Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (22 page)

Soon after these revelations another plum landed unexpectedly in the lap of the police. A bus conductor came forward who remembered helping a man on board his bus with an extremely large and heavy trunk. The conductor was sure the date was 6 May. The conductor had been extremely unhappy about taking the trunk because it obstructed the rear platform, but he was a kindhearted Cockney used to life’s rough-and-tumble and he liked to help people out whenever he could. The man had booked to Victoria but had alighted instead at Rochester Row in Westminster, a couple of stops short. It had been just as much of a palaver to get the blinking trunk off the bus.

The investigations were becoming more convoluted by the hour, although the police were convinced that they were on the right trail. The cabbie had picked up the fare and the trunk in Rochester Row close to a block of offices at No.86. There was little residential property in the area and it therefore seemed a reasonable bet that whoever the mystery fare was, he probably had some connection with this or another block of offices nearby. The police decided to question everyone who worked in the vicinity and started with the nearest block. They struck gold immediately.

Many of those who worked in this particular building remembered a very large black trunk which, because it was there for a few days, was creating an increasingly irritating obstruction in a corridor. It was rumoured that the trunk contained ledgers and other items relating to one of several companies that had occupied offices in the building but had gone bust. This was, after all, the economic depression of the inter-war years.

Ongoing enquiries established that a firm run by a John Robinson had hired a suite of offices a few months previously but had apparently gone bust and vacated them. A cheque he had paid for the rent was traced to the landlord and Robinson’s address obtained. This was in Camberwell but he had moved away – significantly on 6 May – announcing to all and sundry that he was moving to Lancashire. It was subsequently found that he had actually moved to the Kennington district of south London, not far from Camberwell.

The gaunt prison on the Pentonville Road was completed in 1842. It retains its baleful presence to this day.

Everyone was now on the lookout for Mr John Robinson. On 19 May he was seen near Elephant and Castle and was accosted by the police who asked him ever so politely if he would be so good as to come with them to the station and help to elucidate a few matters they were looking into. He assured them that he was only too happy to help in any way he could and he provided full, and seemingly very plausible, answers – or were they somehow too glib?

Robinson had been a real rolling stone, turning his hand to all manner of jobs, seemingly legal at first but branching out into illegality when he married bigamously. Still, that peccadillo was not germane to the current investigation, and the police continued to listen closely to a long and rambling discourse of his comings and goings on the days leading up to 6 May. He coolly denied knowing anything about a Minnie Bonati. Robinson was affable, even charming, but there was something about him that did not quite ring true.

It was decided to put him in an identity parade to see whether the man who had sold him the trunk and the taxi driver who took Robinson and the
trunk to Charing Cross could pick him out – they did not. Reluctantly the police let him go but then turned their attention to a minute examination of the office he had occupied in Rochester Row. A few items were found which had some traces of blood on them, and a towel with a sewn-in name which was traced to a pub in which he had worked behind the bar.

The chapel at Pentonville Prison. Here prisoners kept under the ‘Silent System’ were harangued on the hellfire waiting for them if they did not redeem their sins.

They still did not have any irrefutable evidence but they decided to have Robinson in again for questioning and to rough him up a bit psychologically. If he was guilty of Minnie’s murder then he was certainly a cool character. However, they went at it hard and it seems that the tension was getting to him and he began to crack up. With little prompting he made a full confession.

He had met Minnie at Victoria station – perhaps we could say that he picked her up there. Presumably they had sex in mind and they went back to his office where he finished a number of letters while she waited, apparently with increasing impatience. It was hardly flattering for her ego as he sat there banging away on a typewriter doing essential correspondence. Eventually she told him that she needed some money. Robinson told the police that when he refused to give her any she became abusive and started to swear at him.

He suddenly decided he had had enough, and to silence the foul-mouthed harridan he picked up a poker and hit her on the head whereupon she fell against the fireplace banging her head again. He said he then went home but when he returned the next day, he found that she was dead. He was dumbfounded
and confused, he said, and in a panic he bought a knife and cut Minnie’s body up, placing the pieces in the trunk and disposing of the knife by burying it on Clapham Common. He then called a cab and, accompanied by the trunk, made for Charing Cross where the trunk was placed in left luggage.

There were a few questionable points in all this but the police were certain they had got their man and he duly appeared in court charged with murder. In court it was demonstrated that Minnie’s injuries were such as could not have been caused by falling on a hard object. Certainly she had been hit, probably knocked unconscious, and then strangled. The trial took place at the Old Bailey and the execution was at Pentonville on 12 August 1927.

You Need Trunks When You go to Brighton in Sussex-by-the-Sea

Nowhere else in Britain is quite like Brighton. It has always managed to exude a unique combination of elegance and raffishness. In reality parts of it have always been downright tawdry or worse. It has rejoiced in any number of nicknames, some affectionate, others opprobrious, over the last four centuries. Probably no other place in Britain with the exception of London, Edinburgh and Bath has been more written and talked about.

W.M. Thackeray (1811–63), the novelist, described it in 1848 as, ‘Brighton that always looks brisk, gay and gaudy, like a harlequin’s jacket.’ Now in the twenty-first century it is probably associated in the popular mind with party conferences, a nudist beach, the gaunt remains of a once splendid pleasure pier, dirty weekends, magnificent Regency architecture, day trips from London, the gay scene, foreign language students, the London to Brighton Vintage Car Run and possibly Richard Attenborough’s extremely unconvincing performance as a rookie gangster called ‘Pinkie’ in the film
Brighton Rock
made in 1947 and based on the novel of the same name written by Graham Greene.

Brighton is not a resort made by the railways in the sense that such a description can be applied to Blackpool, Skegness or Cleethorpes, for example. Brighton had already established itself as a favoured and fashionable seaside watering place in the eighteenth century long before the first railway to the town was opened in 1841. This was the line from London and its arrival changed the character of Brighton, allowing it to offer itself as the place for a day trip for lower-middle class and better-paid working class people from London. It also became a dormitory for substantial numbers of workers in well-paid employment who could now live by the sea and work in London, these being commuters before the word had been invented.

The changing, more demotic character of Brighton was reflected in the fact that Queen Victoria stayed there for the last time in 1845. Clearly she had
no desire to get too close to her subjects, particularly the more proletarian ones. The social and other ramifications of the changes brought by the railway are beyond the remit of this book, but suffice it to say that the railway has always had a significant presence in what, since 2000, has become the City of Brighton and Hove.

It still has a large central station with a magnificent overall roof and the London Road viaduct which towers above and absolutely dominates the quarter of the city over which it passes. It formerly had the locomotive and rolling stock workshops of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, and unusually for such an important town and key railway centre it was only ever served by one main line railway company.

Sunday 17 June 1934 was an almost oppressively hot day and Brighton station was doing a roaring trade with day trippers from the metropolis coming to sample its delights and perhaps have a dip in the cooling sea. Brighton was, after all, ‘Old Ocean’s Bauble’. By contrast with the bustle around the concourse and platforms, the left luggage office was almost somnolent, few people having a use for its services on such a day. It was also stuffy and, as the day wore on, increasingly smelly.

It was not difficult to locate the source of what could only be described as a stench. It was enough to make the two men working in the office retch – and it did. It was a plywood, canvas-covered and clearly very new trunk which had been deposited on the floor because of the weight of whatever it contained precluded it from being placed on the shelves. What on earth could it contain that was producing such an appallingly offensive odour?

The men had their suspicions that the smell was organic with a markedly sinister putrid tinge to it, and they must have remembered the sensational story of the body in the trunk at Charing Cross station in 1927; it had, after all, only been seven years previously. They decided that they had had enough and they spoke to a railway police officer about it. Accompanied by an officer from the county constabulary, this man confirmed the source of the smell and concluded, not without misgivings such was the gagging stink that assailed his nostrils, that the trunk and its contents should be opened and investigated. This was indeed a daunting prospect and it must have been with some sense of relief that both officers quickly agreed that they needed to refer the situation to higher authority.

The outcome of this initiative was the swift arrival on the scene of a Detective Constable. He knew what had to be done but it was another matter actually doing it. Summoning every ounce of fortitude he possessed he prised the trunk open whereupon the smell became even worse. He had to rush out onto the concourse several times and gratefully inhale the smell of the station, which by comparison was like the scent of freshly mown meadows. In between he investigated the contents of the trunk.

He was soon joined by another plain clothes officer and the three of them probed something emitting the foulest smell imaginable and, perhaps fortunately, wrapped in brown paper. The police officers did not need to be geniuses to know even before it was opened that the parcel contained mortal remains, probably human and in an advanced stage of putrescence. A female human torso was soon transfixing their horrified eyes.

Within minutes the area was cordoned off and the local constabulary top brass had arrived on the scene. The trunk, complete with its gruesome contents, was removed to the mortuary. All the other items deposited in the left luggage facility were scrutinised to see if the other bodily parts could be located, but without success. However, by extraordinary coincidence, other human remains were found. They were those of a baby girl who had clearly died within days of being born and had presumably been placed there by her mother, perhaps to hide the stigma of illegitimacy. These remains had been there for about five months and the officers quickly ruled out any connection with the current investigation.

There were a number of items in the trunk along with the torso but they did little more than add to the questions that the police wanted answering. Who was the woman in the trunk whose remains showed that she had been so brutally butchered? Left luggage facilities on both railway and bus stations throughout southern England were scoured. An appeal went out for anyone to contact the police if a female relative or friend had gone missing. Surely somebody would come forward, surely some clues would turn up.