The Detective Branch pm-4

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘ Culpepper. Come on, Little Georgie. Let me beat you like the dog you’ve always been.’

  He felt the jab of something hard and cold against his neck.

  When Pyke turned around, one of Culpepper’s lieutenants was aiming a pistol directly at his face. Soon there were four others in the room, all armed with pistols, and finally Culpepper appeared, his face relaxed, his gait almost languid.

  Pyke took stock of his situation, only now beginning to realise how badly he’d misjudged the situation.

  ‘Drop it,’ Culpepper barked. Pyke felt one of the lieutenants jab the end of his pistol into the side of his cheek.

  Opening his hand, Pyke let the plank of wood clatter to the floor. Grinning, Culpepper took a few steps towards him and aimed a sharp kick at his groin. It connected almost perfectly and, for a moment, Pyke felt as if he might pass out.

  ‘Go and fetch the police,’ he heard Culpepper grunt to one of his men. ‘There’s a reward for this one.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  Pyke stumbled to his feet and looked around him. The route back to the corridor he’d come along was blocked by three men, all armed.

  ‘As much as I’d like to cut you up with an axe, I have to be practical,’ Culpepper said, smiling. ‘It would be satisfying in the short term, but I’d be pissing good money up the wall.’

  One of the men turned and left. Pyke tried to focus. How long would it take him to fetch a police constable? Five minutes perhaps?

  ‘That was quite a performance you put on at the courthouse the other week. I’d say you’re about as famous as any man in the country at the moment.’ Culpepper paused and touched his chin. ‘I’m just trying to imagine the scene when you’re led out on to the scaffold.’

  ‘For that, Little Georgie, you need to have an imagination. But they say dogs can’t even see in colour.’

  Culpepper seemed amused rather than irritated by Pyke’s attempt to rile him. ‘The other day I was thinking about the street we used to live on. But you know what else I remembered? Your father. He used to coin for a living, didn’t he? He was a failure and a drunkard and when he perished in that stampede outside Newgate prison, hardly anyone went to his funeral. I heard folk talking about it afterwards. Said it was an embarrassment. For a moment I even felt sorry for you. I always knew you wouldn’t amount to much.’

  Pyke felt something as close to pure, undiluted hatred as he had ever experienced. He hadn’t thought about his own father in years and wasn’t even certain that he could remember what he looked like.

  Culpepper continued to grin. ‘I know you visit Clare Lewis’s place every now and again, just as I knew how you’d react when you saw what I had done to her. I’ve been expecting your visit.’

  Pyke looked around him and tried to ignore Culpepper’s taunts. They had backed him into a corner of the room: just a window behind him; no door and no way out.

  ‘Who paid you to set Sharp on those men in Cullen’s shop? And who paid you to go after Keate’s mother?’

  ‘You think you’re in a position to ask me questions?’

  Fighting off the fear in his stomach, Pyke ran through his options. The window behind him seemed to be the only viable choice but he didn’t know what lay beneath it, or whether the storey-high fall might, in the end, do more harm than good.

  ‘Was it Benedict Pierce?’

  Culpepper’s small, quick eyes gave little away.

  Without warning, Pyke suddenly turned and launched himself at the window, his arms wrapped around his head to protect it from the glass. He heard the blast of a pistol as the glass shattered into a thousand pieces. He landed, shoulder first, on a ledge before rolling over and falling ten feet into the yard below. This time he landed partly on his side, the force of the impact momentarily winding him. Up on his feet, Pyke stumbled through an open gate just as a ball-shot tore into the mushy ground where he’d landed. And then he was moving, half-running, half-limping, into the street behind the yard.

  But he wasn’t free, not by a long way. Behind him, he heard shouting and, somewhere beyond that, the tat-tat-tat of a policeman’s rattle. At the next junction, he turned into a narrow alleyway and followed it as far as it took him. He turned again and continued deeper into the rookery, the houses becoming more ramshackle. When he reached the end of that lane, Pyke tumbled out on to a much wider, busier street. It took him a moment to work out he’d come as far as High Holborn, and just for a moment the brightness and noise were almost too much for him.

  Up ahead, a drover and his two sheepdogs were herding a line of long-horned oxen in the direction of the market at Smithfield. Instinctively Pyke moved towards the group. He crossed the road, weaving between slow-moving drays, wagons and carriages, and noticed two constables with their stovepipe hats in the crowd behind him. Pyke kept moving, his head down and hands in pockets. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself.

  Out of nowhere he felt a hand clasp his shoulder.

  Turning around, he saw the man’s dark blue swallow-tailed coat and brass buttons. The young constable had a truncheon in his hand and he swung it through the air. Pyke just managed to duck under it and kick the man’s ankles. Another constable saw the tussle and blew his whistle, and soon there were three or four stovepipe hats converging on him from different directions. Without thinking about it, Pyke scrambled into the middle of the herd and started to shout and flap his arms. The first animal reared backwards, its hind legs catching one of the sheepdogs, and another charged forward, ramming the ox in front with its horns. That set off a ripple effect, and soon the beasts were rampaging through High Holborn, panicked pedestrians pushing each other out of the way. It was hard to tell the human shouts from the petrified squeals of the animals as fully grown oxen slipped on the damp cobblestones and careered into traders’ barrows. Pyke took advantage of the confusion and slipped into an alleyway running perpendicular to the street. He could hear someone behind him, maybe the same man who’d tried to arrest him, but he didn’t stop. Finally, when he couldn’t run any more, he came to a halt in a sunless court, wheezing for breath. On the other side of the court was a slaughterhouse, but none of the men standing outside it paid him much attention. He walked past them, avoiding eye contact, and looked over his shoulder. The policeman had just entered the court. He heard the man’s whistle, darted into a passageway that ran along one side of the slaughterhouse and found himself in a yard surrounded by ten-foot-high brick walls. It was where the slaughterhouse discarded what they couldn’t use or sell — piles of hooves, teeth and cartilage. Flies hovered around the mass, feeding off the putrefying flesh. Pyke heard someone coming towards him down the narrow passage. There was no way out. Covering his mouth and nose, he dived into the mountain of flesh and quickly manoeuvred himself into the centre of the pile. The smell was so bad he retched instantly. He held his breath and counted at first to ten and then to fifty. Eventually he heard the footsteps receding.

  Every time Pyke walked through the City of London, he was surprised not only at the number of people on the pavements but also the traffic on the roads, omnibuses seemingly disgorging hundreds of bodies every time they stopped. What surprised him just as much were the new buildings; on every street and at every corner, old lath-and-plaster Georgian edifices were being pulled down and in their place would suddenly emerge monstrous granite structures, soaring upwards into the grey skies. There was always a lot of discussion about the new city that was materialising, and when you walked along a particular street and came across one, two, sometimes three gleaming new edifices, it was hard to deny that progress was being made. But at what cost? Certainly fewer and fewer people lived within the square mile. This was now where the new public companies, flush with money following their stock market ventures, wanted to establish offices that were increasingly grand, each a monument to the ambition and vanity of their chairman.

  Pyke found No. 23 Cheapside easily enough. It was another newly built structure, this one of modest scale and proporti
ons. A fashionable linen draper occupied the ground floor, offices the upper floors.

  The proprietor of the shop greeted Pyke warmly but some of this evaporated when he explained he was a private enquiry agent investigating a robbery that had taken place at the premises about five years earlier. Pyke had changed out of the clothes he’d been wearing and had bathed and scrubbed himself clean, but even so, he could still smell rotten animal flesh on his skin.

  ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t here five years ago, sir, and as you can probably see, nor was this building.’

  ‘Do you own it?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t. I rent it from the City Corporation.’

  Pyke wondered whether this had anything to do with what Saggers had told him about Hogarth. As alderman for the Court of Common Council, which was an arm of the City Corporation, Hogarth had been instrumental in increasing the number of properties available for non-residential use.

  ‘Perhaps I could ask you just one more question?’

  The draper smiled uneasily. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you remember the name of the contractor who pulled down the old building and put this one up?’

  The draper wiped his hands on his apron. ‘I should be able to. I liaised with him about the plans.’

  ‘Was it Sir St John Palmer? Was it his company?’

  Pyke knew from the draper’s reaction that he had scored a hit. The man stared at him, flummoxed. ‘Yes, that was it.’

  Outside, Pyke wandered along Cheapside and came to a halt outside an older, lath-and-plaster building about six doors down from the draper’s shop. At one time it had perhaps been tenanted by one family of means, but now the number of bells and plates on the front door suggested that numerous individuals resided there. Pyke pulled one of the bells at random and, when no one answered, he tried another, then another.

  The man who opened the door was elderly, with ash-white hair, stooped shoulders and poor eyesight. He was also hard of hearing.

  ‘What’s that, cock?’ he said, when Pyke asked him whether he’d known the person or people who’d lived at No. 23 before it was rebuilt.

  Pyke repeated the question, this time almost shouting.

  ‘I knew ’im, not well, mind. But I knew ’im. What I call a God-botherer. ’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What happened to him? Did he move?’

  ‘He died. Sudden, like. Just keeled over one day. ’Is nephew fancied the old boy would leave ’im the property but when the will was read, turns out the old coot ’ad gone and left everything to the Church. More fool ’im, I say, but it must ’ave been a shock to the nephew.’ The thought of it made him chortle.

  ‘I just called in there; seems the draper is renting it from the City Corporation now,’ Pyke said, trying to rein in his excitement. He knew he was getting close. ‘So the Church doesn’t own it any more?’

  ‘No, they sold it to the City Corporation, as soon as they got their grubby little hands on it.’

  Pyke almost put his mouth up against the old man’s ear. ‘Did you hear anything about a robbery there? Would have happened about five years ago?’

  ‘A robbery?’ He scratched his chin. ‘No, can’t say I did. But you said it ’appened five years ago, eh? That would’ve been around the time the old boy passed away.’

  The garret room Pyke had rented, on Broad Street, was less than a hundred yards from Sarah Scott’s address on Berwick Street, but he had deliberately avoided her ever since his escape because he hadn’t wanted to involve her any further. After all, he hadn’t known for certain that their relationship, if that was what it was, was entirely secret, and there was always a slim chance that one of Pierce’s men, or one of Wells’s men, had followed her after her visits to Bow Street. He had left her a note explaining all of this, but now he felt that perhaps he owed her more than that.

  He entered the building through the back, and when he knocked gently on her door and there was no answer, he picked the lock and let himself in. It was a small space, barely enough room for a mattress, but Sarah had managed to erect an easel holding a canvas which she had yet to start. A few brushstrokes marked the white background but nothing else. Pyke gave the room a quick search but found nothing apart from some paint and a few brushes. The air, he thought, smelled of her; it made him think of the way the skin at the sides of her eyes creased when she smiled. It was late afternoon and Pyke was more tired than he realised. As soon as he had removed his coat and boots and lain down on the mattress, his eyelids drooped and he quickly fell asleep.

  He was woken by a gentle kick, and when he looked up, Sarah Scott was standing over him, wearing a simple white dress and a blue woollen shawl. Her hair was partly held up in a clip.

  ‘So Lazarus rises from the dead.’ She said it with a vague sneer, and Pyke knew at once that he hadn’t been forgiven. ‘It’s nice of you to come and see me. Even though I thought I’d locked the door when I left this morning.’

  Pyke sat up, yawned and scratched the hair on his chin. ‘I left you a note.’

  ‘I got it.’

  ‘When I last saw you, when you visited me, I had no idea I’d have to do something so drastic. I got some news at the last minute which made me realise I’d been set up; that there was no way I’d walk out of that courtroom a free man. I had to make other arrangements; and I didn’t want to involve either you or my son because I knew they’d come after you if I did.’

  That seemed to soften her a little. ‘I met Felix one day outside the station house. One of the clerks told me who he was.’

  ‘Aiding an escape from prison or knowing about it in advance and not contacting the authorities. They can transport you for that.’

  Pyke looked at the way her dress clung to her hips. He also thought about how she had come to his aid during his incarceration at Bow Street. But if she was, in fact, Kate Gibb, she had been wilfully deceiving him for the entire time he’d known her.

  She saw the way he was looking at her and scowled. ‘You didn’t explain how you got into my room.’

  Pyke made space for her on the mattress next to him and patted it. ‘Come on, Sarah. Sit down.’

  In the end she did, reluctantly, but kept at least a yard between them. ‘I thought you were going to die, Pyke. We all did; everyone in that room.’

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you sooner. There were things I needed to do.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘If I said scooping shit out of other people’s cesspits, would you believe me?’

  Intrigued now, she looked at him and sniffed. ‘I thought there was a funny smell when I walked in here.’

  ‘You know I told you about a man called Morris Keate?’ Pyke watched her reaction carefully. ‘I needed to find out about Keate’s family, his half-brothers and half-sister. Becoming a night-soil man was the only way I could do it.’

  Sarah regarded him with curiosity. If she was Keate’s half-sister, she was hiding it well. ‘And did you?’

  He shrugged. ‘Some details. Enough.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be concentrating on how to get out of the mess you’re currently in?’

  ‘The only way I can do that is by proving other people’s culpability. Believe me, there’s nothing selfless about what I’m doing here.’

  A lopsided smile spread across her face.

  In spite of himself, Pyke found her coolness under pressure alluring. Could she really be Kate Gibb? Suddenly he couldn’t be sure of anything.

  ‘I missed you,’ she said, reaching out and touching him on the shoulder.

  It was hard to tell who had pulled who into an embrace. Their mouths met somewhere in between, their kisses hot and urgent. She had already removed her shawl and he helped her with her dress while she tugged at his trousers. He had always liked her confidence, and her experience as a lover, the ease he felt in her company. Did it matter that she might not be who she claimed to be? This thought left his head as soon as he saw her
naked body. He pulled her down on to the mattress, and, as he guided himself into her, feeling her breath on his cheek as he did so, he wondered, if only for a moment, whether he might be using her in some nameless, complicated way.

  Afterwards, they lay in silence and stared up at the dark stains on the ceiling. He had done what he’d just done because he wanted to, because he couldn’t stop himself, because he liked her more than he wanted to admit, but he had done it, too, because he wanted to convince himself that she was who she claimed to be, that physical intimacy was somehow a guarantor of truthfulness. Now, exhausted, he saw this for the lie it was. She had been as ethereal and closed off to him as ever, and he’d used what they’d done as a sly form of interrogation. Where was the truthfulness in that?

  ‘Kate…?’ He waited for her to turn around and look at him.

  Eventually she did, but her expression was quizzical. ‘ What did you just call me?’

  He felt a slight dampness in his armpits. Perhaps he’d made a mistake.

  ‘Why did you call me Kate?’

  Pyke suddenly felt very foolish. He had expected, or perhaps hoped, that having been addressed by her real name, she would turn to him instinctively and answer him. Now all he’d done was given her a reason to be angry at him.