing a new song.

O God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come,

Our shelter from the stormy blast,

And our eternal home.

He picked up a rock and walked quietly up to the Scottish warder and struck him hard in the back of the skull. As he slumped to the ground like a ripped sack of shit, Mulvey began beating him hard with the rock, pummelling him in the face until his cheekbones collapsed and his left eye burst open like a shattered egg. He tried to call out and Mulvey stepped on his neck, grinding his foot as though crushing a snake. He began to gurgle and whisper for mercy. It was tempting not to give it to him, to let him suffer before death, but Mulvey told himself that would be needlessly indecent. He sank to his hunkers, murmured an Act of Contrition in his dying rapist’s ear and bashed in what was left of his face with the rock.

He dipped a finger in his victim’s blood and scrawled two lines from Milton on a dusted flagstone.

To do aught good never will be our task,

But ever to do ill our sole delight.

He unbuckled the guard’s belt and took it off him; tied it in a loop through the end link of the drive-chain. Flung it with every splinter of his strength. It sailed heftily upwards, clunking on the wall. Fell back down with a nauseating clangour. The second throw sent the belted link drifting over the summit. Mulvey yanked on it. It began to slide. Stuck in the prongs of the cheval-de-frise.

He took a hard run, somehow clambered up as far as the end of the chain. Climbed its thick links, his naked toes clinging. Grabbed a tight hold on the stanchions of the death-horse. A breeze caught the spikes and spun them slowly. Immediately his hands were
flittered with cuts, but he hung on, moving himself – swinging himself – around the upper walls of the yard, until he came to the leaking, corroded cistern. Planted his foot on the ashy rim. It gave a skreeking lurch as it took his weight. His arms were shaking. His hands felt like anvils. A lunge gained him the summit as the cistern crashed into the yard. He clambered over and dropped to the ground, his whole body sopping with blood and rusty water.

Trailing gore like a stuck pig, he began to totter in the direction of the river. By the time he was in sight of it, he was almost fainting. It was no use. He would never make it this way. As the trill of police whistles rose up from the distance he slipped back through the alleyways and coach-lanes in the direction of Newgate, crossing the back gardens and stealing clothes from a line. A workman’s overalls. A soldier’s old greatcoat. He wrapped his hands tightly to staunch the bleeding and staggered onwards, light-headed with fear. It occurred to him now that there still was a way. If he could stay on his feet for another five minutes, he would not be caught. He would never be caught. Onwards he lurched, back towards the prison. Its blackness loomed up at him like a ghost-hulk in a story. Back to the prison. Only the prison. When he was close enough to see the bars on its windows, Frederick Hall knew he was a free man now.

He spent the night in the gateway huddled with the beggars, occasionally banging on the door and pleading to be allowed in. He stayed there for a week, until his wounds had begun to heal.

The harder he banged on the door, the more they told him to go away.

T
HE FURTHER
WICKED DEEDS
OF
P
IUS
M
ULVEY, ALSO KNOWN AS
THE MONSTER OF NEWGATE;
HIS
M
OCKERY OF
L
AWFULNESS AND OTHER
D
ARK
M
ATTERS
.

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 the lines of poetry inscribed in the victim’s blood encouraged frenzied speculation, as their inscriber had carefully calculated they should. What half-way normal man, escaping from prison, would take the time to do such a thing? What could the eerie couplet mean? Was that part of the story true or invented? It began to be whispered around the East End that ‘Frederick Hall’ must be a
nom de guerre
. The crime had been done by somebody else. The guard had been murdered by a colleague he had cuckolded. The murderer was a member of the Royal Family on a visit, a syphilitic minor Duke who had suddenly gone insane. The slaying was the work of a bizarre Masonic cult to which the slaughtered officer had once belonged. (The latter piece of hearsay garnered even more currency when his widow appeared to confirm in a newspaper interview that her husband had indeed been a member of a Masonic lodge. When denied by the Lodge’s captain in a subsequent interview, it came to be regarded as gospel truth.)

‘Freddie Hall’ was an
agent provocateur
for the Crown. A religious
fanatic. A secret agent of the Chartists. ‘Freddie Hall’ had been billeted in the Governor’s house. Permitted to work without his mask. Given books. Allowed to speak. Moved around Newgate like a guest in an hotel. Darker rumours began to circulate. The popular papers stoked up the coals. The prison was now said to be a nest of Satanists. If you gave each letter of the monster’s name its corresponding numerical value and added together the resulting digits, you would come up with a total of 66. And if you appended the 6 you got from the capital F, you would be left with the number of the biblical beast. It was the
Tomahawk
magazine which first pointed out that ‘Freddie Hall’ was an anagram of Hellfire Dad!