Kill-Devil and Water (4 page)

Authors: Andrew Pepper

Tags: #Jamaica, #Murder, #England, #Sugar Plantations, #London (England), #Mystery & Detective, #Prostitutes, #Crimes Against, #Fiction, #General, #Investigation, #Historical, #London, #Crime

BOOK: Kill-Devil and Water

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Felix didn’t move.

Jo appeared from the back of the apartment; she was wearing a kitchen apron and her hair was tied up under a lace bonnet. ‘
Pyke
.’ She hurried forward and they greeted one another awkwardly, a handshake and a kiss rolled into one. Although she was technically his servant, they had nonetheless become close in the years since Emily’s death. In that time, Pyke had also become aware that Felix had started to regard Jo as a surrogate mother, and he’d tried not to place too great a burden on her, but her kindness and good nature meant she had always been willing to help in whatever way she could.

‘You look well,’ Jo said. ‘You really do.’

‘And so do you.’ He meant it, too, but his gaze drifted up the stairs to where Felix was still standing.

Jo noticed this and said to Felix, ‘Come down here at once, young man.’

But Felix still refused to budge. Pyke took a few tentative steps towards him. ‘Felix?’ He waited for his son to look at him but the lad’s eyes were planted on his shoes. ‘Do you not recognise your own father?’ He tried to keep his tone light and breezy, not wanting any of them to see his bitter disappointment at Felix’s apparent indifference. In his head, he’d imagined the lad bounding down the stairs and throwing his arms around him.

‘Hello, Father,’ Felix mumbled. Then, without warning, he turned and disappeared up the stairs.

Jo called out, ordering Felix to come back down ‘this minute’, a maternal firmness in her tone, but when nothing happened, she said she would go and drag him down if necessary. Pyke stepped forward and blocked her path. ‘It’s my fault. I should have given you time to prepare, time for Felix to adjust. Leave him for the moment. He’ll come round.’

‘I just can’t understand it,’ Godfrey said, shaking his head. ‘The boy talks about you constantly. Doesn’t he, my dear?’

Jo smiled but her awkward reaction suggested she didn’t entirely concur with Godfrey’s assessment. Pyke thought about the way she had spoken to Felix, and the way Felix had taken her hand on the street earlier that day.

‘You’ll stay with us, though? I’m afraid you won’t have your own bedroom but if you don’t mind sharing the front room with Copper ...’

‘Thank you, but the sooner I find my own accommodation, the better it’ll be for all of us.’ Pyke had intended to stay the night but the coolness of Felix’s reaction had wounded him and now all he wanted to do was be by himself.

‘At least stay for a glass of claret.’

Pyke glanced up the stairs and then bent down to give Copper another pat on the head.

‘Just give him a little time, dear boy. Deep down, the lad adores you.’

Jo excused herself and returned to the kitchen. Godfrey led Pyke into the front room and said, ‘Perhaps you haven’t heard about the success of our book ...’

‘It’s not
our
book,’ Pyke said, glancing around the room, taking in its familiar sights and smells. ‘It’s your book.’

‘Quite.’ Godfrey smiled awkwardly. ‘So tell me why they let you out so soon.’ He went to pour them both a glass of claret from the decanter.

‘Well,’ Pyke said, taking a sip of the wine, ‘an old friend wants me to investigate the murder of this woman ...’

He wanted Godfrey to know what he was doing because he hoped his uncle would tell Felix; most of all he wanted Felix to know that he was more than just an ex-convict.

That night, Pyke found accommodation - little more than a garret really - in Smithfield and, with nothing to unpack, he lay down on the old mattress and listened to the rain beating against the tiles. At his side Copper, who had insisted on coming with him, snored contentedly. As he tried to sleep, he thought about the ward at Marshalsea and the fact that, to all intents and purposes, he had swapped one cell for another.

Early the following morning, Pyke went to see the old man who ran the dram-shop - the one who’d found the body. He told Pyke essentially the same story he’d told Tilling: that he had first seen the corpse while discarding the previous night’s soil into the stream that ran through the land at the back of his shop; that it hadn’t been there the day before or else he would certainly have noticed it; and that he hadn’t interfered with the corpse in any way but had sent a lad to fetch the police.

He struck Pyke as a credible witness, or as credible as someone who sold illegal spirits with the potential to blind customers could be. But it was his wife, a stout, unattractive woman with thick, wiry hair sprouting from her nose, that Pyke really wanted to talk to. She also stuck to her story and, in the end, Pyke decided that she, too, had told the truth. On the night in question, she had been woken by hushed voices coming from beneath her bedroom window; her husband, she’d told Pyke, had been drunk and hadn’t stirred. She hadn’t gone to the window because she suffered from gout and hadn’t wanted to move from her bed, but she’d certainly heard a wagon or cart stop near the bridge. She reckoned it had stayed there for about ten minutes.

Outside by the stream, Pyke looked for further clues but found nothing except for a broken plate, a few pieces of wood and some furniture. It was a grim spot. Climbing up to the bridge, he looked down at the place where the body had been found and tried to put himself in the mind of the man who’d dumped her there. It would have been easy enough to drag the body from the cart across the road and then shove it over the edge towards the stream. The bank was muddy and yet the body, at least when he’d seen it upstairs in the tavern, had been almost spotless. This was further proof, in Pyke’s mind, that the corpse had been washed with rum. But why?

Next Pyke knocked on doors and stopped people on the street but no one admitted to having seen anything on the night in question. He showed people the drawing of the dead woman but no one recognised her.

At ten o’clock he attended the coroner’s inquest just a few yards away at the Green Dragon, where the jury, as expected, returned a verdict of wilful murder.

Strenuous efforts had been made to ensure that the jurors wouldn’t run to the newspapers with stories of what they had seen - the last thing Pyke wanted was a rush of pilgrims to the scene of the crime - but he also knew it was only a matter of time before the story leaked out into the public domain. Still, at Pyke’s insistence, the jurors had all been warned that if specific details of the mutilation made their way into the newspapers, there would be serious consequences.

A while later, returning to the old bridge, Pyke had a peculiar feeling he had known this place as a child. It took him a good few minutes to remember the exact incident and the date.

The bridge looked much smaller than he remembered, but this was to be expected. He had been eleven, maybe twelve, and he had made the journey to the Ratcliff Highway on New Year’s Eve to witness the corpse of the murderer, John Williams, being paraded in an upturned coffin attached to a wagon. Williams had apparently bludgeoned to death two families who lived on the Ratcliff Highway but had committed suicide before the court could pass sentence on him. The purpose of the parade, therefore, had been to satisfy the public’s demand that the murders be properly avenged. Standing on the bridge, at almost the same spot where he had stood almost thirty years earlier, Pyke could still picture the dead man’s hard, mummified face and the cold, staring eyes. Later he had followed the procession north up Cannon Street to a piece of scrubland where the body was to be buried. There, he had witnessed one of the burial party, a red-faced man wearing a billycock hat, drive a wooden stake through the corpse’s heart using a sledgehammer.

At the time he had been terrified - at the sight of the corpse and of the notion that the murderer, Williams, wasn’t in fact dead - and for weeks afterwards he’d dreamt that his mother, who had left when Pyke was just five, had been one of Williams’ early victims.

It was odd to think that the murders of two families from the Ratcliff Highway, one of the poorest and most notorious streets in the entire city, had caused such a stir throughout the metropolis. Thirty years later, an elderly aristocrat had been murdered in his elegant Park Lane home, and this was the murder that everyone was talking about. No one seemed to be bothered about the murder of an unknown mulatto woman. Of course, there was nothing especially surprising about this state of affairs but, in the circumstances, Pyke couldn’t help but think about the procession he’d witnessed thirty years earlier, and it made him wonder whether the city really was a safer, fairer place to live, as the politicians and civic leaders often tried to claim.

The Bluefield lodging house was neither blue nor situated anywhere near a field. In fact, it was located at the end of a thin, sunless court and had nothing to recommend it. The smell of fried fish and horse dung was pungent and a grey-flannelled mist drifted off the river. Inside, the ceilings were low and buckled and the plaster flaked off smoke-blackened walls. Pyke found Thrale in the kitchen. The former bare-knuckled fighter took him up the corkscrew staircase to the room Mary Edgar and Arthur Sobers had rented. They knocked but no one answered. Thrale took out some keys and tried them, one by one, until the lock turned. He let Pyke go ahead of him with the lantern. The room was empty.

After Pyke had given it a thorough search, and found nothing of interest, he joined Thrale in the kitchen.

‘I’m thinking they would both have come here with luggage,’ Pyke said, not posing it as a question.

‘I expect so.’

‘You must have seen whether they did or not when they first arrived.’

‘Yes, they both had cases.’

‘But you didn’t see them leave with their cases?’

‘That’s right.’

Pyke considered this. ‘Sobers stayed here for about three weeks, you said. During that time, he must have talked to some of your guests.’

‘Like I said earlier, they both kept themselves to themselves.’

‘But when they cooked their food, for example?’

‘No one wanted much to do with a blackbird, to be honest.’ Thrale rubbed his eyes and hesitated. ‘Actually, come to think of it, Sobers did have a visitor, or should I say a gang of visitors, about a week ago. Almost got nasty, so I heard.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘What’s to tell? A couple of free-booters turns up looking for Sobers and the woman. Someone points them in the direction of the room. They bangs on the door, barges in. There’s some shouting. They leave. I don’t even think she was there at the time. Sobers handled them on his own.’

‘You know what they talked about?’

Thrale gave him a look. ‘Ain’t you listened to a word I said? I respect me guests’ privacy.’ But a peculiar smile spread across his lips as though he knew more than he’d let on.

‘How many visitors were there?’

‘Three.’

‘Did you recognise any of them?’

Thrale shrugged. ‘Not the ones who confronted Sobers.’

‘But there was someone else?’

‘Aye.’

Pyke waited. ‘A name?’

‘Ain’t you going to allow me to wet me beak?’

Taking out his purse, Pyke selected a half-crown coin and thrust it into the older man’s outstretched hand.

‘That it?’ Thrale said, looking down at the coin.

Pyke doubled it. That seemed to improve Thrale’s mood. ‘Jemmy Crane,’ he said after a while.

Pyke thought the name sounded familiar. ‘Crane?’

‘You know, the pornographer.’ Thrale’s face glistened with excitement. ‘I used to know him a bit. He’d come and watch me fight, back in the old days.’

‘Do you think he recognised you?’

Thrale thought about it. ‘I stepped out into the court and he was waiting there. We looked at one another. He might have nodded at me.’

‘And you’re sure he was there with the men who’d come to see Sobers?’

‘I watched ’em all leave in a group.’

Pyke waited for a moment, trying to gather his thoughts. ‘Weren’t you just a little bit curious to know what they wanted with Sobers and Mary Edgar?’

‘Maybe.’ Thrale shifted from one foot to the other. ‘Afterwards I asked the culls who shared the room next to them if they’d heard anything.’