The Detective Branch

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘I saw you talking to young Lockhart,’ Wells said. ‘I trust he wasn’t causing you any problems.’

  ‘No, no problems.’ Pyke could see that Wells wanted to know what they’d been talking about.

  ‘He seems to have buckled down, got on with things. Perhaps Gerrett’s dismissal will be good for him, good for all of us.’

  Pyke sat down in his chair and waited for Wells to do the same, but Wells opted to stand. ‘You didn’t say much in the meeting, Walter. I take it you don’t approve of the turn the investigation’s taken?’

  ‘I said I’d support whatever course you wished to steer.’

  ‘But you don’t think this is the best one?’ Pyke raised his eyebrows. ‘You still think Francis Hiley killed Guppy?’

  Wells’s eyes drifted to the small window behind Pyke. ‘We’ll find him eventually, and then we’ll know one way or another.’ His expression darkened. ‘But I’ve had to redeploy most of my men to another most disagreeable matter. You won’t have heard about it yet, I suppose.’

  ‘Heard about what?’

  ‘A man was shot dead yesterday. The body was found in the river near the Billingsgate stairs.’

  Pyke’s blood ran cold. ‘Who?’

  ‘One of the Rafferty brothers. Sean was his name, I believe.’

  The news took a few moments to sink in. ‘Do you have any idea who might have done it?’

  ‘Could be one of a hundred thousand, I’d say.’ Wells rubbed his hard, waxy skin. ‘You know as well as I that the Irish are prone to violence and a wildness of spirit that can be quite lethal, especially if they find themselves under a feebler police than they’re used to.’

  ‘And you think that’s what’s happened here? Sean Rafferty has been shot dead because we, as a police force, have become permissive?’

  Wells smiled. ‘Indeed, I’d forgotten that your attitudes vis-à-vis our Irish brethren are less hostile than mine. Nevertheless, this murder will have to be investigated with our characteristic thoroughness and the task of doing so has fallen to me. I don’t doubt it will be a nasty job; the list of names bearing brutes like the Raffertys a grudge is likely to be a long one and I can hardly expect assistance from the brothers.’

  ‘Except this time the Raffertys are the victims.’ Pyke thought back to the summer when Wells had been convinced of the Raffertys’ guilt on the pawn shop murder.

  Wells’s eyes shifted focus. ‘I might have leapt to the wrong conclusion about the Raffertys before but you can hardly blame me for doing so: they’re notorious for their thieving and general disregard for the law.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, Walter,’ Pyke said, sighing, not wanting to further antagonise the man. ‘Actually, now that you’ve reminded me of the murders in the pawn shop, there was something I wanted to ask you,’ Pyke added.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You remember I mentioned that a constable in uniform had been seen in the vicinity of the pawnbroker’s just before the shooting?’

  Wells jaw tightened. ‘You said someone saw this man, a beggar or hawker.’

  ‘A crossing-sweeper.’

  Wells looked at him carefully. ‘What about it?’

  ‘He said the policeman in question had a limp. I met a sergeant matching that description a couple of weeks ago. Man by the name of Russell.’

  ‘Russell?’ Wells seemed to give the matter some thought. ‘No, I don’t think I’ve come across him.’

  ‘Part of Kensington Division.’

  ‘Still doesn’t ring a bell.’

  ‘I didn’t expect it would, but it struck me the other day that Pierce was in charge of that division before he moved to Holborn.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re implying, Pyke?’

  Pyke eyed Wells carefully, not sure himself what he was suggesting, whether the matter was worth looking into or not. Perhaps it would turn out to be a dead end. Perhaps it was just the case that Sharp, the tall man they believed had shot the victims in the Shorts Gardens robbery, had acted on his own volition and had taken the secret of the cross’s whereabouts to his grave. But that didn’t explain how Sharp had come by the cross in the first place, nor why a policeman in uniform had failed to respond to the sound of three loud blasts of a pistol.

  ‘Sergeant Russell?’ Pyke waited to see whether the man would recognise him or not. He had presented himself at the desk in the police building on the King’s Road and asked whether Russell was available. The man had kept him waiting for a little more than five minutes.

  Russell was heavier than Pyke remembered and, without his stovepipe hat, his hair was bushier and more unkempt. He had the same ferret-face, with small, quick eyes, thin lips and a pinched nose. It took the man a few moments to recognise Pyke and when he did, he stiffened slightly.

  ‘Detective Inspector . . .’ Russell paused and grimaced. ‘Trout?’

  ‘Pyke.’ He held the man’s stare. ‘With a “y”.’

  Russell nodded. ‘What brings you to Kensington?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about an incident that took place in the summer. I was looking back at our records and I saw that, for some reason, you were the first policeman on the scene after a robbery at a pawnbroker’s on Shorts Gardens, just off Drury Lane.’

  Russell’s expression gave nothing away. ‘I’m sorry, Detective Inspector, but you must be mistaken. You say I was first at the scene of a robbery in St Giles? That can’t be right. It must have been someone else.’

  ‘Are you quite sure?’ Pyke made a point of checking something in his notepad. He reeled off Russell’s rank and badge number.

  ‘That’s me, but I wasn’t in the centre of the city that day and I didn’t see or report a robbery.’ Russell’s manner wasn’t aggressive; he just sounded irritated.

  Pyke glanced down at his notepad one final time and snapped it shut. ‘Then I believe I owe you an apology. Please excuse me. I didn’t mean to waste your time.’

  ‘No harm done.’

  Russell had said the same thing to him outside Helen Hogarth’s mansion on the King’s Road.

  Pyke held out his hand and waited for Russell to shake it. The sergeant did so, but grudgingly. As he gripped the other man’s calloused hand, Pyke stared into his eyes, and looked for any sign that he might have been lying.

  Later that afternoon, Pyke went looking for Edmund Saggers in the Green Dragon on Fleet Street and then the Cole Hole, Coach and Horses and Edinburgh Castle, on the Strand. From there, he tried the parlour at Clunn’s Hotel in Covent Garden, and eventually found the journalist holding court at the Shakespeare on Wynch Street. In fact, Saggers wasn’t talking but eating. As he later told Pyke, he’d wagered a pound with a fellow journalist that he could put away ten steak and kidney puddings in one sitting. By the time Pyke found him, Saggers had managed to consume eight and the strain was beginning to show on his face. A vast man with an even vaster appetite, he was sitting alone at the table, a napkin tucked into his collar. The ninth steak and kidney pudding was pushed towards him and, with a sly glance at the man he’d made the bet with, Saggers took his fork and devoured it in a few mouthfuls. Looking up, he asked for the tenth pudding in a manner that suggested he was still hungry. A sheen of perspiration clung to his rotund cheeks. After a few moments’ delay it was brought to him by a harassed pot-boy. Barely allowing it cool, Saggers opened his mouth and shovelled it in, and when he had finished, he washed it down with a glassful of wine.

  Once the crowd who’d gathered around Saggers’s table to watch him eat had ebbed away and the man he’d made the bet with had paid up, Pyke sat down opposite him. ‘Can I buy you lunch?’

  ‘Very droll, I’m sure.’ To alleviate his discomfort, the garrulous journalist opened his mouth and let rip with a belch that filled the room.

  They hadn’t seen one another since Godfrey’s funeral, and Saggers asked how Felix and he were faring. Pyke shrugged, not sure what to say. The fact was that he had spent the past week trying not to think about the death and the hole
it had left in both his and Felix’s life. He was aware that this was not necessarily the best way of dealing with the situation. He was also aware that he and Felix hadn’t talked about Godfrey’s death for a number of days and the closeness they’d shared around the time of the funeral had already started to fade. Instead of answering Saggers’s question directly, Pyke said, ‘Actually I wanted to pick your brains about something.’

  A few months earlier Saggers had written a piece for the London Illustrated News about the detective department in which he’d described the figure of the detective as a secular priest for the modern era. It had been a gauche piece, little more than an advertisement for the department. Pyke had sanctioned it not because he needed the publicity but because Saggers wanted to write the story and he valued his association with the journalist. Then, as now, there was little that happened in the city that escaped Saggers’s ears and eyes.

  Briefly Pyke told him everything he already knew about Morris Keate and the murders five year earlier. Saggers said he remembered them, though not particularly well.

  ‘So what do you want to know?’ he asked, when Pyke had finished.

  ‘Does that sound like a fair summary of what happened?’

  Saggers took a swig of wine. ‘From what I remember, the two boys did work as part of the same mob.’

  ‘Do you know which one?’

  ‘Not as such, but I can say with some certainty that any dipper who worked the theatre crowds around that time would have handed a part of their take to a mobsman called Horace Flint.’

  ‘Flint?’ For some reason the name seemed familiar. ‘Didn’t someone stick a knife into his belly?’

  Saggers nodded briskly. ‘That would have been about three or four years ago. I’m assured that anyone who answered to Flint now answers to a fence called Culpepper.’

  ‘Georgie Culpepper?’

  ‘You know him?’

  Pyke laughed. ‘I used to; if he’s the same man I’m thinking of. We grew up on the same street.’ This would have been before his father died, before he’d spent a year in the orphanage, before Godfrey had rescued him.

  ‘Well, if he is the same one, I’d tread very carefully. I’m told he’s ambitious and he has a nasty bite.’

  Even after Pyke had moved away from the rookery, he’d heard stories of Georgie Culpepper’s exploits, and he knew the man was active in the city’s underworld.

  ‘Do you know where I can find him?’

  ‘You could try the Coach and Horses on Duke Street, or the Rat’s Castle. Someone there will know where to find him.’

  Standing up, Pyke surveyed the detritus of Saggers’s eating marathon and smiled. ‘You could try looking into the affairs of a City alderman called Charles Hogarth, if you felt so inclined.’

  ‘And why would I want to do that?’

  ‘He died about ten days ago. The coroner described the cause of death as heart seizure. I think he was murdered. The body was stolen from the family mausoleum and both the porter who found the body and the coroner are now missing, too.’

  Saggers’s interest was clearly kindled, as Pyke had known it would be.

  Pyke found Conor Rafferty in the same place as before, the Blue Dog in St Giles, but this time the back room was closed to the public and Pyke was told to leave his knife and pistol at the counter. A tall, muscular man with a gaol-cropped head took him along a damp, narrow passageway and through two sets of doors that had to be unbolted from the other side. Conor Rafferty was sitting alone at one of the tables, a half-empty bottle of whisky for company. Pyke could see that his eyes were tired and bloodshot, the lids heavy and bloated.

  ‘Come to tell me who killed our brother, Detective Inspector? Or to promise me you’ll have the gunman behind bars before the end of the week?’

  ‘I didn’t think you had such faith in the police.’

  Even though he had agreed to let Wells run the investigation into Sean Rafferty’s murder, Pyke wanted to talk to Conor, to reassure himself there was no link to the ongoing search for the Saviour’s Cross. He also didn’t sufficiently trust Wells to look into the matter with fairness and impartiality.

  Rafferty smiled thinly. ‘I’m pleased to see that a man of the law can spot irony when he hears it.’

  ‘Can I sit down?’

  Rafferty shrugged and pushed the whisky bottle towards him. ‘You can have a drink, too.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who might have killed your brother?’ Rafferty’s eyes were as cold as ice. ‘We can bury our own and we can take care of our own problems too.’ The Irishman groped for the whisky and, realising it wasn’t in front of him, he laughed and shook his head. ‘At home, anyone who blabs to a Peeler ends up at the bottom of a well.’

  ‘And anyone else who crosses you, too.’

  ‘It’s a nasty world, Detective Inspector. But I expect you know that already.’

  ‘It’s not the world that’s nasty. It’s the people in it. When I came to see you in the summer, you were enjoying a drink with the rest of the customers in the taproom. Now you’re hiding out in one of the back rooms, guarded by a small army of your men. Am I to deduce that someone wants to kill you as well?’

  ‘Tell me, Detective Inspector.’ Rafferty gave him a long, cold stare. ‘Why did you really come and see me today?’

  ‘I heard what happened to your brother. It reminded me of a conversation we’d had in the summer.’

  ‘I remember now. You reckoned we might have had some hand in that shootin’ at the pawnbroker’s.’

  ‘Some did; I wasn’t one of them.’

  ‘It’s certainly true we can’t be claimin’ too many friends among your colleagues.’ Rafferty looked into Pyke’s face. ‘Every day, it seems, one of our flash houses, our card games, our brothels, our taverns is raided by your lot. Meanwhile, other folk go about their business like their shit smells of roses.’

  ‘If the police are harassing you, it’s just because they’re doing their job.’

  Later Pyke would think about the implications of Rafferty’s remarks. Could it be true that someone was specifically targeting them?

  ‘Doin’ other folks’ jobs for ’em, more like.’

  It was the way Rafferty said this which interested Pyke. ‘What do you mean?’

  But Rafferty waved him off with his hand and said, ‘I’ll drink a wee drop for the big lad in your name.’

  Pyke stood up. ‘I’m guessing you’ll want to take the law into your own hands and punish your brother’s killer.’ He paused and added, ‘This is just a friendly warning. If the streets start running crimson, I’ll come back and drag you off to the cells.’

  Rafferty took another swig from the bottle and watched Pyke carefully until he had reached the door.

  That night, the rain returned, a faint drizzle turning into a violent downpour, drops of water hammering against the windows and doors. Pyke had tried, and failed, to have a proper talk with Felix and lay in his bed worrying about the way they were drifting apart. Felix had gone back to school, and the return to a normal routine had proved to be comforting. Still, this had perhaps given his son the impression that he had already adjusted to Godfrey’s death and moved on, which was far from the case. It also meant that the two of them would be spending less time together. This was one of the reasons Pyke had suggested they both go and see Martin Jakes at his church in Bethnal Green. If nothing else, it would give them something to do.

  The following morning, the rain had cleared and the temperature had dropped, a chill wind blowing in from the east. The sky was hard and blue and the pavements and roads were treacherous. Together with Felix, Pyke walked down to the High Street and waited at the stand for a cab to take them to the East End. Inside the carriage, Pyke took off his gloves, unwrapped the muffler from his neck and waited for Felix to do the same. ‘It’s a cold one, isn’t it?’

  Felix barely looked at him. Pyke stared out of the smudged glass at a donkey and cart standing in the middle of the pavement.

  ‘I
hope you’ll like this man I’m taking you to see,’ he said, thinking about Jakes. ‘I think you will.’

  ‘Because he’s a vicar?’ Felix commented sceptically. He’d made it very clear the previous night that he was making this journey under duress.

  ‘Because he has a conscience.’ Pyke continued to stare out of the glass. ‘In a small way he reminds me of Godfrey.’

  ‘What?’ Felix’s stare intensified. ‘Are you looking to replace Godfrey already?’

  Before he could stop himself, Pyke reached out and grabbed his son’s wrist. ‘How dare you doubt my feelings for Godfrey.’ The extent of his anger took him by surprise.