Just when it looked as if the situation couldn’t get any more serious, Pyke moved to intensify the crisis. In his last days at Blackwood’s bank, he had borrowed a large sum of money on short notice from a bill-broking friend who, under Pyke’s instructions and in the wake of the financial crisis that was threatening to engulf the entire City, recalled the loan. With too little held in reserve to meet this debt, William Blackwood had no choice but to call in the money Blackwood’s had loaned the Grand Northern — all one hundred thousand pounds — to cover what it owed. He had to give a significant period of notice, of course, but since everyone knew that the Grand Northern was in no position to pay back the loan and had no funds to begin the enormous task of repairing the damage, those who had deposited their hard-earned savings with Blackwood’s started to demand their money back. Overnight panic among its customers spread, and by the middle of the week there were queues stretching down the stairs from the main banking hall into Sweeting’s Alley and along Cornhill as far as Bishopsgate. The bank’s already depleted reserves could not meet this demand and despite the large sums of his own money that Gore ploughed into it to plug the hole, Blackwood’s was forced to close its doors to note-holders and depositors: the crisis had gained its first casualty. Later on, it was reported that the bank’s chairman, William Blackwood, had slit his wrists with a razor and bled to death in his own home.
As the situation started to unravel further, calls for the government to intervene and bail out the Grand Northern — or at the very least make available funds so that it could pay off some of its creditors and start the clean-up work — intensified. Newspaper editors demanded that Melbourne’s cabinet take immediate action to restore confidence in the battered financial system and prop up the ailing railway company. Investors who had lost their life-savings when the Grand Northern’s shares were rendered worthless marched on Whitehall demanding recompense. Everyone, it seemed, expected the government to step in and announce a series of measures that would alleviate the problem, but it did nothing. And when the government did nothing, pressure was brought to bear on the opposition to take a stance but the Tory leader, Robert Peel, was apparently unwell and convalescing at his country home.
During this time, despite the near-continuous delegations that were sent to Pyke’s new home in Berkeley Square, and the Hambledon estate, begging that he at least discuss the situation with representatives sent by Melbourne and Peel, Pyke turned them away with a simple message. They knew what he wanted; if he didn’t get what he wanted, the threat of a Cumberland monarchy remained.
During this time, Pyke dozed fitfully at night and sleep-walked through the day drugged on laudanum. If he shut his eyes, she was there; if he saw faces moving towards him in a crowd, she was among them; if he walked into a room, it was as though she’d just left, a trace of her perfume lingering in the air. At night, she would come to him in his dreams, begging him to find Felix and telling him not to give up on himself. Pyke found there was something reassuring about those dreams until Emily’s face transformed into a grinning demon and all he could hear were the same words repeated over and over: when will it all be enough? He would wake up, his body drenched with sweat, disoriented until he remembered where he was and what had happened, and then a feeling of shame, guilt and loss would wash over him until he could lie there no more. On such occasions, he would reach for his laudanum and kill the time until dawn walking the dark corridors of the old hall, thinking about what he might have done, what might have saved Emily’s life. He would pause only in Felix’s room, and he might pick up his son’s blanket, bring it to his nose and inhale the scent, trying to keep alive, if only in his own mind, the hope that Felix wasn’t dead; that something good might yet come from the hole he had dug himself.
Bentley’s jewellers was a tall, narrow shop on the south side of the Strand, a little before Temple Bar, in between a bookseller and a stationer’s. Inside was a cornucopia of silver and gold bracelets, pins, necklaces, rings and timepieces of every size, make and denomination. Townsend had already explained to the owner, Jeremy Bentley, what was going to happen — and he’d already been well paid for his services — so that when the bell rang at the front of the shop, just before closing time, indicating that their visitor had arrived, Pyke retreated to the back room and waited, while Bentley introduced himself and invited the new arrival to join him in the parlour, where the light was better and they wouldn’t be interrupted. Bentley stepped to one side and allowed the customer to enter the back room first; Pyke was waiting for him and after a few moments, Jem Nash knew he was trapped. It was written all over his face: the shock, the thought of escape, the fear and finally the resignation.
Pyke shoved Nash down into a chair. For some reason, his assistant looked older, as though the difficulties of the previous month had aged him beyond recognition. His once sparkling eyes were lifeless; his skin was grey and his hair seemed suddenly thinner. Bentley had left them alone, as he’d been instructed to do, and for a while, the only noise in the building was the sound of the ticking clocks. Pyke held out his hand and said, ‘The watch, if you please.’ He added, almost as an afterthought, ‘The watch you stole from Morris when you killed him.’
Nash tried to laugh but it was flat and hollow and his eyes betrayed him. ‘I don’t know what you mean…’
‘ The watch,’ Pyke shouted, so loudly it made Nash jump.
Nash fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the timepiece, handing it to Pyke but not meeting his gaze. Pyke took it and inspected the diamond-encrusted case.
‘It’s fitting, in a way, that your greed was your undoing, don’t you think?’ When Nash didn’t answer, Pyke said, ‘What did you hope to get for the watch? A few hundred at most?’ He waited and added, ‘It’s not much, is it? If you consider what you’re going to lose as a result.’
‘Pyke, I know what you must be thinking…’
Pyke punched Nash in the face, splitting open his cheek and sending him spinning to the floor. ‘Don’t presume to know anything about me, you miserable little shit.’ He ordered Nash to get up, and when he did, Pyke pushed him down on to the chair. Nash clutched his bruised cheek and started to cry. It took every ounce of Pyke’s self-control not to beat him further.
‘There’s a price to pay for what you’ve done, Nash,’ Pyke said, ‘and this is your chance to atone.’ He waited for a moment. ‘Had Morris found out you were blackmailing him? And what did you have over him? A love letter he’d written to one of your friends perhaps?’
‘He was a sentimental old man. What he wrote didn’t leave too much room for the imagination. A jury wouldn’t have needed much else to put him up on the gallows.’
Pyke gritted his teeth. He wanted to hit Nash again but managed to restrain himself. ‘And you find it amusing?’
‘To be honest, I find it a little pathetic.’
‘That he had feelings for another human being and took the time to express them in words?’
Chastened, Nash gripped the edge of his chair.
‘I take it you’d had your eyes on Morris for a while,’ Pyke said, ‘but then you lost seven thousand on one of Barnaby Hodges’ tables and suddenly you needed some money quickly.’
‘If I didn’t pay him, Hodges would have killed me. Even if I’d run away, he would have paid someone to track me down.’
‘Did you know Morris would come to me for the money you were blackmailing him for?’
‘No.’ Nash shook his head vigorously as if to underline the point.
‘So what did you think when you found out that Morris was borrowing it from the bank?’
‘At first, I didn’t think about it. I mean, it didn’t matter to me where the money came from. Morris could afford it, and he didn’t know I had anything to do with the blackmail. If he borrowed it from the bank, then he’d have to pay it back, wouldn’t he?’
‘But then you saw this chance of fucking me and you grabbed it with both your grubby little hands.’
‘No! God. It was
never about you.’ He sounded angry for the first time.
‘Not about me?’
‘Hodges sent one of his doormen to my lodgings. A brute called Miller. He was the one who’d beaten me before. This time I was ready for him. I didn’t intend to kill him until he took out a piece of lead pipe and told me he was going to smash my brains into a pulp. I had a knife on me and I used it. He bled all over the floor. I’d never seen so much blood. And I panicked. I didn’t know what to do with the body. There was no way I could carry it down the stairs, into the yard and somehow dispose of it. Someone would have seen me and, anyway, if Hodges ever found out I’d stabbed one of his men, he wouldn’t have left me alone. Not ever.’
‘That’s when you came upon the idea of faking your own murder.’ Pyke could see it now. It made a certain amount of sense.
‘I’d read about the headless corpse in Huntingdon like everyone else. I thought if I dressed Miller in my clothes and managed to hack off his head, everyone would mistake him for me and assume I’d been killed by the Huntingdon madman. That way, I’d solve the problem of what to do with the body in my lodgings. I’d still get the money from Morris and I’d get to keep it, too. Hodges would think I was dead. It was the only way out of the hole I’d dug myself.’
‘And when your body was stolen before the inquest, people would just blame the resurrectionists.’
Nash nursed his bruised cheek and nodded.
‘So why did you have to steal the loan documents from the vault? That’s when it became personal. Did you do it just to spite me? Because I’d humiliated you in front of the cashiers?’
‘Not at all,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But once I’d made the decision, you were always going to be my problem.’
‘Me?’
‘You told me you were going to Huntingdon. I guessed your visit there must have had something to do with the headless corpse.’
‘So?’
‘If my body was found in a similar state, I knew for a fact you wouldn’t accept the coincidence. That’s why I had to make it seem personal. I didn’t want to drag you into it but I didn’t have a choice.’ Nash managed a faint smile. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you tend to believe people are out to get you. If you believed what happened was part of a plot against you, you wouldn’t see my death purely as a coincidence. You’d see it as a concerted attempt to harm you…’
Pyke considered what he’d been just told and weighed it up in the light of his own discoveries.
‘So you paid the gypsy woman to harass me in front of the bank and steal the safe key from my chain.’
Nash bowed his head and nodded.
‘There were two keys: the key to the safe and another one. I want that other one back.’
‘I don’t know where it is,’ Nash muttered, still staring at the floor. ‘I think the old woman kept it or threw it away.’
Pyke felt a surge of anger rip through his body. The knife was in his hand and he jabbed the tip of the blade into Nash’s chin.
Hands trembling, Nash produced a different key from his pocket. ‘Please, take it. I’ve been living in lodgings in Fulham. Most of my share of the money is still there, hidden under the floorboards.’
Pyke took a sharp breath. He wasn’t irritated by Nash’s efforts to try to ingratiate himself or even by his callow efforts at self-justification but by the realisation that he’d once seen, or thought he’d seen, a little of himself in his young assistant. Could he have been that blind? To have imagined he shared anything with this petulant liar?
‘I said earlier it was time for you to answer for what you’ve done.’
‘And I have. I’ve told you the truth. And you can have the money back. All of it. I’ll make sure you get the whole ten thousand, too.’ Nash described where the lodgings were and let out a brief sob.
‘I’m not interested in the money.’
He looked up at Pyke, this time with a frown. ‘What?’
‘I said I’m not interested in the money. I’m not even interested in the fact that you betrayed my association with Ned Villums to Peel and Fitzroy Tilling.’
That made Nash’s eyes bulge. ‘What do you want, then?’ He seemed bewildered.
‘I want to know why you killed Morris.’
Nash fell silent and his legs stopped twitching.
‘You’ve got the watch. I know you killed him. I just want you to own up to your mistakes.’ Pyke made out he was about to strike Nash again and the young man cowered, his hands raised to protect himself.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said, on the verge of tears again. ‘Or I didn’t plan to.’
‘Then why do it?’
‘It was late. Most of the guests had left already. Morris was drunk. Drunker than I’ve ever seen him before and irate as well.’
‘Is it any wonder?’ Pyke said, interrupting. ‘You’d just blackmailed him out of ten thousand pounds.’
‘But Morris didn’t know it was me, did he?’
Pyke nodded for him to continue.
‘He cornered me in the supper room. He wanted someone to confide in. He knew I knew about the ten thousand. He told me someone was blackmailing him. He didn’t say what it was about and I didn’t ask. But he also told me he knew who it was. He said he’d hired someone to follow the money. I thought we’d been careful but he knew; he gave me my friend’s name. The right address, as well. He’d only just heard about it that night. He told me he was going to take action in the morning. I panicked. At first I just wanted to shut him up. I grabbed the nearest thing I could find — a table weight — and hit him with it. I must have hit him harder than I’d first thought. He went down and stopped moving. I didn’t stop to see whether I’d killed him or not. I fled through one of the doors at the back of the building.’
Pyke studied his expression, trying to detect obvious signs that he’d been lying, but there weren’t any. Nash was good. He deserved credit for that, at least. ‘But someone saw you, didn’t they? Someone saw what you’d done; someone saw you standing there over Morris’s body. Tell me. Was it Gore and Bolter or just Bolter on his own? No, Gore would have had to have been there.’
Nash stared at him, aghast. ‘How did you know?’
‘Gore liked Morris. Even though they were rivals and despite the fact that he had no compunction about killing insignificant people, poor people, Gore had never wanted to actually kill Morris. Of course, he could have called the police there and then and handed you to them on a plate. But Gore saw an opportunity, didn’t he? He recognised you. He realised you worked for me. He had Bolter hide the body. Then he sat you down and proceeded to get everything he wanted out of you. I’m guessing he approved of your plan to steal the loan papers from the vault: anything to weaken my grip on the bank. But he must have asked for something else; he must have wanted something else. That’s when I thought about your five per cent stake in the bank. In the case of your death, your shares were meant to come back to me. I assumed you were dead. I assumed the five per cent stake would revert to my ownership. Gore made an offer for a third share of the bank and told me he’d be happy if I retained a fifty-one per cent controlling interest in it. In reality he had your five per cent in his pocket as well. I wouldn’t have known this at the time but you’d already agreed to sell him your shares, hadn’t you? And together with William’s holdings, it would have given Gore a controlling interest in the bank and allowed him to steal it from under my nose.’ Pyke looked around him and shrugged. ‘All Bolter had to do was stay behind, with or without the caretaker’s knowledge, and make Morris’s death look like a suicide. If Morris’s death had been proven to be murder, the spotlight might have fallen on Gore’s sharp business practices. No, suicide was the best verdict all around. The best for you; the best for Gore. But I just have one more question that I need you to answer.’ Pyke knelt down on the carpet and whispered in Nash’s ear, ‘Why did you send the deeds to Morris’s estate to his widow?’
‘Because Gore asked me to.’
&
nbsp; ‘Just like that?’
Nash shrugged. ‘The papers didn’t mean anything to me.’
Pyke thought about it for a moment. What did it prove? On its own, nothing. But it did raise another, altogether more disturbing prospect. What if Gore was involved with Marguerite?
‘What’s going to happen to me?’ Nash looked around for a possible escape route but there was nowhere for him to go.
Pyke pointed down at the Turkey carpet. ‘There’s a wheelbarrow waiting outside and a skiff moored by the Arundel stairs. I’m going to wrap you up in the carpet, haul you outside to the barrow and wheel you down to the skiff. Of course by then you’ll be dead and none of this will matter.’
Nash started to smile. ‘That’s a joke, right?’
Removing his knife, Pyke shook his head. ‘You should know by now I never joke when it comes to killing someone.’
‘You can’t help me?’ Nash’s pleading expression made Pyke hate him even more. ‘Not even for old time’s sake? Please…’ He tried to leap up from his chair and push past Pyke but didn’t make it up off his feet.
It took him less than five minutes to cart the large barrow down the narrow lane to the waiting skiff and another few minutes to lift the carpet, which he’d tied up with rope and weighed down with stones, into the boat. The chilly night air smelled of rotten fish and raw sewage. Leaving the barrow at the top of the stairs, Pyke used the sculls to push himself away from the bank and began to row, each stroke taking him farther towards the middle of the river and giving him a clearer view of the lattice of wharfs and warehouses that lined the bank. Despite its stench, Pyke had always loved the dirty brown Thames. He had always loved walking along the cramped, muddy lanes that led down to the river and suddenly coming on it and being assailed by its vastness, the flotsam and jetsam of humanity, water and sky merging into one, the buildings made to look insignificant in its wake. But on this occasion, Pyke wasn’t thinking about the grubby majesty of the river or how small and quiet the city looked from such a vantage point. Rather he steered the skiff out into the part of the river where the tide was strongest, picked up one end of the carpet, lifted it over the edge of the boat and pushed from the other end. Weighed down by the stones, it sank without a trace, just a few bubbles rippling the surface, and then everything went quiet. Pyke started to row back towards the bank, thinking only about Felix and whether he had already met a similar fate.
The Revenge of Captain Paine pm-2 Page 45
