The Detective Branch pm-4

by Andrew Pepper

  Saggers finished what was in his wineglass. ‘I’m not sure what you’re getting at.’

  ‘Just be patient. I’m trying to think… One aspect of this campaign was to persuade as many people as possible to leave an endowment to the Church in their wills.’ Pyke thought about what the old man living on Cheapside had told him. ‘Let’s assume that the campaign was a success, but that people didn’t just leave money to the Church, they also left their properties.’

  ‘That seems plausible enough.’

  ‘But in order to turn these properties into capital, the Churches Fund, or those overseeing it, would’ve had to put these properties on the open market.’

  ‘There’s nothing illegal about that,’ Saggers said.

  Pyke rubbed his beard, the part under his chin that itched the most. ‘But what if City Holdings Consolidated sold these properties to Palmer’s company for well under the market value and then Palmer, Jones and Co. sold them on to the City Corporation at the full price?’

  That seemed to prick the journalist’s curiosity. ‘If we’re talking about a lot of properties across the entire city, and if the mark-up was great enough, we could be talking about a vast amount of money.’

  Pyke was thoughtful. ‘Did you know that Isaac Guppy, rector at St Botolph’s, died with more than forty thousand pounds to his name, in six different bank accounts? And Guppy served in an administrative capacity on the fund-raising arm of the Churches Fund — the arm that tried to persuade people to leave endowments to the Church in their wills?’

  Saggers took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his face. ‘None of this has been reported, has it?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I take it no one has yet proved that the forty thousand was stolen from this fund.’

  Pyke shook his head. ‘Before all this happened…’ He gestured at the cap and clothes he was wearing. ‘I was allowed to inspect the Churches Fund’s accounts. Everything seemed to be perfectly in order.’

  ‘Seemed?’

  ‘It struck me just now. What if there was another set of accounts? A set that gave a fairer sense of the large sums that were paid into the Fund and the much smaller sums that were made available for the church building programme.’

  ‘You’re saying there might be a discrepancy?’

  Another set of accounts.

  Pyke had said the words without realising what they meant. Saggers must have seen his expression because he reached across the table and touched his arm. ‘What is it?’

  Whoever had broken into the archdeacon’s safe in March of the previous year hadn’t been after the Saviour’s Cross — the accounts had been the real prize.

  ‘I know someone who works for Palmer, Jones and Co.,’ Saggers said. ‘Perhaps I could quietly talk to him. He’s involved in the new road they’re building through St Giles — the one they had to demolish those slum houses on Buckeridge Street for.’

  It was suddenly so obvious that Pyke was astounded he’d missed it for so long. For the second time in as many minutes he sat there, unable to speak.

  The last time he had been to the archdeacon’s home, on Red Lion Square, it had been summer and the interior had seemed cool and airy. On that occasion, it had been morning, and he had entered via the front door, invited but not entirely welcome. This time, he picked a lock at the back of the house and entered via the kitchen, taking care not to disturb the policemen stationed at the front. Pyke didn’t know what he wanted to prove by confronting Wynter with his accusations, and what it would achieve if Wynter acknowledged that a set of accounts had been stolen from his safe along with the Saviour’s Cross. Still, as he crept through the lofty, oak-panelled hall and noticed the same Gainsborough and Titian paintings he’d seen hanging there in the summer, he knew he wasn’t going to leave until he’d forced the truth out of the man.

  It was after midnight and the servants were all asleep. Pyke intended to confront Wynter in his bedroom, if necessary. He’d based this plan on the quite reasonable assumption that Wynter and his wife slept in separate bedrooms; on his previous visit, he’d assessed their marriage as entirely loveless. But as he made his way up the oak staircase, it struck him that he was putting himself in a rather precarious position. All Wynter needed to do was shout and four, five, maybe more servants would all come running; then there were the two policemen outside. What would he do? Fight his way past all of them? At the top of the staircase Pyke paused, noticing light streaming out of a partly open door. He could hear someone moving around there and when that someone, a man, emerged, Pyke withdrew into the nearest room and held his breath. It was dark and the curtains were drawn so it took Pyke a moment to work out that there was someone asleep in the bed. He waited for the footsteps to pass and slipped back on to the landing. Perhaps it had been Wynter he’d seen, but Pyke didn’t think so. The man had been taller and younger than the archdeacon. He crept along the landing as far as the open door and peered inside. It was the legs he noticed first. Stepping into the room, he saw the rest of the archdeacon’s body. Blood was still leaking from the multiple stab wounds that peppered the corpse, a pool of crimson spreading over the polished floor. It struck him that Wynter had only just been killed, perhaps by the man he’d seen leave the room. Turning quickly, Pyke retraced his steps. At the top of the stairs, he heard a door close at the back of the building. As quietly as possible, he slipped down the stairs and left the house by the route he’d taken earlier. In the alleyway at the back of the house, he looked first left and then right. It was deserted. He turned left, ran to the end of the passageway and found himself on Red Lion Square. He could see the constables at the front of the building, still unaware of what had happened.

  Pyke was about to give up the chase when he noticed a lone figure on the other side of the square. The man had stopped and was looking back in the direction of Wynter’s house.

  Breaking into a run, and not worrying about whether he drew attention to himself, Pyke had crossed half of the square when the figure noticed him and bolted.

  The streets were deserted, which meant it was easy, at least at first, to follow the man; and whoever it was made it easier still by staying on the main roads, first Red Lion Street and then High Holborn. It was hard to tell anything about the person he was pursuing — he was too far away and Pyke was running at full tilt — but whoever it was, Pyke decided, was taller and younger than him. And quicker. Just past Gray’s Inn Road, the man he was chasing did the sensible thing at last and darted into one of the side streets running north from Holborn. It turned out to be Leather Lane; it was dark and narrow and the cobblestones were slippery from the remains of the daily market. Pyke reached the first junction, looked right and then left, but couldn’t see his man. Gasping for breath, he carried on, but at the next junction he still couldn’t see him. There was a pub on either side of the street and the man could have gone into either of them. There were another two pubs farther along and at least two more that he knew of on Hatton Garden, any of which the man could have gone into. Not wanting to admit defeat, Pyke stood for a moment or two, trying to catch his breath. Could it simply be a coincidence, that he had turned up at Wynter’s home at the same time as the murderer? Pyke had been told by Whicher, who had found out from Wells, that the archdeacon had returned to London that same day. But how had the murderer known?

  ‘I can’t do this any more,’ Clare Lewis said, as soon as she’d taken the chair opposite Pyke and removed her headscarf. She had sent a note to his room that morning, asking Pyke to meet her in a tavern just around the corner from her brothel.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘This. All of this.’ She looked angry.

  ‘Tell me what’s happened.’

  ‘Nothing’s happened. Nothing and everything.’ She managed a thin smile. ‘I’m not making much sense, am I?’

  ‘Why did you ask to see me, Clare?’

  She turned and surveyed the faces in the taproom. ‘I don’t want to see Culpepper ever again. Is that clea
r enough for you?’ Pyke saw that her hands were trembling.

  In the end, it was easier than Pyke could have imagined. A few hours later, Culpepper arrived on Great White Lion Street and left two of his mob guarding the front entrance. He was escorted up the rickety stairs to the prostitute he liked to see, a strong, big-boned woman who called herself Emerald. All Pyke had to do was wait. As he did so, he imagined the scene unfolding in the room: Culpepper removing first his shoes, then his waistcoat, shirt, trousers and socks; Culpepper, naked; Culpepper, waiting for Emerald to do what he paid her to do; Culpepper, oblivious to what was about to happen to him.

  As Emerald passed Pyke on the landing, she didn’t even acknowledge him. Perhaps, he thought later, she had come to like the man she was paid handsomely to service.

  Pyke entered the room quietly and closed the door behind him. Culpepper made an odd, unedifying sight: a sinewy, almost emaciated figure curled up on a bed of crisp, white cotton. Emerald had blindfolded him and tied his wrists and ankles with a silk binding to each of the bed’s four posts. To Pyke, he looked older and more wizened than he’d been expecting, and it took some of the sting out of his anger, until he remembered what Culpepper had done.

  The first thing he did was check that the binds on Culpepper’s wrists and ankles were tight. Culpepper sensed his presence for the first time and, thinking he was Emerald, said, ‘Are you going to punish me? I think you should. I deserve to be punished.’ Pyke looked at him and noticed his shrivelled penis had begun to stir.

  ‘I have to agree with you there, Georgie. I’m not sure I’ll live up to Emerald’s standards but I’ll do what I can.’

  Pyke waited for Culpepper to flinch or struggle but the man remained absolutely still. Perhaps he was trying to place the voice or maybe he thought he could talk his way out of the situation. Pyke didn’t allow him the luxury of thought. Swinging the hammer he’d brought with him, he aimed a blow at Culpepper’s kneecap and felt the joint dissolve under the force of the impact. Culpepper’s cry put Pyke in mind of a cow being crushed under the wheels of a train.

  ‘You should understand, Georgie, that no one is going to come to your rescue. Not the men you left outside on the street nor any of your mob, who, as we speak, are being routed by Conor Rafferty.’

  Culpepper’s body had gone limp and Pyke noticed that the man had soiled himself.

  ‘You’re finished, Georgie. You know it and I know it. But you still have a choice. I can act humanely and slit your throat with a single draw of my razor or I can set to work on you with my hammer the way you did to poor Johnny Gregg.’

  ‘At least take off this blindfold so I can see you,’ Culpepper said, his voice barely more than a whisper.

  ‘What’s it to be, Georgie? Are you willing to tell me what I want to know?’ Pyke reached down and yanked off the blindfold.

  Culpepper’s eyes were tired and bloodshot. ‘I knew I should’ve killed you when I had the chance.’

  ‘I want to know why you carried out the murders of Johnny Gregg and Stephen Clough five years ago.’

  Culpepper lifted his head off the pillow for a moment and tried to assess the damage to his kneecap. ‘I didn’t think that bitch had the guts to cross me.’

  ‘Well, I suppose this is her way of repaying you for rearranging her face.’ Pyke walked around to the other side of the bed, the hammer still in his hand, and gestured at Culpepper’s other kneecap. ‘I asked you a question, Georgie.’

  ‘There was a house on Cheapside, I think.’ Culpepper shut his eyes and winced. ‘I sent the boys there to turn it over. They saw this man leave, a gentleman, and thought he was the owner of the house. One of the boys chose to follow him, probably intending to pick his pockets. The other one broke into the house and found a body in the living room — turned out to be the nephew of the former owner, who’d left the place to the Church in his will. The cull was dead but still warm; he’d been strangled. The lad stripped the place of anything he could stuff into his pockets, brought it all back to me. Meanwhile, the other lad had followed this gentleman he saw leaving the place to a church in Aldgate.’

  ‘St Botolph’s.’

  Culpepper wetted his lips and nodded. ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I waited to read about the murder in the newspapers but there was nothing. Nothing about the robbery either. By then we knew the gentleman one of my boys had followed was a rector by the name of Isaac Guppy. So I paid him a visit, told him what I knew, what one of my lads had seen. The body and him scampering down the front steps. I told him I wanted to be properly recompensed for my silence.’

  ‘You didn’t know for certain whether Guppy had strangled this man or not?’

  ‘That didn’t matter to me. He’d left the scene of a crime without reporting it. It meant he was involved.’

  ‘Did Guppy tell you what had happened?’

  Culpepper shook his head. ‘I never talked to him after my first visit. But about two days later I had a visit.’

  Pyke nodded, trying to speculate about what may have happened: Guppy and the nephew arguing over the uncle’s will. Perhaps the nephew had threatened to go to the police, or the newspapers. Perhaps the argument had turned violent.

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘One of yours.’

  Pyke felt his throat tighten — but he already knew what Culpepper was going to say.

  ‘Wells.’

  Pyke nodded. ‘And he offered you a deal?’

  Last summer, Wells had joined the operation in Buckeridge Street to find the men suspected of carrying out the Shorts Gardens murders. But instead of carrying out that detective work, Wells and his men had spent their time clearing the surrounding slums in advance of demolition work to be carried out by the contractor, Palmer, Jones and Co. It all pointed to a long association, and Pyke was sure that if he dug around, he would learn that Wells was the one who’d first put Palmer in touch with Sir Richard Mayne.

  ‘If I made the problem go away, if I was willing to get my own hands dirty, he promised I’d be allowed to run my affairs without interference from your mob. He also said if any freebooter caused me aggravation, he’d personally make sure the cull was stamped on from a great height.’

  ‘What exactly did he order you to do?’

  ‘Later I worked out that he’d already planned for that cully to take the fall…’

  ‘Keate,’ Pyke said, interrupting.

  Culpepper nodded. ‘At the time, Wells just said he wanted something to scare the rest of the boys, make sure none of them blabbed. Told me he wanted it to look like a religious lunatic had done it.’ His eyes were blank, as if he was just describing what he’d eaten for lunch. ‘I was going to nail them both to a door but then the older one, Gregg, got a bit uppity so I had to finish him with a cudgel. I reckon the other one, Clough, got wind of what was happening and went on the run. I found him in the end. I had to finish him off with a knife first, of course. Didn’t want to cause the lad any unnecessary pain.’

  ‘But they were both your boys.’

  ‘So what?’ Culpepper’s eyes were hard and small. ‘You think I’m attached to any of my boys? That I can afford to be sentimental?’

  ‘Sharp was one of your men, too, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He was a good boy but he was always a little too quick to reach for his pistol. I only used him when I had to.’

  ‘You sent him to Cullen’s pawn shop, to recover some goods that Walter Wells wanted back? The Saviour’s Cross, for a start.’

  Culpepper shook his head. ‘Wells was never interested in that cross. He just wanted some ledger book. I could see he was desperate. For good measure, he arranged for one of his men to patrol the street outside the shop. A Peeler.’

  This had been the man the crossing-sweeper had seen. Sergeant Mark Russell. Part of Kensington Division but formerly of A Division. Wells’s division.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Sharp had his orders but one of the culls in the pawnbroker’s we
nt for his pistol and all hell broke loose. My lad had just got a new Darby, could fire five times without having to reload. Next thing, all of them culls were dead and Sharp scarpered out the back. He didn’t get the ledger; but he took the cross and a few things from the safe which was already open.’

  This fitted with what Pyke had already worked out. Luke and Johnny Gibb must have suspected, or known, from the beginning that their half-brother, Morris, was innocent of the crimes he’d been accused of committing. Maybe they also suspected that someone had deliberately picked him out to shoulder the blame. Perhaps, over the subsequent years, they had followed a trail of evidence that led back to Guppy and Wynter, although at the time Wells’s identity must have remained obscure; maybe it was simply the case that someone had tipped them off about the Churches Fund. In any case, it now seemed likely that, having been alerted to the Church’s collusion in the matter of their brother’s execution, Johnny and Luke Gibb had broken into Wynter’s safe and taken the cross along with the genuine copy of the Churches Fund’s accounts ledger. The accounts, Pyke guessed, would have told them all they needed to know about the embezzling of funds and who’d been involved; the cross had just been an added bonus and Johnny had gone to see Cullen to arrange a quick sale. Cullen, in turn, had contacted Harry Dove as a potential buyer and all three men had met that morning in Cullen’s pawn shop on Shorts Gardens. Somehow Wells must have found out about the rendezvous. Doubtless he had been frantically scouring the city in the aftermath of the robbery, desperate to recover a set of accounts that set out, clearly and unequivocally, not only his own guilt but also that of Palmer, Guppy, Hogarth and maybe others. Pyke didn’t yet know whether Sharp or Sergeant Russell had been able to recover the accounts ledger, but Sharp had certainly made it his business to retrieve the Saviour’s Cross before he shot and killed Johnny Gibb, Harry Dove and Samuel Cullen.

  ‘And when Wells wanted someone to find and perhaps frighten Keate’s elderly mother and his family, he came to you again.’