The Revenge of Captain Paine

by Andrew Pepper

  Holding the cue with the tapered end, he swung it through the air and struck Bolter on the side of his face, his cheek splitting open from the blow, his eyeballs bulging from their sockets. A streak of crimson arced across the green baize. Bolter went down, his legs buckling as if they were made of paper, and Pyke bent over him, holding the cue at either end and pressing the middle part down against Bolter’s neck. For a moment he thought he might throttle him.

  ‘How do you know Rockingham?’

  He lifted the cue, enough for Bolter to croak, ‘He’s involved with the regiment.’

  Immediately Pyke remembered a story that had been told to him by the magistrate in Huntingdon. ‘You were on the Kent when it caught fire and sunk in the Bay of Biscay, weren’t you?’

  Bolter’s eyes bulged as Pyke pressed down on the cue but he managed a desperate nod.

  ‘Did you kill Morris?’

  Bolter shook his head.

  ‘I said, did you kill Morris?’

  ‘No.’

  He released the cue and Bolter rolled over and retched, his whole body convulsing through lack of air.

  Standing up, Pyke turned to face Rockingham, who had sought neither to intervene nor call for help. Rather the older man had stood there, rooted to the spot, and watched as Pyke had struck his companion with the wooden billiards cue, as though it had been a form of entertainment put on only for his benefit. Others had drifted into the room, attracted by the whiff of trouble, but as Pyke walked past Rockingham, the old man opened his mouth, a blast of fetid breath leaking from it, and whispered, ‘I’ll see you in hell.’ And it was this, more than what he had done to Bolter, which made Pyke contemplate what he had done and wonder whether he was as damned as he felt.

  The following morning, as he walked through Regent’s Park, Pyke could still smell traces of blood on his clothes. It was a beautiful November day and, away from the choking miasma of dust and smoke that hung over much of the city, Pyke could see the cornflower blue of the sky and feel the pleasant crispness of the air against his skin. It was the kind of day that should have made him feel happy to be alive, but as the giant portico and rotunda of the Colosseum loomed in the distance, above the line of trees, he couldn’t rid his mind of an image of Morris plummeting to his death.

  It was only half-past eight and the attractions weren’t yet open to the public, but he found the caretaker mopping the floor in the central rotunda. His figure looked as if it had been bent out of shape and he needed the mop to prop him up. He watched Pyke cross the floor towards him, his paintbrush moustache twitching and his armpits already dark with sweat.

  Perhaps he recognised Pyke from the coroner’s inquest or perhaps he didn’t. But it was only when Pyke asked the question that a trace of caution, even concern, appeared in his face.

  ‘If you toured the building at one, before you locked up, and didn’t see Morris or his body anywhere, how is it possible that you found it lying here on the floor when you opened the building the following morning?’

  The caretaker pulled himself up straight and shrugged. ‘Like the man said, maybe the cully that died hid himself in the building and then jumped after I’d done my rounds.’

  ‘That would be one explanation.’

  ‘And the other?’ The caretaker seemed amused by something.

  ‘You waited until all the guests and workers had gone and then turned a blind eye while someone dragged Morris’s drink-addled body over to the edge of the promenade and hauled him up over the railing. Perhaps you even helped.’

  ‘The man’s death was ruled as suicide. You’d do as well to remember that, before spreading your lies.’

  ‘How much did someone pay you to keep your mouth shut? Ten guineas? Maybe twenty?’

  ‘I’ve got work to do. If you’ll excuse me.’ He started to walk off in the direction of the entrance.

  ‘Who killed him? Was it Bolter? Or perhaps a man with a glass eye?’

  But the caretaker didn’t turn around and Pyke caught up with him only on the very edge of the main floor. ‘Did you see anything unusual or strange that night, sir? Please, it could be important.’

  His unexpected politeness softened the caretaker’s indignation. ‘Now you mention it, I did see the gentl’man who died arguing with a cull up on the promenade. There were still a few guests left but none up there. Well-dressed cull, black hair, same as yours. I’d say he was younger than you, mind.’

  ‘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 façade 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 th
rough 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 through 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 compl
ain 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.