Free Pierrepoint by Steven Fielding

responded, as they left the cell and walked towards to the scaffold. As they entered the workshop Harry noticed a large table had been set up facing the drop. Behind it sat a row of dignitaries.
    They halted at the table and one of them spoke to the prisoner.
    ‘Are you Pasha Liffey?’
    Liffey murmured a reply, and at a signal from the City Chamberlain, who headed the table, Harry turned and led the prisoner across to the drop. He placed the noose and white cap over his head, and as Liffey had offered no resistance he did not strap his feet before reaching across and pulling the lever.
    The execution had caused great excitement in Glasgow and as a result thousands of people crowded outside the gates of the prison as the black flag fluttered in the breeze to show that Mrs Welsh had been avenged.
    Later that morning, Harry left the prison without attracting any attention and with a little time to wait for his train back south he stopped off into a hotel close to the station. He ordered a drink and stood at the bar. A short time later a man entered and spoke loudly to some friends sat in the corner.
    ‘Do you know, I have just been talking to Pierrepoint the executioner who hanged the nigger this morning!’
    Immediately the company became all attentive.
    ‘What was he like?’ one asked.
    ‘A big strapping fellow, just the man for the job.’ He described what Harry had been wearing and ended by saying, ‘And he was carrying a leather bag in which he keeps the rope for hanging people!’
    Harry listened in amusement as the man continued with what he described as wonderful romancing, and wondered at the temptation to reveal his identity and call the man’s bluff. But he let him carry on with his tale, slipped out of the bar and went to catch his train home.
    December was to be a busy month for Harry, and so brought a welcome boost to the family income. There were 11 appointments in the diary, but a number of these ended in reprieves for those condemned. The first execution was on 5 December, when he was at Worcester to execute William Yarnold, a 50-year-old army veteran with 28 years’ service. While Yarnold had been serving in the Boer War, his wife had left him and had gone to live with another man. When Yarnold returned to England his wife came back to him, but soon left him again for her lover. He discovered where shewas living, called at the house, drew out his army knife and plunged it into her back. She died a few days after the attack.
    Despite a petition that attracted 6,000 signatures, Yarnold became the first man to die on the gallows at Worcester for over a hundred years.
    Both Harry and assistant Ellis were also engaged for a job in Newcastle on the following morning, and once the formalities had been completed at Worcester they hurried to the station to catch the train north. Henry Perkins and Patrick Durkin were tenants at a house in Newcastle upon Tyne. On the evening of 13 July, while drunk, Perkins stabbed Durkin in the neck. He told detectives he thought the other man was going to attack him first, so it was a form of self-defence. Durkin died from blood poisoning six days later.
    When Harry made his second visit of the year to Maidstone on Wednesday, 20 December, he found himself accompanied by a new assistant – William Fry. They were there to execute a 60-year-old rag-and-bone man who had followed his estranged young wife and her new lover from Kent to Bedford, where, finding her alone, he had cut her throat and left her to bleed to death in the gutter. Fry carried out his duties by all accounts without any problems but it appears that once was enough and he was never called upon again.
    Harry rounded off the busiest month in his career with three executions in three days. Ellis was his assistant for all three jobs; they met up in Manchester on the afternoon of Boxing Day and travelled together to Stafford Gaol for the first execution. The people of Stafford took great interest in the hangman,