Bruce Alexander - Person or Persons Unknown

Mr. Bailey tucked away his club, still holding the unfired pistol: then did he reach down to retrieve the body of our assailant. He felt about ‘He ain’t here.” said he.

“The current,” said I. “the current must have moved him. ‘

I went splashing back, searching with my feet and finally came in contact with the body about six feet or more from where he had fallen. I planted my foot firmly and held the body in place.

“Here he is.” I called.

Together we lifted him from the water. I held the lantern to his face, yet the wet hair that obscured his features made it impossible to make them out. Mr. Bailey put his hand to the chest for a long moment then shook his head We had no choice but to drag him back between us the way we had come.

As we pulled him along. Mr. Bailey remarked: T don’t know was it my blov^ to his head, or drowning that killed him.” After a bit he added: Think of drownmg in all this piss and shit”

‘He swam below in it to get behind us.”

‘Desperate men do desperate things. Or so Sir John says.”

Some minutes later. I made out the dim shaft of light from the open trap door through which we had descended into this hellish place.

“He went at you first Jeremy, because you had the lantern. The pistol misfired from the wetting I gave it falling off the ladder. All I could do was jump away from him.”

“Aye. but you kept hold the lantern. In the dark he might have cut me proper. I couldn’t have done without you, lad.”

Somehow, pushing and pulling, we managed to get the inert form up the ladder to the surface. I who had done the pushing, emerged last of all. To my surprise, a group had gathered m anticipation of our return, among them constables Cowley and Picker. They paid me little attention, for they had laid the body out upon the pavement and had pushed back the hair. Two good-sized Bow Street lanterns were held over him. Uneasily, I looked carefully at those peering down at the dead man and noted the absence of the woman to whom I had entrusted my beautiful bottle-green coat. Yet before I could worry overmuch about it, I heard the constables exclaiming.

“By God, Mr. Bailey,” said young Cowley, “look who you brought up. It’s the medico, that one who was an Army surgeon!”

“Damn me if it ain’t! See here, Jeremy, it’s Amos Carr!”

I pushed forward and saw, to my amazement, that Mr. Bailey was right. It was indeed Amos Carr.

There was great surprise and no little consternation when it was bruited about Covent Garden that Dr. Amos Carr was the perpetrator of those bloodiest homicides. Sir John Fielding himself was shocked quite beyond belief until he did order a search of the doctor’s apartment and surgery which resulted in grisly discoveries that incriminated the medico ex post facto. There were bloodied clothes discovered in his wardrobe, yet worse was found in a cabinet in his surgery: there in a glass of gin discolored slightly to a brown tint were found two eyeballs — the missing eyes of Libby Tribble, as Gabriel Donnelly attested.

Mr. Donnelly also helped Sir John gain some understanding of what had turned Amos Carr in such a devious direction. He explained that Dr. Carr had the pox, which Sir John had, of course, not known; and further, that in the last stages of that dreadful disease the brain is sometimes infected with results quite unpredictable. It could be, he suggested, that Dr. Carr, perhaps for good reason, believed himself to have been infected by a prostitute, and that his diseased brain urged him to take revenge upon this unfortunate class of women. Had he not been spied in the act of mutilating the corpus of his third victim, he would probably have continued upon his murderous course as long as he lived (which, considering the advanced state of his disease, might not have been so very long). As later quoted to me by Mr. Donnelly, Sir John’s comment upon all this was that, absent any other explanation for those otherwise incomprehensible crimes, he would have to accept Mr. Donnelly’s, for there could be no doubt that Amos Carr was the man hauled out of that sewer, nor of the incriminating nature of the gruesome evidence found in his place of dwelling.

As for me, save for the tribute paid me by Mr. Benjamin Bailey, I received little praise for accompanying him down into the Reet. Mr. Donnelly, who was among that group gathered round the body of Amos Carr, chastised me for having put myself in environs so insalubrious. And once the constables had done marveling at the identity of the corpus, they stood well away from it and from Mr. Bailey and me, for the odor of the sewer offended them. They were greatly dismayed when their captain ordered them to carry the body away.

Lady Fielding would not allow me upstairs until I had bathed and changed my clothes. She sent the necessaries down with Annie who held her nose in appreciation of my befouled state. Yet I did as told, off in some dark comer, washing well with soap as I shivered in cold water. As I did so, Mr. Bailey gave his report to Sir John. When he had concluded and I was fit once more for human society. Sir John took me aside and told me that it was “a brave and foolish thing” I had done and suggested that next time I was tempted to act on impulse I was to take a moment to consider the potential dangers.

He mentioned, too, that I might be entitled to some share of the ten-guinea reward for the second murderer, but I told him I wanted no part of it. I said Mr. Bailey had done all; that I had merely held the lantern and kept out of his way. That seemed to satisfy him. In the end, however, the constable did share his reward with one Albert Mundy, carpenter by trade; Mr. Mundy it was who’d spied Amos Can-bending over his last victim and ripping at her body with his knife and then did raise the hue and cry. There was general agreement that he was entitled to something, though certainly no more than the three guineas he got.

The good woman who did our wash was summoned next day, and she did look most doubtfully at my best breeches and shirt which I had, the night before, tossed upon the back privy to dry. They were stained and stinking and gave little promise of ever coming clean. Thus much she said, but pledged herself to do what she could. I gave her what words of encouragement I could, saw her on her way, and then set off for Covent Garden to find what had become of my bottle-green coat.

I found the greengrocer where she had always been in the past, settled in her stall, lustily calling out the quality of her stock to all and sundry. As I approached, I saw no sign of the coat. Since I had brought with me her lantern, I had thought to make a fair trade of it. I could but wonder why, failing to bring my coat to Bow Street as I had asked her to do, she had also failed to bring it to her stall. Surely she did not suppose I could have forgotten about it.

I presented myself and said to her rather sternly: “I have come with your lantern.”

She left off her shouting and regarded me somewhat in disappointment. “I thought I was to get another in its place — bigger.”

“Only if this one was lost.”

“Well …” She shrugged and took the lantern from me.

“Where is my coat?”

“Ain’t it been brought to you?” She turned away in a manner a bit shamefaced, or so it seemed to me.

“No, it has not.”

She sighed. “Here’s the truth of it, young sir. Soon as you went down the hole, a young fella comes up to me, and he tells me he is your friend, and he will keep the coat for you. I tell him no, that I’m to take it to Bow Street, and what does he do then but grab at it and says that he will take it there. Well, I held on awrighl, and he gives me a great shove, and I lands on my arse and lets loose your fine coat. By the time I got to my feet, he had got away, quite disappeared into the crowd, he did. I went after him, lookin’ for help, and who did I come upon but a constable. I started to tell him how that fella said he was your friend just took your coat and ran, but all he wanted to hear about was why I had it, how you and the other constable went down into the Fleet. He would have naught but I show him the hole. Then another constable come along, and I showed them both. They fell to arguin’ amongst themselves as to whether they should follow you down and give help. That was when I walked away and went home to my bed.”