The Slaughter Man by Tony Parsons Page A

display of Victorian mugshots, brown with age, the faces of these long-dead villains seen facing forward and also in profile, just like today, except their profiles were all reflections in a mirror when they were facing the camera. They all posed with their hands resting on their chest and their expressions looked like villains throughout the ages. Resigned. Defiant. Some of them trying to look amused. Some of them trying to look hard. Many of them bearing the scuffs and bruises that come with resisting arrest. There were women on display, plenty of them, but for the most part they looked as cold and hard as the men.
    Apart from one.
    She was young, plain and among that wall of Victorian mugshots, she was the only one who looked as if she had been crying.
    ‘Maisy Dawes,’ I read. ‘What did Maisy Dawes do?’
    ‘Maisy Dawes wasn’t a villain,’ John said. ‘She was a blind.’
    ‘A blind?’
    ‘A blind was a false trail left to deceive the law. An unwitting decoy. A distraction. Some poor sucker who is used to mislead the police. Maisy Dawes was an innocent young woman who was used by villains to send investigating officers off on a false trail. See the date on her picture?’
    ‘1875. The year the Black Museum opened.’
    ‘Maisy was a maid in Belgravia back then. Scrubbing toilets for some Lord and Lady in Eaton Square. Then one night there was a burglary. Those Victorian burglars called themselves the Dancing Schools of London. They would go on the rob at dinnertime because that was when the entire house was eating their dinner, upstairs and downstairs. What they would do is slip into one of the higher floors – dancing inside, they called it – and lift the jewels at the top of the house. But before they danced out again they often left a souvenir under the mattress of some poor little cow like Maisy Dawes.’
    ‘So when detectives searched the premises they found the jewel under Maisy’s mattress. And they stopped looking for the real thieves.’
    ‘Exactly. And Maisy Dawes did hard time. Ten years for lifting some lady’s bauble. Maisy came out, went on the game and died of smallpox in some East End gutter.’
    ‘How do you know so much about her?’
    ‘Because they found the real jewel thieves after Maisy died and she became famous. And because Maisy Dawes fascinates me, young man. In this temple of human cruelty, what they did to Maisy Dawes takes some beating.’
    I looked around the room, the cattle gun feeling suddenly heavy in my hand.
    ‘You think we might be following a blind now?’ I said. ‘That someone might be setting up the Slaughter Man?’
    ‘No idea, son,’ John Caine sighed. ‘But I leave Maisy Dawes up there so that the boys and girls from Hendon will learn to distrust their first impressions.’ He took the cattle gun from me and put it back on its little display table, carefully adjusting it so it was exactly where it was before.
    ‘In answer to your question – Maisy Dawes didn’t do anything,’ he said. ‘That was her tragedy, son. All she did was die.’

7
    ‘It’s really not a big deal,’ Mary Gatling said, twenty years old in 1994, a beautiful young woman in a Team GB tracksuit, her face flushed with embarrassment, serious exercise and all that mountain air. Then she smiled awkwardly at a press conference full of camera crews and journalists who were about to make her virginity the biggest deal in the world.
    The camera briefly cut to the reporters, all wrapped up warm enough for Norway in the middle of winter, and you could see some smirks that registered – what? Disbelief? Cynicism? Envy? All of the above, I thought, as that long-lost girl squirmed before a forest of microphones, her blonde hair falling in front of her face.
    I hit the pause button and stood up, stretching.
    It was after midnight and I had been looking at these clips on YouTube for two hours. I still hadn’t learned a thing.
    Out in the street I could hear the quiet roar that Smithfield