Kate Colquhoun
Little, Brown
Thomas Briggs was an elderly London banker who, on July 9, 1864, caught the 9.45pm North London Railway train from Fenchurch St station to Chalk Farm. As usual, he travelled in one of the first-class compartments, each of which was an isolated unit with no means of communication with compartments either side. At Hackney station, passengers about to board the train alerted the guard to the fact that one such apparently unoccupied compartment was soaked in blood.
Barely 20 minutes later, a dying Mr Briggs was found between the rail tracks midway between two stations.
Despite the efforts of several doctors, he died later that night.
Scotland Yard had only recently introduced the concept of specialised plainclothes detectives (and publishers were not far behind with police thrillers) and the case was handed to Inspector Richard Tanner, its top investigator.
He had few clues to work with in what was essentially a classic locked-room mystery. It was soon established a gold watch had been ripped from the dead man's waistcoat and his expensive top hat was missing, although a cheaper, older hat had been left in the compartment.
With a hiss and roar, English newspapers hit top gear in a way that makes modern tabloids seem tame. The general tenor of their complaints was the fact Briggs had been murdered in a first-class compartment: if such a place was unsafe, then might not wealthy people be murdered in their homes or even their own pews at church?
Tanner made little progress at first, much to the exasperation of indignant journalists, but the breakthrough came when a jeweller came forward to describe a customer who had traded in a gold watch chain, followed shortly after by a cab driver who identified a young German tailor, Franz Muller, as the owner of the hat found in the carriage. However, three days earlier, Muller had sailed for New York, so London detectives set off in pursuit.
Muller was arrested on arrival in America, the steamer used by the police having overtaken the old sailing ship on which Muller was travelling.
The German was duly extradited, tried and hung at the notorious Newgate prison.
Colquhoun makes an excellent job of exploring the solely circumstantial evidence on which the jury convicted Muller, the crudeness of the English justice system, which at that time did not allow the accused to speak in his own defence or appeal against the jury verdict, and the pressure exerted by the newspapers and the huge mobs packing the streets around the court and eventually the gallows (50,000 watched Muller die). Along the way, Colquhoun portrays a society struggling to cope with momentous change, nationally and internationally.
- Geoffrey Vine is a Dunedin journalist and Presbyterian minister.
