Part the first, where the tale of the misfortunate pair is begun, the antagonists are drawn, and a young colt is drawn from a life of respectability to one of infamy.

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Mayer ate Oates
And Dawes ate Oates
And little Lambe ate Iveagh.

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It was the crime of the decade, if not the century -- three ne'er-do-wells arrested for the brutal murder and dismemberment of two innocent down-and-outs. Sensationally, it was claimed thereafter that the perpetrators ate parts of their victims' corpses.

The press had a field day.

Oates and Iveagh were a couple of vagabonds that were known to spend their days by the canal locks. Their familiar brazier became well known locally as "The Moo and Baa", for Oates was a bull and Iveagh a ram. Good-natured and civil when sober, they welcomed all misfortunates in need of warmth to their town seat of wooden fruit and vegetable crates (comfortable padded with the finest newsprint money could buy) and a hearty slug from the ubiquitous brown paper bag "t' heal what ails yeh." Considered generally as a pair of good-natured fools, they kept themselves to themselves; grooming their persons at the public conveniences behind King's Road; purchasing their sups of the good stuff at the Brazen Inn; they were polite to a fault and never failed to doff their battered caps to any lady that happened past.

Not that many ladies frequented the locks, of course.

As the cant of such gentlemen of leisure states proudly, their living room was walled-in by warehouses, roofed by rain gutters and skies, fueled by fires fed by the coals carelessly dropped from the coalman's cart (and on occasion, the dung from the drey) and cleaned regularly by clouds carrying God's own rains.

Their kitchen was the Mission house on nearby Turnpike Road, where the bovine and ovine presented themselves each noon-time for a hearty plate of filling Irish Stew. As it happens, any proud Irishman would have descended into threats of bodily harm should the proud dish of his nation be compared to the slop in the Mission's pot, but none could deny it was adequate, filling and provided sustenance that the spirits of the grape and grain could not. Iveagh himself stated that a plate of it bound him up better than a hundredweight of dry cornflour.

As for their sleeping arrangements, fate had, it seemed, gazed kindly upon them and amply provided a comfortable boudoir, par excellence. Close to the brazier that was the hearth of The Moo and Baa stood a railway viaduct, its century-old brick and ironwork wilfully spanning the canal with shoulders of stone and trestles of tough oaken beams. Overhead the canal, therefore, ran the gleaming tracks for the fastest and best of the nation's proud locomotives, the finest in civilisation, all steam and rush and smoke and whistle, red and white lights, wires and signals. In the peace beneath the arch, while looking for abandoned metal to hawk to the rag and bone men, Oates had discovered a stiff, rusted hatch that led into long-abandoned sheds used way-back-when by the labourers and their betters, in that time when the barge was still king of travel. The bull and the ram chose the outermost two of these exceptional rooms as their bedchambers, complete with a pair of somewhat dubious mattresses the ram had carefully liberated from the very same rag and bone mens' cart. There they slept safe and sound at night; warm in winter; perhaps a tad hot in summer, but dry and safe; as secure as the bedroom of the King, God bless him; and possibly a little more so than that of his daughter, if there be any truth to the scandal at court.

However, that is not of concern to us, as it was in this self-same work shed that Oates and Iveagh came to their grisly end.

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It appears that Lambe and Mayer had been acquainted with each other for only a short time. Both were especially well-known to the constabulary, having been detained for His Majesty's pleasure for several periods each when younger. Mayer had served his time primarily for the theft of some property that he claimed was abandoned by its owner and thus could be considered as fair game, while Lambe had chosen to render a young fellow blind, courtesy of a bottle that he had conveniently broken over the same fellow's head in a fracas in a public house. He swore to the magistrate that an insecure boot-lace caused him to stumble forwards bearing the sharp instrument, and that it was not an action he would ever have considered, it being immoral, distasteful and against the laws of God and Man. The attending policeman called to the scene considered that Lambe's boot-lace must have been a particularly treacherous form of binding, as the many witnesses confirmed the bottle was thrust into the victim's face a good half-dozen times.

They were a pair of mismatched reprobates, the strong, stoic, imposing Mayer being a grizzly bear, and the darting, daring, dangerous Lambe born a stoat.

Life for our thuggish twosome might have remained a pleasant escapade through the annals of petty crime were it not for the malign influence of Albert Philip Sebastian Dawes. The only son of a respected stockbroking father and a reknowned socialite mother, young Albert presented to public an air of aloof, thoughtful maturity, matched by his refined and immaculate dress sense. Albert had style. It came from his mother, nodded the approving classes, as those with daughters of a compatible age plotted how best to capture the colt and harness his obvious good breeding to the yoke of their own lineage. It was inevitable that he would go places, and his doting parents ensured their boy would be best prepared to join -- and some day lead -- the captains of industry in their town. One never knows, many opined -- while tapping a forefinger to nose, snout or muzzle -- how far the boy might go. Perhaps even to a pensionable position in the City.

Ah, yes, the sky was the limit for Albert.

There was but one problem. Albert was not at all keen on the staid and familiar. The child had a need that went unfulfilled by parental desire and premeditated paths to financial success. Deep within him lay the seeds of greatness and he knew it. His ever-loving mother and father tried to beat that heretical and alien character flaw from him. Regarding him as a stranger, one may never have had an inkling of his dark nights in coal cellars being taught valuable lessons by his father's leather belt, nor of the slow-healing welts over his back that his fine linen shirts and neatly cut waist-coat hid from public view. Regarding him as a friend, not that Albert required or sought the comfort of others, one would never guess that his superb posture and carriage was of necessity. Were he to lean back in his seat, the pain would cause him to blanch and -- Heavens forbid -- utter a curse word. Regarding him from within, his soul became as calloused as his own abused hide.

He discovered that he could take control of his own life, and revenge upon those that assaulted him with the Word of God and the prerogative of parenthood. During the latter years of his private education in a local school, he combined his training in terror, his respectability and his business and organisational acumen with his twisted hatred of his own mother and father. Unbeknownst to Mr and Mrs Dawes, young Albert 'turned bad.'

They left town, forever disgraced, after Albert's arrest, but more of that anon. As it will probably not be mentioned in this narrative, it may be of interest to the casual reader to note that Mr. Dawes took his own life soon afterwards, unable to live with the disgrace heaped upon him by his offspring.

Mrs. Dawes took to performing charitable actions, and lived to a fine old age.

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In the next thrilling installment - "The Criminal Genius" - discover how Dawes descends further along his path and the crime of the century draws close to the canal.