The Detective Branch

by Andrew Pepper

  TWO

  Grief affects people in different ways but Pyke had always thought that it was a luxury of the indolent. The next morning, he found Cullen’s wife at the front of the shop. On her hands and knees, and wearing a tatty apron, her hair tied up in a bun, she was scrubbing the floor with a wire brush. Her face was rigid with concentration as she drew the bristles back and forth across the dark stains, as though the act itself could somehow erase the memory of what had happened. Pyke let the door close behind him and coughed. She looked up, startled, and then allowed her gaze to return to the stain in front of her. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Tell me about the Rafferty brothers.’

  Pyke saw at once that his words had rattled her. She stared down at the damp, soapy residue on the floor. ‘What about them?’

  ‘You know who I’m talking about, then?’

  ‘There’s not many folk around ’ere what don’t know the name.’

  ‘Yesterday I asked you whether anyone had threatened your husband. You gave me an equivocal answer.’

  This time she stopped scrubbing, put down her brush and looked up at him. ‘Equivocal?’

  Pyke nodded, acknowledging her subtle rebuke. She wouldn’t have known it from the way he spoke, he thought, but he came from the same background she did. ‘The Raffertys or someone from their mob came to the shop, didn’t they?’

  Cullen’s wife hauled herself up off her knees and stretched. ‘You seem to have all the answers.’

  She started to walk away but Pyke grabbed her wrist. ‘I’m trying to find the man or men who killed your husband.’ The woman tried to shake him off but he wouldn’t let go.

  Her small, quick eyes hardened. ‘Folk like us don’t say no to the likes of the Raffertys.’

  Pyke let go of her wrist. ‘What did they want with your husband?’

  She put her hands on her hips and sniffed. ‘Fence some of their loot.’

  ‘And he agreed?’

  ‘’Course he agreed. What choice did he ’ave?’

  Pyke paused for a moment, listening to the jangling of knives and spoons from the eating house next door. ‘Maybe your husband tried to pull the wool over the Raffertys’ eyes and they came here to teach him a lesson?’

  That elicited a hollow chuckle. ‘My Sammy weren’t a brave man but he weren’t stupid, neither. If the Raffertys told him to dance a barefoot jig on a bed of hot coals, he woulda done it with a smile on his face.’

  ‘You don’t think it was the Raffertys who killed your husband, then?’

  Cullen’s wife dug her hands into the pouch of her apron. ‘Like I said yesterday, Sammy was excited ’bout something, a cull comin’ to see him. If he was expecting the Rafferty boys, he would’ve been quakin’ in his boots.’

  It was still early but the street outside was thronging with people and no one was paying much attention to the shop, as though what had happened the day before had already been forgotten. Pyke walked under a line of dripping clothes and stepped out on to Drury Lane, where an endless procession of cabs, drays and costermongers’ barrows were crawling in both directions. The pavements were full, too; navvies in their white moleskins and laced boots idling on the corner, an old man blowing on Irish pipes, a younger man carrying a sign advertising a camphor emetic. From the upper-floor windows, Pyke could hear crying and screaming, men still drunk from the night before berating their wives and children. All around, men and women dressed in work clothes were readying themselves for the day ahead; some would find work pulling up potatoes or picking hops in Bromley and Bow, others would lump coal or lay bricks. Some would set up makeshift stalls on the city’s streets selling oranges and potatoes. In the window of a baker’s there was a placard declaring ‘No Popery’. Next door, outside a ginnery, was a board advertising Dublin stout. A newspaper seller stood on the next corner holding up a copy of the London Illustrated News. Doubtless its revelations, and its lurid description of the murders, would further fan the flames of discord: Catholic Ireland bringing its barbarian ways to the streets of Protestant England. Pyke knew there were around fifty or sixty thousand Irish in St Giles alone. What would happen, he wondered, if the Catholics and Protestants living alongside each other in the rookery really did turn on one another?

  On the other side of the street, Pyke saw Lockhart emerge from a butcher’s shop. Cutting in between a brewer’s dray and a hackney carriage, he caught up with the man outside the Queen’s Head.

  ‘I’ve just talked to an old man who lives in one of the tenements at the back of Cullen’s shop,’ Lockhart said, breathlessly.

  They looked at one another warily as Pyke waited for Lockhart to catch his breath. Personally Pyke felt his colleague’s face was too gaunt and his eyes were too close together but he’d heard it said, by Gerrett when he was drunk, that he, Pyke, was jealous of Lockhart’s youth and good looks.

  On this occasion, Lockhart seemed excited rather than diffident. He told Pyke that a witness, a retired coal-whipper, had seen a well-dressed man, tall, with dark hair and swarthy skin, in the alley behind the pawnbroker’s just after the shooting. The man had been carrying a large pistol. The coal-whipper reckoned he’d be able to recognise the gunman if he ever saw him again.

  A cart piled high with wooden crates rattled towards them, the harness clanking loudly as the iron-shod wheels rolled over the cobblestones. Pyke waited for it to pass. ‘That’s fine work, Detective.’ He thought he saw Lockhart smile. ‘Keep it up and I’ll see you back in the office at five.’

  About lunchtime it started to rain and by early afternoon a brown slush had collected at the sides of the street and was sprayed up on to the pavements by the passing traffic. It meant there was standing room only in the taproom of the Blue Dog, traders from the nearby market taking refuge from the downpour alongside knife-grinders, basket sellers, hawkers, balladeers, oakum pickers and costermongers. Steam rose from wet clothes, creating a fug that smelled almost as bad as the rotten vegetables on the pavement outside. Pyke approached the zinc-topped counter and asked to speak to the landlord. No one took much notice of him until he said he was there to ‘rattle the cage’ of the Rafferty boys. The pot-bellied landlord folded his arms and smiled. Almost immediately, conversation in the vicinity of the counter stopped.

  ‘And who, sir, are you?’ The landlord’s moustache twitched.

  ‘Pyke.’ He waited. ‘Detective Inspector Pyke.’ As he said it, he could almost feel the walls closing in on him.

  ‘A Jack, eh?’

  ‘You want to point me in the direction of the Raffertys or do I have to arrest you for being fat and ugly?’

  ‘Tough-talking, too.’ The landlord’s eyes were as dead as a filleted mackerel’s. ‘You here on your own?’

  ‘I see you can count to one. I’m impressed.’

  That drew a smirk. ‘A brave man. Or a stupid one.’ A few men within earshot laughed.

  ‘You can talk, surely you can, friend, but I wonder if that’s all you’ve got,’ a voice said behind Pyke. An Irish brogue.

  Pyke turned and found himself staring at a man in his forties, with unkempt, reddy-brown hair, a sunburnt face with a six-inch scar running down one side of it, a neck as thick as the stump of a small tree, and arms that had doubtless crushed men to death. He was the kind of man who could plunge a knife into your belly as easily as he could drink a mug of ale. Pyke noticed, too, that a path had cleared around him.

  ‘Your name Rafferty?’

  ‘Might be. Then again it might be O’Shaunessy or Cleary depending on who’s askin’ the question.’ A few nervous laughs rippled around the taproom.

  ‘Yesterday morning, three men were shot and killed in a pawnbroker’s just off Drury Lane. The rumour is that you or one of your brothers might have pulled the trigger.’

  His expression didn’t change. ‘Is that so? And why would we want to go and do a thing like that?’

  ‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’

  The man studied him with a disconcerting mixtur
e of curiosity and indifference. ‘Where I come from, a Peeler dares enter a place like this, he leaves in a box.’

  ‘Lucky for me we live in a more civilised part of the world.’

  ‘You saying me or my brothers had anything to do with that shootin’?’ the man asked.

  ‘That’s what I’m here to find out.’

  ‘Has the widow been talkin’?’

  Pyke took a moment to assess the threat he’d implicitly made against Cullen’s wife. ‘If you or your brothers touch a hair on her head, or even go within fifty yards of her shop, I’ll dunk you in a cesspool until you choke.’

  Rafferty seemed amused, rather than unsettled, by Pyke’s words, as if he knew that the threat was a hollow one. ‘Cullen was nothing. Not worth the steam risin’ off my piss. The fact he was shot has nothin’ to do with us.’

  Pyke studied Rafferty’s face for signs that he might be lying but his ignorance appeared to be genuine. ‘So where were you and your brothers yesterday morning between the hours of ten o’clock and midday?’

  ‘Right here,’ Rafferty said, without hesitation. ‘In full view of a hundred men.’

  ‘And people here would be happy to swear an oath to that effect?’ Pyke looked at the faces flanking Rafferty. Of course they would be happy to swear an oath, he thought. They were all completely terrified of him.

  Rafferty just shrugged. ‘Ask ’em yourself.’

  Pyke turned to the landlord. ‘Well?’

  The pot-bellied man grinned. ‘None of ’em Raffertys even slipped out back to relieve ’emselves.’

  A chorus of validations echoed around the taproom. Rafferty stood there, arms folded. Pyke turned back to face him. ‘So which Rafferty are you?’

  ‘Conor.’

  ‘I’ll come back soon and we’ll continue this conversation.’

  Rafferty smiled. ‘Any time, Peeler.’

  Later Pyke learned that Conor Rafferty had once taken a hammer to a man who’d slept with his sister and systematically broken every bone in his body. The person who told the story added that Conor was the least cruel of the brothers.

  The address of the New Police’s headquarters was 4 Whitehall Place but the entrance was in Great Scotland Yard. The building housed the police’s administration, the offices of the two commissioners, the men of the Executive Division, the newly instituted Criminal Returns office, which compiled information and statistics to show the prevalence of crime in particular districts, and the accounts department. While the commissioners enjoyed views that took in the river on one side and St James’s Park and Horse Guards’ Parade on the other, the Detective Branch occupied three poky rooms on the ground floor that looked directly on to a brick wall. Pyke found the view oddly reassuring. As he sometimes told his men, it gave them a proper sense of their place in the New Police’s hierarchy.

  As a detective, Pyke didn’t have to wear a uniform, something he was very grateful for. Even though he had been doing the job for over six months, he still didn’t feel wholly comfortable with his new-found authority and he was glad not to be reminded of it each time he walked past a mirror. It was a long time since he had served as a Bow Street Runner and it had taken him a while to find his feet and adjust to being part of a large organisation again. Still, his time as a Runner had taught him the rudiments of detective work and, more than this, how a detective branch should function. For many years, his mentor at Bow Street had failed to convince successive home secretaries about the merits of creating a centralised, dedicated detective department. Tory and Whig politicians had felt that the true role of the police should be to deter crime from happening in the first place and that detectives were akin to spies whose unseen presence on the streets threatened the very notion of liberty. Now, though, the political wind had changed and Pyke had been given the chance to turn his mentor’s vision into a reality.

  Pyke kept one of the rooms for himself. The second room, also small, was used for questioning witnesses and interviewing suspects. The largest room housed desks for all the other detectives, together with a row of filing cabinets that contained a growing library of cards. These cards detailed the criminals or suspected criminals known to them and were arranged according to their particular skills. There were sections for pickpockets, lumpers, footpads, magsmen, swell mobs, sharpers, prostitutes, pimps, house burglars, horse thieves, rushers, receivers, murderers, rapists, sodomists, shoplifters, screevers and cracksmen. Each card listed the person’s name, their aliases, all known acquaintances, their current residence, all former residences, a list of any convictions and details of time served in prison. This information was then cross-referenced with the names of other known or suspected criminal associates. Each section was arranged alphabetically, according to surname, and the idea was that any piece of information they came across, no matter how trivial it seemed at the time, would be added to a person’s card. Additionally the cabinets contained copies of the daily crime reports circulated by the assistant commissioner’s office to all divisional superintendents, providing descriptions of suspects, missing persons and stolen property.

  Sometimes Pyke wondered what his wife, Emily, would have made of his decision to join the police force, whether or not she would have been surprised. Part of her, he suspected, wouldn’t have batted an eyelid, even though he had once told her, after leaving the Runners, that he would never go back. Throughout their marriage, Emily had known that he missed his former profession: the excitement and even the grubbiness of the work. But he had changed in the years since her death. As a young man, he had been as much concerned with lining his own pocket as locking up malefactors. Those ambitions hadn’t deserted him entirely but these days he’d come to believe that the law, even if imperfect, was both a necessary and an inevitable part of civilised existence. Part of him also knew she would have been disappointed in his decision. He could hear her voice: telling him that by becoming a policeman he was colluding with a system that was founded on unfairness. She had been a firebrand radical, a socialist, someone who’d believed passionately, naively perhaps, that the world could be altered by the words and deeds of those with political commitment.

  Pyke checked to make sure there wasn’t a card made up for Harry Dove and that his name wasn’t listed in connection with other known receivers. When he was satisfied of this, he walked up the staircase to the office of the two commissioners and knocked on the door of Sir Richard Mayne, entering before being invited to do so.

  Mayne was sitting behind his gargantuan desk. He was youthful in looks, despite his fifty years, with a smooth, oval face, brown hair that was greying at the edges, and a hard, compressed mouth. He was cold and taciturn but, as a former solicitor, he had a good brain for police work and it was he, rather than the other commissioner, who had argued for the creation of a specialist detective department. Some liked to compare Mayne to Peel, and Pyke could see the similarities. Like Peel, Mayne could be stern and humourless; Pyke rarely saw him relax and he never spoke an unnecessary word. But Mayne could be loyal, too, and while he hadn’t exactly warmed to Pyke as head of the Detective Branch, Pyke knew he had vigorously defended him to outsiders and at his twice yearly appearance before the parliamentary select committee.

  With him in the room was Walter Wells. Wells had just been promoted to the rank of acting superintendent of the Executive Division, the largest and most prestigious of all of the New Police’s divisions and the only one based at the headquarters in Whitehall Place. It was the most senior position in the New Police after the two commissioners and the post of assistant commissioner. Wells was about the same age as Mayne but his hair was still thick and black and looked as if it had been cut with the aid of a pudding bowl. His head was the size of a pumpkin and his skin seemed to have the consistency of hard wax. Even when he smiled, it didn’t move. He had joined the police force ten years earlier and had risen steadily through the ranks. As a soldier, he had been decorated for his service to the Afghan campaign, during which it was said he’d single-handedly fo
ught off a mob of tribal warriors for two days until reinforcements had arrived. There were a lot of former army men in the New Police, and many of these spoke highly of Wells. Pyke had yet to make up his mind, and he was irritated by Wells’s mostly crass attempts to ingratiate himself with whoever he was talking to.