Post by Joanna on Aug 13, 2017 23:49:14 GMT -5
The Mile End Murder by Sinclair McKay
The eccentric and very funny American poet Ogden Nash once wrote this ditty about detective stories:
Had she told the dicks
How she got in that fix
I would be much apter
To read the last chapter.
I thought of this charming little verse as I was reading Sinclair McKay’s interesting new book, The Mile End Murder, about the real-life Victorian murder of a rich old lady. Though the crime took place more than 150 years ago, McKay believes he has finally worked out whodunit – and it wasn’t the poor man who was sent to the gallows.
But has he fingered the right villain? Only the victim could ever really tell the dicks “how she got in that fix,” and she, alas, is beyond words, having been found lying dead in a messy pulp on the top floor of her own home in the hot summer of 1860.
Mary Emsley was by no stretch of the imagination a sympathetic character. Rather, like the murder victim in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, she was a grasping, mean-spirited moneybags who seemed to delight in collecting rent from hundreds of poor tenants and evicting those who were unable to pay, never allowing them any more than a week’s grace. Twice-widowed and childless, she lived by herself in a three-story house in the East End of London and seemed to relish her own miserliness. Rumors shared by her neighbors – many of whom were also her tenants – were that she spent her evenings counting her money.
In August 1860, one of her rent-collectors grew worried that no one had seen her for two or three days. One thing led to another and soon the police were letting themselves into the house. The first thing that hit them was the “foul and unmistakable smell.” On the top-floor landing, they noticed a bloody footprint and the “nauseating stench” intensified. Seconds later, they stumbled upon the corpse of Mrs Emsley, her head pulverized with “maggots writhing in and around the lurid crater in her skull.”
As you can see, Sinclair McKay doesn’t believe in holding things back. He knows full well that people prefer their murders grisly – and preferably in Technicolor. There was, he notes, a “greenish hue” to her face and one of her hands was grasping a table leg. Additionally, there had been an explosion of blood “in three directions.”
Needless to say, it’s impossible not to continue reading. McKay tells a compelling story and skillfully weaves into it fascinating threads about Victorian London with illuminating sketches on such diverse contemporary themes as immigration, the workhouses, the coming of gaslight, the temperance movement and the threat of terrorism.
Given that Mrs Emsley was a mean-spirited moneybags with more than a hundred hard-pressed tenants, there should have been any number of suspects. At first, the police spread their net wide, realizing, in their blunt manner, that “some hundreds … of the most depraved and lowest class … have frequently threatened her.” But they soon convinced themselves that, as there was no sign of forced entry and very little taken, the murderer must surely have been someone she knew and trusted. A fairly typical murder had suddenly turned into a proper whodunit, with what appeared to be a fairly limited cast of suspects.
Mrs. Emsley’s solicitor offered £200 for information leading to a conviction, to which the government added an additional £100. In today’s money, this would amount to £35,000 ($45,500), a sizeable amount and quite enough to transform a pauper into a fanatical sleuth. One of those with an eye on the reward money was an odd-job man named James Mullins, who had been employed by Mrs. Emsley as a repairman to keep up her multiple properties. With an eye toward the reward money, Mullins led the police to a shed in which he claimed to have espied Mrs, Emsley’s chief rent-collector, Walter Emm, depositing a mysterious parcel. The police opened the parcel and found a few sundry objects, among which were four teaspoons owned by the late Mrs Emsley, along with a cheque made out to her. An open-and-shut case, one might have thought, but at this point, the tables were turned on Emm’s accuser when the sharp-eyed police inspector noticed the string that wrapped the parcel exactly matched the string Mullins used to lace up his boots.
Might Mullins have set up Emm? And might Mullins himself be the murderer? The police decided to hedge their bets and arrested both men. They then search the men’s domiciles and among Mullins’s possessions, chanced upon a hammer which soon became one of the key pieces of evidence in the case. It was, the police announced, “with just such an instrument that the deceased, Mrs. Emsley, was struck.” Furthermore, they thought Mullins’s boots matched the bloodied footprint on the floorboards of Mrs. Emsley’s home.
Within a matter of days, there seemed to be a solid case against Mullins and the public was soon convinced he was the guilty man. It didn’t matter to interested citizens, or to the police, that there was no trace of blood on the hammer or boots and there was no shortage of nosey neighbors happy to say they had noticed a strange, haunted look on Mullins’ face in the hours following the murder. One of them, Mrs. Fuke, even remembered the accused telling her that Mrs. Emsley deserved everything that was coming to her. “It was a great pity,” she claimed he had told her, “that such a miserable old wretch should be allowed to live.”
The Old Bailey trial lasted two days, which was considered lengthy at that time. The judge dismissed as “idle dreaming” the evidence of those who said they had spotted Mullins on the night in question looking crazed and haunted and made it clear he thought the bloody footprint on the floorboard – theatrically displayed in the courtroom – was unrelated to the accused’s boots. Nevertheless, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and, after a failed appeal, the unhappy Mullins was executed before an audience of 30,000, which some felt was the largest ever gathered at Newgate.
Mullins, it emerges, had lived an extraordinary life before meeting his sorry end. As a young man, he had been recruited into the newly-formed police force and then served as a spy in Ireland, successfully infiltrating a bloodthirsty group of Irish nationalists. However, the terrorist cell had gotten wind of him and had been about to execute him when he managed to escape and raise the alarm. Forced to return to the British mainland, he was demoted, then badly injured in an accident and driven to petty crime, for which he was sentenced to six years in Dartmoor prison. Once out of prison, Mullins seemed to have gotten back on his feet when he was hired to perform plastering work by Mrs, Emsley. But then came her murder, his over-zealous sleuthing and his subsequent arrest.
Did he actually commit the crime that put the noose around his neck? Writing about the case 40 years later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, felt the man’s guilt should be reclassified as “unproven,” but McKay is totally convinced Mullins was innocent.
With elaborate tarantaras, he waits until the last two chapters to reveal the true identity of the guilty party. His choice “true villain” choice is ingenious and artistically satisfying, too, in that it would have pleased Wilkie Collins, or even Conan Doyle. But is it true? Perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t. But it doesn’t strike me that, based on McKay’s fairly slim evidence, a sensible jury would convict. My own suspicion is that Mrs. Emsley might have let an outsider into her home – she had advertised a sale of wallpaper, so she would have been expecting strangers – which means her killer could have been just about anyone. And I suspect, too, that McKay is not quite as convinced by his solution as are his publishers, who confidently assert he has finally revealed the “true murderer,” would have us believe. Being an honest writer, he uses the weasel-word “possibly” on two occasions when announcing whodunit. Nonetheless, this is a fascinating book, by turns riveting and unsettling, and wonderfully rich in period detail.
Source: Craig Brown, The Mail on Sunday, August 12, 2017.