Free The Excursion Train by Edward Marston

written by no less a person than Charles Dickens. An execution that Cathcart obviously listed among his successes had, in fact, provoked widespread disapproval. There was a gruesome smugness about the man that Colbeck found very distasteful but his personal feelings had to be put aside. He probed for information.
    ‘Does it worry you to be a figure who inspires hatred?’ he asked.
    ‘Not at all,’ returned Cathcart with a chuckle. ‘I thrives on it. In any case, most of the cullies who come to goggle at an ’angin’ looks up to me really. They’re always ready to buy me a drink afterwards and listen to my adventures. Yes, and I never ’ave any trouble sellin’ the rope wor done the job. I cuts it up into slices, Inspector. You’ve no idea ’ow much some people will pay for six inches of ’emp when it’s been round the neck of a murderer.’
    ‘Let’s get back to Jacob Guttridge, shall we?’
    ‘Then there’s another way to make extra money,’ said Cathcart, warming to his theme. ‘You lets people touch the ’and of the dead man, see, ’cos it’s supposed to cure wens and that. Don’t believe it myself,’ he added with a throaty chuckle, ‘but I makes a pretty penny out of it.’
    ‘Some of which you give to your mother, I understand.’
    As Colbeck had intended it to do, the comment stopped Cathcart in his tracks. Two years earlier, the hangman had been taken to court for refusing to support his elderly mother, who was in a workhouse. Though he earned a regular wagefrom Newgate, and supplemented it by performing executions elsewhere in the country, he had had the effrontery to plead poverty and was sharply reprimanded by the magistrate. In the end, as Colbeck knew, the man sitting opposite him had been forced to pay a weekly amount to his mother, who, though almost eighty, preferred to remain in a country workhouse. It was a case that reflected very badly on the public executioner.
    ‘I’m a dutiful son,’ he attested. ‘I done right by my mother.’
    ‘It’s reassuring to hear that,’ said Colbeck, ‘but it’s Mr Guttridge that I came to talk about. You claimed just now that you don’t mind if people hate you because of what you do. Jacob Guttridge did. He was so nervous about it that he used a false name.’
    ‘That’s why ’e’d never be another Bill Cathcart.’
    ‘He obviously tried to be.’
    ‘Jealousy, that’s wor it was. Jake knew, in his ’eart, that I was the master. But did ’e take my advice? Nah!’ said Cathcart with contempt. ‘I told ’im to use a short drop like me but ’e always used too much rope. Know wor ’appened at ’is first go?’
    ‘No,’ said Colbeck. ‘Tell me.’
    ‘Jake allowed such a long drop that ’e took orff the prisoner’s ’ead, clean as a whistle. They never let ’im work at Norwich again.’
    ‘Were there other instances where mistakes were made?’
    ‘Dozens of ’em, Inspector.’
    ‘Recently, perhaps?’
    ‘There was talk of some trouble in Ireland, I think.’
    ‘What kind of trouble?’
    ‘Who knows? I don’t follow Jake’s career. But I can tell this,’said Cathcart, slipping his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. ‘If I was in the salt-box, waitin’ to be took to the gallows, I’d much rather ’ave someone like me to do the necessary than Jake Guttridge.’
    ‘Why do you say that, Mr Cathcart?’
    ‘Because I tries to give ’em a quick, clean, merciful death and put ’em out of their misery right way. It’s not ’ow Jake did it.’
    ‘No?’
    ‘That psalm-singin’ fool made their sufferin’ worse before they got anywhere near the scaffold. A condemned man needs peace and quiet to fit ’is mind for the awful day. Last thing ’e wants is someone like Jake, givin’ ’im religious bloody tracts or readin’ poetry and suchlike at ’im. All that a public ’angman is there to do,’ announced Cathcart with the air of unassailable authority, ‘is to ’ang the poor devil who’s in the condemned