Bloody Winter: A Pyke Mystery (3 page)

He told the man that the cemeteries were full and the undertakers were turning people away. The man looked at him, hollow-eyed. Knox doubted whether he’d be able to pay what they were demanding.

Without thinking, he thrust the cured meat into the man’s outstretched hand. Trade it for a coffin, he said, or just eat it.

The man looked down at the meat but said nothing.

Knox deposited the vagrant’s body in the cellar at the barracks and walked the mile and a half back to his cottage on the outskirts of town. Martha was waiting up for him; she had been waiting for hours. His first thought was for the infant, James, but she reassured him that everything was fine.

‘I thought something terrible had happened to you,’ she said, embracing him.

At twenty-three, Martha was five years younger than Knox and much better looking. She had thick, black straight hair, pale, freckled skin and delicate cheekbones. He had met her at a town fair three summers ago and they had married the following spring. Their marriage had been condemned by both families but it had been harder for Martha, especially as the ceremony had taken place in an Anglican church. Until the birth of their son, Martha had worked in the Union workhouse. In recent months, however, with the assistance of a Quaker family from Cork, she had given up this position to help run a soup kitchen which fed those who had been turned away from the workhouse.

‘Do you know how much the Cornwallis estate has contributed to the poor relief fund?’ she’d asked him the previous evening. ‘A hundred pounds. That’s all. Over the whole of last year.’

When he hadn’t responded, she’d added, ‘It hasn’t stopped him claiming for five and a half thousand against the public works scheme. And why? So he can pay his own tenants out of the general rate to square his fields and drain his land. Land, I don’t need to tell you, which was taken from those who needed it most.’

Later, he told Martha what he’d seen that day and what had happened to him in Dundrum. Afterwards they lay in silence, listening to the tree branches tapping against the windowpane.

‘People are dying and there’s no corn in the depot, not here, not in Clonmel and not even, I’ve heard, in Cork.’

Knox thought about the provisions the constabulary gave its men but decided not to say anything. Martha, he suspected, didn’t want or expect him to comment.

‘On the way to the house this morning,’ he said eventually, ‘I passed the time imagining what I’d say to Moore, how I would stand up to him and make him see the error of his ways.’ In private, this was what they both called Cornwallis, an obvious marker of disrepect. ‘But when I had the chance, I did nothing.’

Turning around, Martha kissed him gently on the cheek. ‘You have your mother and your family to think about.’

Knox listened to the sound of the infant sleeping. This was what his mother had meant. The family’s well-being depended on Moore’s patronage and the aristocrat had wanted to remind him of this. ‘Moore ordered me to bury the whole matter. I said I would.’

Martha waited a moment before saying, ‘And will you?’

‘What choice do I have?’

Martha ran her fingers through his still-damp hair. He could see one side of her face illuminated by moonlight shining in through the half-open curtains. ‘You’re a good man, Michael Knox. When the time comes, I know you’ll do what is right. That’s why I married you. Well, it’s one of the reasons at least.’ She tapped him playfully on the arm.

Knox let out a sigh. It was true. He did always try to do what was right, but this time he didn’t share his wife’s optimism.

P
yke had begun to feel his age.

It was the little things, he noticed. Such as the pain when he emptied his bladder in the mornings and the fact that when he first staggered out of his bed, his joints were so stiff he couldn’t walk without a limp. This morning he felt fuzzy-headed and disoriented. He had taken to drinking wine on his own, to ward off the loneliness, now that Felix, his only son, had left home. Dry-mouthed, he rubbed the crust from his eyes and yawned. He had opened a second bottle, he remembered, as he listened to the empty house creaking in the autumn wind. He would get up in another five minutes.

It had been harder to get going, Pyke had found, since Felix’s departure in the summer. Perhaps it was simply that he no longer had an example to set. But Pyke hadn’t been sleeping well for other reasons. A month earlier one of his sergeants, Frederick Shaw, had been killed during a botched raid on a warehouse, but not by of the one of the robbers they’d been hoping to apprehend. It was Pyke who had shot him by mistake. He had given his men orders not to enter the warehouse while he reconnoitred it but shots had been fired and chaos had broken out. Later, having listened to the evidence, the jury at the inquiry had declared the death to be an accident, but Pyke hadn’t been able to absolve himself of blame. He had been distracted; his head had been thick from the previous night’s wine; someone ahead of him had moved and he had ordered them to stop. He’d reacted too quickly or not quickly enough and now a man, one of his very
best
men, was dead.

The funeral had been terrible. Pyke had decided to attend it, at the bidding of the other detectives, but he hadn’t known what to say
to Shaw’s wife and his young son. Throughout the service, he had listened to their sobs. Later he had visited the widow at home and had spent an hour with her, offering his sympathies and telling her what a fine man her husband had been. She had greeted him politely and seemingly bore him no ill will, but once or twice the mask had slipped and he’d seen what she really thought about him, the fear and revulsion. The boy had bawled throughout his visit. He would now grow up without a father and Pyke knew from his own experience the disadvantages this would bring. Pyke had assured Shaw’s widow that she would receive a generous pension but he knew this wouldn’t be enough to bring up the child. He’d left her an envelope with a hundred pounds stuffed into it. Blood money, he’d thought as he said goodbye.

‘I called out to him. I identified myself,’ Pyke said after the funeral to Jack Whicher, one of his detectives. ‘Why didn’t he react? Why didn’t he let me know who he was?’

Whicher hadn’t been able to give him an answer.

‘I’m not sure I can do this any more.’

‘
This?
’ Whicher had put his hands up to his eyes to shield them from the dull glare of the winter sun.

‘If I hadn’t been there, in that warehouse, Shaw might well be alive now.’

Whicher shook his head. ‘It was Shaw’s mistake, not yours. If he hadn’t gone into the warehouse, none of this would have happened.’

That conversation had taken place a month earlier, but if anything Pyke’s disquiet had intensified. He hadn’t been able to put Shaw’s little boy out of his head, trying to imagine what kind of man he would grow up to be. It wasn’t guilt he felt – he’d done a lot worse in his life – it was just how quick and needless it had all been. Yet the repercussions would last a lifetime: Shaw’s boy would find this out for himself. It was at times like these that Pyke missed his uncle: Godfrey would have known what to say, how to put things into perspective.

Pyke got up and emptied his bladder into the commode. Downstairs, he lit the fire that his housekeeper, Mrs Booth, had prepared and waited for the kettle to boil on the range. As he broke three eggs into a jug and whisked the white and yolk together he wondered – not for the first time – whether he’d meant what he’d said to Jack Whicher.

Did he really want to resign his position? Could he afford to?

As an inspector he enjoyed a modest salary, most of which he spent on the running of the household. He owned the house in Islington and had inherited a small sum from his uncle Godfrey, the best part of which he was using to pay for Felix’s education. From time to time, he took the opportunity to augment his income by keeping back some of the items recovered from robberies or by pocketing jewels or other valuables that no one came forward to claim. He was comfortable rather than well off, but didn’t know whether he’d be able to support himself without his detective’s salary.

Once he’d poured the boiling water into the teapot, he collected the newspaper and the post from the doormat and began to sift through it, looking for anything interesting. There was a letter postmarked Merthyr Tydfil. He read the name on the reverse and it took him a moment to place it.

Pyke hadn’t thought about Jonah Hancock for five years. His wife, Cathy, had been the daughter of one of Godfrey’s friends.

Tearing the envelope, Pyke couldn’t think how the man knew his home address, until he recalled he’d written to Cathy to tell her about arrangements for Godfrey’s funeral. She hadn’t attended but had sent him a letter of condolence. Pyke tried to remember her as she’d been five years earlier, the last time he’d seen her: barely eighteen years old and pretty, her fine blonde hair arranged into ringlets. Pyke had seen for himself that she didn’t love or even much care for the man she was about to marry, yet he’d said nothing. Perhaps it hadn’t been any of his business. Still, if he was honest, he had known – he had always known – that she admired him and would have listened to him. At the time, he hadn’t wanted to court intimacy with her; she was too young for any good to come of it.

Cathy had been attractive and flirtatious but he wouldn’t have described her as sweet. She had always been too worldly, even as an eighteen-year-old. Instinctively she was aware of the effect she had on men, and Pyke couldn’t pretend that he had been immune to her charms. At times, when she’d held his hand and laughed, he had felt a powerful tug in his stomach and she had seemed to realise this. Cathy was wasted on her husband. Jonah Hancock was dull and boorish at his best but he was also fabulously wealthy and had been looking for a young wife. Cathy, who’d been devoted to her father
and was easily impressed, had consented to the arrangement. Pyke hadn’t been invited to the wedding but he had met Cathy and Jonah Hancock a few weeks before it in London. The occasion had been pleasant at first but Hancock had drunk too much wine and, after lunch, Pyke recalled seeing them in the back of a phaeton, Hancock’s arm around her, pulling her closer, Cathy struggling to free herself from his grip.

A year later, Pyke heard from Godfrey that Cathy had borne Hancock a son. Now, it seemed, from the content of the letter, that the young boy had been snatched by kidnappers.

It was odd, Pyke mused as he reread the letter, that Jonah Hancock and not Cathy had written to him. Perhaps Cathy had badgered her husband to write to him. Perhaps she had told him that Pyke was head of the Detective Branch. Or perhaps the man was just desperate. Pyke had gone through something similar with Felix, when he was about the same age as the Hancock boy, and he could recall how helpless he had felt. Now Jonah Hancock was offering him a thousand pounds if he would oversee the safe return of his son.

At first Pyke didn’t seriously think about accepting the offer, despite the enormous sum of money being promised, but then he remembered that Bristol was on the way to Wales and he could stop there and see Felix, who had gone to study in Keynsham under a vicar they’d known in London.

Patting Copper, his three-legged mastiff, on the head, Pyke poured a cup of tea and sat down at the table. Perhaps it would do him good to get out of London for a while. He took a sip of tea and thought about the difference a thousand pounds would make to his bank balance.

Pyke knocked on the door of the Commissioner’s private chambers and waited for Sir Richard Mayne to answer.

Mayne was sitting behind his polished, well-ordered desk. He looked relaxed and was talking to Benedict Pierce, the Assistant Commissioner. They stopped speaking as soon as Pyke stepped into the room, their eyes following him as he crossed the floor. Without saying a word, Pyke took out the letter he’d received from Jonah Hancock and placed it on the desk in front of Mayne. Now he was
glad that Cathy hadn’t written it: the ironmaster’s sanction gave the mission additional legitimacy.

The Commissioner had silver hair, a firm mouth and quick, intelligent eyes. He had been supportive of Pyke mostly because he’d argued for the establishment of the Detective Branch and couldn’t afford for it to fail. Still, their respective vision of the work detectives should perform was fundamentally at odds: Pyke had always argued that good detective work was founded upon the gathering of information from the criminal classes while Mayne worried that these encounters would inevitably corrupt the detectives under Pyke’s command. Mayne could be taciturn but he was fair. Pierce, on the other hand, was a punctilious man who had climbed the greasy pole through a combination of flattery and viciousness. Pyke had hoped that his appointment as Assistant Commissioner – the youngest man to have held this post – might have mellowed Pierce, but the evidence pointed to the contrary. It was no secret that Pyke and Pierce despised one another and Pyke didn’t doubt that if the man came upon something he could use against him, he would do so without a second thought.

Mayne passed the letter to Pierce and waited for him to read it. ‘I’ve met Hancock’s father, Zephaniah,’ he said, when Pierce had finished. ‘The ironworks they own is one of the largest in the country.’

Pyke just nodded. Mayne understood, without having to be told, that the kidnapping had wider political ramifications.

‘So you think it’s important that you attend to this business personally?’ Mayne said, cautiously.

‘Of course he does,’ Pierce exclaimed. ‘This man is offering to pay him a thousand pounds.’

Ignoring this outburst, Mayne stroked his chin, trying to assess the situation. ‘Why did he write in person to you, Detective-inspector?’

Pyke explained that he’d known Hancock’s wife and that he’d met Hancock himself just prior to the wedding five years earlier.

‘You must have made an impression on him.’ Mayne waited and added, ‘Or her.’

That drew a slight smirk from Pierce. Pyke decided that the remark didn’t warrant a response.