Kill-Devil and Water pm-3

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘I don’t know…’

  Pyke dug the blade deeper into Rowbottom’s neck. ‘Think very carefully about what will happen if you don’t answer my question.’

  ‘The Island Queen,’ Rowbottom croaked, in barely more than a whisper. ‘That’s the name of the ship. And that’s all I know. I promise you.’ It was the same ship the docker had told him about.

  Pyke tutted under his breath and drew the blade very slightly across the clerk’s throat. A faint line of crimson appeared. ‘She was taken somewhere in a gentleman’s carriage. I just want the name of the man who arranged it.’

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t give me his name; he just told me he wanted to meet someone arriving on the Island Queen. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.’

  ‘One more jerk of my wrist and I’ll sever your jugular vein. And you know what’ll happen if I do that? You’ll be dead within five, ten minutes. No one saw me come in here and no one will notice me leaving. And you will have died for what? To protect the name of a client or associate who, if the roles were reversed, would have told me your name in a second.’ Pyke licked a line of saliva from his bottom lip.

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Then you’re dead.’

  ‘No. Please.’ Rowbottom seemed to be losing control of his bowels. The smell was appalling.

  ‘A name. One last chance.’

  ‘Alefounder,’ Rowbottom sobbed. ‘William Alefounder.’

  Pyke kept the blade to his throat but eased the pressure a little. ‘There; that wasn’t so difficult, was it?’

  A wail of despair spilled from Rowbottom’s mouth.

  ‘Who is he and where can I find him?’

  The clerk fell on to his desk. ‘He’s a sugar trader… His offices are located in St Michael’s Alley just off Cornhill… across from the Jamaica Coffee House.’

  In quieter moments, Pyke liked to think of himself as fair and even-handed in his dealings with others: someone who didn’t take account of status, wealth, religion or colour but who dealt with people on their own terms. But this was not true. In fact, he had always pursued the wealthy and privileged as though they had personally done him wrong.

  ‘Go and fetch the police.’

  William Alefounder looked at Pyke from his place at the end of a polished mahogany table in what was evidently the company boardroom, then glowered at the apologetic assistant who’d been unable to prevent Pyke from interrupting the meeting. Around the table were five or six smartly attired men, in addition to Alefounder, all of whom Pyke could have beaten in a fight with one arm tied behind his back.

  ‘Do it now.’

  The assistant fled from the boardroom but left the door open. A couple of clerks had gathered at the threshold, alerted by the brusque, even violent, way in which Pyke had forced his way through their various lines of defence.

  Pyke strode over to where Alefounder was sitting and put the charcoal etching of Mary Edgar down on to the table.

  ‘Her name is Mary Edgar, but you already know that. She was murdered about a week ago. Her naked corpse was found just off the Ratcliff Highway. You met her off the Island Queen when it arrived at the West India Docks some time before the twenty-fifth of last month.’

  Alefounder’s impassive stare and cool, almost translucent eyes gave little away. Pyke couldn’t tell how tall he was, but his solid chest, broad shoulders and lantern jaw suggested he should not be taken lightly. In other circumstances, Pyke might even have described him as good looking. His skin was dark and smooth and his black hair, cut short, was flecked with a few grey hairs, the only indication that he was middle-aged rather than young.

  The eyes of the other men gathered around the table had shifted from Pyke to Alefounder. Now it was up to the trader to explain himself, and Pyke thought he saw a chink in his armour: a hint of nerves, a smile that was a little too wide and a slight quiver of his top lip.

  ‘Yes, her name is familiar but I’ve never actually met her.’ Alefounder glanced down at the drawing in front of him. ‘You say she’s been murdered?’ He tried to appear unconcerned but droplets of sweat were massing on his forehead.

  ‘She was strangled then tossed away like night soil.’

  Alefounder’s hands began to tremble. ‘I’m disturbed you can talk about another human being in such a manner.’

  ‘I saw her corpse. I stood over her grave while they buried her.’

  ‘Please leave. I don’t have to answer your questions, sir, or justify myself to you.’

  ‘How did you know Mary Edgar?’ Pyke asked.

  ‘I didn’t know her.’

  In the ten years he’d served as a Bow Street Runner, then five years as a partner in his own bank, Pyke had learned to tell when someone was lying. It was what made him a decent card player, too. Sometimes it was just an instinct; a feeling that was hard to put into words. At other times you could actually see that someone was lying. In this instance, it was a little of both.

  ‘Then why did you meet her from the ship?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Alefounder even managed a slight smile. ‘I arranged for my carriage to meet her and transport her to an address in town.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘As a favour to an old friend.’

  ‘His name?’

  ‘As I said, I don’t have to answer your questions, sir. And I don’t care for your tone, either.’

  Pyke folded his arms. ‘So whereabouts in the city did your carriage take her?’

  ‘I had no idea until now that she was dead and I shall, of course, make myself available to the police to answer any questions they might wish to ask me.’

  ‘You’re saying you never laid eyes on her?’

  Alefounder floundered and looked around the room for support. None seemed forthcoming.

  ‘Just answer me this.’ Pyke waited for the man to meet his stare. ‘Why did you try to force a clerk called Rowbottom at the West India Dock to keep your name out of the affair?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’ But Pyke could see very well that he did.

  ‘Were you fucking her or did you just want to fuck her?’

  That was enough to bring the support of the room back behind Alefounder. Pyke had seen it before. Sooner or later, people rallied to their own. In this instance, it was perfectly acceptable for a man to sleep with his mistress in private, but the moment someone made a reference to sexual congress in public, the outrage on their faces was inevitable.

  ‘So, you were consorting with Mary and your wife or someone else found out, and you decided the best thing to do would be to get rid of her.’ Pyke checked the size of Alefounder’s hands. They were small, like a squirrel’s.

  ‘Really, sir, your ability to cause offence to one and all…’ One of the men sitting behind the table rose to his feet.

  Pyke realised he’d overplayed his hand because he’d given Alefounder the chance to play peacemaker. The trader held up his hands, interrupting his associate, and turned to Pyke. ‘The police have already been summoned; you should go now before you are led away in manacles.’

  Pyke noticed a print hanging above the fireplace detailing a lush, tropical landscape. ‘A slave owner I once had the misfortune of knowing raped one of his female slaves. Later on, he heard she was pregnant, so he waited until she gave birth and then strangled his own progeny in front of her, as soon as it had emerged from her womb. Don’t you dare lecture me about manacles.’

  No one even looked at him.

  Pyke picked up the drawing, and as he did so, he leaned across the trader and whispered, ‘If I find out you’re part of this, in any way, I’ll make it my business to ruin your life.’

  For a moment, Alefounder didn’t know where to look or what to do.

  Pyke stepped out on to the pavement in St Michael’s Alley just as two breathless police constables appeared at the far end of the passage.

  Half an hour later, and twenty shillings lighter, Pyke emerged from the Jamaica Coffee
House with a much fuller picture of William Alefounder. He was forty-five, married, with no children, and he lived in a large, detached property on Richmond Green. He was generally well respected and had inherited his sugar trading company from his father. Each morning, regardless of the weather, he travelled into the city in an open-topped phaeton. The company, Pyke was told, had gone through a bad patch a few years earlier but was moderately prosperous and dealt primarily with sugar plantations in Jamaica, where Alefounder went once a year to conduct his business. There were a few grumbles about his high-handed manner and the dismal rates he paid his clerks, but most of the men Pyke had approached preferred to chat about his physical vigour — he liked to ride horses and play polo — and his charitable work for the Suppression of Vice Society, of which he was a board member. But a few of the men Pyke talked to had other, less favourable stories to tell; stories that stood in sharp relief to accounts of the charity work he did. Apparently Alefounder was also a notorious philanderer and had cheated on his wife countless times during their marriage. No one had been able to give Pyke exact details but at least two clerks had said the same thing, which was sufficient corroboration in his mind. The idea that Alefounder might pontificate about the ills of lewd behaviour in public and carry on in private attested, in Pyke’s view, to his gross hypocrisy. But was he capable of murder? That was the question Pyke needed to answer.

  Copper was waiting for Pyke on the steps of the ancient, dilapidated tenement that housed his garret. So, too, was Benedict Pierce. A former Bow Street Runner and now part of the Metropolitan Police’s Whitehall Division, Inspector Benedict Pierce, was the man who’d been appointed to lead the investigation into Mary Edgar’s death. Pierce wore his dark blue uniform as Pyke had imagined he would: nothing was out of place; the belt was neatly buckled around his waist, the coat was buttoned right the way up to his collar, and every one of the brass buttons had been polished to such a sheen you could see your reflection in it. His pencil moustache had been neatly trimmed, as had his sideburns, and his sandy-coloured hair had been slicked back off his forehead with some unguent.

  Pierce looked as if he had made the transition from Bow Street Runner to New Police without too many difficulties. In fact, Pyke thought, he was probably far more at home in the New Police, with its rules and procedures, than he had been at Bow Street.

  It was a damp afternoon, with dark clouds threatening to dump their rain on the city’s streets. Pierce was standing under a butcher’s awning; in the window, a heap of meat sat slowly blackening under the flare of a gas-lamp. Pyke ignored him and went to pat Copper on the head.

  ‘Come on, let’s walk,’ Pierce said, impatient now that Pyke had returned home.

  ‘What brings you down here?’

  ‘You know as well as I do I’ve come to talk about the dead girl.’ Pierce strode forward in the direction of Smithfield. Just ahead of them, a collie was barking at a stationary cow but keeping far enough back from the animal’s hind legs to avoid being kicked.

  ‘Yes, I heard you’d been given the investigation.’ It was clear he didn’t yet know about Mary Edgar’s connection to Alefounder, but if the sugar trader was as good as his word, Pierce and his team would soon be paid a visit.

  Pierce took a couple more steps, then stopped. ‘I want to know everything you’ve found out about the murder so far.’

  ‘Then I suggest you read the newspapers. I’m told the Examiner has taken an interest in this case.’ Pyke allowed himself a quiet smirk.

  ‘We already know you’re responsible for that, Pyke, and believe me, it’s left you dangerously short of friends.’ Pierce was, of course, referring to Tilling, and Pyke found himself wondering again how Tilling had reacted to the story in the Examiner and whether he had been punished for employing Pyke’s services. ‘You know it’s a crime to withhold information about a criminal act from a police officer.’

  ‘You do your job, I’ll do mine. And if you stay out of my way, I’ll stay out of yours. How does that sound?’ Pyke looked down at a mountain of rotting animal flesh quivering in the gutter.

  ‘The old way of doing things, your way, is over. Finished. Just crawl back to the stone Tilling found you under and stay there.’

  ‘Do your job, Pierce. Be a detective. Go and find things out. It’s what you’re paid to do.’

  ‘This is now a police matter. If I find out you’ve been withholding information or using your limited skills to inappropriate ends, I’ll make sure you go back to prison for good.’

  ‘You’ve never liked me, have you, Pierce?’

  ‘Liked you? I’ve always thought you were corrupt. I despised you and everything you stood for. I still do.’

  ‘For all your moral righteousness, I know you cut corners, Pierce. Too busy trying to impress your seniors. In this instance, I’m guessing you won’t look any farther than Arthur Sobers. Find him and you’ve found Mary Edgar’s murderer.’

  Pierce tried to hide his surprise but didn’t quite manage it. ‘Do you know where he is?’

  Pyke stepped over the rotting meat, avoiding the swarm of flies that was hovering over it. He left Pierce standing with a vacant expression on his face and joined Copper at the door of his building.

  Later that evening, just as it was getting dark, and after Pyke had washed himself with a sliver of soap and a bucket full of water in the yard and changed his clothes, he set off along Cock Lane in the direction of Giltspur Street and Smithfield, where he would hail a hackney coach to take him to Camden Town. He would see Felix before he went to bed and then perhaps stay for dinner with his uncle and Jo. Whistling, he didn’t notice the men appear from a side alley and creep up behind him until they were almost upon him. Spinning around, he held up his hand and tried to parry the blow, but was pushed from behind, and struck over the head with a cudgel. The last thing he remembered was falling to his knees, and worrying about dirtying his clothes.

  When he regained consciousness, he discovered he’d been hooded and his hands had been tied to the back of the chair he was sitting on. Disoriented, dry-mouthed and with a headache so intense his whole skull seemed to be throbbing, he tried to work out how long he had been unconscious and where his attackers had taken him. It took him a few moments to realise how quiet the place was and a few more to sense how cold and empty it felt. Then the smell hit him; the ripeness of putrefying flesh and the metallic scent of fresh blood. At a guess, he decided, he was being held in the back room of a butcher’s shop or one of the underground slaughterhouses in the vicinity of the market.

  At the same time, when Pyke heard the clip-clop of footsteps and felt someone tug off his hood, he was still surprised to find himself looking up into the grinning face of one of the city’s most feared criminals.

  Up close, the first thing he noticed was the careful manner in which Field had groomed his facial hair; his elaborate handlebar moustache was oiled and coiled, his broad, mutton-chop sideburns had been freshly trimmed and the thick tufts of red hair on top of his head smelled vaguely of perfume. Indeed, with his unnaturally red lips and long, wispy eyelashes, there was something almost feminine about Field’s appearance, and it was only when you looked into his eyes, like two dark holes drilled into his skull, that you realised something was missing in him, something that you recognised in others that made them human.

  There were plenty of stories about Harold Field circulating around the slaughterhouses, tripe dressers, glue-boilers and butchers of Smithfield; some were true, others were distortions. But the very fact that everyone knew something about Field and that the something they knew invariably painted him in a nefarious light meant that he had achieved an almost mythical reputation in the area. Field owned and ran a slaughterhouse on the south side of Smithfield and was a butcher by profession. According to rumour, countless enemies had been killed in the vast underground chambers whose walls were covered in layer upon layer of putrefying fat; then dismembered and incinerated, to hide the evidence. Pyke’s own story about Field related to a t
ime he had been drinking in one of the man’s many gin palaces. This had been a little over a year ago and Field himself had been present, counting the takings in a back room. Instead of pot-boys, Field employed young women to serve his drinks, a popular development with many of his customers, but for one man in particular, a man who didn’t know of Field’s reputation, the temptation of so much young flesh had been too much to bear. Inebriated, he had tried to grope one of the servers and when she resisted, he’d punched her in the face. Field hadn’t witnessed the incident personally but someone, of course, told him about it. Still wearing his cutting apron, stained red with sheep’s blood, he’d casually walked across the room to where the man was sitting, produced a gleaming meat cleaver and swung it down on the table, severing the man’s hand from his arm just above his wrist. Pyke had watched Field walk back to the counter whistling a tune, as though nothing had happened. He had passed close to where Pyke was standing, the meat cleaver in his hand dripping with blood, and when he spotted Pyke, he’d stopped, because he knew Pyke both by reputation and from a previous encounter, and began a conversation about the mild weather. But it wasn’t the cleaver which had stuck in Pyke’s mind most of all: it had been Field’s eyes, clear, almost translucent, but without the slightest hint of life, like a frozen lake in the middle of winter.

  True to this memory, Field was carrying a cleaver now and he wiped the blade on his clean white apron.

  ‘Welcome to my humble slaughterhouse.’

  Pyke took a moment to check the bindings around his wrists. The cleaver, he knew, was intended to intimidate him — but knowing this didn’t make it any less intimidating. Field circled around his chair.

  ‘I apologise for the manner in which I extended my invitation.’ Field stared at him. ‘I wanted to have a talk, just the two of us, with no chance of anyone eavesdropping on our conversation.’