Read Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders for Free Online

David (rashly or stupidly, one may rather think) they were wearing the same clothes in which they had committed the burglary. They were carried off to Durham, tried and returned to prison to await sentence of death at the end of the assizes.
    Fortunately early nineteenth century jails were not so hard to escape from. The buildings were frequently old and in poor repair, the turnkeys aged also, drunken, corrupt and incompetent. Barney, David and some other prisoners in the same unhappy condition set to work on the wall of their cell. Interrupted by a turnkey, whose slumbers the noise had disturbed, they seized him, `took the dubs, and bound and gagged him’. They gained the backyard and scaled the wall. By bad luck Barney and another prisoner fell back after reaching the top, and, the hue and cry having been raised, were recaptured.
    Here however the amiable element of David’s character reveals itself. He at once organised Barney’s escape. It would have been easy to have shrugged his shoulders and said, `well, that’s the way of the world’. Not at all; at some personal risk he got him out, perhaps killing of a policeman in the course of the action. `Whether I have his murder to answer for, I cannottell, but I fear my aim was true and the poor fellow looked dead enough.’ If so, it probably sat lightly enough on his conscience. It is difficult to place much value on another’s life, when you hold your own cheap.
    The escape was vain enough, for after another tour of the Borders, Barney was again arrested. Still legal liaison was so poor that he was not identified as the perpetrator of the Durham burglary, who should have been awaiting sentence of death, and in fact he received only three months’ imprisonment. The disconsolate David returned to Newcastle and his old lodgings, where he amused himself with his worthy landlady’s daughters, and did not work till the Spring, `having been tolerably successful in gambling’. This association in Newcastle appears to have been the only respectable one of his adult life. Pleasant though it was, it provided in its cosy and teasing domesticity, no substitute for the glamour and thrills of action. In the early summer of 1818 David returned to Edinburgh.
    Naturally he found lodgings in the Old Town, first on the south side of the Grassmarket. He was now a fully - fledged member of his profession, and as such was quickly absorbed in a dense yet multifarious, fraternity. The rhythm of his life was established. It was one of short stops and sudden aid to identification. There must have been many who knew Haggart well enough. Edinburgh was still a small city, even more so in geography than in population - and the handsome redheaded boy, still only eighteen, was not someone easily ignored. Yet the fraternity could absorb him easily. There was nothing fixed or formal about it of course; it had no limits. The cheap lodging-house, the boozing ken and the brothel were not easily distinguished from each other; they were all part of David’s world, a world where he had also innumerable associates and casual partners. One example will suffice, his encounter one day with George Bagrie and William Paterson, a fortuitous meeting which reveals very clearly something of the nature of their society. They were, in David’s disdainful words, `very willing but poor snibs’. David came upon them when they were with `a lushy cove’ on whom they were going to work `in a very feckless manner’. Irritated by their evident incompetence - perhaps they were a spot lushy themselves, always an occupational hazard when so much time was spent waiting for prospective victims to attain a suitable state of inebriation - he intervened, carried out the job on their behalf, and then proceeded with them to a house on South Bridge, kept by Miss Gray, a celebrated Madame; for refreshment of one kind, or several.
    These crimes were all small beer, pickpocketing or shoplifting for the most part. There was always a