The Detective Branch pm-4

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘I’ve just talked to an old man who lives in one of the tenements at the back of Cullen’s shop,’ Lockhart said, breathlessly.

  They looked at one another warily as Pyke waited for Lockhart to catch his breath. Personally Pyke felt his colleague’s face was too gaunt and his eyes were too close together but he’d heard it said, by Gerrett when he was drunk, that he, Pyke, was jealous of Lockhart’s youth and good looks.

  On this occasion, Lockhart seemed excited rather than diffident. He told Pyke that a witness, a retired coal-whipper, had seen a well-dressed man, tall, with dark hair and swarthy skin, in the alley behind the pawnbroker’s just after the shooting. The man had been carrying a large pistol. The coal-whipper reckoned he’d be able to recognise the gunman if he ever saw him again.

  A cart piled high with wooden crates rattled towards them, the harness clanking loudly as the iron-shod wheels rolled over the cobblestones. Pyke waited for it to pass. ‘That’s fine work, Detective.’ He thought he saw Lockhart smile. ‘Keep it up and I’ll see you back in the office at five.’

  About lunchtime it started to rain and by early afternoon a brown slush had collected at the sides of the street and was sprayed up on to the pavements by the passing traffic. It meant there was standing room only in the taproom of the Blue Dog, traders from the nearby market taking refuge from the downpour alongside knife-grinders, basket sellers, hawkers, balladeers, oakum pickers and costermongers. Steam rose from wet clothes, creating a fug that smelled almost as bad as the rotten vegetables on the pavement outside. Pyke approached the zinc-topped counter and asked to speak to the landlord. No one took much notice of him until he said he was there to ‘rattle the cage’ of the Rafferty boys. The pot-bellied landlord folded his arms and smiled. Almost immediately, conversation in the vicinity of the counter stopped.

  ‘And who, sir, are you?’ The landlord’s moustache twitched.

  ‘Pyke.’ He waited. ‘Detective Inspector Pyke.’ As he said it, he could almost feel the walls closing in on him.

  ‘A Jack, eh?’

  ‘You want to point me in the direction of the Raffertys or do I have to arrest you for being fat and ugly?’

  ‘Tough-talking, too.’ The landlord’s eyes were as dead as a filleted mackerel’s. ‘You here on your own?’

  ‘I see you can count to one. I’m impressed.’

  That drew a smirk. ‘A brave man. Or a stupid one.’ A few men within earshot laughed.

  ‘You can talk, surely you can, friend, but I wonder if that’s all you’ve got,’ a voice said behind Pyke. An Irish brogue.

  Pyke turned and found himself staring at a man in his forties, with unkempt, reddy-brown hair, a sunburnt face with a six-inch scar running down one side of it, a neck as thick as the stump of a small tree, and arms that had doubtless crushed men to death. He was the kind of man who could plunge a knife into your belly as easily as he could drink a mug of ale. Pyke noticed, too, that a path had cleared around him.

  ‘Your name Rafferty?’

  ‘Might be. Then again it might be O’Shaunessy or Cleary depending on who’s askin’ the question.’ A few nervous laughs rippled around the taproom.

  ‘Yesterday morning, three men were shot and killed in a pawnbroker’s just off Drury Lane. The rumour is that you or one of your brothers might have pulled the trigger.’

  His expression didn’t change. ‘Is that so? And why would we want to go and do a thing like that?’

  ‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’

  The man studied him with a disconcerting mixture of curiosity and indifference. ‘Where I come from, a Peeler dares enter a place like this, he leaves in a box.’

  ‘Lucky for me we live in a more civilised part of the world.’

  ‘You saying me or my brothers had anything to do with that shootin’?’ the man asked.

  ‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’

  ‘Has the widow been talkin’?’

  Pyke took a moment to assess the threat he’d implicitly made against Cullen’s wife. ‘If you or your brothers touch a hair on her head, or even go within fifty yards of her shop, I’ll dunk you in a cesspool until you choke.’

  Rafferty seemed amused, rather than unsettled, by Pyke’s words, as if he knew that the threat was a hollow one. ‘Cullen was nothing. Not worth the steam risin’ off my piss. The fact he was shot has nothin’ to do with us.’

  Pyke studied Rafferty’s face for signs that he might be lying but his ignorance appeared to be genuine. ‘So where were you and your brothers yesterday morning between the hours of ten o’clock and midday?’

  ‘Right here,’ Rafferty said, without hesitation. ‘In full view of a hundred men.’

  ‘And people here would be happy to swear an oath to that effect?’ Pyke looked at the faces flanking Rafferty. Of course they would be happy to swear an oath, he thought. They were all completely terrified of him.

  Rafferty just shrugged. ‘Ask ’em yourself.’

  Pyke turned to the landlord. ‘Well?’

  The pot-bellied man grinned. ‘None of ’em Raffertys even slipped out back to relieve ’emselves.’

  A chorus of validations echoed around the taproom. Rafferty stood there, arms folded. Pyke turned back to face him. ‘So which Rafferty are you?’

  ‘Conor.’

  ‘I’ll come back soon and we’ll continue this conversation.’

  Rafferty smiled. ‘Any time, Peeler.’

  Later Pyke learned that Conor Rafferty had once taken a hammer to a man who’d slept with his sister and systematically broken every bone in his body. The person who told the story added that Conor was the least cruel of the brothers.

  The address of the New Police’s headquarters was 4 Whitehall Place but the entrance was in Great Scotland Yard. The building housed the police’s administration, the offices of the two commissioners, the men of the Executive Division, the newly instituted Criminal Returns office, which compiled information and statistics to show the prevalence of crime in particular districts, and the accounts department. While the commissioners enjoyed views that took in the river on one side and St James’s Park and Horse Guards’ Parade on the other, the Detective Branch occupied three poky rooms on the ground floor that looked directly on to a brick wall. Pyke found the view oddly reassuring. As he sometimes told his men, it gave them a proper sense of their place in the New Police’s hierarchy.

  As a detective, Pyke didn’t have to wear a uniform, something he was very grateful for. Even though he had been doing the job for over six months, he still didn’t feel wholly comfortable with his new-found authority and he was glad not to be reminded of it each time he walked past a mirror. It was a long time since he had served as a Bow Street Runner and it had taken him a while to find his feet and adjust to being part of a large organisation again. Still, his time as a Runner had taught him the rudiments of detective work and, more than this, how a detective branch should function. For many years, his mentor at Bow Street had failed to convince successive home secretaries about the merits of creating a centralised, dedicated detective department. Tory and Whig politicians had felt that the true role of the police should be to deter crime from happening in the first place and that detectives were akin to spies whose unseen presence on the streets threatened the very notion of liberty. Now, though, the political wind had changed and Pyke had been given the chance to turn his mentor’s vision into a reality.

  Pyke kept one of the rooms for himself. The second room, also small, was used for questioning witnesses and interviewing suspects. The largest room housed desks for all the other detectives, together with a row of filing cabinets that contained a growing library of cards. These cards detailed the criminals or suspected criminals known to them and were arranged according to their particular skills. There were sections for pickpockets, lumpers, footpads, magsmen, swell mobs, sharpers, prostitutes, pimps, house burglars, horse thieves, rushers, receivers, murderers, rapists, sodomists, shoplifters, screevers and cracksmen. Each card
listed the person’s name, their aliases, all known acquaintances, their current residence, all former residences, a list of any convictions and details of time served in prison. This information was then cross-referenced with the names of other known or suspected criminal associates. Each section was arranged alphabetically, according to surname, and the idea was that any piece of information they came across, no matter how trivial it seemed at the time, would be added to a person’s card. Additionally the cabinets contained copies of the daily crime reports circulated by the assistant commissioner’s office to all divisional superintendents, providing descriptions of suspects, missing persons and stolen property.

  Sometimes Pyke wondered what his wife, Emily, would have made of his decision to join the police force, whether or not she would have been surprised. Part of her, he suspected, wouldn’t have batted an eyelid, even though he had once told her, after leaving the Runners, that he would never go back. Throughout their marriage, Emily had known that he missed his former profession: the excitement and even the grubbiness of the work. But he had changed in the years since her death. As a young man, he had been as much concerned with lining his own pocket as locking up malefactors. Those ambitions hadn’t deserted him entirely but these days he’d come to believe that the law, even if imperfect, was both a necessary and an inevitable part of civilised existence. Part of him also knew she would have been disappointed in his decision. He could hear her voice: telling him that by becoming a policeman he was colluding with a system that was founded on unfairness. She had been a firebrand radical, a socialist, someone who’d believed passionately, naively perhaps, that the world could be altered by the words and deeds of those with political commitment.

  Pyke checked to make sure there wasn’t a card made up for Harry Dove and that his name wasn’t listed in connection with other known receivers. When he was satisfied of this, he walked up the staircase to the office of the two commissioners and knocked on the door of Sir Richard Mayne, entering before being invited to do so.

  Mayne was sitting behind his gargantuan desk. He was youthful in looks, despite his fifty years, with a smooth, oval face, brown hair that was greying at the edges, and a hard, compressed mouth. He was cold and taciturn but, as a former solicitor, he had a good brain for police work and it was he, rather than the other commissioner, who had argued for the creation of a specialist detective department. Some liked to compare Mayne to Peel, and Pyke could see the similarities. Like Peel, Mayne could be stern and humourless; Pyke rarely saw him relax and he never spoke an unnecessary word. But Mayne could be loyal, too, and while he hadn’t exactly warmed to Pyke as head of the Detective Branch, Pyke knew he had vigorously defended him to outsiders and at his twice yearly appearance before the parliamentary select committee.

  With him in the room was Walter Wells. Wells had just been promoted to the rank of acting superintendent of the Executive Division, the largest and most prestigious of all of the New Police’s divisions and the only one based at the headquarters in Whitehall Place. It was the most senior position in the New Police after the two commissioners and the post of assistant commissioner. Wells was about the same age as Mayne but his hair was still thick and black and looked as if it had been cut with the aid of a pudding bowl. His head was the size of a pumpkin and his skin seemed to have the consistency of hard wax. Even when he smiled, it didn’t move. He had joined the police force ten years earlier and had risen steadily through the ranks. As a soldier, he had been decorated for his service to the Afghan campaign, during which it was said he’d single-handedly fought off a mob of tribal warriors for two days until reinforcements had arrived. There were a lot of former army men in the New Police, and many of these spoke highly of Wells. Pyke had yet to make up his mind, and he was irritated by Wells’s mostly crass attempts to ingratiate himself with whoever he was talking to.

  Briefly Pyke told them what had happened at the pawn shop, that three men including the owner had been shot and killed, then he outlined how the investigation was proceeding. Both men seemed happy enough with his account, but the fact that Wells had been invited to this meeting in the first place worried Pyke. The Detective Branch, with just five men, was a minor department, and although it answered directly to the office of the two commissioners, this autonomy was constantly under threat. Each of the divisions had its own area of jurisdiction and some superintendents resented the fact that crimes committed in their patch could be handed over to the Detective Branch. Some argued that the Detective Branch wasn’t strictly necessary and that crimes committed in their areas could be investigated just as well by their own men.

  When Pyke had finished talking, Mayne invited Wells to respond and the acting superintendent told them about some Irish ruffians who had been seen firing their pistols on waste ground near King’s Cross. Pyke’s thoughts immediately turned to the Raffertys, and when Wells added that these Irishmen had been spotted drinking in the King of Denmark on Long Acre, the place Villums had mentioned, he knew they were talking about the same men.

  Mayne turned his gaze towards Pyke. ‘In the last hour, and with my approval, Walter has dispatched a group of officers from the Executive Division to pay this establishment a visit and, I hope, apprehend the men in question.’ He looked across at Wells. ‘Do you have their names, Walter?’

  ‘No names, I’m afraid. Just descriptions.’

  ‘I see.’ Pyke took in this information, wondering whether any of the descriptions would match Conor Rafferty. ‘Does this mean I’m no longer in charge of the investigation?’

  ‘Not at all. But we both felt that, in the circumstances, time was of the essence. In view of the seriousness of the incident, I feel that the investigation would benefit from Walter’s expertise and experience.’

  Pyke glanced across at Wells. ‘And who would be in overall charge of the investigation?’

  ‘You would still run the day-to-day affairs.’ Mayne tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘This is about co-operation between departments. Anyway, you’ll be snowed under as it is. Another pair of hands can’t do any harm.’

  ‘You don’t seem especially convinced by the course of action we’ve taken,’ Wells commented, trying to smooth over the situation. ‘You’re a plain-speaking man by reputation. I’d like to hear what you’ve got to say.’

  Pyke shrugged. He considered telling them about the Rafferty brothers but decided this would only stoke Wells’s rash decision-making. ‘What evidence is there to indicate that these men were involved in the robbery?’ He waited. ‘Aside from the fact they’re Irish and were seen in a pub on Long Acre?’

  When neither of the men answered immediately, Pyke added, ‘And to date, our enquiries have led us to believe we’re looking for a single gunman, not a mob.’

  Mayne’s jaw hardened and he shook his head. ‘A single gunman couldn’t have fired all three shots.’

  Wells leaned back against his cushioned chair and extended his arms upwards. ‘Perhaps I might ask, Detective Inspector, what is your opinion of the Irish?’

  ‘The Irish?’ Pyke turned to look at him. ‘I know a few, rich and poor, and I couldn’t generalise.’

  ‘Perhaps you should spend more time in places like Saffron Hill or Little Dublin. Ten or fifteen to a room, fifty in every building. More arriving by the day and reproducing quicker than vermin.’

  ‘If we peddle that notion to the newspapers, I guarantee we’ll see Catholics hanging from gas-lamps by the end of the week. Is that what you want? Mobs of irate, self-righteous Englishmen burning people out of their homes?’

  Wells clenched his jaw but said nothing.

  ‘Enough of this,’ Mayne interrupted. ‘Personal views aside, we are following up on this line of enquiry because it is, or might be, pertinent to your investigation.’

  Pyke was surprised that the commissioner had again referred to it as his investigation and wondered to what extent this was true.

  ‘More to the point,’ Mayne added, ‘I want the two of you to cooperate with the new
superintendent of Holborn Division.’

  ‘I thought that position hadn’t been filled,’ Pyke said. He’d heard that the old superintendent had retired but that a replacement still hadn’t been found.

  ‘It hadn’t,’ Mayne said carefully. ‘Until this afternoon.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘In light of the events that have brought us all here I felt it was imperative to make an appointment. And as fortune would have it, there was a suitable man willing to put himself forward.’

  There was a knock on the door. ‘Come,’ Mayne barked, adding, ‘That should be him. I asked him to attend this meeting.’

  Benedict Pierce strode into the room and nodded politely at Wells. Ignoring Pyke, he said, ‘Sir Richard,’ and waited for Mayne to invite him to sit. He had the stiff demeanour of a military man but, unlike Wells, Pyke knew for a fact he had never seen, or been anywhere near, active service. All of the buttons on his frock-coat had been polished and there was a perfect crease running down the length of his trousers. Not a single hair on his head was out of place and his chin was smooth and clean shaven. He removed his stovepipe hat, sat down on the empty chair next to Wells and crossed his legs.

  Pyke considered his options. He could refuse to work with Pierce and see what transpired, or he could say nothing and find out what kind of game Pierce was playing.

  ‘You know Walter, of course. Pyke, too.’ For Pyke’s benefit, Mayne added, ‘I’m pleased to say that Superintendent Pierce has agreed to assume control of E Division with immediate effect. Any questions?’

  Pyke smiled, deciding to keep his thoughts to himself. ‘I’m pleased, for your sake, that you were able to fill the vacancy at such short notice.’

  There were many reasons why Pyke disliked Pierce. The fact that the man was punctilious, vain and self-regarding was almost beside the point. Pyke didn’t hold Pierce’s rampant ambition against him either, even if this meant he had risen with an almost obscene swiftness through the ranks of the New Police. What rankled most was that this success was not due to Pierce’s skills as an investigator or even an administrator but rather because he had always sought out the right connections. He belonged to the clubs that mattered and had even joined a Masonic lodge. Pyke had traded with men like Villums and the information he had bought and sold had secured his position in the New Police. But while he had turned a blind eye to some of Villums’s activities, he had never accepted a bribe to cover up someone’s involvement in a murder and had never allowed the rich and powerful to tell him how to do his job. Pyke suspected this wasn’t true of Pierce, but it was the man’s hypocrisy which galled him most of all; the fact that the new head of E Division could let a rich man who’d strangled his servant live out his days in peace and yet would make sure a poor man who had stolen in order to feed his starving family was sent to the scaffold.