Bloody Winter: A Pyke Mystery (32 page)

Disturbed from his sleep, Peter stumbled bleary-eyed into the room and scurried over to where their mother was sitting. Instinctively she opened her arms and allowed the lad to nestle against her.

‘If not for me, son, then for Peter’s sake.
Please
. Just let sleeping dogs lie. I’ll tell you all you want to know in time. But not now, not like this.’

Without knowing what he was doing, Knox slapped her around the cheek, once, the noise echoing around the small room. ‘Our child,
your grandson
, is desperately ill with a fever he picked up after we’d been driven from our home.’ He stared at her, then at his hand, unable to comprehend what he’d done.

Peter was wailing in her arms, sobbing and shaking uncontrollably.

‘Little James is ill?’ She had been trying to console Peter but all of a sudden she looked up at Knox through bloodshot eyes.

‘I want to hear you say it, Mother. Tell me to my face. John Johns is Moore’s son.
Your
son.’

She bowed her head and nodded.

Knox never thought the day would come when he hated his mother but in that instant he felt nothing but contempt for her; contempt for the life she’d built, a life built on lies.

‘Yes, Michael, he’s
our
son,’ she whispered, not looking at her husband, who hadn’t uttered a word. ‘There. Are you satisfied?’

Our son
. Hers and Moore’s.

‘I’ve lost everything, Mother. My position, my home, maybe even my child. You could have helped. You could’ve said something. But you just let it happen.’

Peter had calmed down a little but she still wouldn’t look at Knox, wouldn’t meet his eyes.

‘And if I’d told you, what do you think Moore would have done? That he wouldn’t have tried to evict us? And how long do you think your brother would have lasted, living hand to mouth, sleeping rough?’

This took the sting out of Knox’s anger but it didn’t dissolve it completely. ‘He asked for me, Mother, for me. Because he knew he could lord it over me. Knew you would keep me in line. He asked for me because he thought I was weak, pathetic, that I’d roll over and let him get away with it, just like this family’s been doing for the last forty years.’

Tears were flowing down his mother’s cheeks again and Knox began to feel a pang of sympathy for her. ‘You don’t think I’m proud of myself? That I don’t hate myself for turning my back on you? What I did, I did for your brother’s sake alone. But every night I went to bed and prayed for you, Michael, prayed that God would keep you safe.’

Knox felt another spike of anger. ‘You prayed? You think God – if there is a God – is listening? Folk are dying out there in their thousands. If God cares so much, why doesn’t he do something about it? I don’t need your prayers.’ Disgusted, Knox looked across at his father. ‘You knew about this, didn’t you? That she’d given birth to Moore’s bastard. And yet you went ahead and married her.’

But Martin Knox didn’t say a word. Instead his mother rose and moved into the space between them. ‘Michael, I’m begging you, please go. I’ll meet you in a day or two, we can talk then, I’ll tell you everything …’

Knox stared at his father. The man’s lips were dry and flaky, and his eyes were empty. There was something else, something they knew, his mother and father, something they’d both wanted to keep from him.

Knox turned back to her, afraid now. ‘He was here, wasn’t he? John Johns. He came to see you.’ The reality of what he’d done – striking his mother – was starting to sink in and Knox knew he was capable of worse, knew it because it ran in his blood.

‘I told him he couldn’t stay.’

‘He’s your son; he came to you in his hour of need. And what did you do? You turned your back on him, just like you turned your back on me.’

‘
NOOOO
.’

They stopped and stared at Peter, who had bellowed this, the loudest sound Knox had ever heard coming from the lad’s lips.

Sarah Knox gathered him up into her arms and held him. ‘Whether you can understand or not, Michael, I did what I did, I made the choices I made, to ensure this one would have a roof over his head.’

‘What did Johns want? Why did he come here? It has something to do with the man who died, doesn’t it? Did Johns kill him?’

‘I don’t know, Michael.
Please
, I can’t do this.
Not now
. Not like this.’

‘Well, does he look like me?’

That drew the first sound from his father’s lips. It came out like a strangled laugh. For the first time, Knox saw there were tears flowing down his cheeks too.

He had a terrible sense of foreboding.

‘What is it you’re not telling me?’ Knox looked first at his mother, and then at his father. ‘This is me you’re talking to, Mam. If you turn your back on me again, I’ll walk out of that door and never come back. Is that what you really want?’

‘I don’t know what I want any more.’ This time, she shouted, her face red and blotchy. ‘I want what’s best for everyone but I know I can’t have that.’

His father turned and withdrew into the bedroom. His mother went to follow him but Knox grabbed her wrist.

‘You don’t understand. I need to talk to him …’

Sarah Knox managed to free herself from his clutch. When Knox joined her in the bedroom his father was sitting on the edge of the bed, weeping. Knox tried to summon pity for the man but he
couldn’t. He thought about all the times his father had beaten him, with a leather strap, with a cane, with his fists.

‘I’m not your real father,’ the man said listlessly. ‘Moore is.’

His mother had collapsed on the bed and was weeping. Somewhere in the other room, Peter was screaming. Numb, Knox looked between his mother and father, still trying to assimilate what his father had said. His father, who wasn’t his father. The truth of it was beginning to dawn: why his father had always hated him, the living embodiment of his wife’s infidelities.

His mother was still sobbing and was trying to catch hold of his father’s hand. ‘All this time you knew?’ she kept saying.

‘Is it true?’ Knox felt dizzy, the room spinning around him. ‘Is it true, Mam?’ he whispered.

She stared at him, her hands cradling Martin Knox’s almost unrecognisable face. Knox tried to digest what he’d been told, the fact that his mother had never told his father that Knox wasn’t his, that she’d kept this from him and believed – wrongly, as it turned out – that the man was unaware of Knox’s real parentage. That she’d continued the affair with the father of her first child after their marriage.

Sickened, bewildered, Knox lurched towards the door.

Outside, he felt a blast of cold air against his face. He stumbled down the steps, looked around him and started to run, with no idea of where he was going. He ran until his lungs gave up and he fell down on to the muddy ground.

P
yke had seen the men guarding the front gate before but he had thought nothing of it. Now, though, he knew why they were there. The Hancocks hadn’t decamped to Hampshire to mourn William’s death. They had never left their fortress, and if Pyke had pushed on into the Castle, after finding Cathy’s body, he would also have found father and son hiding away in their dusty rooms. As before, he approached the Castle from the mountain. There were no lights burning in any of the windows but this didn’t mean the Castle was deserted. The shutters and curtains were thick enough to block out the light from a few candles. Aided by the moonlight, Pyke moved down the slope, oblivious to the cold and the discomfort of his wound, and found the entrance that Cathy had shown him at the back of the building.

His thoughts turned to finding Cathy’s corpse in the dank passageway, a lump of waxy flesh. What had gone through her mind, he wondered, as she had drawn the razor across her wrists? The fact that her son had died? The guilt at the part she might have played in his death? And would he move her now that he knew the full story?

Now he was there, Pyke questioned again why he had come back. What good could he do? Except it wasn’t a question of righting wrongs, he told himself. He needed to know what had happened to Felix. It was as simple as that. Pyke had no illusions any more about the law or his role in trying to enforce it.

The interior of the Castle was cold and draughty: a fire would create smoke, would let people see that the building was occupied. He slipped quietly along the polished wooden floors from drawing
to dining room. The rooms were all deserted. No sounds anywhere in the building, just the wind howling outside. He moved towards the staircase and ascended, one step at a time, careful not to make any noise. At the top of the stairs, he looked along the landing and decided to try Jonah Hancock’s room first.

The hinges groaned as he opened the door but Pyke needn’t have worried. Jonah Hancock was lying, fully clothed, face down on his bed, an empty bottle of gin next to him. Pyke prodded him and the ironmaster grunted once but didn’t come around.

Looking at him, Pyke felt a twinge of something, sympathy perhaps. Whatever else the man had done, he had lost his son, and Pyke knew well enough the utter desolation he must be feeling. To have something, someone, you loved snatched away from you – Jonah Hancock knew what that felt like, the hole it left.

At the far end of the passage, Pyke tried the door to Zephaniah Hancock’s bedroom. Despite the lateness of the hour he found the old man lying in bed reading a book, a pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose. As soon as he saw who it was, Zephaniah let the book fall to his lap and fumbled for something under the sheets.

Before he could retrieve his pistol, Pyke hit the old man on the mouth, heard his jaw snap.

‘When did you find out that the child wasn’t Jonah’s?’ While he waited for Zephaniah to recover, he inspected the pistol. It was loaded and ready to fire.

The answer had come to Pyke almost as soon as he’d found out that Zephaniah had ordered the assassination of the Irishman up on the mountain. Everything had followed from this simple truth: the child wasn’t Jonah’s, so Zephaniah, who had never much cared for the boy and who had another heir waiting in the wings, had devised a scheme to turn Cathy’s kidnap plot to his own advantage.

‘In the summer,’ the old man croaked finally.

‘Who was the father? Johns?’

Zephaniah nodded. ‘I intercepted a letter she wrote earlier in the year. It confirmed what I already knew: that the boy wasn’t a Hancock – too meek, cried a lot, no backbone.’

Pyke didn’t try to hide his revulsion. ‘The boy was only five years old. For five years, he was your grandson, your son’s son. Blood can’t change how you feel about a person overnight.’

‘Can’t it? That boy was an impostor. This way the estate can pass to Richard’s eldest, my other son in England. A fine chap, strong and clever as a whip.’

The idea that Zephaniah would knowingly arrange the murder of a five-year-old boy, a boy he’d thought of as his grandson for five years, was almost too appalling for Pyke to take in. Worse still was his seeming lack of regret.

‘But Jonah didn’t see it that way, did he? This was your doing, not his? He loved that boy, whether he was the father or not. Right now he’s passed out on his bed, a bottle of gin at his side.’

A frown spread across the old man’s haggard face. ‘I’m afraid my firstborn has always been a disappointment to me.’

‘Because he’s capable of some degree of empathy and still possesses a modicum of humanity?’

‘He could see the logic of what I proposed but baulked at the implementation. But he didn’t build up the ironworks to what it is today. I did – and I found out that the world isn’t a nice place. Wolves eat dogs, sir, but I’m sure a man of your various experiences knows this.’

‘You arranged to have a five-year-old butchered in cold blood and you imagine you can lecture me about the state of the world?’

‘You’re a woolly little lamb, aren’t you? Do you have any idea how many men and women died at the works last year? Because they fell or their equipment failed or due to accidents, explosions, unforeseen circumstances. Am I to be held accountable for their deaths too? If so, perhaps the works should simply close down. But if this were to happen, thousands would lose their positions and the town would go into terminal decline.’

Pyke hesitated and took a deep breath. He would never get a man like Zephaniah Hancock to examine his heart and find it wanting. What he needed to do was get him to talk about what had happened. The truth about Felix would be in there, whether Zephaniah had a direct hand in that death or not.

‘Perhaps you need a lesson in biology, sir,’ Zephaniah continued. ‘But the boy wasn’t my flesh and blood and therefore had no claim over my estate.’ Zephaniah must have seen Pyke’s expression because he added, ‘If you think me cold-hearted and lacking in
sentiment, be that as it may. I make no apologies for who or what I am.’

‘Tell me, then. When did you learn that Cathy and John Johns were behind the kidnapping? Before it had even happened?’

‘Of course,’ the old man wheezed. ‘She should have known that nothing happens in this house without my knowledge.’

‘So you knew she was planning the kidnapping and you decided to turn the situation to your advantage.’

‘Stupid bitch thought she could get away with stealing money from under our noses.’ Zephaniah’s pink tongue brushed his dry, shrivelled lips. ‘The whore didn’t know that we knew, of course.’

Now Pyke understood what had happened. The Hancocks had lost a son and grandson – or so he’d thought. Being victims had put them above suspicion.

‘So when Cathy came home that day and told you William had been snatched, you had everything in place. You were the one who sent the second ransom demand. You arranged for Captain Kent and Considine to be up on that hill, paid some poor, innocent Irishman to pick up a parcel from the cabin, sacrificed him; planted a rent book in his pocket, a few of the boy’s clothes in a house on Irish Row, and let rumour and insinuation do the rest.’

‘Just details,’ the old man purred. ‘You’re not able to see the whole canvas, what we’ve been able to achieve.’