Kill-Devil and Water pm-3 Page 5

  ‘Seven.’

  Pyke curled his finger around the trigger and took a deep breath.

  ‘Eight.’ He took another step.

  ‘Nine, and…’

  When he turned around, he could barely see Maginn in the gloom. The man’s stovepipe hat was the most recognisable thing about him. He heard the shot before he saw the barrel of Maginn’s pistol raised towards the night sky. Carefully Pyke took aim and squeezed the trigger; he couldn’t see immediately, but he could tell from the gasps of the crowd huddled in the doorway of the bookshop that he’d hit the target. Later, he would hear how the stovepipe hat had flown from Maginn’s head and how the journalist had stood there, rooted to the spot, too frightened even to blink.

  That was when he saw the glint of metal and heard a click. As he turned around, there was a flash of exploding gunpowder and momentarily Hunt’s cadaverous face was lit up, his hiding place in a smaller alleyway revealed. Too stunned to move, Pyke felt a rush of air through his ears as he waited for the shot to tear him apart. It never happened. From less than five yards, Hunt had missed his target. Pyke sucked air through his clenched teeth, tasting the acrid sting of gunpowder at the back of his throat.

  The pistol clattered on to the cobblestones and Pyke saw that Hunt had sprung from his hiding place and was running away. He decided against pursuing him.

  Back inside the shop, Pyke looked for Maginn but couldn’t see him. He found Jo and Felix talking with Godfrey. Most of the crowd had left by now, perhaps as a result of the argument and the duel, and Pyke tried to play down what had just happened. He wondered whether any of them had actually seen the hidden shot that had been fired, or knew how close he’d come to being killed. Perhaps Godfrey did; he was much too effusive in his praise of Pyke’s bravery. Jo and Felix said very little, and when it was suggested that they call it a night and go home, Pyke offered to hail them a hackney carriage on Piccadilly.

  Outside, in the gaslight, Pyke noticed that his hands were still trembling. He looked up and down the darkened street for any sign of a passing cab and noticed Maginn stumbling into a side alleyway. Godfrey had seen Maginn, too, and placed his hand on Pyke’s arm. ‘Come back with us to my apartment.’ But Pyke could feel the anger he’d been trying to repress billowing up inside him. Maginn had challenged him on a point of principle, but all he’d really wanted to do was give Hunt the chance to shoot him dead. There was no honour in that; no honour in shooting a pistol at another man’s back from five paces. Suddenly he despised the Cork man for all his piousness and his false desire for ‘satisfaction’. Pyke found Maginn in the alleyway; he was fumbling at his breeches. A frightened prostitute was trying to free herself from his drunken grip. Maginn had knowingly colonised the moral high ground and now here he was harassing a street-walker. The hypocrisy was too much for Pyke to bear. Maginn raised his hand to slap her, but Pyke caught it, pushed the woman to one side and swung his fist into Maginn’s face, dislodging two teeth in the process. Spitting blood, Maginn tried to defend himself but Pyke landed another blow, this time to the side of his head. Maginn fell forward and Pyke brought his knee up to the man’s face. The prostitute disappeared farther into the alleyway. Pyke wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his frock-coat. Maginn was lying on the ground. That should have been the end of it but Pyke’s thoughts turned to Mary Edgar, who had been cut up and left to rot by the side of the road, and then to Emily, who had been killed by a single rifle shot to her neck. He took a deep breath and kicked Maginn hard in the stomach, then again. He heard a noise and turned round to find Felix standing there, speechless, his face white with terror.

  ‘Felix.’ He paused, not knowing what else to say. Maginn, still on the ground, gave a muffled groan.

  Godfrey and Jo stepped into the alleyway and saw Maginn lying at Pyke’s feet, with Felix trembling in front of him.

  Pyke looked down and noticed that the ends of his boots were glistening with Maginn’s blood. He wanted to make his son understand what had happened but the words wouldn’t form on his tongue. He saw the fear and revulsion in the boy’s eyes. Pyke wanted the ground to open up and swallow him.

  It had always amused Pyke that Holywell Street got its name from a holy well that stood in the vicinity and that pilgrims bound for Canterbury used to drink from; it amused him because ever since the radical presses had been disbanded or moved underground and the Jewish traders had relocated farther east to Spitalfields and Petticoat Lane, the street had become the centre of the city’s trade in pornography. He would have liked to have seen the pilgrims’ reaction to the lewd etchings and lithographs and snuff-boxes detailing men and women engaged in obscene sexual acts.

  Outwardly, little had changed on the street since Elizabethan times — it had escaped the worst ravages of the Great Fire and the lath-and-plaster houses with their lofty gables, overhanging eaves and deep bays were throwbacks to another era — but the air of gloom and disrepair had a modern countenance, as did the open manner in which some of the proprietors peddled their smut. None went as far as to display lewd engravings in their windows or place the latest ‘limited edition’ from Paris on the lean-tos outside the shops, but the lingering scent of grubby licentiousness pervaded the immediate environment. Pyke had even heard it called ‘the vilest street in the civilised world’.

  Jemmy Crane’s bookshop occupied a tall, four-storey building on the north side of the street. Outside, wooden trestles supported neatly stacked piles of antiquarian books and above the door a crescent moon sign gave the shop a veneer of respectability.

  ‘What can I do for you, sir? May I say you look like a connoisseur of bedroom scenes. Am I warm, sir?’ The elderly man behind the counter had a shambling gait and studied Pyke through the monocle attached to his left eye.

  ‘I want to see Crane.’

  The man gave him a kindly smile. ‘Oh, I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’

  ‘He’s not here?’

  ‘Mr Crane has asked not to be disturbed.’

  Pyke pushed past him and made for the back of the shop, shouting Crane’s name. He had made it as far as the staircase when a man appeared at the top of the stairs, his face displaying a mixture of curiosity and irritation.

  Crane cut a dashing, rakish figure and looked younger than his forty years. His hair was ink-black and his skin was smooth and free from wrinkles. He had full, plump lips and a leering, sensuous smile that put Pyke in mind of Pierce Egan’s Corinthian rakes Tom and Jerry: the kind of man who both looked down on the filth and degradation around him, yet wallowed in it, too. Dressed like a dandy, he wore a tight-fitting brown frock-coat, a frilly white shirt, blue cravat and matching waistcoat over brown trousers.

  Behind Crane, silhouetted at the top of the stairs, was a much burlier, rougher creature, waiting to be told what to do.

  ‘To what do I owe this pleasure, sir?’ Crane spoke in a clipped, polished accent, his tone, dripping with condescension.

  ‘My name’s Pyke…’

  ‘I know who you are.’ Crane paused. ‘You once owned a ginnery on Giltspur Street. I used to be an acquaintance of your uncle, Godfrey Bond.’

  Pyke studied Crane’s expression, wondering what Godfrey would have to say about this man. ‘A week ago, you accompanied three men to a guest house on the Ratcliff Highway. Your men were heard arguing with one of the guests. I need to know why you went there and what the argument was about.’

  Crane’s expression betrayed nothing. ‘You like to get straight to the point, don’t you? I admire a man who knows his own mind.’ He seemed to be the kind of man who enjoyed the sound of his own voice.

  ‘What business did you have with Arthur Sobers and Mary Edgar?’

  ‘It was the old man who saw me, wasn’t it? I didn’t recognise him at the time but later it came to me. I used to watch him fight, back in the old days, a real bruiser, but I can’t for the life of me remember his name.’

  ‘Thrale.’

  ‘That’s it.’ Crane’s face lit up for a moment. �
�These days my tastes are more refined. I have a box at the Theatre Royal and I attend concerts at Somerset House.’ His smile was without the faintest hint of warmth.

  ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘And I’m not going to.’

  Pyke could see the coldness in his eyes. He removed the drawing of Mary Edgar from his pocket and handed it to Crane. ‘You know her?’

  Crane glanced down at the drawing and just for a moment his mask slipped and a look of curiosity, even puzzlement, crossed his face. ‘No.’

  ‘That’s Mary Edgar, the woman you visited.’ Pyke paused. ‘She was strangled and her body dumped a few hundred yards away on the Ratcliff Highway.’

  Crane assimilated this news. ‘And what is your interest in this affair, sir?’

  ‘I’m investigating her murder.’

  ‘Out of a sense of civic duty?’ His tone was vaguely mocking.

  ‘What took you to Thrale’s lodging house that day?’

  ‘A private matter. In other words, none of your business.’

  ‘You don’t deny you were there, then?’

  ‘How could I? Thrale saw me. And now you’re here.’

  ‘And I’m not leaving until you’ve answered my question.’

  ‘I’ve told you all I’m going to tell you. I suggest you leave before the situation becomes unpleasant.’

  ‘Unpleasant for me or for you?’ Pyke’s stare didn’t once leave Crane’s face.

  ‘I might appreciate a Beethoven symphony more than a bare-knuckle fight these days but if I give the word, Sykes here will do to you what Benbow did to Thrale. And I’ll watch, as I did then.’

  Pyke looked up at the muscular figure at the top of the stairs. ‘Does he speak as well as glare?’

  That drew the thinnest of smiles. ‘I admire courage up to a certain point, but after that it becomes stupidity.’

  ‘If you know who I am — if you know me from the old days and what I’m capable of — you’ll know I’m not likely to give up until I’ve found what I’m looking for.’ Pyke waited and sighed. ‘She had just arrived from Jamaica. They both had. How would a piece of dirt like you know them?’

  The skin tightened around Crane’s eyes. ‘My patience has run out. You can find your own way out.’ He turned and started back up the stairs.

  ‘One way or another you’ll tell me what I need to know,’ Pyke shouted up the stairs but Crane, blocked by his burly assistant, had disappeared from view.

  At the front of the shop, Pyke passed the elderly assistant who looked at him as though he’d heard at least some or all of their conversation.

  For the rest of the afternoon, once he’d ascertained that Arthur Sobers hadn’t returned to the Bluefield lodging house, Pyke patrolled the sunless court outside the building asking anyone who entered or emerged from the front door whether they knew or had seen Arthur Sobers. He had no luck for the first hour or so and was just about to give up — it had started to drizzle and he needed to eat — when a fat man with whiskers shuffled out of the door.

  ‘Yeah, I ’member the cull,’ he said, once Pyke had explained who he was looking for. ‘Saw him a few times with a mudlark goes by the name Filthy on account of his stink.’

  ‘You know where I can find this man?’ Pyke looked down at his bruised knuckles and thought about the scene his son had witnessed the previous night.

  ‘Filthy? A cull like that don’t have no home, just sleeps rough, wherever he can lay his head.’

  ‘Then how can I get in touch with him?’

  ‘How should I know? You often see him on the Highway, hanging round the docks or the river at low tide.’

  Pyke tried to rein in his frustration. ‘Could you give me a description, then?’

  The fat man rubbed his whiskers. ‘Older ’n me, wizened little fellow. Grey hair. But you’d know him on account of the patches he wears over his eyes, like a pirate, and the long bamboo cane he carries.’

  ‘This man is blind?’

  ‘Didn’t I say that? He’s blind. That’s right. Why else would he be wearing patches an’ carrying a cane?’

  Pyke walked back up the hill to the Ratcliff Highway thinking about what he had just been told and whether this mudlark’s condition was, in any way, linked to the manner of Mary Edgar’s death.

  FOUR

  Even for a country teetering on the brink of full-scale economic depression, the scene outside the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs was a remarkable one. There must have been a thousand people clamouring for the attention of the foreman and his crew; in addition to the regular porters, stevedores, coopers, riggers, warehousemen, pilers and baulkers who had already been admitted into the docks. The explanation for the crowd, if not its size, could be seen over the top of the high brick wall that circumnavigated the docks: a three-mast ship had docked overnight and word had quickly spread that the company intended to employ around fifty casual dockers to unload crates of sugar, rum and coffee on to the quayside. The mood of the would-be dockers was anxious, and even from the fringes of the crowd, Pyke could scent their desperation. Jobs were scarcer than smog-free days and the deluge into the city of farm labourers, identifiable by their dirty smocks and kerseymere coats, and navvies, unemployed since the railway boom had faltered, had made the situation even worse. The merest whiff of a job would attract tens, sometimes even hundreds, of dead-eyed men; workhouses across the city were turning people away; petty theft and begging were on the rise; and men and women were sleeping rough in numbers Pyke had never seen before.

  A horn sounded and the men surged towards the arched entrance to the docks, crushing those at the front. Hands were raised to attract the foreman’s attention and coins were offered, by way of a bribe. But rather than select men by pointing at them, the foreman threw a bucket of brass tickets into the mob and stood back to admire his handiwork. Scuffles broke out as men fought each other, desperate to catch or pick up the tickets, or indeed prise them from those who’d been fortunate enough to scoop them up. Some of the tussles turned violent; one man was stabbed in the eye; another had part of his ear bitten off. It was a difficult thing to watch: men fighting for a job that would earn them just a few pence an hour and that would be paid not in coins but tokens that could be redeemed only at taverns owned by the dock company, where prices were kept artificially high.

  As the crowd began to disperse, Pyke contemplated what Emily would have said about such a spectacle and how little he had done since her death to honour her legacy.

  Pyke passed through the stone archway and paused to survey the scene. Directly ahead of him, bobbing gently up and down in the water, was the tall ship with three masts and a thick forest of rigging. The stevedores, who were the most experienced and therefore the best paid of the workers, brought the crates and sacks up from the ship’s hold as far as the deck, where the ordinary dockers would carry them down gangplanks to the quayside. There the sacks and crates were taken by warehousemen and porters to the various storage buildings that surrounded the dock.

  At the company’s clerical offices, Pyke showed the drawing of Mary Edgar to a bored clerk who had introduced himself as Mr Gumm and explained that she’d recently arrived in London from the West Indies.

  Gumm didn’t feel able to handle Pyke’s query himself, so he fetched his supervisor, Nathaniel Rowbottom, who listened insincerely as Pyke explained why he was there. Rowbottom was a fastidious dresser, nothing out of place in his plain, sober outfit, and his beard and moustache were perfectly trimmed. He struck Pyke as the kind of man who would know, to the last penny, how much money he had in the bank.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t recognise her,’ he said, barely looking at the picture. He put his hand to his mouth and yawned.

  ‘She might have arrived on the same ship as a black man called Arthur Sobers.’ Pyke offered a brief description of Sobers.

  ‘I still don’t recognise her and I’ve certainly never come across a gentleman matching your description.’

  ‘You
barely looked at the drawing.’

  Rowbottom glanced down at the drawing and looked up again, his face blank. ‘There. I’ve never seen her before in my life.’

  ‘Then maybe you could tell me how many ships from Jamaica have docked here in the last two months.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t have that information to hand.’ Rowbottom adjusted his collar. All of a sudden, he seemed a little unsure of himself.

  ‘But you could find out.’

  Rowbottom eyed him carefully. ‘Take a look around you, Mr…?’

  ‘Just Pyke will do.’

  ‘This is a working dock, Mr Pyke. It’s not a place where passengers from the Caribbean embark and disembark.’

  ‘But the ships that depart from, and arrive, here must occasionally carry passengers.’ It wasn’t intended as a question.

  ‘On the odd occasion, perhaps.’

  ‘And given what a meticulous man you are, I’m guessing you would take a record of these albeit unlikely occurrences.’

  ‘Perhaps, but as I’m sure you’ll understand, it’s against our policy to permit non-company personnel to inspect company records.’ He drummed his fingers impatiently on the polished surface of his desk.

  ‘So you’re not prepared to confirm or deny that Mary Edgar disembarked from a ship that docked here?’

  Rowbottom continued to tap his fingers against the desk. ‘Could I perhaps enquire as to the purpose of your visit?’

  ‘She was strangled and her corpse was dumped just off the Ratcliff Highway.’ Pyke paused to check Rowbottom’s expression, but even this piece of information failed to provoke a reaction. ‘I’m in charge of the investigation.’