The Detective Branch

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘My hands, Fitzroy. You’d find eight good fingers and two thumbs.’

  Tilling said as he walked away, ‘There’s always a line, Pyke. I hope for your sake you haven’t already crossed it.’

  Two days later, after Pyke’s painstaking scrutiny of the Churches Fund’s accounts had revealed no evidence of malpractice, he presented himself at Traitor’s Gate at the Tower of London. Minutes later, he was escorted over the dry moat and past the Wakefield Tower to the Queen’s House, where Druitt was being held. Pyke hadn’t realised that the Tower was still being used to house prisoners, and being within its ancient walls made him think about the way in which the authorities had once dealt with threats to their authority: the rack, the press, hanging, drawing, quartering. Such monolithic power had long since dissipated in this enlightened, democratic time, or so they were told, but as Pyke looked up at the Bloody Tower and thought about all of those who had been killed there, he wondered how much had really changed.

  After a flight of stone stairs, Pyke was led along a narrow passageway, through a reinforced door guarded by a turnkey, and then to a row of cells, all of which were empty, apart from the final one. The warder produced a key and inserted it into the lock. Then he slid back the iron bolts at the top and bottom of the door and, with both hands, pulled it open.

  Ebenezer Druitt was sitting on a pile of straw, head bowed. His ankles and wrists were in chains. When he looked up and saw Pyke, his expression didn’t change. He had been badly beaten; his nose was broken, there was bruising around both of his eyes, his cheek was swollen and one of his teeth was missing.

  ‘When I realised they were bringing me here, I expected to be subjected to torture. Unfortunately the methods my interrogators have used have been drearily predictable.’ When he smiled, Druitt revealed his bloodied gums.

  Pyke stood with his back to the door. ‘What have they been asking you?’

  ‘What do you imagine, Detective Inspector?’

  ‘I’m guessing they want to know who killed Guppy and Hogarth. They want the killer’s name.’

  Druitt moved a little and winced from the pain. ‘Unfortunately for them, I was unable to provide this information. I rather fear my relocation has been a waste of time.’

  ‘And do you know who they are?’ Pyke looked down at him. ‘These men who’ve been interrogating you?’

  ‘Funny you should mention it, Detective Inspector, but to be quite honest, they haven’t bothered to introduce themselves.’

  ‘You could always tell me what you’re keeping from them.’

  Druitt rolled his eyes. ‘Very clever, Detective Inspector. Forge a bond with the prisoner by implicitly establishing a common enemy.’

  ‘Who said they’re my enemies?’

  ‘Oh, they will be, if you push hard enough.’ Druitt tried to smile.

  ‘Push hard enough at what?’

  ‘Do you imagine we’re so very different, Detective Inspector? That we want such very different things?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. I have no idea what you want.’

  ‘But I can see in your eyes you’re less hostile than you were. You’ve found out some things, haven’t you? It’s put you in a difficult position vis-à-vis your superiors.’

  Pyke tried to conceal what he was thinking. Druitt’s grin widened. ‘They don’t want you to continue with your investigation . . . they want you to crawl back under your stone and pretend everything in the garden is sweet-smelling.’

  ‘Guppy stole more than forty thousand pounds,’ Pyke said, eventually. ‘Did it come from the London Churches Fund?’

  ‘The fact that you’re good at your job is threatening to many people. I can’t emphasise enough how careful you need to be.’

  ‘Perhaps if you were to give me a nudge in the right direction, I could do my job a little better.’

  Druitt leaned back against the bare wall and shut his eyes.

  ‘I’ve seen the Churches Fund’s official accounts. Perhaps you know something I don’t.’ Pyke waited. ‘Is there another set of accounts?’

  Druitt opened his eyes suddenly. ‘Just do your job, Detective, and let me worry about the rest.’

  ‘The rest?’ When Druitt refused to answer, Pyke added, ‘Is whoever killed Guppy and Hogarth planning to strike again?’

  That elicited a subtle shake of the head. ‘A predictable question, Detective Inspector. Very predictable.’

  ‘When I visited you in your Pentonville cell, how did you know I was reading The Fable of the Bees?’

  This time Druitt just stared at the wall in front of him. ‘I didn’t. But I suspect we’re both attracted by Mandeville’s bleak vision, his desire to rip off the veil of hypocrisy that surrounds us and see virtue for what it really is.’

  The sky was still blue by the time Pyke returned home. Felix hadn’t come back from school and Mrs Booth had gone to the shops. With only Copper for company, Pyke let himself out into the garden to check on the two remaining pigs. The ground was still hard from the previous night’s frost. As Pyke peered over at the lowest point of the wall into his neighbour’s garden, he saw Mabel’s carcass still lying where he’d killed her, all the blood having long since drained into the soil.

  Back in the house, he had just heated up a pot of coffee when someone knocked on the door. Copper sniffed the air and hobbled on his three legs into the hallway. Shoving the mastiff into the living room, Pyke turned the handle on the front door and pulled it open, expecting to see a delivery boy or a door-to-door hawker.

  There were five or six of them; police constables, all wearing their uniforms. Pyke didn’t recognise any of them.

  Two of them rushed towards him and bundled him on to the floor. The coffee cup fell from his hand and Copper started to bark and scratch at the living-room door. Two of the constables sat on him while the others attached handcuffs and leg-irons. It all happened in the blink of an eye.

  ‘Who authorised this?’ Pyke said, thinking it was all a terrible mistake.

  One of the men, perhaps a sergeant, ignored him and said to the other men, ‘Bring him out into the garden.’

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Pyke, head of the Detective Branch . . .’

  The sergeant looked at him, his moustache twitching on his upper lip. ‘I know exactly who you are.’

  Ignoring Copper’s increasingly frantic barks, the policemen dragged him through the house and outside into the garden. There, his neighbour Leech was waiting, together with his pet spaniel. Leech followed the dog to a flower bed on the left-hand side of the garden. The policeman in charge joined them, Pyke shuffling along behind, escorted by the four constables. Leech was holding a shovel and, when the sergeant nodded, he started to dig. Pyke didn’t have any idea what they were looking for, but he knew they were going to find something.

  They all heard the shovel strike a hard object in the ground. It took Leech and two constables another minute to scoop out enough earth from the hole to retrieve whatever was there. Dry mouthed and fearing the worst, Pyke watched as they lifted out a wooden box he had never seen before. It was the size of a small chest. Carefully they placed it on the grass and one of the constables took a hammer and bashed off the padlock. The sergeant stepped in and opened the box; even before he’d done so he smiled, as though he already knew what he was going to find there.

  Pyke recognised the object immediately. What he didn’t know was how it had come to be buried in his back garden. They had just found the Saviour’s Cross.

  Bow Street

  JANUARY 1845

  TWENTY-THREE

  Pyke pulled the threadbare blanket over his shoulders and tried to get comfortable on the floor of his cell. The stone was as hard and cold as ice and a bitter draught eddied around the confined space. It was dark but not completely; candlelight from the passageway trickled through the peephole in the cell door, which had been left open so the gaoler could check on him every hour. The handcuffs had been removed but not the leg-irons, and as an extra precaution they had
been chained to the wall, which made sleeping difficult. Clearly they, whoever they were, were taking no chances. Given that he had been taken to the cells at Bow Street, where Pierce was the commander, it was clear to Pyke that Pierce must have orchestrated the arrest from his hospital bed, and had been planning it for some time. Still, the question of how Pierce had been able to lay his hands on the Saviour’s Cross was unclear, as was the question of who had sanctioned his arrest. Pyke assumed it had come from the very highest level and he thought about his last exchange with Mayne.

  Since arriving in his cell, Pyke had tried to assess the strength of the case against him; how they would attempt to prove his involvement in the theft. He wasn’t naive enough to think his neighbour’s testimony alone would be sufficient to get a conviction, which meant there would be other so-called witnesses, and perhaps more fabricated evidence.

  Pyke knew this row of cells very well. Little had changed in the fifteen years since he’d left the Bow Street Runners, and while the Runners themselves had long since been disbanded and the building taken over by the Metropolitan Police, the smell of the passage, the sound of clanking keys and the slamming doors reminded him of the time he’d spent there. Then, of course, he’d been the one in charge. It was revealing that none of the constables who’d accompanied him from Islington had wanted to meet his eyes or acknowledge him as one of their own.

  It was also true that Pyke had been in this position before. Fifteen years earlier, he had been arrested, tried and convicted of murdering his mistress, Lizzie Morgan, and had evaded the hang-man’s noose only by escaping from Newgate prison and eventually earning a pardon from Peel himself. As a younger man, he’d had little faith in the legal system and hadn’t bothered to defend himself in court, believing that the jury had been instructed to return a guilty verdict irrespective of what he said. Now that he was a serving policeman, however, his view of the law was more balanced. The system was skewed towards vested interests, as all institutions were, but rarely was someone convicted of a crime like theft or murder without overwhelming evidence pointing to their guilt.

  That first night, Pyke slept fitfully under the meagre blanket and thought often about Felix and what his son would do when he saw the scribbled note that Pyke had left for him. As watery daylight leaked through the barred window, Pyke listened to the sounds drifting down from the street: the rattle of the drays and carts, horses’ hooves, the clanking as street vendors set up their stalls. At seven or thereabouts, a bowl of cold, inedible gruel was shoved through the door, and half an hour later he was unshackled and led to a bare room where Superintendent Walter Wells was waiting for him. He waited for the gaoler to leave them alone.

  ‘I had to fight for this detail, believe me,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure that Sir Richard trusts me to act impartially, but in light of Pierce’s condition, and given that I am the acting superintendent, he couldn’t very well deny me the right to question you.’

  Pyke thought about his first impressions of Wells, of a barely tethered aggression, but now he saw that the man’s heavy features were mitigated by a kindness in his eyes.

  ‘As I’ve been telling you for months, old man, I knew that our friend from this building had something planned for you but I had no idea what a thorough job he’d make of it.’

  ‘I presume my arrest was sanctioned by Rowan and Mayne,’ Pyke said, leaning back against his chair.

  ‘I’m told Sir Richard baulked at the idea initially. In his eyes, he’s made a great personal investment in you and knows he’ll be implicated in the mess.’

  Wells was telling him that the evidence that Pierce had accrued, or that he’d managed to concoct, was strong. Otherwise Pyke’s arrest would never have been allowed.

  ‘How about you, Walter? When did you hear I’d been arrested?’

  ‘I only found out after the event. But as I said, I did my utmost to make sure I was the one who would carry out this interview.’

  Pyke studied Wells’s face. ‘Tell me, Walter. How bad does it look?’

  ‘Bad enough.’ Wells took out his snuff box, brought a pinch of the powder up to his nostrils and sniffed. ‘But before we get to the evidence, I need to ask you a few questions.’ Wells gestured to the quire of foolscap in front of him on the desk. ‘For the report I’ll have to write.’

  Pyke folded his arms and nodded.

  ‘Do you have any idea how the Saviour’s Cross, a highly valuable religious artefact stolen from the private domicile of the Archdeacon of London on . . .’ He glanced down at another piece of paper. ‘ . . . on the seventh of March last year, came to be buried in your garden?’

  ‘Someone put it there to incriminate me.’

  ‘So it is your assertion that you were in no way responsible for its theft and the subsequent efforts to find a buyer for it?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  Wells took his pen, dipped it in the ink, and scratched a few words on to a piece of foolscap. ‘Of course, I know this to be so but I need to make quite sure I have asked all of the questions that Sir Richard will, at some stage, ask me.’ He waited for a moment and then continued, ‘So by the same logic, the testimony of your neighbour, Percy Leech, who claims he saw you digging in the same spot where the cross was found, is a bare-faced lie.’

  ‘He’s been angry at me for a long time because my pigs keep escaping from their sty and ruining his garden.’

  ‘Good, so he can be discredited on the stand.’ Wells had moved seamlessly from being Pyke’s accuser to his advocate. ‘Perhaps we can talk about this fellow Sharp, then. You fought and arrested him earlier this year, apparently on suspicion of him having stolen the cross in the first place.’

  Pyke looked across the table at Wells and nodded.

  ‘The Crown is going to try to claim that you and he were partners-in-crime. That the two of you arranged the theft from the archdeacon’s home together and planned to split the proceeds.’

  Pyke knew Wells was taking a risk by telling him this. ‘But if that was true, why would I go to the effort of trying to arrest him? By doing so, I’d be laying myself open to his accusations.’

  ‘The Crown’s case is essentially that you decided to claim all of the spoils for yourself while putting the blame on Sharp. They will argue that you intended to kill Sharp before he got anywhere near a prison cell. They’ll call on the testimony of witnesses who saw you chase and fight with Sharp in an alleyway behind Field Lane. I’ve seen some of the statements: you’re variously described as an animal and a man hell-bent on murder. You get the idea.’

  Pyke turned his mind back to the struggle. ‘He punched, kicked and stabbed me; I was fighting for my life.’

  Wells smiled. ‘I know that. I’m just trying to tell you how the Crown’s lawyer is going to come at you.’

  ‘And I appreciate it, Walter. So what else have they got?’ He knew this couldn’t be the sum of their case against him.

  ‘After you failed to kill Sharp, the Crown is going to claim that you returned to the cells that night and finished him off; that you drugged and strangled him and then made it look like he’d hanged himself.’

  Pyke nodded; he could see where this was going, and the potential danger he was in. ‘Even though I was two miles away at the time, injured, in St Bartholomew’s?’

  ‘They’ll claim that since you were well enough to leave your hospital bed the next day, you would have been well enough to have taken a cab from the hospital to Scotland Yard on the night that Sharp died.’

  ‘They have a witness, do they?’

  Wells leaned forward over the desk, and whispered, ‘The gaoler, for a start. Apparently he’ll testify that he saw you go down into the cells on the night in question.’

  ‘So why did he wait this long to come forward; especially as he was dismissed from his position in the aftermath of Sharp’s death?’

  ‘I’m told he’ll claim he was too afraid of you to want to risk testifying against you.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Pyke sudde
nly felt a lot better about his prospects. The gaoler was a drunk and his testimony would be riddled with inconsistencies, and therefore be demolished in court.

  But Wells’s expression hadn’t brightened. ‘I’m reliably told we have a man called Alfred Egan, too.’

  An image of the slight, hatchet-faced fence he’d seen that night in the Red Lion flashed through his mind. Pyke knew immediately this was bad news: not only had Egan been in the cells at the time Sharp died; he would also be able to insinuate, from an insider’s perspective, that Pyke and Sharp were partners and that Pyke had done what the Crown were accusing him of. In effect, he could make their whole case. But like the gaoler, Egan hadn’t come forward with any of this at the time. More to the point, as a receiver of stolen goods with a criminal record, his testimony could not be treated as vouchsafe. A good lawyer would tear him apart on the stand.