Death of a Wine Merchant by David Dickinson

evening he put her in bed with her favourite doll beside her. When she was asleep he cut her throat and wrapped her little body in the Union flag. To the end he protested that he had done it because he loved her and could not bear his daughter living with her mother and a man who was not her father. Henry Pierrepoint, the executioner, said Williams was the bravest man he ever hanged. But courage didn’t do him any good, did it, Mr Colville? Williams was still left dancing on the air. So will you be if you don’t say something soon. I don’t think that bit lasts very long, the legs flailing about, the neck about to break, everything about to go dark, perhaps a scream or two. What do you say, Mr Colville?’
    The only sound in the little room was the distant clanging of some prison bars. The prisoner kept his counsel.
    ‘Then there was a man called Charles Stowe. He became infatuated with a barmaid. When the girl refused to have anything to do with him he went to the Lord Nelson public house where she worked late one night and grabbed her. Then he stabbed her a number of times. The interesting thing about Stowe is that we know how the hangmen did it. They were brothers called Billington from Lancashire, these hangmen. They always took details of the height and the weight of the prisoners in the condemned cell and used them to work out how big the drop should be. Stowe was five foot four and eleven stone so they gave him a drop of seven feet two inches. I suspect they’d left themselves quite a margin of error, Mr Colville, I expect six feet six would have been more than enough but they weren’t taking any chances. If you don’t speak before your trial I expect the hangman will be along to have you weighed and measured in your turn. Let me see, I’d say you’re about five feet ten and around twelve stone or so. Seven feet drop be all right for you?’
    Silence reigned in the little room. Powerscourt could hear the guard hopping from foot to foot outside the door. He wondered how much longer he had left.
    ‘Some of those hanged in Pentonville have killed more than one person,’ Powerscourt tried once more. ‘Let’s take chemist’s assistant Arthur Devereux. He and his wife Beatrice had a little boy and not long after that they had twins. Money was very tight. He wasn’t paid very much, our Arthur, so he decided on drastic measures. He bought a large tin trunk and a bottle of chloroform and morphine, which he persuaded Beatrice to give to the twins and then take herself. He told her it was cough medicine. When they were dead he put them in the trunk and sealed the lid with glue to keep it airtight. He had the trunk sent off to a warehouse in Harrow and moved away with his son to a new address. But he’d reckoned without the mother-in-law. She didn’t believe hisstory that they’d all gone on holiday. She learnt that a removal company van from Harrow had called at the house. She set off for Harrow where she found the warehouse and the trunk and the three bodies. Devereux was traced to Coventry and tried to persuade the jury at his trial that Beatrice had killed the twins and then committed suicide. He had found them all and panicked, sending them all to the warehouse. He was not believed. His hangman, Henry Pierrepoint, recorded that Devereux stood five feet eleven and weighed eleven stone four. Pierrepoint gave him a drop of six feet six inches.’
    Powerscourt wondered if Colville had lost his voice. There was no reply, no response, nothing at all. Cosmo might as well have been a statue. Powerscourt pulled a book out of his pocket and began to read:
    ‘“He did not wear his scarlet coat,
    For blood and wine are red,
    And blood and wine were on his hands
    When they found him with the dead,
    The poor dead woman whom he loved,
    And murdered in her bed.”’
    ‘This is an account of the last days and hours of a man called Charles Thomas Wooldridge, sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards, executed HM Prison,