The Revenge of Captain Paine pm-2 Page 8

  They were playing ‘twenty-one’ and it took Pyke just a few minutes to work out that Yellowplush, who had acquired a stack of coins, was cheating, by drawing the cards he needed either from up his sleeve or, more likely, from somewhere under the table. During each game, he would take his hand and inspect it under the table, ostensibly to shield it from his opponent. From this, Pyke concluded that duplicate playing cards must be fixed to the underside of the table.

  With a hand of two jacks and an ace, the rector had just lost again, to an unlikely five-card trick, and he seemed to be on the verge of giving up. Seizing on his indecision, Pyke stepped forward and tossed five gold coins on to the table, considerably more money than they had been playing for. He patted the clergyman on the shoulder, consoling him for his luck, and asked whether he might play the next hand against his opponent. Yellowplush’s eyes narrowed but his face remained composed. He looked at the coins and loosened his cravat. The rector didn’t seem to mind and willingly gave up his seat, commenting only on his opponent’s good fortune.

  ‘And who might you be, friend?’ Yellowplush said in a staccato voice that was far from friendly.

  Pyke’s initial impression of Septimus Yellowplush had been that of a schoolyard bully, the kind of man that he had once dealt with almost without having to think about it: a slap around the face, a few words of warning, perhaps even the flash of his blade to make his point. But having studied the man for a few moments — his hard, waxy skin that barely moved, even when he laughed or frowned, his grey eyes that looked like buttons drilled into his skull, and his small, pink tongue, which darted from his mouth as he spoke — Pyke saw a coldness in him and possibly even a propensity for violence. It was the curly wig which made him look ridiculous, but while misplaced vanity may have convinced him to don such a garment, the fact that no one had summoned sufficient courage to tell him about the folly of his choice told Pyke all he needed to know about the grip with which Yellowplush ruled his fiefdom.

  ‘You can call me Pyke.’ He eased into the chair, trying to seem more comfortable than he felt. It had been a long time since he had done this kind of work.

  ‘And where are you from, Mr Pyke?’

  ‘Just Pyke will do.’

  ‘Just stopping here for the night?’ Yellowplush picked up the cards and began to shuffle them.

  Ignoring the question, Pyke took a swig of ale and wiped his mouth.

  ‘Not the chatty type? Perhaps your luck will be better than your conversation.’ A ripple of laughter spread across the room. ‘It’s a rich game you’re asking for. You must feel lucky, sir.’

  ‘Far from it,’ Pyke said, staring down at the table. ‘But any fool can see that luck like yours can’t last for ever.’

  Yellowplush’s smile vanished. ‘Would you have any objections to my dealing?’

  Pyke took the pack, shuffled the cards and handed them back to his opponent. ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘A stranger in a strange town.’ Yellowplush licked his lips. ‘I’d be careful how you conduct yourself, sir.’

  ‘Yes, I read in the newspapers this wasn’t the most welcoming of places.’

  ‘I’m guessing that you’re referring to the headless corpse.’ Yellowplush had dealt himself two eights and Pyke a ten and a seven. ‘Or perhaps to the arrival of the navvies?’

  ‘It’s not every day a headless corpse is reported in the newspapers. I’d say it was the talk of London when I left.’

  Yellowplush looked at him, unimpressed. ‘Brutal murder may be commonplace in that city but it’s thankfully rarer here in the provinces.’ He smiled without warmth. ‘What did you say your business was?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Pyke stared down at his hand and pushed the gold coins into the middle of the table. ‘I’ll have another card.’

  The magistrate dealt him a card, face down. Leaving it on the table, Pyke turned over one of the corners and saw it was the four of clubs.

  ‘Good card?’

  Removing a purse from his coat, Pyke pulled out a ten-pound note. ‘Just to make it interesting.’

  There were gasps of astonishment around the table. It was more money than many of them would earn in two months.

  ‘You’re not one for small talk, are you?’ Yellowplush looked down at the cards in front of him. Beneath his wig, he had started to sweat.

  ‘As you said, a stranger should learn to hold his tongue.’

  ‘Indeed.’ The magistrate took some snuff on the tip of his finger, brought it up to his nose. ‘I’ll take the bet, sir.’ It was what the whole room had wanted to hear.

  ‘Perhaps you might allow me to see your money.’

  This drew a hollow chuckle. ‘You don’t imagine I carry such a sum on my person, do you?’

  ‘Then how am I to know you can actually afford to pay your debt?’

  ‘Assuming I lose.’

  Pyke nodded. ‘Assuming I win.’

  ‘Are you saying my word is somehow insufficient?’ Yellowplush asked, smiling to conceal his threatening tone.

  ‘Would you trust my word?’

  ‘I’m the magistrate of this town.’

  ‘I suppose someone has to be.’ Pyke folded his arms and looked around the room dismissively. ‘But I’ll still need to see your money.’

  Yellowplush licked his lips and studied Pyke’s face. ‘Perhaps you would allow me a few minutes to discuss terms with the landlord.’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  It took Yellowplush ten minutes to come up with the money; when he returned to the table, he emptied the coins out of his pockets on to the table. ‘Count ’em if you like,’ he said, taking another pinch of snuff.

  Pyke leant across the table, whispering, ‘How much does it cost to buy the law in a town like this? More than the price of a new wig?’

  The outrage registered in the magistrate’s dilated pupils.

  ‘I’d be careful of loose talk in a town where folk are already twitchy and fearful of what might happen.’

  ‘What might happen when?’ Pyke stared at his opponent’s leathery skin.

  The magistrate shrugged and dealt himself another card.

  As Yellowplush dealt it, Pyke again leaned over the table and whispered, ‘That card remains on the table in full view of everyone here. If you try to swap it with one of those duplicate cards you’ve fixed to the underside of the table, I’ll expose your squalid little scam. Nod once, to show me you understand.’

  Colour drained from the magistrate’s face and sweat leaked from beneath his wig.

  ‘Was that a nod?’

  Yellowplush didn’t seem to know what to do. His curly wig slipped farther down his forehead but he didn’t seem to have noticed.

  A crowd of faces had gathered around the table, watching their every move with a keen interest.

  ‘Did I just see a nod?’ Pyke said, louder so others could hear him.

  Yellowplush pushed his wig back up on top of his head and nodded. Pyke turned over his four of clubs. ‘Twenty-one. ’ He smiled at the glowering magistrate. ‘What? Has your luck finally run out?’

  When Yellowplush neither answered him nor turned over his cards, Pyke added, ‘Remember what I said about keeping your hands above the table.’ Then he reached out, plucked the card from the magistrate’s hand and tossed it on to the table. ‘Makes nineteen, if I’m not mistaken.’ Scooping up the coins and his own ten-pound note, he deliberately knocked over his ale glass, and watched as the brown liquid dripped on to the magistrate’s lap. Before Yellowplush could stop him, Pyke swiped the curly wig from his head and began to mop up the mess. An awed silence fell across the room. Whistling, Pyke continued his mopping-up work, until the table was dry, and then rinsed out the wig and placed it back on the magistrate’s head. Ale began to drip down on to Yellowplush’s face. There were a few nervous twitters from the very back of the room. Otherwise, no one said a word. As he arranged the wig on the magistrate’s head, Pyke added, ‘Lay a finger on me in here and I’ll make sure that every man an
d woman in this inn knows you cheat at cards.’ Then he wiped both hands on his jacket and stood up. ‘Now that’s settled, perhaps you’ll join me for some night air,’ Pyke said, so that everyone in the room could hear him.

  Insisting that Pyke go first, Yellowplush had prodded what felt like the end of his pistol into Pyke’s back before they had even departed the inn. ‘Tell me who you are and what you want right now,’ he whispered, ‘or I’ll squeeze the trigger and you’ll die a long, painful death.’

  Outside, on the street, Pyke turned around to face Yellowplush, whose shining face was as large as a turnip, barely visible in the gloom. ‘I’m an emissary from Sir Robert Peel. He’s taken an interest in your corpse and he asked me to investigate the matter further.’ Pyke expected that Yellowplush might be surprised by this revelation but the magistrate merely shrugged as though the matter were of no consequence. ‘I have a letter confirming this,’ he added, quickly, ‘if you’ll allow me to find it.’

  Yellowplush poked the pistol into Pyke’s chest. ‘I can’t understand why Peel’s so interested in our body.’

  ‘I don’t know. Like I said, he asked me to look into the matter and report back to him.’ Pyke waited, deciding not to say anything about Peel’s interest in Captain Paine and the threat posed by radicals.

  ‘Why didn’t you introduce yourself at the outset?’

  ‘Peel is a divisive figure,’ Pyke said. ‘In my experience, his name doesn’t always open doors.’

  ‘I know that, for a fact.’ Yellowplush reached out his hand. ‘Let me see the letter.’

  Pyke retrieved it from his pocket and gave it to the magistrate, who surveyed the content without much interest. ‘It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t kill you, leave you to bleed to death for what you did in the inn.’

  ‘You think Peel wouldn’t find out? Or that everyone in the inn who witnessed our card game loves you so much they wouldn’t give you up, if and when Peel’s men have to come looking for me?’

  That seemed to register with Yellowplush. He put the pistol back into his belt and shrugged. ‘You’d better come with me, then.’

  It was a damp night and the air smelled of wet leaves. The street was deserted and they walked in silence as far as the watch-house where prison cells were visible from the street through iron grilles.

  The watch-house was besieged, with men of all ages lining up in an orderly queue that snaked around the building. The magistrate explained they were waiting to be sworn in as special constables. Once this had been done, they would be allocated a weapon of their choice. The selection was a rich one. Lining the wall at the back of the watch-house were brickbats, muskets, shovels, swords, machetes, pick handles and even a few rifles. When Pyke likened the scene to an army preparing to go to war, Yellowplush looked at him and smiled.

  ‘I take it you’re expecting trouble,’ Pyke said, as he followed the magistrate down a flight of stone steps to the cellar of the watch-house, where the headless body was being stored.

  The flickering light given off by the magistrate’s lantern barely illuminated the tomblike corridor.

  Pyke smelled the corpse before he saw it, a ripe odour that filled the windowless room.

  Yellowplush put the lantern down on the floor and said, ‘I’ll leave you the light. I don’t imagine you’re used to spending time with dead bodies.’

  Pyke looked at him. ‘And you are?’ The air around them was cloying, fleshy and sickly.

  ‘I used to serve in the army. The regiment was travelling to India when the ship caught fire in the Bay of Biscay. A casket of rum split open and one of the ship’s officers dropped a lantern. The fire spread from the hold to the rest of the ship. I was tasked with the job of raising men from their cabins on the port side of the ship towards the stern but the fire spread too quickly for me. The screams of those men will live me with the rest of my days, sir. The next day, after the ship had finally blown up, we discovered the charred remains of a young child. I was there in the boat with his father when we came across it. The sound that came from the man’s mouth was not one I ever want to hear again. So to answer your question, sir, the idea of spending some time in the presence of a dead body doesn’t concern me in the slightest.’

  The heels of Yellowplush’s leather boots clicked against the stone as he ascended the stone steps.

  The air in the cellar felt cool against Pyke’s skin and it took him a few moments to adjust to his new surroundings. Holding his nose as best he could, Pyke pulled back the sheet, but the stench of rotting, decomposing flesh was too much and he snapped his head backwards, a hot spike of vomit spurting from his mouth. The next time, he whipped the sheet off with a single jerk. Underneath, the bloated corpse looked inhuman, a fatty torso already as stiff as a washboard and discoloured from decomposition, and just a bloody stump where the head had once been. Wiping bile from his mouth, he brought the lantern closer to the corpse and bent down to inspect it further. Pyke’s eyes passed across the corpse’s clammy skin but he couldn’t see an obvious cause of death. There was no stab wound and no visible scars or bruises of any sort except for a cluster of what looked like burn marks at the top of his arm. Four or five reddish circles, no larger than a five-shilling coin. Pyke prodded them with his thumb, trying to work out what might have caused them.

  He walked around the corpse a few times, taking note of the thickness of the arms and thighs and the hairiness of the chest and arms. He’d been a young man, Pyke decided, no more than thirty years of age, and physically active, with well-developed leg and arm muscles. There was a zigzag scar running down the length of his forearm and a birthmark on his chest. From the length of the torso and the thick hairs on his chest, Pyke guessed he would have been about six foot, with dark hair. He inspected the cluster of burn marks again, wondering what might have caused them and whether they had, in fact, been inflicted by the killer. Why bother to do this to a man whose head you were about to cut off?

  Pyke brought the lantern up to the neck stump and inspected it, trying to work out what instrument had been used in the decapitation. The wound seemed remarkably clean, as though the man’s head had indeed been removed with a couple of swings of an axe rather than hacked off in a less clinical manner. This suggested the act may have been premeditated, that the killer had planned to decapitate his victim, but it didn’t begin to suggest why he’d chosen to do so in the first place. Pyke could rule out torture: he was reasonably confident that the decapitation had taken place after the man had died. There were no rope marks around the wrists or ankles, for example, and to cut off someone’s head while they were still alive would definitely require restraints. This left the thorny question of motivation. Why had someone gone to the trouble of decapitating a man they had already murdered? The most obvious answer was that the killer or killers had wanted to conceal the victim’s identity.

  ‘Where was the body found?’ Pyke asked, once he’d rejoined Yellowplush at the back of the watch-house.

  ‘A farmer fished him out of the river just to the east of the town.’

  Pyke considered this for a moment. ‘Would I be correct in assuming the river flows from west to east?’

  Yellowplush nodded.

  ‘So the body was either dumped into the river where the farmer found it or, more likely, it ended up there having been discarded elsewhere.’ Pyke rubbed his eyes. ‘Who owns the land upstream from where the corpse was found?’

  ‘Is that relevant?’

  ‘It might be,’ Pyke said. ‘If you don’t tell me I can always find out from someone else.’

  ‘Sir Horsley Rockingham.’

  ‘A friend of yours?’

  The magistrate stared at him but declined to answer the question.

  ‘Are you planning to leave the body down there until it rots?’

  ‘The body belongs to a local lad. Word spreads slowly in the country. I’m waiting to see if someone decides to claim it.’

  ‘You know it’s a local lad for certain?’

  Yellow
plush shrugged.

  Pyke nodded. ‘So tell me something. How does an ex-soldier suddenly become a magistrate?’

  The question seemed to take Yellowplush by surprise. ‘I don’t take kindly to your insinuation, sir. Remember, you’re here as my guest and, as my guest, your invitation can easily be revoked.’

  ‘Is that what happened to the dead man?’ Pyke held the magistrate’s stare. ‘Was his invitation revoked, too?’

  ‘You’d do as well to hold your tongue. The countryside isn’t always the peaceful idyll city folk imagine it is.’

  ‘I can see that well enough with my own eyes.’ In the yard men were still queuing for weapons.

  Yellowplush rearranged his wig and stared out into the darkness. ‘Navvies can be a barbarous lot but we’ll not tolerate their violence. If they try something, we’ll be ready for them.’

  ‘Why would they try something?’ Pyke didn’t bother to hide his scorn. ‘What is it you’re not telling me?’

  ‘Despite that letter, I’m not obliged to tell you a thing.’ Yellowplush waited for a few moments, his stare intensifying. ‘And in answer to your question, do heathens need a reason to embrace violence?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Pyke said, staring directly into his dry eyes. ‘Do they?’

  ‘I think you’ve officially outstayed your welcome.’ Yellowplush ran the tip of his pink tongue across his pale, flaky lips. ‘I’ll bid you goodnight, sir.’

  ‘Goodnight and good riddance?’

  ‘Country people don’t much care for city types with their fancy clothes and slick ways.’

  ‘I’m sure the feeling’s mutual.’

  ‘If you know what’s good for you you’ll go back to London and leave us to sort out our own troubles.’

  ‘What if I don’t want to go? What if I’ve taken an inexplicable liking to this dour town of yours?’

  Yellowplush took out his pistol once again and thrust it into Pyke’s face. ‘Do you really want me to answer that question?’