The Revenge of Captain Paine

by Andrew Pepper

‘I put some documents in here yesterday at close of business. They’re now gone. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘I hope you’re not insinuating I had anything to do with it,’ Blackwood replied in a rush.

  ‘There are only two keys that open this safe. Yours, and one that was stolen from me yesterday.’

  Sweat had broken out around Blackwood’s temples.

  ‘Yesterday I made a private loan to Morris of ten thousand pounds.’

  Blackwood looked at him, open mouthed. Finally the seriousness of the situation was beginning to dawn on him. ‘I take it there was a witness.’

  ‘Nash.’

  ‘Then you’ve covered yourself, haven’t you? We can always recover the money from Morris’s estate.’

  Pyke nodded but he couldn’t shake the feeling of unease that lurked in the pit of his stomach.

  ‘Of course, if Nash doesn’t verify your story then we might have a very serious problem,’ Blackwood added.

  Pyke’s punch landed squarely on Blackwood’s nose, knocking him backwards, blood spurting freely from his nostrils. ‘Why wouldn’t Nash verify it?’ Pyke lifted him up by his collar. It was like picking up a skeleton. ‘I said, the documents were stolen. Didn’t you hear me?’

  Blood glistened on the end of Blackwood’s nose. He was too nonplussed to speak but his eyes burned like hot coals behind glass, as though he couldn’t quite put a name to the humiliation he felt.

  The entrance to Moor’s Yard was blocked by two policemen and when Pyke tried to push past them, the taller of the two men held out his arm and told him that no one was allowed to enter the yard. Other people wanted to know why both ends of the yard had been blocked and what the policemen had found there. The mere sight of the police made Pyke even more jumpy than he’d been before. He tried to explain that he had important business with one of the residents, business that couldn’t possibly wait.

  ‘You ain’t going in there, squire,’ the policeman said, squinting at him.

  A small crowd had gathered on the pavement around him, forcing passers-by on to the road. The midday bells of St Martin’s began to chime. Pyke couldn’t wait. The worry was eating him up. He had to find Nash. Seeing his chance, he shoved the other officer to one side and broke into a run. Behind, he heard shouts and cheers but he didn’t look back. He ran along the narrow alley until it opened up into a yard. Nash lodged at number eight, above the farrier, an apartment on the first floor that overlooked the horse pond. But there were more policemen in the yard and, alerted by the shouts of their colleagues, they were ready for him.

  ‘Nash. I need to talk to Jem Nash. He lives at number eight.’

  A few of them exchanged looks.

  ‘What is it?’ Panic iced Pyke’s stomach.

  ‘I don’t think you want to see him, the state he’s in, sir.’ The policeman was blocking the doorway leading up to Nash’s apartment.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Pyke felt his throat tighten.

  ‘Dead?’ The policeman laughed. ‘If you can survive without a head, then I’d like to know how.’

  Pyke’s legs buckled.

  The policeman nodded. ‘That’s right, cully. When word starts to spread, as it will, there’ll be panic on the streets.’

  With a sudden movement, Pyke shoved past him and bolted up the stairs ignoring the shouts of the policemen behind him. At the top of the stairs, he pushed open the door to Nash’s apartment and stepped inside. He didn’t get beyond the entrance hall. Nash’s body lay there on the floor, still dressed in the outfit he’d worn to the ball. The air smelled cloying. The stump where Jem Nash’s head had been was bloody and raw. Pyke tried to get a better look at the body, but policemen had chased up the stairs and dragged him out of the apartment.

  Were there burn marks on the body? That was what he wanted to know. And was the head there? Had the killer taken the head?

  It took six of them to drag him down the stairs. One of them tried to arrest him for disturbing the peace. Outside it had started to rain but Pyke hardly noticed it. Everything he’d done, everything he’d achieved, everything he’d earned since he’d taken over at the bank, was hanging by a thread. He thought about the old crone, the dead navvies, Freddie Sutton and his wife, and now Morris and Nash. Were they all part of the same thing? All that blood spilt and for what?

  The policemen left him alone. Doubling up, he spat bile on to his boots. He could still see Freddie Sutton’s dried blood on them.

  He would find out who had done this and make them pay. Someone, somewhere, would pay dearly for what had happened. Staring up at the rain, he repeated these words like a mantra.

  PART II

  The Eminence of Thieves

  THIRTEEN

  In the days after the discovery of Nash’s mutilated corpse, the mood in the capital was anxious and expectant. The murderer had struck once in Cambridgeshire and again in London, and many seemed to think it was only a matter of time before he murdered again. The theories most often repeated were the absurd ones: that the murders were the work of an escaped Bedlamite unable to control his impulses or else that they had been committed by devil worshippers. To Pyke’s surprise, no one had thought to connect the first headless corpse, pulled out of a river near Huntingdon, with the brutal clashes that had taken place between the navvies and special constables in the town itself. But then again no one apart from Pyke knew that the same burn marks had been found on the first victim and the old woman whose senseless rape and murder had sparked the navvies’ anger. Pyke didn’t yet know whether Nash’s body had been afflicted with the same marks and couldn’t begin to think how his death might be linked to the body found in a river near Huntingdon. For a start, the coincidence seemed too glaring. Just a week after he had been asked by Peel to investigate the first headless corpse, his assistant had been murdered in exactly the same fashion.

  Perhaps more perplexing were the circumstances linking Nash’s murder, the death of Edward James Morris and the sudden disappearance of the loan papers from the bank’s vault, and it was this matter which constituted Pyke’s most immediate concern. For without a witness or any supporting documentation, there was no evidence that a loan had indeed been made. Pyke had arranged for one of the cashiers to bring ten thousand pounds up to his office and, as such, the missing sum could be traced back to him. All of which meant that his partner, William Blackwood, would be within his legal rights to demand that the money be paid back to the bank in full. Ten thousand pounds. His savings, which he had struggled to build up for the past fifteen years, didn’t even meet this figure. If he failed to recover the stolen papers or indeed the money, then his financial future looked bleak. The moment Blackwood demanded the money be repaid, Pyke would be sunk. But at the same time, he knew that even if he did have the money in his bank account, he wouldn’t give it up without a fight. He had to get back what had been stolen from him. What he needed to do was work out how someone had gained access to the safe; whether they had used the key purloined from him, possibly by the gypsy, or Blackwood’s duplicate key, and whether his partner had played any role in the burglary.

  On the same afternoon he had learnt about Nash’s death and the stolen documents, Pyke gathered together the watchmen who had been guarding the bank the previous night. But to his consternation and irritation, it transpired that no one had seen or heard a thing. Pyke believed them, too. The watchmen he’d employed didn’t have the wit or the courage to lie to him.

  ‘I want to know who’s stolen from me and I want you to help me,’ he’d told them at the meeting. ‘And if I find out that one of you was involved or knows something and is covering up for someone else, I’ll make you wish that you’d never taken a job at this bank.’

  If Nash’s murder was linked to the corpses discovered in Huntingdon it suggested that the suppression of the navvies and the rape of the old woman were in turn connected to the internal politics of his bank. But in spite of his investigative prowess Pyke couldn’t determine what the connection might b
e. In his eyes, the only way Nash’s murder and the riots in Huntingdon were linked was by the slavering interest shown in both events by journalists and news editors. It was perhaps inevitable that a gruesome murder would find favour with hacks who could exploit its sensationalist appeal to promote their names and sell newspapers, but Pyke was surprised by the extent of the coverage on the riots and the obvious bias shown towards the townsmen. Even the apparently liberal Chronicle and The Times, though regretting the still-unconfirmed loss of life suffered by the navvies, placed all blame for the disturbances on the navvies and the radicals who’d infiltrated their ranks and incited them to violence.

  To counter this view, the unstamped newspapers like Godfrey’s the Scourge had started to circulate an alternative account of the events in Huntingdon among the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, producing a groundswell of sympathy for the navvies and anger at the perceived vigilante behaviour of the special constables who’d been appointed without due process and who’d taken the law into their own hands. Many of the trade unions had already convened impromptu meetings to plan their response, something that in turn had prompted the government to fill up the barracks on Birdcage Walk with detachments of cavalry from Hounslow and Croydon and regiments of infantry from Woolwich and Chatham. There were also two thousand uniformed police officers making their presence felt on the city’s streets.

  Unlike Nash’s murder, Morris’s apparent suicide merited only a very brief mention in The Times’ City Intelligence column and was deemed to be significant only insofar as it affected the already flagging fortunes of the Grand Northern Railway. The Chronicle ran a slightly longer account of his ‘unfortunate demise’ and speculated that the difficulties facing the railway and boardroom tussles regarding the future direction of the venture had driven him to ‘tragically’ take his own life. Unsurprisingly, since no corpses had yet been unearthed, no mention had been made of the two Spitalfields weavers, Freddie Sutton and his wife, whose deaths Pyke had stumbled across. Nor, in spite of his personal intervention, had anyone at Scotland Yard treated his claims seriously; Pyke had been shooed from the assistant commissioner’s office and warned not to waste police time with his ‘groundless scaremongering’.

  As Gore had intimated, Bellows was the kind of man whose apparent commitment to public service concealed a burning private ambition to succeed the Right Honourable Charles Lord Tenterden on the bench of the Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. As such, his liberal contributions to the royal commission on capital crimes and his proximity to the Home Office were not principled stances but rather appropriate ways of currying favour with those who might be able to influence the appointment of the next Lord Chief Justice. As the chief magistrate at Bow Street he had sought to foster a reputation as a thoughtful, fair-minded figure, liberal in his dealings with the poor but hard on all forms of political radicalism. In public, he liked to believe that his efforts were part of a larger project to reform the entire judicial system according to Benthamite principles; in private he was a cruel, vindictive man who beat his servants and used his office to punish those who had personally crossed him.

  Pyke had heard a rumour that Bellows had once set up a man who had cuckolded him on a false theft charge and sentenced him to hang.

  On the morning of the coroner’s inquest, Pyke met the chief magistrate outside the King’s Head tavern, the first time he had encountered the man since walking out of his courtroom with Godfrey on his arm. It was an awkward moment but Bellows made no mention of that incident and pushed past him without uttering a word, indicating to Pyke that he had no desire to discuss the fact that all the charges against Godfrey had now been dropped. His bristling, self-righteous air suggested that he hadn’t adjusted to his humiliation very well.

  The stink from the filth-blackened north bank of the Thames at low tide had filled the upstairs room of the King’s Head. Filthy remains washed up from the tanneries and glue factories on the Surrey side of the river mixed with slaughterhouse offal and human excrement to produce dark pools of slime whose eye-watering smell easily penetrated the closed windows and overpowered the rosemary and lavender that had been sprinkled over the floor.

  It was the only room that the coroner, Daniel Day, had been able to requisition at such short notice that was large enough to accommodate the twelve jurors and the various witnesses he intended to call upon. Still, his timid apologies regarding the foulness of the air and the grubbiness of their surroundings did little to appease Bellows, who bewailed having to run the gauntlet of the rambunctious mob gathered downstairs in the taproom, where, Pyke knew, ratting contests sometimes took place.

  It was highly unusual that such an important legal figure should attend or present evidence at a coroner’s inquest, even more so because the chief magistrate had no connection with the deceased. This didn’t stop him complaining bitterly about the vile stink and the drunken behaviour he had witnessed downstairs. Briefly Pyke thought about explaining to him that public houses always did brisk business on the day of inquests but decided that he would be wasting his time. How could Bellows ever be made to see that the working men and women weren’t drinking to celebrate someone else’s death but rather to affirm the fact they were still alive? He would never imagine that survival was a sufficient cause for revelry.

  Including the twelve men of the jury, there were twenty or so people squeezed around the two adjoining tables. Bellows sat at one end and a space had been reserved for Day at the other end. A few others rested on spittoons and window ledges and perched on top of the old piano. But pride of place had been reserved for Morris’s corpse, laid out in the middle of the two tables and covered with a dirty sheet. Pyke could just about make out Morris’s features under the sheet and felt a mixture of sadness and anguish wash over him.

  ‘Thankee kindly for helping a crippled man.’ Jake Bolter hobbled into the room with the grace of a man wearing leg-irons and collapsed into the Windsor chair reserved for the coroner. Behind him, his mastiff stood panting, a wet string of saliva hanging from its powerful jaws.

  When Bolter sat down, he let rip with a fart that seemed to go on for minutes and which produced a stink much worse than the odours emanating from the river. ‘That’s what they call letting a brewer’s fart, grains and all.’ Bolter grinned as he looked around at the others. ‘Must be the meat pie I ate playing with my digestion.’

  Those who were sitting nearest to him edged away, perhaps because of the smell but also on account of his mastiff, which had taken its place at Bolter’s feet and growled at anyone who looked at it.

  Day, who had helped Bolter up the staircase, looked around for a chair, now that his had been taken.

  ‘Can anyone fetch me a pot of ale?’ Bolter said, trying to get comfortable in his chair. ‘I’ve a powerful terrible thirst and I need a drop to meller the throat.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Pyke offered, having given up his chair for the coroner. ‘Would a pot of Barclay’s ale suffice?’

  Bolter looked up at him, unable to hide his surprise. Bellows seemed confounded, too. ‘That would hit the spot perfect, sir. Much obliged to you.’ Bolter doffed his cap and smiled awkwardly, doubtless still trying to make sense of Pyke’s generous offer.

  Downstairs in the taproom, Pyke pushed past a gang of coal-whippers to the zinc-topped counter and waited until he’d caught the landlord’s eyes. He took out a sovereign and pushed it across the counter. ‘There’ll be another one for you, if you bring me one of your ugliest sewer rats, in a box, within the next few minutes.’ When the landlord didn’t move, he added, ‘Oh, and I’ll have a Barclay’s ale, too.’

  When Pyke returned to the upstairs room, he placed the pot of ale on the table in front of Bolter, who thanked him profusely, and kept the small wooden box on the floor. No one paid it any attention.

  Bellows’ jurisdiction as chief magistrate at Bow Street extended only as far north as St Martin’s Lane, and the Colosseum in Regent’s Park, where Morris had died, fell under the auspices of the Mary
lebone police office. Nonetheless it was Bellows, rather than Day, who began the proceedings and as soon as he’d done so, Pyke asked on what or under whose authority he was there. Bellows smiled thinly and told the jury he’d been asked by his ‘good friend’ and the ‘barrister-at-law’ at Marylebone to attend the meeting. Attend but not take charge of? Pyke asked. This drew another frosty stare, by which time the coroner had developed enough of a backbone to impose himself on the meeting. ‘It’s stuffy in here,’ he said, looking at Bolter and his dog. ‘Perhaps we could allow a little air into the room? At present it resembles a garden of earthy delights.’ He looked around him to see whether anyone had picked up on his reference.

  ‘Or a ship of fools,’ Pyke said, looking at Bellows.

  Bellows was up on his feet. ‘I object to this man’s impertinence.’

  Day waved his hand in a fey manner. ‘Good Lord, man, pipe down. We were just sharing a private joke. He meant no offence and I’d hope none was taken.’ He looked at Pyke and smiled, revealing a set of perfectly straight teeth. ‘The air will have to do. After all, this is the Thames and not Lake Windermere.’

  Bellows glared but said nothing. Pyke found himself warming to the coroner.

  ‘Well?’ Day folded his arms and looked at the chief magistrate. ‘Don’t you have some evidence to present, sir?’

  Bolter took a few sips of ale and put the pot down on the floor for his dog. Copper slurped from the pot and nuzzled against Bolter’s leg.

  Bellows stood up and addressed the room. His chest puffed out, he said it was his belief that Edward James Morris had tragically taken his own life on the second night of November, 1835, and that he had done so by jumping off the viewing promenade, a raised platform some two hundred feet above the ground floor of the Colosseum, at the end of a charity function held there to celebrate the birthday of his wife Marguerite.

  Pyke interrupted and asked how he knew that Morris jumped and wasn’t pushed. ‘That’s what we’re here to determine, isn’t it? I’d hate to think the chief magistrate was trying to sway the minds of the jurors even before any evidence has been heard.’