Free The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise Page A

standing outside the County Fire Office at the southern end of Regent Street (“the Quadrant”) in early October. It had been raining hard that day, and the child had looked cold and unhappy. Paragalli said that he had not noticed what the boy was wearing but he had seen that the mice were kept in a box that was divided in two; one half was a cage with a wheel for the mice to run round in; the other half was wooden and enclosed, and this was where the animals slept. Paragalli said he often visited Elliott’s house in Charles Street and had seen Carlo there on a number of occasions, and was even present when Brun had bound Carlo over to Charles Henoge. One week before seeing him in the Quadrant, Paragalli claimed, he had spoken to Carlo in Portland Place, just north of Oxford Circus.

    One sketch artist’s concept of Carlo Ferrari, named as the victim two weeks after the discovery of the corpse
    Proceedings in the magistrates court were about to finish for the day when Superintendent Thomas stepped forward and asked if he could—in his capacity as a public officer—make a further charge against Bishop and Williams only. May and Shields having been escorted from the dock, Thomas charged Bishop and Williams with “the murder of another boy, whose name for the present is unknown.” He expected to be able to present evidence in this second case before long. Minshull told Thomas that he had acted very properly in bringing the new charge. The case could not be in better hands, said the magistrate, deeply impressed.
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    On Superintendent Thomas’s orders , Sarah Bishop and Rhoda Head had been taken into custody on Wednesday, 11 November, and had been remanded. Thomas had told Minshull that he would soon prove that the women had known about the killing of the Italian boy. There was no suspicion that they had taken an active role, but Thomas was convinced that anyone living in a house as small as 3 Nova Scotia Gardens must have been aware of everything that had gone on there.
    Sarah and Rhoda had been arrested by Constable Higgins at the Fortune of War at four o’clock in the afternoon. Higgins went with them to Nova Scotia Gardens, accepting that Sarah had to make provision for her children—two boys, aged twelve and seven, and a two-year-old girl. While there, Higgins searched the cottage and took away with him what he believed to be significant objects: two chisel-like iron implements, each with one end bent into a hook; a brad awl with dried blood on it; a thick metal file; and a rope tied into a noose.
    Later, before the magistrates, Richard Partridge examined these tools and gave his opinion that one of the bent chisels could have been used to inflict the wound on the dead boy’s forehead and that the heavy file could have dealt the blow to the back of the neck. Partridge told Minshull that he and George Beaman were certain that death had been caused by a blow to the back of the neck, repeating the evidence they had given to the coroner’s court. The two surgeons differed, said Partridge, only in one respect: Beaman believed death had been caused by blood entering the spinal column as a result of the blow, while Partridge thought death had occurred as a result of concussion of the spinal marrow. George Douchez, another local surgeon who had been present at the postmortem, was called and gave his opinion that the boy had been stunned by a blow to the head and then killed by having his neck wrung “like a duck’s.” At this, a thrill of horror—gasps and murmurs—ran around the Bow Street courtroom.

    The Quadrant at the southern end of Regent Street, under construction in 1813; the County Fire Office is to the far right in the picture.
    Forensic medicine was a young discipline. While celebrated surgeon and anatomist William Hunter had written his Signs of Murder treatise in 1783, the first coroners’ guides were not published until thirty-five years later. The courtroom discussion of the Italian