Kill-Devil and Water pm-3 Read online

  ‘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 k
now 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.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘One fellow reckoned they was threatening Sobers but he didn’t hear nothing more than that.’

  ‘Could I speak to him?’

  Thrale seemed put out. ‘He’s at work. You could come back a while later but he’ll tell you the same thing.’

  Pyke looked at the older man’s weathered face. ‘Why didn’t you mention this yesterday when you identified the body in the Green Dragon?’

  Thrale met his stare and held it. ‘What does it matter?’ The skin wrinkled at the corners of his eyes. ‘I am mentioning it now, ain’t I?’

  That afternoon, Pyke accompanied the gravediggers and the body to a grassy field in Limehouse. The sky was leaden and the air cloying and humid. He watched as the two men dug the hole, their coats resting on the coffin and their sleeves rolled up. They chatted to one another as though what they were doing was the most commonplace thing in the world. When the hole had been dug, the three of them lowered the coffin into it using a length of rope. After that, the gravediggers withdrew for a few moments, perhaps thinking that Pyke had known Mary Edgar and wanted time at her graveside to remember her. As he stared down into the hole, he thought about Emily and how it had rained on the day he had buried her. Pyke didn’t know whether he was still grieving for her or not; on good days, he could shut his eyes and summon an image of her that seemed so vivid it was as if she was there in the room with him, but at others he could barely remember the colour of her eyes.

  He helped the diggers shovel earth back into the grave and once they had gone, he stood there for a while listening to the crows cawing and watching the masts of ships glide past on the nearby river. His thoughts, now turned back to Mary Edgar. Her good looks and dress indicated that she moved in genteel circles and that he should perhaps concentrate his search on the West End, places such as Bloomsbury, Marylebone or St John’s Wood. But her body had been found on the Ratcliff Highway and, in that sense, Tilling had been quite right. There weren’t too many jobs a woman could hope to get in this part of the city, and if one ruled out domestic service and factory work, that left prostitution as the most likely option. Though not convinced by this hypothesis — if she had worked as a prostitute, surely it would have been at one of the respectable bordellos in St James’s — Pyke decided to put off calling on Crane until the next day and spent the rest of the afternoon traipsing from one sleazy brothel to the next, showing the dead woman’s likeness to the pimps and madams.

  As he moved along the Ratcliff Highway from east to west, tramping between brothels, slop-shops, taverns, pawnbrokers, gin palaces and beer shops, past vendors selling pies, chestnuts, gingerbread and baked potatoes, he didn’t exactly feel unsafe but he did make a point of not catching anyone’s eye unnecessarily. He also kept the purse he’d been given by Tilling close to his body. It was a warm, early spring afternoon but the weather did nothing to improve the Ratcliff Highway: it had always felt like the kind of place where someone might slit your belly as easily as shake your hand.

  The pavements were full, but many of the faces were alien to Pyke. Lascar and Malay sailors with their dark skin and tear-shaped eyes; bearded Jews hawking piles of old clothes; German and Scandinavian stevedores, recognisable by their uniform, biding their time before their ships sailed for home; and black dockers who could carry a hogshead of sugar on their shoulders. There were the children, too: bow-legged, malnourished, running alongside the wagons and drays barefoot. Everyone was going about their business but Pyke couldn’t help feeling that people had noticed him, noticed that he was different, that he didn’t belong there. Even as a Bow Street Runner, he’d rarely ventured to this part of the city: a Runner who had tried to serve a warrant on a tavern landlord here had been dragged out on to the street and kicked to death. Pyke couldn’t say with any conviction that it was either the poorest or indeed the most dangerous part of the city — St Giles and parts of Shadwell and Rotherhithe came close — but it was undoubtedly the street whose reputation cast the greatest terror into the hearts of most Londoners.

  He had also heard a lot about Craddock’s brothel but had never had a reason to visit it. Not that he had missed much. Its ill repute was based on the promise of its madam, Eliza, that no reasonable offer would be turned down: that a ‘reasonable’ offer could sometimes be as little as a shilling was indicative of the kind of customer it hoped to attract. Pyke had once been told by a woman who’d worked there that a mattress might see five or six different bodies in the space of an hour. The same woman had had her face slashed by a broken bottle wielded by a drunken sailor, but Eliza hadn’t even contacted the authorities, saying it would be bad for business. Instead, the woman had been dismissed. She’d been told no one would want to fuck a girl with a scarred face. There were few businesses Pyke knew of where the laws of the market were practised with the same cold efficiency.

  ‘So who is she?’ Eliza Craddock asked, when Pyke showed her the drawing of the dead woman. She sat behind her desk like an enormous beached whale, folds of blubber hanging off her arms and face.

  ‘I take it she’s not one of yours?’

  Craddock grinned, revealing an enormous gap in her front teeth. ‘Most of the bucks come in here would just as well poke a hole in the wall. But a gal like that would cause a riot.’

  Pyke nodded. Her thoughts confirmed his own suspicions that the dead woman probably wasn’t a prostitute, at least not one who plied her trade on the Ratcliff Highway.

  Craddock had another look at the charcoal sketch. ‘You reckon she might be a blue-skin, then?’

  Pyke had already mentioned this. He then described Arthur Sobers and asked whether she had seen him.

  ‘I don’t know him but we see all sorts in here. I ain’t prejudiced against the darkies. Even employed one for a while.’ She crossed her arms and shrugged. ‘You could talk to her, if you like. Popular with the Lascars and the blackbirds, she was. But I had to let her go.’

  ‘You know where I can find her?’ It was unlikely that this woman had known Mary Edgar or Arthur Sobers but it was worth a try.

  Craddock held out her chubby hand and Pyke tossed a shilling coin on to the table. She scooped it into her apron and rested her arms, two mounds of flesh, on the table. ‘Jane Shaw. Last I heard she’d
taken a room in the old lepers’ hospital on Cannon Street, near New Road.’

  ‘Is that how it works?’ Pyke felt the skin tighten around his temples. ‘You use them up and when they’re beyond repair you toss them away?’

  But the criticism was lost on Eliza Craddock. She stared at Pyke, as if he’d spoken to her in a foreign language, and asked, ‘The girl you’re looking for. Is she dead or just missing?’

  ‘Would it make any difference?’

  Craddock shrugged. ‘I don’t like it when a girl gets killed. Makes folk jittery and it’s bad for business.’

  ‘It’s bad for the girls, too.’

  She regarded him with cynical good humour. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’ll always be more girls.’

  The old lepers’ hospital on Cannon Street had long since been overrun by rogues and vagabonds of every hue: broken-down coiners, their skin eroded by the liquids used to oxidise base metal; footpads waiting to beat up their next marks; ageing prostitutes prowling the corridors; distillers inhaling fumes that would kill them; pickpockets as young as ten emptying stolen pocket handkerchiefs into the hands of their receivers; rampsmen polishing their brass cudgels; and mudlarks picking caked mud and faeces from their old boots.

  Pyke found Jane Shaw in one of the rooms right at the top of the building. There was no heat or light and he’d had to pay for a lantern to guide his way through the mass of bodies, either sleeping or staring vacantly into space. A few of them begged for money, but he kept moving, only stopping to ask where he could find the ‘blackbird’ and only giving a farthing or two to those who helped him. Most were drunk or, as he discovered later, pacified by laudanum.

  Jane Shaw could have been thirty or sixty, for all Pyke could tell. Her hair and all of her teeth had fallen out, and when he brought the lantern up to her face and saw her ravaged nose, it confirmed what he had suspected from the first moment he had stepped into the room. She was dying of untreated syphilis.

  ‘You the first visitor I had in t’ree months,’ she said, the whites of her eyes accentuated by the inky blackness of her skin.