Kill-Devil and Water (61 page)

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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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When he suggested that she play Elizabeth one last time, and explained what he wanted her to do and why, she said she’d do it.
 
Even when he introduced her outside the Guildhall police office to Fitzroy Tilling, as Elizabeth Malvern rather than Mary Edgar, she didn’t seem overawed. They went over the plan another time. She asked whether Jemmy Crane would actually see her. Tilling assured her that she wouldn’t have to confront Crane directly and her face would remain hidden. As long as he believed she was who she claimed to be, that was all that mattered. She was introduced to the police sergeant who would take her down to the cells. Pyke watched as she and the sergeant disappeared into the building.
 
Pyke looked up at the Guildhall and they waited for a horse and cart to rattle past. ‘I was thinking about Trevelyan.’
 
‘And?’
 
‘And you could always take some police constables to his house and search the study.’
 
‘Why does it sound like you already know what they might find?’
 
‘Trevelyan bought daguerreotypes from Crane of dead and dying women. Do you think he should be given the benefit of the doubt?’
 
Tilling’s stare remained impassive. ‘Anywhere in particular they should look?’
 
‘Any loose floorboards would be a good place to start.’ Pyke found himself looking at the entrance to the police office. ‘And if you ever manage to find Bedford’s butler again it’s my guess he’ll tell you that it was Pierce, acting for Silas Malvern, who fabricated the evidence that convicted Morel-Roux.’
 
Tilling turned to face him, his expression suddenly hardening. ‘That’s a very,
very
grave allegation.’
 
‘Morel-Roux didn’t kill Bedford. The evidence suggested he did.’
 
‘But if
he
didn’t kill Bedford, who did?’ Tilling’s frown deepened. ‘And who killed Mary Edgar?’
 
‘Arthur Sobers.’
 
‘Both?’
 
Pyke shrugged.
 
Tilling reddened and shook his head. ‘What aren’t you telling me, Pyke?’
 
But just at that moment Mary Edgar appeared in the entrance. She looked up, walked towards them and waited for them to ask the question.
 
‘Well?’ Pyke beat Tilling to it.
 
‘Crane had Phillip killed, once he was no longer useful to him. He wanted me to find a scavenger,
any
scavenger, put words into his mouth and bring him back here to this office.’ A solitary tear snaked down her cheek.
 
Tilling looked at both of them and took a few steps backwards. ‘I’ll be over here if you need me.’
 
Pyke took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m sorry.’
 
When she looked up at him, her eyes were wet with tears. ‘So what have you decided? Should I give myself up?’
 
THIRTY
 
The following morning, half a dozen police constables attached to the ‘A’ or Whitehall Division, acting under the orders of Fitzroy Tilling, conducted a search of Abel Trevelyan’s Regent’s Park mansion. One of the party, Constable Henry Steggles, came across a loose floorboard in the study and, having lifted it up, found a daguerreotype depicting a naked woman sprawled out on a bed, staring into the camera, a hooded man standing over her. An amethyst ring with a serpent motif was also found and, later, as a result of testimony provided by former neighbours, it was identified as having belonged to Bessie Daniels, the woman in the daguerreotype. Meanwhile, after an anonymous tip-off, a decomposed corpse was excavated from Trevelyan’s garden. Though the body couldn’t be positively identified, the police were happy to conclude that it was the woman in the daguerreotype, especially once Saggers had submitted the testimony regarding the ring. The banker was taken to the watch-house at Scotland Yard. There, it was established, via statements made by two former employees of a pornographer’s shop on Holywell Street (again procured by Saggers), that Trevelyan had been a customer at Crane’s shop for a number of years. Presented with all this evidence, Trevelyan (who had, of course, strenuously objected to the police’s search of his property and had denied all knowledge of both the daguerreotype and the body) was persuaded to change the statement he’d made to the City police regarding the break-in at the Bank of England. Additionally, and in exchange for the promise of judicial leniency over the matter of his ownership of obscene materials, he put his name to a deposition naming Crane - and three accomplices including a man called Sykes - as central figures in a conspiracy to profit from the lives and deaths of a number of ‘low’ women. In the end, although the corpse was found on his property, and despite the presence of Bessie’s amethyst ring under the floorboards, no one could say with absolute certainty either that it was Bessie Daniels or that Trevelyan had killed her.
 
With their collective defence regarding the break-in at the Bank of England in tatters, and facing the likelihood of transportation for life and possibly even the gallows (depending on whether the robbery was interpreted as treason or not), Crane’s accomplices willingly turned on him and named him as the leader of the plot. For his part, Crane threatened to name names and expose men who’d been his long-standing customers unless all charges against him were dropped, but his threats fell on deaf ears. Since Tilling couldn’t cajole Crane and Sykes into turning on each other, however, the police weren’t able to charge the two of them with the murders of Bessie Daniels, Lucy Luckins and as many as five other ‘low’ women. This was the one glaring failure of the action Pyke had mounted against the pornographer, and it meant that, officially at least, the deaths of these women went unpunished. Still, at his trial for the attempted robbery of the Bank of England, the Crown played on Crane’s former associations with radical thinkers and rabble-rousers and presented the robbery as a treasonous action intended to destabilise the national economy. Crane and his six accomplices were found guilty; Crane, as the leader, was sentenced to hang, while the others, including Sykes were transported to Australia for life.
 
On a cool, autumnal morning, Pyke joined the large crowd that watched Crane walk on to the scaffold in front of Newgate prison and wait as the hangman put the noose around his neck. When the block was kicked away from under him and he fell to his death, Pyke tried to think of the last, and only, time he’d seen Bessie Daniels alive. As the hangman pulled down on Crane’s legs to finish the job, he thought of the manner of the transaction whereby Bessie had been sold to Crane by Eliza Craddock, and about Silas Malvern, who had accrued a vast fortune using exactly the same process: hard currency in exchange for a human life. But as Pyke watched Crane die, he didn’t feel any satisfaction, not did he try to convince himself that justice had been served.
 
A month earlier, Arthur Sobers had made the same short trek from Debtors’ Door to the scaffold, this time in front of a much smaller crowd. Pyke hadn’t attended this execution because he didn’t want to have to ask himself the difficult question: was it right to punish an essentially good man for taking another’s life? In the small hours of the morning, Pyke asked himself the same question and found himself thinking about Peter Hunt, the son of the former governor of Newgate prison who had tried and failed to avenge his father’s death. Pyke knew that the law and justice were very different creatures, but often he would wake up, unable to silence the screams of the men he’d killed.
 
Phillip Malvern’s body was never found.
 
The governor and directors of the Bank of England sought to limit the damage to the Bank’s reputation as a result of the failed robbery and to distance themselves from their former friend and colleague, Abel Trevelyan, who was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for the possession of lewd and obscene materials. Their efforts to ‘contain’ the story were thrown into disarray, however, by a series of columns in the
Examiner
by ‘staff writer’ Edmund Saggers, in which he laid bare the link between Trevelyan and Crane and between pornography, the unexplained deaths of at least two women and the failed attempt to empty the bullion vault under the Bank of England. No mention was made of Harold Field; nor was his disappearance mourned. As far as Pyke knew, Matthew Paxton stepped into the dead man’s shoes without too much guilt.
 
About a week after the body of Lord William Bedford’s former butler was discovered floating in a lake near St Albans, Pyke found himself waiting in Scotland Yard for Pierce, who had just been promoted to the rank of superintendent.
 
‘I’d say congratulations, but that would suggest you earned your promotion rather than buying it with the blood of an innocent.’
 
Pierce removed his hat and smoothed his hair. ‘Your preference for the melodramatic is well known but tedious.’
 
‘An innocent man went to the gallows because you took the thirty pieces of silver that Silas Malvern offered you, to keep his family’s name out of the investigation.’
 
Pierce seemed amused rather than upset by this accusation. ‘You want to know something, Pyke?’ he said, picking his teeth. ‘We never did apprehend the fellow who tried to help Morel-Roux escape from Newgate.’
 
‘I hope you see Morel-Roux’s face when you’re lying in your bed late at night, trying to forget about what you’ve done.’
 
‘I sleep perfectly well.’ Pierce looked around the yard and put on his hat. ‘It’s quite clear you don’t. That should tell you something.’
 
‘Yes, it tells me I’ve got a conscience.’
 
Pierce appeared to be on the verge of saying something but at the last moment shook his head, as though it wasn’t worth the effort.
 
‘I’m not scared of you, Pyke, and I’m not even remotely concerned by your low opinion of me. In fact, the notion that you - of
all
people - think you’re somehow more ethical than I am greatly amuses me.’
 
Pierce walked off and left Pyke to his thoughts. It took every ounce of self-control on Pyke’s part not to follow him.
 
 
A few weeks after Jo had moved out to take up a nursemaid’s post in a household in Bloomsbury, she came to visit Felix. After a long and tearful reunion with her former charge, she came to find Pyke and sat with him in the front room.
 
‘You look well.’ He meant it, too.
 
‘I wish I could say the same about you.’ She said this, he thought later, not to crow but simply to point out what was self-evident: he hadn’t washed or trimmed his whiskers for days and he’d been surviving on a diet of laudanum and baked potatoes.
 
‘And your visitor? I never did find out her name.’
 
Pyke couldn’t bring himself to look at her. ‘She’s gone.’
 
‘Oh.’ Jo’s expression was measured, her voice composed.
 
For a while neither of them spoke. The rattle of wood and iron wheels across cobbles temporarily filled the room.
 
‘I saw the way you looked at her and I recognised it. It was the same way I used to look at you.’ When he didn’t respond, Jo offered a gentle smile.
 
Pyke fumbled around in his pocket and produced an envelope. ‘I’d like you to have this as a token of my appreciation for all the work you did for my family.’
 
Jo took it, peered into the envelope and tried to hand it back to him. ‘I couldn’t possibly accept it, as generous as it is.’
 
‘Don’t think of it as coming from me. Think of it as a gift from Emily. I’d say you were her best, and most loved, friend. Or think of it as a gift from Felix if that makes you feel any better.’ Pyke looked away suddenly because he didn’t want her to see his expression.
 
She held out the envelope for him again but he wouldn’t take it. ‘Please, keep it. I’d like to think I’ve done at least one right thing with respect to you.’
 
Jo sat there for a while contemplating what he’d said and finally put the envelope into her shawl.
 
‘Will you come and visit Felix again?’
 
On the front steps, they shook hands and, as their fingers parted, Pyke had to rein in a sudden desire to take her hand and ask her to reconsider. Tying her bonnet under her chin, she turned around and looked at him. ‘Try not to be too hard on yourself, Pyke. For some reason, and I hope you take this as a compliment, self-loathing doesn’t suit you.’
 
 
The same night Mary had found out that her father had been killed by Crane, she had come to Pyke’s room. She wore a cotton nightdress that clung to her figure and revealed just enough of her firm, plump calves to elicit his attention. He had been sitting up in bed reading. She had stood by the door and even when he had invited her into the room, and had cleared a space for her next to him on the bed, she had remained where she was.

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