How are you doing there, big guy? he asked.

John Bishop and another grave-robber called Thomas Williams had drowned the boy, a woman and another boy in a well in John Bishop's garden in Bethnal Green... Bishop and Williams were hanged outside Newgate Prison in December 1831 in front of an angry crowd of 30,000.

From behind that structure came out an impression of pale plumpness in a frock-coat.

[…] booted he was after Saincte Benettes guise, and a blacke Stamell robe, with a lothlie monsterous hoode hanging backward […]