The Invention of Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

to take him, he played an innocent part very well, and artfully pretended total ignorance. I drove up to the inn, where Probert and Hunt were in charge of the local constables. Let us have some brandy and water, George, said Thurtell. I went out of the room to order it. Give us a song said Thurtell, and Hunt, who was a beautiful singer, struck up ‘Mary, list awake’. I paused with the door in my hand and said to myself – ‘Is it possible that these men are murderers?’
     
    The newspapers had no such doubts, even though no charges had yet been laid and there was as yet no body. One week after the crime took place, six days after the weapons were found in the bushes, two days after the arrest of Thurtell, the
Morning Chronicle
ran its first piece on the ‘Most Horrible Murder Near Watford’.
    Thurtell and his friends had the disadvantage of poor reputations. Thurtell himself had been born into relative gentility: his father was a prosperous Norwich merchant, later an alderman and in 1828 mayor. Thurtell had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marines in 1809, when he was fifteen or sixteen. Despite the French wars, he saw action only once, and in 1814 he retired on half-pay and returned to Norwich. His father set up him as a bombazine (woollen cloth) manufacturer, but Thurtell became enamoured of ‘the fancy’, the world of Regency prize-fighters, gamblers and their followers.
    This was his first downward step. Prize-fighting was illegal, and fights were held in fields, for preference near county boundaries, so that in case of trouble the crowds could disperse across more than one jurisdiction. Thurtell became what in modern parlance would be called a fight promoter, or manager, although the role was then much more informal. The first fight that we know he was involved in was between Ned ‘Flatnose’ Painter, a Norwich fighter, and Tom Oliver, in July 1820. This meeting was later immortalized by George Borrow, in
Lavengro
in 1851 (‘Lavengro’ is Romany for ‘philologist’, supposedly the name given to Borrow himself by the Rom he befriended). Much of
Lavengro
is fictionalized, but the description of Thurtell is based on reality:
    a man somewhat under thirty, and nearly six feet in height … he wore neither whiskers nor moustaches, and appeared not to delight in hair, that of his head, which was of light brown, being closely cropped. the eyes were grey, with an expression in which there was sternness blended with something approaching to feline; his complexion was exceedingly pale, relieved, however, by certain pockmarks, which here and there studded his countenance; his form was athletic, but lean; his arms long. You might have supposed him a bruiser; his dress was that of one … something was wanting, however, in his manner – the quietness of the professional man; he rather looked like one performing the part – well – very well – but still performing the part.
    Borrow recounted how one day Thurtell and Ned Painter called on a local landowner, asking for the use of a small field in which to stage a fight. They were refused, the man explaining that, as a magistrate, he could not become involved. ‘Magistrate!’ says Thurtell, ‘then fare ye well, for a green-coated buffer and a Harmanbeck.’ * The magistrate was wiser than he knew, as Thurtell had a reputation for being ‘on the cross’ – involved in match-fixing. When in September 1820 Jack Martin, ‘the Master of the Rolls’ (he was a baker), fought Jack Randall, ‘the Nonpareil’, the match was thought by many to have been a cross arranged by a gambler named William Weare to allow Thurtell to recoup some of the money Weare had won off him. Thurtell, ultimately, would be the death of Weare – and vice-versa.
     
    Borrow, although obviously impressed by Thurtell, had no illusions about him: ‘The terrible Thurtell was present. grim and pale as usual, with his bruisers around. He it was, indeed, who
got up
the fight, as he