The Revenge of Captain Paine pm-2 Page 21

‘As you indicated the other night, we might see that our respective positions aren’t as compatible as we might have once hoped.’

  ‘Perhaps they’re closer than we might have imagined, too.’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘Captain Paine is an advocate of direct action, isn’t he?’ Pyke looked at the words daubed on the gable-end in white paint. ‘It’s what I’ve always said. You want to make an impression, you don’t reason with someone. You take out a pistol and press it against the man’s head.’

  They had travelled a few hundred yards along the cobbled street in their carriage when Pyke banged on the roof and ordered the driver to stop.

  ‘Where are you going? What are you doing?’ Emily called out as he opened the door and took off back down the street. ‘ Pyke.’

  He found one of the masters in an upstairs room, shaving with a razor over a pail of hot water.

  The man wore a black monkey coat with knee breeches, wool stockings and lace-up boots. Standing up, his whiskers lathered with soap, he held out the razor. ‘You want, I can walk the blue dog with you, cully.’

  Pyke went for his throat and the master managed only one wild swipe of the razor, catching Pyke’s forearm and slicing through his coat and jacket, before Pyke had landed a clean blow on his nose, breaking the bone, blood and sinew exploding from his nostrils. Clutching his nose, the man fell backwards, the razor clattering harmlessly to the floor, as Pyke scooped him up by the collar and dragged him over to the half-open window. ‘As of now, your employment here is terminated.’ Pyke rammed his head through the gap, forcing the rest of the man’s body out of the window but making sure he held on to the legs. Soon the master was dangling precariously from the upstairs window, people gathering in the street below to watch. ‘It takes a big man to keep children in line, doesn’t it?’ From somewhere out of the window he heard the master scream for help. But he was heavier than Pyke had realised and his boots were slippery, too, and soon Pyke knew he wouldn’t be able to hold him.

  Later, when the children Pyke had rescued from the first house gathered cautiously around the man’s motionless body, hardly daring to get any closer, Pyke suspected the fall might have killed him, but then he saw the man’s limbs twitch and heard him gasping for air and realised that he was just very badly injured. But the ensuing pandemonium had roused the masters from the other houses on the terrace and, when they saw what had happened, they tried to round up as many of the stray children as possible. Some of the children were still too dazed to take evasive action; others had seized the chance and had already made their escape. The masters were armed with pistols and sticks and there were too many of them for Pyke to take on without support. Retreating along the street, he came across one of the youngest boys he’d seen in the first room huddled in a fetid alley. Pyke hadn’t stopped to think what might become of the children, assuming that a life on the street was preferable to another minute in Horace Groat’s employment, but now it struck him that he’d rushed into something, more to appease his own conscience than to help the children, and created a whole new set of problems.

  Where would this child sleep tonight? What would he eat? How would he survive on his own?

  If Pyke didn’t do anything, the lad would be back stitching together Groat’s shoes before nightfall.

  ‘Do you have anywhere to go? Any family?’

  The boy stared up at him though large, liquid eyes.

  ‘Who brought you here?’

  The boy shrugged. ‘A man. Before, I went to a school in the country.’

  ‘What kind of a man?’

  ‘A man with a dog.’

  ‘A big, fighting dog with copper-coloured fur?’

  ‘Aye, that’s the one.’

  Pyke tried to sound calm. ‘You went to Prosser’s school in Tooting?’

  The boy nodded. ‘My family all died last year.’

  A moment passed. ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Pyke thrust a few coins into his hand and said, ‘There’s this basement shop in St Paul’s Yard, number seventy-two, in the shadow of the cathedral. Present yourself there today and tell the white-haired man I sent you. My name’s Pyke. He’ll pay you to deliver a newspaper. It’s not much but it might keep you alive. Do you think you can remember all that?’

  The boy gave him a confused, bewildered stare and later, when Pyke was lying in his own bed unable to sleep, it struck him that the young lad might not have the necessary toughness and guile to make it through the night.

  ‘I want you to call in all of Horace Groat’s outstanding loans. Everything we’ve lent him.’

  William Blackwood flicked through an oversized ledger on the table in front of him and frowned. ‘He’s a very good customer. He hasn’t missed a single payment.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Pyke said firmly. ‘In addition, I don’t want us to lend another penny to the slop trade in the East End.’

  Blackwood removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. ‘Can I ask what’s brought this on?’

  ‘No, you cannot. I’ve made my decision. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘But those are some of our most reliable customers,’ Blackwood said, frowning. ‘And in the light of your questionable decision to loan such a large sum to the Grand Northern, we need to set our liabilities against more reliable forms of income.’

  They were sitting around a table in the boardroom, just the two of them. They had begun the meeting at nine o’clock as usual, without acknowledging what had happened to Nash or even mentioning the matter of the loan and the missing contracts. They had taken their usual places around the table, Pyke nearest to the fire, but their efforts to continue as normal quickly seemed misplaced.

  Someone — a good man, no less — had died and a proper reckoning of the situation was required.

  ‘Just do it. I want the notices served on him by the end of today.’

  There was a loud rap on the door, but it was William Blackwood, rather than Pyke, who called out, ‘Enter.’ Tiny beads of sweat had appeared around his temples.

  ‘And you are?’ Pyke asked, barely looking up from the table.

  A smartly dressed grey-haired man wearing a full-length velveteen coat and a white pique waistcoat buttoned all the way to the top stood there, his top hat cradled in his hand.

  But Blackwood had clearly been expecting him and shook the man’s hand, before showing him to one of the empty chairs at the other end of the table.

  ‘Allow me to introduce Mr James Herries,’ he said for Pyke’s benefit. ‘Mr Herries is currently the solicitor to the committee of bankers for protection against forgers and fraud.’

  This time Pyke had a proper look as the man shuffled to his chair. Herries was a strange, elfin-looking individual with long, pointy ears, sharp canine teeth and an unctuous manner that immediately irritated him. Grinning, Herries assured Pyke that there was nothing to worry about and that the whole matter had doubtless been a terrible misunderstanding that could now be cleared up.

  There wasn’t too much difference between him and the eels they pulled out of the Thames.

  Clenching his fists until the knuckles had turned white, Pyke stared at his partner. ‘This is your doing, I presume.’

  ‘Let’s try and move beyond attributing blame.’ Herries smiled. ‘Suffice to say, an audit was conducted yesterday afternoon that I oversaw, and it’s come to light that a sum of ten thousand pounds of the bank’s money cannot be accounted in terms of the existing documentation.’

  Still ignoring the lawyer, Pyke said, to Blackwood, ‘I told you I lent that money to Morris according to the standard procedures of this bank.’

  ‘Ah, indeed, very good, sir,’ Herries said, interrupting. ‘Then perhaps you would be so good as to provide me with the attending documentation and this unfortunate matter can be resolved.’

  ‘You know me and what I’m capable of and yet you still decided to humiliate me in this way.’ Pyke waited for his partn
er to look up at him but his eyes remained rooted to the floor. ‘That either tells me you’re stupid or you know something I don’t. Which one is it?’

  But it was the lawyer who answered him. ‘If the documents aren’t forthcoming in, say, ten days — after all, we don’t mean to be unfair — it’s my unpleasant duty to inform you that a warrant for your arrest will be served and you will be sanctioned by the courts to repay the ten thousand pounds from your own pocket or face a lengthy sentence in one of His Majesty’s prisons.’

  Finally Pyke turned to him and licked his lips. ‘If you haven’t left this building by the time I’ve counted to thirty, I’ll tear you apart with my own hands and happily face the scaffold.’

  But Herries wasn’t cowed. ‘I was warned about your questionable reputation and I should just add that if something untoward was to happen either to Mr Blackwood here or myself the charges against you would still be pursued right the way to the highest court in the land.’ Gathering up his papers, he stood up and smiled. ‘Good day, gentlemen.’

  But when Pyke stood up at the same time, the lawyer’s composure finally cracked and he bolted for the door.

  As the dust settled, Pyke had to hold in the urge to stamp on his partner’s head, but the feeling passed quickly. This time he knew that a different approach was needed. For a start, there was no conceivable way Blackwood would have initiated such a bold move on his own, which meant that someone else was pulling his strings. Someone with sufficient status and power to afford Blackwood the protection he would undoubtedly need.

  ‘William?’

  Blackwood was trying to slip out of the room without a confrontation and seemed to freeze as Pyke barked his name. ‘Yes?’ But he couldn’t bring himself to actually look at Pyke.

  ‘You do know you won’t get away with it.’ Pyke shook his head, feigning sadness rather than anger. ‘That’s to say, you do know I’ll do everything in my power to stop you ruining my name.’

  Blackwood licked his lips. He looked like an unarmed man trapped in front of a cavalry charge.

  ‘Ten thousand has effectively been stolen from under my nose.’ Pyke slammed his fist down on the table so hard that Blackwood jumped. ‘ Ten thousand. I don’t even have that amount in my own account.’

  ‘I don’t know what you expect me to say,’ Blackwood mumbled.

  ‘I don’t expect you to say anything. But I want you to know I’ll strangle you with my bare hands before I give up a penny of my own money,’ Pyke added, calming down. ‘Nod, if you think I’m capable of it.’

  Dumbstruck, Blackwood scurried from the room, his face noticeably whiter than it had been at the start of the meeting.

  Pyke had thought that if he traced the missing ten thousand pounds, he would find Jem Nash’s killer; but equally, if he found out who had killed Jem Nash, he would surely be led to the stolen papers and the missing money. And what he discovered from Ned Villums later that afternoon, though not throwing any direct light on the issue of who may have killed Nash, certainly revealed Pyke’s assistant in a new light.

  Villums was waiting in his office. A coal fire had been burning in the grate since early morning and the room was comfortably warm. An oil lamp on his desk produced a greasy yellow flame.

  Pyke sat down behind his mahogany desk and poured them both a glass of whisky from a crystal decanter. ‘I wasn’t expecting you for another couple of days.’ He’d already seen that Villums hadn’t brought anything with him: no case, no money to deposit.

  Villums took a drink of the amber liquid. ‘The chat we had the other day made me nervous. Then I happened to read that your assistant at the bank had his head cut off.’

  ‘Are you saying you want to terminate our arrangement?’

  Villums shook his head. ‘I just want to give you a few weeks to get your house in order.’ He pulled up his chair closer to Pyke’s desk and added, ‘And I thought you’d like to know something about the lad.’

  ‘Nash?’ The skin tightened around Pyke’s eyes.

  Villums nodded. ‘He lost seven thousand on the roulette table at Barnaby Hodges’ gaming house in a single night.’ He must have seen Pyke’s expression because he added, without changing his tone, ‘Suffice to say, he couldn’t pay his debt.’

  ‘He told me he lost money on the tables. But I had no idea it was as much as that.’ Pyke finished his whisky and poured himself another. The fiery liquid tasted good against his throat. ‘It would have been the night before he died. The next day at work, it looked as if he’d been in a prize fight.’

  ‘Hodges told me that his men gave your lad a reminder of what might await him if he didn’t settle his debt.’

  ‘But you don’t think they killed him?’

  ‘Why would they? What good would Nash be to them dead? Hodges is still owed the seven thousand.’

  Pyke tried to turn this information over in his mind but he could see that Villums hadn’t quite finished. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

  ‘Hodges also told me your lad liked to frequent a place called the Bluebell Club on Windmill Street in Soho. You know it?’

  Pyke shook his head.

  ‘It’s a club for mollies.’

  ‘Mollies?’

  ‘Mollies, mandrakes, she-shirts.’ Villums winced. ‘You know.’

  He must have stared at Villums for some time, unable to assimilate or make sense of this revelation, because the next thing he was aware of was Villums preparing to depart.

  ‘Does he know for a fact that Nash was…’

  ‘A molly?’ Villums put his coat on and shrugged. ‘Hodges told me he’d heard it on very good authority.’

  Later, Pyke tried to reconcile what Villums had told him with his own knowledge of his assistant. He had always imagined Nash to be a ladies’ man, someone who had shown no inclination to settle down because he was happy playing the field. In addition, Pyke had always thought himself a good judge of character and an exemplary reader of people’s thoughts, but armed with this new information, he felt foolish and short sighted, and wondered what else he might have missed about his young assistant.

  ‘Before you go, Ned, I was hoping there was something else you might be able to help me with.’

  ‘Oh?’ Villums turned around in the doorway.

  ‘I’m looking for a man.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘A heavily whiskered man with a glass eye. A nasty sort. The kind capable of rape and murder. He likes to burn people with cigars.’

  ‘And you reckon I might know him?’

  ‘Of him.’ Pyke stared into his associate’s unflinching face. ‘Just like you know of everyone else who steals, cheats and kills in this city.’

  That drew a hint of a smile. ‘I don’t have any doubts that you’ll get to the bottom of this whole mess, Pyke, but I want to make it clear to you that I don’t want to get drawn into it.’

  ‘I just want a name.’

  Villums nodded and said he would see what he could do. ‘And Pyke?’

  He looked up from behind his desk.

  Villums tapped his head. ‘Remember, there are times when this works just as well as a loaded blunderbuss.’

  After Villums had gone, Pyke went over to the window and looked out at the vista of tiles, steeples and chimneys. The ravens were no longer there.

  It had been a few years since Pyke had last seen Townsend and he was shocked by the much diminished figure that shuffled into his office. They had once served together as Bow Street Runners and Pyke remembered Townsend as a barrel-chested man with hands as large as grapefruits, knuckles like sovereigns and forearms that resembled the branches of a mature oak tree. He had once seen his former associate lift two fully grown pigs, one under each arm, without breaking into a sweat. Pyke had heard that Townsend had suffered some kind of fever but he hadn’t expected the dismal sight that greeted him. His head had been given a prison-crop shave, his shoulders and limbs had lost much of their power, his clothes were tatty, and his skin was dotted with
pockmarks, the kind that suggested smallpox.

  They chatted for a few minutes about the old days, but it quickly became apparent that any rapport they’d once shared had now been eroded by the strictures of money and class. Out of shame or perhaps resentment, Townsend could hardly bear to meet his stare, and it took Pyke’s act of passing an envelope containing money across the table to lighten the atmosphere. That cleared up a lot of the problems. Townsend realised Pyke was about to offer him some work and, on that basis, he appeared happy enough to remain where he was.

  ‘I’d like you to do a couple of things for me.’ He looked up and tried to assess his former associate’s reaction.

  Townsend had made no effort to retrieve the envelope from the desk.

  ‘First, I’d like you to find out everything you can about a man called Jake Bolter. He works, in some capacity, at Prosser’s school in Tooting, and he never goes anywhere without a giant mastiff called Copper. I know he used to serve in the army and his face is horribly scarred. I want to know which regiment he served in, what he did after he left the army, who he associates with.’

  Townsend scribbled some details down on a pad of paper Pyke had left for him on the desk.

  ‘And the other thing?’

  ‘I’d also like you to keep an eye out on my partner, William Blackwood.’

  ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘He may have stolen from me. I’m not sure.’

  ‘So what am I looking for?’

  ‘What he does when he leaves this building. Who he talks to and where he goes.’

  ‘Is that it?’ This time, Townsend picked up the envelope and opened it. His face remained composed.

  A sharp knock on the door interrupted them and one of the clerks from the banking hall peered sheepishly around the door, holding out a letter. ‘This was left for you, sir,’ he said, taking a gulp of air.

  Pyke beckoned him into the office, relieved him of the letter and read it. It simply said: ‘ Rockingham expected in the capital today. Coach due to arrive at Swan with Two Necks at six ’.

  ‘Who delivered it?’

  The clerk shrugged. ‘No one saw. It was left on one of the tables, with your name on the front.’