Great Porter Square: A Mystery. v. 1

by B. L. Farjeon

“Under the sky.”

No answers of a satisfactory nature could be obtained from him, and he was taken to his cell, and orders were given that he should be watched through the night.

As Antony Cowlrick, the man was brought before the magistrate the next morning, charged with the commission of the dreadful crime, and was formally remanded for the production of evidence.

We beg our readers not to be led away by the idea that we are writing a romance; we are stating plain facts. Without a tittle of evidence to implicate or connect him with the crime, the man Antony Cowlrick has been brought up no fewer than seven times, and has been a prey to the vulgar curiosity of eager crowds thronging to catch a glimpse of a monster whose hands were dyed with the blood of a fellow-creature. He has been treated as though he had already been found guilty—and, indeed, in the minds of thousands of persons he was found guilty; all that was needed was to fix the day, and prepare the scaffold. Rumours, false statements, columns of fiction, all tending to establish his guilt and to eliminate from the breasts of his fellow-men every spark of pity or mercy, have been freely and shamefully circulated. Our columns alone have not been degraded by this cruelty and this injustice; from the first we refused to believe in Antony Cowlrick’s guilt, for the simple reason that nothing could be adduced against him; and the course we have pursued has been justified by the result. Antony Cowlrick is innocent. But for weeks he has been confined in prison, and treated with contumely. Yesterday he was brought before Mr. Reardon, at the Martin Street Police Court, and, on the police stating that they had no further evidence to offer, Antony Cowlrick was discharged.

We do not say that he owes his release entirely to the generous advocacy of Mr. Goldberry, but he is certainly indebted to that gentleman for an earlier release from prison than the police would have been willing to accord him. For if prisons were not filled there would be no need of constables, and the common law of self-preservation induces all men instinctively to adopt that course which will preserve and lengthen their existence. Therefore, we say again, the prisons must be filled, and in the performance of this duty the police assert the necessity of their being.

Now, how stands the case at the present moment? What is the position of the Great Porter Square mystery? An innocent man has been arrested and charged with the crime; after a detention of eight weeks he has been discharged; and, during the whole of this interval, the police have been following a wrong scent. That they knew absolutely nothing of the man they falsely accused—that it is unknown where he has been lodging, and how long he has been in London—that not a friend has come forward to speak a word in his behalf, and that he himself has chosen to preserve a strange and inexplicable silence about himself—these circumstances add to the mystery.

A startling coincidence presents itself; the man who was murdered is unknown; the only man whom the police have arrested for the murder is unknown. But it would be odd if, in such a city as London, with its millions of human beings and its myriad of circumstances, strange and startling coincidences did not frequently occur.

There shall be no misconception of our meaning; there have been too many instances lately of wrong done to individuals by false or reckless swearing on the part of the police. The case of Frost and Smith, condemned by Mr. Justice Hawkins respectively to fifteen and twelve years’ penal servitude, on the testimony of the police, for a crime they did not commit, is fresh in the memory of our readers. The men are now released, after undergoing two years’ imprisonment—released, not by the efforts of the police who swore away their liberty, nor by the jury who condemned them, nor by the judge who sentenced them, but by means of an anonymous letter and the arrest of the real criminals for another crime—released really by an accident which, while it restores them to liberty, cannot remove from them the taint of the gaol. But, it may be urged, they have Her Gracious Majesty’s Pardon. Sweet consolation! A pardon for a crime they did not commit! Never was a word with a gracious meaning to it more bitterly parodied than this; the use of the word “pardon” by Home Secretaries, as applied to the men Frost and Smith, is not only an unpardonable mockery, but a shameful insult. Truly, red-tapeism, like charity, is made to cover a multitude of sins, but it cannot cover this.

We trust that the police have restored to Antony Cowlrick the property—the only property—they found upon his person at the time of his arrest; the pieces of stale bread and cheese. According to appearance it is all he has to fight the world with. It is worthy of note that Cowlrick made no application to the magistrate for relief.