Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders by Allan Massie Read Free Book Online

credit to his honesty (or lack of imagination) rather than his humanity). This time they were determined to make an end of him; deal with him once and for all. He had become a well-known nuisance. He was committed to the Calton jail, and indicted to stand trial at the High Court of justiciary for one act of housebreaking, eleven acts of theft and one act of prison breaking. He admitted his guilt, having no hope of acquittal, but with some optimism: the admission might mitigate his sentence. However, as it happened, there were still more charges to answer and he was indicted to stand trial at the next Dumfries Circuit, for the business in which he had been concerned there. The bills were coming in.
    He tried to escape on the way, but was foiled. Not despairing however, he determined to break jail. He did not anticipate difficulty. He made his plans, and had everything in hand for an escape on his own, when other prisoners, with similar ideas in mind, involved him in their plan. As he grandly remarks, `having thus, as I thought, secured my own liberty, by getting everything ready for a start, in a way which none could prevent. I was too easily engaged in another scheme with Dunbar. As I considered myself safe, I did not much care whether we succeeded or not; but I thought it would be a fine thing to make a clean sweep of the quoad (jail)’.
    This was either conceit or sheer good-nature, either way, it was a fatal decision. His associates’ plan was simple in the extreme. They would get hold of a stone, tie it up in a cloth, and strike the turnkey on the head. They would then find it easy to remove the keys and release all the prisoners. No plan could more completely expose the rudimentary security system of Regency jails. It was of course preposterous; nothing so elementary could possibly work; there must, one would think, have been some other precautions. One would be wrong; there weren’t and it did.
    It was an ill success for David. He had deplored the plan, originally saying that, if he should get his liberty, he would never strike the sergeant or turnkey for it. Nevertheless it was David who held the bag with the stone, David who struck the turnkey (the sergeant had gone to the Races), David who rifled the key, David in short who led the escape. Vanity and conceit forbade him to take second place, even in a plan, not of his devising, which was supplanting a far safer one of his own. One can only conclude that to some extent he willed his own destruction.
    For such it was to be, By ill luck, almost certainly not by design, the turnkey was killed. With one blow David had advanced his status from petty thief and pickpocket to killer. The tenacious Richardson, in whose territory the crime had been committed, resolved to hunt him down.
    A note of panic enters David’s account. For the first time, it seems, he felt the danger and isolation of his position. Henceforth, he is no longer in charge of his life; he is a marked man; as much the hunted as the hunter. It was not of course the consciousness of guilt that made the change. True, he affects a pity for the wretched turnkey, and a regret for the deed, that contrast strongly with the nonchalance with which he described the possible killing of a policeman in the Durham escape. Yet the real pity is not directed outwards, but at himself. He is shocked by the realisation that a moment’s unthinking and quite avoidable action should have brought him to this pitch. He was learning what the criminal mind would always prefer to ignore: that actions have consequences.
    He was on the run now, twisting and turning like a hare, knowing that every man, even members of the fraternity, was ready to turn him in. (Perhaps the qualification should be withdrawn; murderers are always regarded as bad news in criminal circles, if only because they stimulate police activity.) Dumfries, Carlisle, Newcastle, he twisted his way along the Border. He determined to return to Scotland, `as I knew they