Pyke 01 - The Last Days of Newgate Page 7

  ‘Before his death, did your brother ever talk about his experiences serving Edmonton?’

  Pyke turned from Townsend, with whom he had been talking, to a constable from the local watch who was blocking their path to the lodging house. He informed the affronted man he was there at the behest of Charles Hume. In the narrow street, there was none of the hysteria of the previous night: apart from a few curious onlookers, the place was almost entirely deserted. Certainly the residents, all potential witnesses or sources of information, had either been taken somewhere else or, worse still, dismissed. No doubt they had given false assurances and willingly taken the opportunity to disappear into the welcoming anonymity of the city.

  Pyke wondered who had let them go. Did this mean Hume already knew something he did not? He dug his hands into his coat pocket and looked over at Townsend.

  Townsend shrugged. ‘He talked about lots of things, mostly what a ghastly, tyrannical creature the old man was.’ Though a Bow Street Runner for longer than Pyke, Townsend had none of Pyke’s ambition, and willingly permitted Pyke to act as he saw fit, so long as he was allowed to prosper from Pyke’s enterprises. It had been entirely fitting that Townsend had come to Pyke three years earlier with news that his brother, a valet for Edmonton, had expired under mysterious circumstances and with a proposal to gain revenge on the man whom he suspected of arranging the death.

  Townsend’ s brother had been accused of stealing from Edmonton. But before the charges had been laid out before the magistrates, his body was found floating in a lake in the grounds of Hambledon Hall. The coroner’s jury had returned a verdict of suicide but Townsend had long suspected foul play. He had always believed his brother had discovered something about the aristocrat; something that had, in turn, hastened his demise.

  Pyke had worked with Townsend to successfully realise a plan to defraud Edmonton, but Pyke knew the rancour his friend felt towards the man had not withered with time.

  ‘Did he ever mention Edmonton’s daughter?’

  Standing at the bottom of the rickety staircase inside the lodging house, they looked up and saw two men struggling down the steps carrying a large crate. One of them said, ‘Is that the last of it?’ The other said, ‘I don’t reckon we need to bother with the mattress. If he wants it, we can always come back for it.’ Upon seeing Pyke and Townsend, they lowered the crate to the floor. One of them, perhaps the foreman, who was a pugnacious man with a neck like a chimney stack, stared at Pyke as though there was some kind of bad blood between them.

  When Pyke explained they were hoping to talk to Charles Hume, the man replied that Hume had returned to number four Whitehall Place, adding, ‘You want him, you ask for him there.’

  Pyke explained who he was and that he wanted to inspect the room where the killings had taken place.

  The man said he didn’t give a damn what Pyke did, but he wouldn’t find anything in the room itself.

  Once the two men were out of earshot, Townsend said, ‘I remember him saying she was wilful. Wilful and able to turn heads, even as a girl. It goes without saying that the old man’s genes can’t have had much to do with her looks. I’m told the mother was a fair beauty.’

  Pyke looked at Townsend, interested, ‘What happened to her?’

  They started to ascend the staircase. The whole building was eerily quiet.

  ‘Apparently she went insane. This was well before my brother worked for Edmonton. But there were rumours that she’d been committed, against her will.’ Though they were alone, he lowered his voice. ‘The money was always on her side of the family, if you know what I’m saying.’ Behind him, Townsend paused on the stairs. ‘I heard that she died shortly afterwards. Convenient, don’t you think? Just like my brother.’

  Pyke digested the implications of this information for a few moments. ‘Do you know anyone who works for Edmonton now?’

  ‘Not any more,’ Townsend said, breathing heavily from the exercise. He was a barrel-chested man with thick forearms. ‘But I could ask some questions, see what I turn up.’ At the top of the building, Pyke held up his lantern and motioned to the room.

  Townsend looked at him. ‘This is the place?’

  Pyke wondered where the corpses had been taken and whether anyone had claimed them for burial.

  At the threshold, Townsend hesitated for a moment and said, ‘Why did you ask me about Edmonton?’ His bloodshot eyes suggested his hate for the old man burned as brightly as ever. ‘Has he got something to do with this business?’

  Pyke thought about Swift but told Townsend that there wasn’t a connection. He had other business with the old man. He did not mention the robberies. Townsend asked what he wanted to know about the lord’s affairs and his family. Pyke shrugged and said he didn’t know, but any information or gossip about the mother or indeed the daughter might be helpful. ‘Family skeletons,’ he said, half distracted by their proximity to the murder scene.

  Townsend assured him he would do whatever he could. ‘Shall we go in?’

  Pyke did not want to, but since a further inspection of the room itself seemed necessary, he did not have a choice in the matter. He needed to know more about the victims and this was his last attachment to them, to their world. If, as he believed, the murders were not the work of a crazed madman, an escaped Bedlamite perhaps, then it followed that the victims had been selected and indeed killed for a reason. Find the reason and he would find the killer. Though he had said little to Fox on the subject, Pyke instinctively believed the victims had known their killer or killers.

  They stepped into the room.

  Apart from the mattress, it had been stripped bare. Even the floorboards had been scrubbed clean, and aside from the dark stains that remained, there was little or nothing to suggest what had taken place there.

  Initially, when he had been told about the removal of all possessions to number four Whitehall, Pyke had been disappointed and angry because he had thought their usefulness as clues depended on their physical presence in the room. But as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, Pyke felt relieved by their absence and indeed by the absence of the three bodies. The room seemed both larger and more peaceful. It afforded him the opportunity to think, to put himself in their places and try to imagine what they had gone through. Taking no notice of the dark stain, he sat down against the wall farthest from the door, in the position that he had found Stephen Magennis in, and put his hands behind his back, as though bound.

  ‘Why did he tie them up?’ Pyke said, half to himself and half to his companion.

  He imagined his mouth was gagged, imagined the metal pail in front of him, and closed his eyes.

  ‘You reckon he tied ’em up before he slit their throats?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Perhaps he tied ’em up in order to slit their throats. Keep ’em still.’

  It made some kind of sense but Pyke was not quite convinced. Sitting in the darkness, he tried to imagine what had happened: in what order had the killings taken place? Had the murderer slit the throats of the parents and then throttled the baby? Or had it happened the other way around? What if the parents had witnessed the killing of their baby?

  This thought struck him with the force of a lightning bolt. What might it have been like for them: having to watch as their own baby was strangled in front of their disbelieving eyes? To watch, bound and helpless, while someone squeezed the life out of the most precious thing in their life?

  ‘What if they were tied up because the murderer actually wanted them to witness him killing their baby?’

  Townsend was standing on the threshold. His figure was silhouetted in the door frame. ‘Why would he want ’em to witness it?’

  ‘What if he knew them?’

  Townsend did not say anything.

  ‘What if it was personal?’ Pyke thought about it: what if they had been attacked and knocked unconscious initially, bound and gagged while unconscious, and brought round by having urine thrown into their faces? What if they had bee
n brought round because they were meant to see it happen?

  ‘That would be a brutal thing,’ Townsend said, guardedly.

  ‘The two of them were propped up against the wall, where I am. The metal pail was placed in the middle of the room. It resembled a stage. In which case, the parents might have been the audience.’

  ‘You think someone would be capable of such . . .’

  ‘Cruelty?’ Pyke said, looking up at Townsend. It was almost impossible to imagine so, but instinct told him it was an idea worth pursuing. It didn’t mean he was any closer to actually finding who had done these things, or why, but it did mean finding out more about the victims would perhaps lead Pyke one step closer to their killer. Or, indeed, their killers, because Pyke could not be sure that only one man was involved.

  Townsend shrank back on to the landing. Pyke heard him mutter something under his breath.

  Standing up, Pyke stretched his numbed legs. On the blackened wall he noticed a small crucifix. Nothing in the room indicated anything of the victims’ personalities and, in order to find their killer, he needed to know something more about their lives. Therefore Pyke knew his first task was to do as Fox suggested: finding the missing cousin was now his main priority.

  SIX

  It had always amused Pyke that the view from Sir Richard Fox’s walnut-panelled office at the front of number five Bow Street took in the Brown Bear tavern, where prostitutes as young as fourteen cavorted with thieves who used its upstairs rooms to plan robberies, exchange gossip and dispose of stolen goods. It amused him that the portrait of Sir Henry Fielding, the man who had founded the Bow Street Runners, which hung on the wall above a marble fireplace, stared down at Fox, who, in turn, stared out of his window at criminals going about their business. It seemed to make a mockery of Sir Henry’s ambitions.

  Fox did not appear to be suffering from any ill effects as a result of his humiliation at the hands of Peel. In fact, he seemed to be more enthusiastic than Pyke had seen him in a while - when Pyke stepped into his office he leapt up off his armchair, came over to greet him and launched into questions. What had Peel wanted and why had he insisted that Pyke stay behind?

  Certainly Fox did not seem to be worried about the lynching of Catholics taking place across the city. All he said on the subject, with some satisfaction, was that Peel and the duke would have to postpone their plans to introduce the Catholic Emancipation Act. He didn’t mention the Metropolitan Police Bill.

  Pyke explained that Peel had merely wanted him to elaborate on his speculations. Peel had seemed worried that, if there were parallel investigations into the St Giles murders, they might arrive at different conclusions and such a state of affairs could end up being politically embarrassing.

  He said Peel had requested that he leave the investigative work to Hume’s team, but he was to make himself available, to assist them if his help was needed. Pyke believed something of what he told Fox was true: Peel’s desire to keep him close at hand was motivated by the fear that he might unearth something potentially threatening to the cause of police reform and Catholic emancipation.

  Fox appeared to believe Pyke’s account of his meeting without reservation. It was as he had expected.

  But Fox was not about to relinquish his responsibility without a struggle and had already questioned Goddard and Townsend about what they had learned of the victims from any of the residents who lodged with Miss Clamp.

  Pyke asked about the missing cousin.

  Fox returned to his chair and sat down. ‘A neighbour, Mrs Jackman, who shared one of the upper-floor rooms, was on speaking terms with the deceased. She informed Goddard that she didn’t know whether the young girl who shared their room was Clare’s cousin or not, but she provided him with a name and a description. Mary Johnson. No more than twenty years old, attractive but frail, with brown hair, a thin face and freckles. The neighbour chatted to her once. The girl had an Irish brogue. She told Mrs Jackman that she worked in a nearby factory as a seamstress, but Mrs Jackman said to Goddard that she often saw her dressed in expensive clothes, dresses made of satin and silk, and that she doubted Johnson would have been able to afford such items on what she earned as a seamstress.’ He looked up at Pyke, pleased with himself.

  ‘You’re saying that she was not a seamstress at all,’ Pyke said.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘A pretty young girl with expensive clothes.’

  ‘It means one of two things, doesn’t it?’

  Pyke nodded without much enthusiasm. ‘That she had a suitor with money or she worked as a prostitute.’

  ‘It’s a start, isn’t it?’ Fox said, seeing his reaction. ‘We have a name, a description and perhaps also know how she earned her money.’

  Pyke gave him a hard stare. ‘Even if that was the case, do you have any idea how many prostitutes there are in this city?’

  The task of locating a young Irish girl who may have been whoring for money was not quite as daunting as it sounded, but it was not too far from finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. Pyke could rule out having to look too far from St Giles and the community in which she lived. Prostitution was rife across the entire city - from the taverns of the Ratcliffe highway to the fashionable assembly rooms of Haymarket - and theoretically Mary Johnson could have travelled to any part of it to ply her trade. But Pyke believed it was more likely she would have done so somewhere in or close to St Giles. This only helped slightly, for St Giles, since it bordered on the theatres of Drury Lane and taverns, hotels and private clubs of Covent Garden, contained the largest number of brothels and the highest concentration of prostitutes anywhere in the city.

  Pyke knew that the image of a prostitute in respectable circles - a foul-mouthed tart with painted lips and false hair who called herself Sal the Siren or Anytime Annie - applied to just a fraction of them. Women from a variety of social backgrounds came to prostitution for a myriad of different reasons: to avoid destitution, to supplement a low income, to escape the shame of pregnancy or a broken engagement, to find a husband, to pay off a debt, or to run away from family.

  Pyke was not looking for a type of woman. He was looking for a particular woman and it paid to know the difference.

  As with all professions, there was an established hierarchy. At the top were the courtesans, who worked in the most fashionable areas and who solicited only wealthy gentlemen, and women who were kept in their own apartment by a single suitor. Below them were the board lodgers who worked and lived in brothels and paid a proportion of what they earned to a madam. Below them were those who hung about the lodging houses and taverns of the rookeries, and the dollymops who had other jobs as maids or cleaners and worked only to supplement their meagre income. At the bottom of the pile were the streetwalkers. Pyke doubted that Mary Johnson was anywhere near the top of that hierarchy. Nor did it seem likely that she worked full-time in a brothel or lodging house since she appeared to board with her cousin. This meant that either she worked on a casual basis, picking up men in taverns and coffee shops, or she walked the streets. And Pyke did not see her as a streetwalker; according to the neighbour, her clothes were too refined.

  Though he had a full description and a name, his task remained a prodigious one: there were hundreds of young, pretty, dark-haired girls who picked up men in the taverns of the area.

  But Pyke had two things going for him: first and most obviously it stood to reason that somebody knew Mary Johnson or knew of her and might know where he could hope to find her. More importantly, however, there was also the fact that Pyke had money and was prepared to pay generously for any information that might lead him to the girl.

  Even though Pyke was aware of how badly he wanted to find and talk to Mary Johnson, it struck him as odd that he was willing to fund the exercise from his own pocket and had no chance of turning a profit on it. As he walked along Bow Street towards Long Acre and stared upwards at the vast canopy of frozen blue sky that stretched far beyond the limits of the city, he felt light-headed, as
though the recklessness of his decision meant that he no longer understood himself as well as he once had.

  After noon the temperature started to plummet, so that by the time dusk arrived the usually bustling streets of the capital were practically deserted. The conditions had driven even the hardy porters, cabmen and dung collectors indoors. It was so inhospitable that the river itself was in danger of freezing. Though it was only early afternoon, it also meant that the taverns and coffee houses were bursting with custom. In these establishments, Pyke found a cavorting mass of stinking bodies.

  Even Pyke, who was used to the harshness of the city, was weary from his exertions, from walking its unforgiving streets and smelling its noxious smells: the grim odours of its wet pavements, the stench of the river at low tide, the tanneries where human excrement was used as an astringent, and the ubiquitous smells of horse dung, animal sweat, fried meat, rotten fruit and discarded herring bones.

  Over lunch purchased from a street vendor, a hot meat pie dripping with warm gravy, he had watched as two men, one dressed as a Protestant minister, staged a ‘conversion’ play for the unwary crowd. The minister said a few prayers and sang a hymn and the other man rose up and started to spit on some rosary beads and an effigy of the Pope. Apart from Pyke, everyone in the crowd applauded wildly. The minister passed round a collection plate. Once the crowd had dispersed, the two men tipped the coins into one of their hats and disappeared into a nearby tavern.

  During the day, Pyke visited countless taverns and brothels, asking for Mary Johnson and spreading the news about the reward money. He had narrowly avoided being attacked with a broken glass in the Black Horse on Tottenham Court Road and had come close to breaking the neck of a young thief who had tried to pick his pocket outside a brothel on the corner of Church Street and Lawrence Street in the heart of the rookery.