‘You didn’t hear what the argument was about?’
The caretaker scratched his head. ‘No, I don’t reckon I did.’
Pyke described Jem Nash as best he could and asked whether this was the man he’d seen arguing with Morris.
‘Aye, it could have been.’ The caretaker looked towards the entrance. ‘You’d better go. My supervisor catches me chinwagging, I’ll be shown the door faster than you can say Jack Robinson.’
Outside something had disturbed the jackdaws from their treetop perches and the sky was momentarily turned black by a flapping of wings. Pyke thought about the man’s claim to have seen Morris and Nash arguing and wondered whether it had been true and, if so, what it indicated.
From the outside, Bartholomew Prosser’s pauper’s ‘school’ looked like any other genteel residence on the outskirts of the metropolis, a well-maintained Palladian mansion with a plain stucco facade and Regency bow windows concealed behind a sturdy wrought-iron fence. But inside was a different story. All the effort and money had been spent on maintaining the exterior of the building and keeping the lawns spruce. Inside was a rabbit warren of damp, gloomy rooms connected by long passageways that put Pyke in mind of a prison. In fact the carceral analogy was entirely appropriate because upstairs Pyke found out that the boys were kept under lock and key, with at least ten shivering, emaciated bodies crammed into rooms that were barely larger than a privy. In all he counted twenty such rooms, meaning the school or, rather, juvenile prison housed more than two hundred boys aged between five and fifteen. Pyke could not find Prosser himself, nor Jake Bolter, who apparently hadn’t been seen since the day before, but at gunpoint he forced an elderly matron figure to unlock all the doors and allow the boys to roam freely in the corridors and rooms.
From her, and his own intuition, Pyke gleaned how the establishment operated. In light of the recent Poor Law amendment, Prosser had written to the workhouse managers telling them about his ‘school’ and requesting that they send him any unwanted boys, for which he would charge a fee of three shillings and six pence a week, which represented a small saving on what it cost to keep a boy at the workhouse. Instead of feeding and educating the boys as he’d promised, however, Prosser then sold them on to various sweaters in the East End and continued to claim the money from the workhouse managers who’d sent him the boys in the first place. It was a lucrative operation that might have earned Prosser as much as five hundred or even a thousand pounds a year.
Pyke was walking back towards the main gate when he looked behind him and saw Jake Bolter appear from one of the outbuildings, his mastiff Copper choking on the end of its leash. Even at a distance of a hundred yards, he could see the man’s injuries as a result of his assault. Bending down, Bolter took off the leash and suddenly the giant mastiff was tearing towards him across the lawn, barking and growling, his paws chewing up chunks of turf. Pyke just managed to climb over the painted fence before the dog took a piece out of his ankles but it didn’t stop the beast from pressing its nose up against the wrought-iron railings and baring its teeth.
Bolter ambled down to the fence and patted the mastiff on the head. ‘Not so brave now, are we?’ Up close, Pyke saw that the gash around his left eye hadn’t properly healed and a flap of skin hung down, surrounded by congealed blood.
‘Tell Prosser that I’m going to close this place down and throw him on to the street where he belongs.’
‘Is that right?’ Bolter was grinning now. ‘A blackguard like yourself, caught up in an apron-string hold.’
Pyke stared at Bolter through the wrought-iron fence, his jaw clenched. ‘What did you just say?’
‘I heard you was living on Queen’s Street. Do you want me to be more plain still, sir? I’m saying your piece wears the breeches.’
Pyke absorbed the insult but he could feel the heat in his own face. ‘I talked to the man at the Colosseum. He admitted he lied at the coroner’s inquest.’
‘Now why would the cull go and do a thing like that?’ Bolter regarded Pyke with scepticism. Down at his feet, the dog was still barking and baring its teeth.
‘He named you.’
‘Named me in what?’
‘The conspiracy to kill Edward James Morris.’
This time Bolter’s grin broadened. ‘I see your plan, sir. You’re putting your line in the water and hoping the fishes bite. Reckon you got it worked out. Except this little fishy ain’t hungry.’ Reaching down, he patted Copper on the head.
‘Who or what did you bury in the grounds of Cranborne Park a few weeks ago in the company of Marguerite Morris?’
For a moment Pyke thought he saw something register in Bolter’s eyes but it was gone as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by a bland expression that suggested Bolter regarded Pyke merely as a nuisance.
‘You want to know about the lady’s business, ask the lady herself.’ With that, he turned around and walked back across the lawn towards the old house, the mastiff trotting happily at his side.
The hack-chaise dropped Pyke at Cheapside, just as the shopkeepers were pulling up their wooden shutters for the night and the lamplighters were working their way along the street, the greasy flame of the lamps hissing in their wake. It was a miserable evening, and the rain had turned the dung and mud into a slushy liquid that coated the trousers and breeches of pedestrians. Sweeping past them and spraying more of this foul brown mulch on to the pavements were the omnibuses, Shillibeer’s originals recognisable by their green markings and others belonging to different operators, all packed, the knife-boards on their roofs filled with back-to-back passengers shivering under tarpaulins.
Pyke had walked perhaps fifty yards along Cheapside in the direction of St Paul’s Cathedral when he realised that someone was following him. At first it was just a feeling, an intuitive sense gained from years of experience as a Bow Street Runner following other people: even among the throng of pedestrians, when he stopped, he could sense someone stopping behind him, even without turning around to check. At the corner of Wood Street, he waited until the last moment and ducked into a bazaar, following a narrow passageway until it opened up into a room adjoined by a myriad of smaller shops set in alcoves, with a refreshment counter at the back. Hiding behind a collection of exotic plants, he waited to see whether someone had followed him into the bazaar, the twittering of parrots and cockatoos drowning out the buzz of voices and the cries of vendors seeking to advertise their wares. Through the green foliage, he surveyed the faces of those entering and leaving the room but didn’t see anything or anyone acting in an unduly suspicious manner. Relaxing a little, he retraced his path to the passageway.
They saw one another and froze. Pyke was close enough to see his glass eye and smell the gin on his breath. Just for a moment it wasn’t clear who was the hunter and who was the hunted. He was a lithe, wiry man, his face covered by a ragged beard and a bushy untrimmed moustache that ran into each other and covered his mouth completely. It was Pyke who moved first, lunging for the man’s arm, but he was quicker than Pyke had expected and had spun around before Pyke could grab him. Barging shoppers to one side, the glass-eyed man set off along the passageway back towards Cheapside, Pyke following him outside on to the street. There the man turned right and stepped out on to the road, just missing a phaeton that swept past at a canter, arms pumping as he broke into a full sprint. Ducking out of the way of a costermonger’s barrow, Pyke kept up with the man in pursuit and shouted, ‘Stop, thief,’ hoping that someone might intervene and bring the man down for him.
Further cries of ‘stop, thief’ reverberated ahead of Pyke, but to avoid being tackled by a random passer-by, the glass-eyed man had swerved on to the road, narrowly avoiding a dung sweeper, weaved his way through the traffic to the end of Cheapside and then crossed over on to St Paul’s Yard, the mighty dome casting its vast shadow over the entire area. But the man was quick and Pyke was able to make up only a few yards, not enough to prevent him racing around the side of the cathedral and entering it thro
ugh the doors on the west side.
Pyke followed him into the cathedral through the main entrance and stopped for a moment: the evening service had just started and the glass-eyed man had pushed his way through a procession of godly men wearing ceremonial robes, gasps of astonishment and shock accompanying his actions. Pyke took the less populated route along the north aisle and managed to cut the glass-eyed man off on the main floor just under the dome, forcing him to take refuge behind the table, where a visibly frightened canon was preparing the communion Eucharist. By this point the choir had stopped singing and the procession had come to a halt farther down the aisle, no one quite knowing what to do or how to address the disruption.
But though cornered, the glass-eyed man was, by no means, finished. Taking out a knife from his monkey coat, he pulled the shaking canon towards him and held the blade to his throat. Behind the ink-black tangle of hair, his one good eye shone with a peculiar malevolence. Someone had seen what was happening and screamed for assistance. Other anguished cries followed. Pyke held up the palms of his hands and took a stride towards the table.
‘Stay there, cully,’ the glass-eyed man barked, ‘or the priest gets cut.’ He started to back away towards the entrance down to the crypt, dragging the canon along with him. As he did so, he picked up the communion cup with his one free hand and took a swig of the wine, streaks of the claret liquid spilling down the sides of his mouth into his tangle of hair. He let out a burp and grinned. ‘Tell that bitch of yours to watch her back,’ he said in a low, gruff voice that sounded almost animalistic in its tone. Around them, the air was thick with the smell of candle wax.
Hot with anger, Pyke started to follow him but the glass-eyed man dug the sharp point of the blade into the canon’s throat and ordered to him to stay where he was. At the top of the stairs that led down to the crypt, a good twenty or thirty yards from where Pyke was standing, he drew the blade across the canon’s throat in a single motion, let the stricken man fall to his feet and turned and disappeared down the steps. But by the time Pyke had covered the ground across to the top of the stairs, checked to see that the canon could not be saved, blood pouring from his neck where the jugular had been severed, and descended the stone steps three at a time, the glass-eyed man had left the building through one of the many side doors and was nowhere to be seen. Above him, Pyke could hear wails of grief and outrage, and rather than trudge back up the stairs and face the combined wrath of the clergy and the congregation, he slipped out of the same door the glass-eyed man had used and closed it behind him.
SEVENTEEN
It was just a short step from the cathedral to his uncle’s shop in St Paul’s Yard and Pyke decided to take refuge there, rather than attempt to run the gauntlet of the massed ranks of police constables who would doubtless be summoned to the cathedral and would soon be looking for the priest’s assassin. In the deserted yard, a squally wind had whipped the sodden pages of a discarded newspaper into the air. Digging his shaking hands into his pockets, Pyke thought of the priest who had been killed for no other reason than that of being in the wrong place and wondered what kind of human being would kill a man of the cloth without pausing for thought, as though the act of taking a life were akin to having a piss or discarding a half-eaten pie. He also thought about the threat that had been made against Emily and decided that, having seen his uncle, he would return to Hambledon to make sure she was safe.
The stone steps that led down to Godfrey’s basement shop were wet from the rain and at the bottom Pyke was surprised to see that the door was ajar. Godfrey liked to complain bitterly about the ill effects of the cold weather. It wasn’t just raining, though. A fog had rolled up the river from the east and made it difficult to see the top of Wren’s dome, even though the cathedral was just a few yards away.
Peering through the door, Pyke shouted out his uncle’s name, his eyes straining to see through the darkness.
He heard Godfrey’s cry before he saw the state of the shop; even in the dim light produced by half a dozen candles, the chaos was evident. Books had been torn apart, piles of manuscripts had been riffled through and strewn on the floor, and bundles of letters had been cut open and discarded.
At the back of the shop, two men wearing tailored swallow-tailed coats over knee-length breeches and wellington boots had pinned Godfrey against the wall. With knife in his hand, Pyke steadied himself and took aim, sending the weapon corkscrewing through the air. The blade tore into one of the men’s flesh, embedding itself deep into the leg. The wounded man screamed in agony and fell to the floor, giving Pyke time to move carefully through the shop. The other man looked up, visibly startled. He wasn’t physically favoured, by any stretch of the imagination, but his quick, darting movements and powerful forearms made him someone to be reckoned with. But Pyke didn’t stop to take stock of the situation and assess the threat posed by the two men. Rather he sprinted through the shop and threw himself at the larger man, driving him backwards into the wall and winding him in the process. He landed a clean blow on his jaw and watched as he collapsed.
Godfrey had slumped to the floor and was wheezing like an injured hog, clutching his chest. Pyke knelt beside him and asked whether he was all right. Godfrey tried to whisper a few words but they wouldn’t form on his tongue.
But the two attackers hadn’t finished with him. The larger man, the uninjured one, had retrieved a broken table leg and was advancing towards him, swinging it wildly in the air like a machete. The first swing missed Pyke’s cheek by a whisker but the follow-up swipe caught him a little off balance and gave his attacker enough time to push past him and run for the door.
Rather than setting after him in pursuit, Pyke decided to concentrate his efforts on apprehending his companion, who, by this stage, had managed to haul himself up on to his legs and hobble to the back of the shop, where a door opened out on to a small court. In the doorway, and just in time, Pyke saw the glint of a gun barrel and fell to the ground before a blast of powder sent ball-shot fizzing over his head.
Pyke moved after the wounded man with more caution. Outside in the courtyard, he followed the trail of blood along a high-walled alleyway, catching sight of the man as he turned the corner into another alleyway, which led to Ludgate Hill. The injured man was moving slowly but Pyke opted to keep his distance, in case the pistol contained another shot.
Ludgate Hill was deserted apart from a street sweeper and a costermonger pulling his barrow by hand. From the entrance to the alleyway, Pyke looked across the street and saw what the wounded man clearly hadn’t: a two-wheeled phaeton pulled by a couple of strapping mares bearing down on him out of the swirling fog. The driver saw the man too late to change his course but tried to pull on the horses’ reins. For his part, the wounded man saw what was about to happen and held up the palms of his hands, a final, pitiful act of defiance before he was trampled under the hoofs of the terrified horses, run over by the wheels of the carriage and impaled on the axle, which had snapped in two as a result of the collision.
First at the scene of the accident, Pyke checked to see that the driver of the phaeton would live and then turned his attention to the dead man, who, minutes earlier, had tried to attack Godfrey in his shop. Pulling the knife from the man’s leg, Pyke wiped the blade on what seemed to be an expensive coat and briefly rummaged through his pockets. The only thing of interest that he found was a brass cravat pin supporting some kind of military coat of arms. The police would have to deal with yet another dead body, Pyke thought grimly as he wandered back to Godfrey’s shop. Two in a night, both within a few hundred yards of each other. Perhaps they would try to connect the two. Perhaps they were connected, he mused.
Back in the shop, his uncle was sprawled out on the floor. He wasn’t moving and when Pyke tried to rouse him, he groaned slightly and clutched his chest, wincing with evident pain. ‘It’s my heart, dear boy,’ he wheezed. ‘I don’t know if I’ll make it.’ His eyelids fluttered and closed.
But Godfrey did not pass away that nigh
t or, indeed, the following day, and by the next evening he had rallied sufficiently to take a few sips of water and two mouthfuls of bread. Pyke had paid for a room in St Bartholomew’s, and also for Sir Henry Halford, the well-respected royal physician, to attend to him around the clock. Pyke hardly slept at all on the first night and remained with his uncle throughout the following day. Emily visited in the evening with victuals and they sat across from one another, each holding one of Godfrey’s withered hands, their thoughts drowned out by the terrified grunts and squeals of animals being herded into the market outside.
‘You know, it was Godfrey who taught me how to read,’ Pyke said, on the second night.
Emily smiled warmly and took Pyke’s other hand in hers.
Pyke looked at her but his mind was elsewhere. The previous night it had struck him, maybe for the first time, that his uncle might die, and he realised how unprepared he was for this eventuality. ‘I still remember the first thing he ever read to me.’
‘Yes?’ Emily looked up at him.
‘ The Life and Times of Sawney Beane.’
‘Who’s that?’ One side of her face was lit up by the candlelight.
‘Sawney Beane.’ He met her gaze across the bed. ‘He robbed people and ate their flesh.’
That drew a knowing smile. ‘And how old were you at the time?’
‘A little older than Felix.’
‘I was going to say it hasn’t done you any harm.’
Pyke smiled. ‘Godfrey always reckoned you could do more damage than good by trying to shield young minds from the less palatable aspects of life.’
Emily regarded him with a thoughtful expression. ‘It sounds very different from our son’s upbringing.’
Pyke reached out and stroked his uncle on the forehead. ‘I’m just saying he never felt the need to censor. Good, bad, gruesome, uplifting. He read them all and let me come to my own conclusions.’
The Revenge of Captain Paine pm-2 Page 23
