Pierce greeted Agar amiably. “Turned nose, did you?” he asked with a smile.
Agar could not meet his eyes.
“Doesn’t matter,” Pierce said. “I’ve thought of this as well, you know.”
“I had no choice,” Agar blurted out.
“You’ll lose your share,” Pierce said calmly.
At the periphery of the P.R. crowd, Pierce was brought before Mr. Harranby of the Yard.
“Are you Edward Pierce, also known as John Simms?”
“I am,” the man replied.
“You are under arrest on a charge of robbery,” Mr. Harranby said.
To this Pierce replied, “You’ll never hold me.”
“I fancy that I will, sir,” Mr. Harranby said.
By nightfall on November 19th, both Pierce and Burgess were, along with Agar, in Newgate
Prison. Harranby quietly informed government officials of his success, but there was no announcement to the press, for Harranby wanted to apprehend the woman known as Miriam, and the cabby Barlow, both still at large. He also wanted to recover the money.
Chapter 50
Winkling Out
On November 22nd, Mr. Harranby interrogated Pierce for the first time. The diary of his assistant, Jonathan Sharp, records that “H. arrived in office early, most carefully attired and looking his best. Had cup of coffee instead of usual tea. Comments on how best to deal with Pierce, etc., etc. Said that he suspected nothing could be got from Pierce without softening up.”
In fact, the interview was remarkably brief. At nine o’clock in the morning, Pierce was ushered into the office and asked to sit in a chair, isolated in the middle of the room. Harranby, from behind his desk, directed his first question with customary abruptness.
“Do you know the man called Barlow?”
“Yes,” Pierce said.
“Where is he now?” “I don’t know.”
“Where is the woman called Miriam?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where,” said Mr. Harranby, “is the money?”
“I don’t know.”
“It seems that there is a good deal you don’t know.”
“Yes,” Pierce said.
Harranby appraised him for a moment. There was a short silence. “Perhaps,” Harranby said, “a time in the Steel will strengthen your powers of memory.”
“I doubt it,” Pierce said, with no sign of anxiety. Soon after, he was taken from the room.
Alone with Sharp, Harranby said, “I shall break him, you may be sure of that.” The same day, Harranby arranged for Pierce to be transferred from Newgate Prison to the House of Correction at Coldbath Fields, also called the Bastille. “The Steel” was not ordinarily a holding place for accused criminals awaiting trial. But it was a frequent ruse for police to send a man there if some information had to be “winkled out” of him before the trial.
The Steel was the most dreaded of all English prisons. In a visit in 1853, Henry Mayhew described its features. Chief among them, of course, were the cockchafers, narrow boxes in a row with “the appearance of the stalls in a public urinal,” where prisoners remained for fifteen-minute intervals, treading down a wheel of twenty-four steps. A warder explained the virtues of the cockchafer in this way: “You see the men can get no firm tread like, from the steps always sinking away from under their feet and that makes it very tiring. Again the compartments are small, and the air becomes very hot, so that the heat at the end of a quarter of an hour renders it difficult to breathe.”
Even less pleasant was shot-drill, an exercise so rigorous that men over forty-five were usually exempted. In this, the prisoners formed a circle with three paces separating each. At a signal, each man picked up a twenty-four-pound cannonball, carried it to his neighbor’s place, dropped it, and returned to his original position where another shot awaited him. The drill went on for an hour at a time.
Most feared of all was “the crank,” a drum filled with sand and turned with a crank handle. It was usually reserved as a special punishment for unruly prisoners.
The daily regimen of Coldbath Fields was so debilitating that even after a shot sentence of six months, many a man emerged “with the steel gone out of him” his body damaged, nerves shot, and resolution so enfeebled that his ability to commit further crimes was severely impaired.