‘I’ll look into the matter, see what I can find. That’s all I can do.’
Morel-Roux flung himself at Pyke’s feet and wept with gratitude.
Pyke spent the afternoon looking for Arthur Sobers in the taverns, beer-shops, bake-houses and slop-shops of the Ratcliff Highway, to no avail. The possibility that they were now searching for a man who had killed twice — killed and mutilated two women in an identical manner — disturbed him more than he cared to admit, not least because it threw into doubt his notion that Mary Edgar had known her killer.
Sobers might be able to shed important light on Mary Edgar’s last days and, as such, Pyke needed to talk to him before the police did.
He had been labouring under the assumption that Mary had been killed because of something she’d done or someone she’d known, but perhaps she’d just been selected at random by the same man who’d killed Lucy Luckins. This possibility suggested that those who had known Mary — such as William Alefounder — must be innocent of her murder. He certainly needed to find out more about the sugar trader’s private life, and the work he did for the Vice Society. The fact that an agent from the Vice Society had tried to rescue Lucy Luckins from a life of prostitution could, of course, be a coincidence, but this link, or rather Alefounder’s possible involvement with both women, was, at present, the only thing that connected the two murders. One thing was clear: Lucy Luckins had been killed long before Mary Edgar. The mudlark had found her corpse floating in the Thames about six months ago.
Pyke ended his search for Sobers in Samuel’s place near the West India Docks, but from the look of it someone had already beaten him to it. Tables and benches had been overturned and broken, the counter had been pulled away from its fixing and bottles and glasses had been smashed. He found Samuel sitting on his own, bewildered, trying to make sense of what had happened.
‘The Peelers came here looking for the same man you asked about,’ Samuel said, when he saw Pyke standing there.
‘They did all this?’
‘Thought I was lying when I told ’em I didn’t know Sobers or where to find him.’
‘How many of them?’
‘Ten, twelve. Tore the place apart.’ He looked around the room and shook his head. ‘Don’t need me to tell you that.’
‘They find anything?’
Samuel shook his head. ‘I told you I don’t know this Sobers fellow. Who is he anyhow? What’s he done?’
‘I’d say the police reckon he killed the woman I was asking you about.’ Pyke noticed the bruise on Samuel’s cheek, a purple welt already the size of an orange. ‘Do you know the name of the man who did this to you?’
‘I heard one of ’em call him Pierce.’ Samuel frowned. ‘Why? You know him?’
‘Oh, I know him.’
‘Go on.’
‘I think he’s an arrogant, ambitious fool.’
Samuel took a swig of rum and passed it to Pyke. ‘In that case, I should buy you a drink.’
*
Pyke found Pierce in the atrium of the police building on Whitehall. He had just been talking to an elderly, smartly attired man in a high-chair. Pyke waited until the two porters had carried the old man out of the building before he approached the policeman.
‘Who do you want, Pyke?’
‘I hear you tore up Samuel’s place.’
Pierce regarded him with renewed interest. ‘You were there?’
‘You’re looking for the wrong man. Sobers didn’t kill Mary Edgar.’
‘You know that for a fact?’
Pyke looked at the clerks and police constables shuffling past him in the direction of the watch-house. ‘Did you know Lord Bedford had a mistress?’
Pierce stared at him, blood vivid in his cheeks. ‘What? Now you want to take over that investigation, too. Is there no end to your arrogance?’
‘I asked a straightforward question.’
‘You want a word of advice, sir?’ He moved closer and whispered, ‘Forget about your absurd little theories, go home, put a pistol in your mouth and pull the trigger.’
‘Ask the butler.’
‘Ask him what?’
‘Ask him about the mistress.’
‘Are you trying to tell me how to do my job?’
Pyke met his stare and shrugged. ‘Someone needs to. Might as well be me.’
Later that night, after Jo and Felix had cooked him a roast beef dinner, and Pyke had read Felix a chapter of Ivanhoe while Jo cleared the table, Pyke joined Jo in the kitchen and helped her wash the dishes.
‘That was a delicious meal,’ he said, taking a wet pan from her and drying it with a cloth. ‘Thank you.’ Godfrey employed a maid to clean the apartment but Jo hadn’t wanted to burden her with additional work.
‘I think Felix enjoyed himself.’
Pyke waited until Jo turned to hand him one of the pots and said, ‘And you?’
‘I had a good time, too.’ He had expected her to be flustered but she held his gaze and even smiled.
Pyke had once tried to kiss Jo, many years earlier, when she had been Emily’s servant and before he and Emily had married. Then his act had been foolish and impetuous, the product of his arrogance and loneliness, and she had rightly run away from him, though he suspected she had never told Emily.
‘For a while, after Emily died, and we still lived in the old hall, we were happy, weren’t we, just the three of us?’
‘And the servants.’
Pyke couldn’t help but smile. He had never liked the servants, the ones who’d revered Emily’s late father. He had never treated Jo as a servant, though. Not consciously, at least, and especially not after Emily’s death.
‘I thought about that time while I was in prison. It’s funny, you don’t realise something for what it is until it’s gone.’ He’d had a glass or two of wine with dinner and felt a little light headed.
Jo put down the glass she was washing and turned to face him. ‘I could see the problems you were getting yourself into, with the Chancery case and then some of the business ventures. You were reckless and you almost seemed to have given up. I didn’t say anything at the time, I didn’t speak my mind, and I’ve regretted it ever since. I still regret not being more of a support to you.’
For a moment Pyke was surprised by her boldness.
‘I don’t blame you for holding your tongue. In the mood I was in, if you’d tried to say anything to me, I would probably have dismissed you on the spot.’
He’d meant it as a joke but realised, too late, that he’d reminded her of the social gap that existed between them — and perhaps always would.
When she didn’t reply, he smiled and added, ‘I didn’t mean anything by that. I’m just a boy from the rookery.’
But whatever had been lingering in the air between them evaporated in that moment and Jo’s manner suddenly became more formal. ‘Please forgive me for speaking so bluntly to you,’ she said, stiffly.
‘Jo, I like it when you speak to me that way. I welcome it. Let’s go through to the front room and have another glass of wine.’
‘I’d like to,’ she said, not meeting his eyes, ‘but I have an early start tomorrow and I’ll need a clear head for it.’
TWELVE
It took Pyke almost two hours to travel down to Richmond by hackney coach and by the time he was dropped off on the green, the clouds had cleared and the sky was an unbroken vista of varnished blue. Now they were ten miles out of the city, the air felt clean and birds darted among the oak and birch trees that lined the green. A butcher’s boy carrying a tray of meat directed him towards the Alefounder residence, an impressive Palladian mansion on the east side of the green surrounded by an iron fence. By the front gate, a weeping willow had just blossomed and the air was perfumed with a scent that reminded him of a woman he’d once known.
Pyke found Harriet Alefounder tending to her flowers in a greenhouse at the back of the main house. She was a tall, distinguished woman, perhaps a couple of years older than her husband,
her greying hair concealed under a straw bonnet. Her gaunt shoulders were covered by a woollen shawl and she was wearing gardening gloves. When Pyke explained why he was there — that he was investigating the ‘unexplained’ deaths of two women and needed to talk to her about her husband — he expected her to call out to her butler and have him removed from the property. But instead she took off her bonnet, rearranged her hair, which had been tied up in a knot, and said that in that case they had better retire inside where they would be more comfortable. As they made their way from the greenhouse to the doors at the rear of the house she added, ‘You have to understand my husband isn’t a bad man,’ as though such an explanation were necessary. And then, ‘Of course, you know that William and I no longer live under the same roof.’ Pyke hadn’t known this but nodded as though he did and followed her into the house.
Given what Pyke had already been told about Alefounder’s roving eye, his wife’s story was, in one sense, entirely without surprises. He’d had a string of affairs in their nineteen-year marriage and she, for the most part, had either turned a blind eye or allowed him to do what he needed to do, apparently secure in the belief that he loved her and would never leave her. This proved to be true until he met a woman called Elizabeth Malvern. The wife explained that she hadn’t known about the affair at the time and had only found out about it when William asked her for a divorce.
Until this point in her story, Alefounder’s wife hadn’t struck Pyke as a particularly bitter or spiteful person, but when she started to talk about the affair, and about the other woman — the harlot as she called her — her whole demeanour changed and the reason why she’d agreed to talk to him became apparent. She was angry and wanted the chance to vent her spleen. Pyke could well understand the source of this bitterness — her husband’s head suddenly being turned by a younger, prettier, flirtatious rival — and he was surprised to learn that Alefounder had, in the end, agreed to end the affair and return home. Their domestic life was good after that, she explained, for another year or so, and as far as she knew, he hadn’t tried to continue seeing ‘the Malvern harlot’. Everything was fine, until the most recent trip to Jamaica — apparently he undertook these annually to arrange the purchase and shipment of sugar directly from the plantations. When he returned, his whole manner had changed. He was cold, moody and distant, she explained, and refused to talk about the problem. This continued for a number of months and things had finally come to a head within the last month. Without explanation, he had moved out of the house, taking an apartment in the city, and then had demanded a divorce, which she’d refused to give him. That conversation, the last time they’d spoken, had taken place about three weeks earlier. But Harriet Alefounder’s story had one final twist.
Hurt, angry and bewildered, she had followed him in a carriage from his place of work to an apartment on The Strand. After waiting for a period of time, she followed him into the building. She’d found his apartment easily enough. All she had to do was ask one of the other residents. At the door she’d listened and heard a female voice laughing. It was the laughing which had cut her the deepest, she explained. She had paced up and down the pavement outside the apartment building for the rest of the evening. Eventually the front door opened, and that was when she saw them, arm in arm: her husband and a pretty mulatto girl. She’d fled The Strand without being spotted.
Outwardly Pyke tried to remain calm, but inwardly his heart was hammering against his ribcage. This was the confirmation he’d been looking for and it had come from the unlikeliest of sources. Of course, it didn’t prove anything more than that Alefounder had been sleeping with Mary Edgar, and perhaps had been since his last visit to Jamaica, but it gave Pyke enough to warrant another conversation with the trader.
He noted down the address on The Strand that Harriet Alefounder had mentioned and waited. ‘That woman — Mary Edgar — was murdered. Her corpse was found last week on the Ratcliff Highway.’
Stiffening her back Harriet Alefounder looked at him, dry eyed, and sniffed. ‘Do you expect me to say I’m sorry?’
‘She was strangled and then her eyes were gouged out.’ It would be in the newspapers soon enough and Pyke wanted to force some kind of reaction from her, but she barely even blinked.
‘You can’t expect that William could be involved in such a business?’
‘I don’t know what to think.’ He stared into her proud face and wondered what she’d had to sacrifice to attain such a level of hardness.
‘You mentioned two women had been killed,’ she said, as if they were chatting about recipes for jam.
Quickly he told her about Lucy Luckins and her possible connection to the Society for the Suppression of Vice.
‘That was how he claimed he first met the Malvern woman.’ Harriet Alefounder’s voice quivered slightly as she said the name.
Pyke considered this new piece of information. ‘If I wanted to talk to her, do you know where I might find her?’
‘Her father owns a big mansion in Belgravia — he made his money from sugar in the West Indies. As I remember it, she owned a much smaller house near Hyde Park.’ She shut her eyes. ‘Curzon Street, I think. I remember following my husband there, too.’
Later, as Pyke prepared to leave, she followed him to the front door and stood there for a moment, contemplating the willow tree through the window. ‘You must think me a heartless, disloyal creature but in my own way I still care for him deeply. And to answer your question, I don’t believe he’s capable of hurting anyone, certainly not in the manner you suggested.’
Pyke had his hand on the brass door handle when she added, ‘But you know what hurt me the most, when I saw the two of them walking arm in arm along The Strand? I was a long way away and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be but I swear there was a little of her, of the Malvern woman, in this mulatto girl.’ And when he looked up, her lips were trembling and her eyes had filled with tears.
The following afternoon, Pyke found Felix and the older boy on the pavement outside Godfrey’s apartment.
The older lad was teaching Felix a game using three coins. He had a malnourished face, with red rims around his eyes and yellow skin from a poor diet. When he saw Pyke, he adjusted his billycock hat, pulled up his knee-breeches and put the coins into the pocket of his monkey coat. He didn’t seem surprised to see Pyke and even managed to hold his gaze for a while.
‘Go back into the apartment and leave us for a while,’ Pyke said to Felix.
‘Eric was just teaching me a trick…’
‘Go inside now and wait for me there,’ Pyke said, looking at the lad, Eric, rather than at Felix.
‘You can’t tell me what to do,’ Felix said, his voice quivering with defiance.
Pyke turned to him and immediately Felix scuttled across the pavement and up into the apartment. ‘I want you to leave my son alone,’ he said, refocusing his attention on Eric.
‘I can come and go as I please, cully,’ the boy said with a sneer. ‘You don’t own the street.’
‘I see you outside my uncle’s apartment again, I’ll come and find you, and when I do, you won’t even be able to hobble home.’
But Eric didn’t appear to be cowed. ‘Your boy’s a bit green, ain’t he? Wouldn’t last a week on the street.’
Pyke took a step towards him. ‘Anything happens to my son, God help me, I’ll rip your head from your neck with my bare hands.’
‘Why should I listen to a pathetic old jailbird like you? Felix told me ’bout you. Put inside for not paying your debts.’ He stood his ground but his face had turned white and his hands were trembling.
‘Did my son tell you that?’ Pyke could feel the anger gathering inside him.
Eric saw he’d unsettled Pyke and grinned. ‘That and a whole lot more about what a rotten father you are.’
For a moment it felt as if he’d swallowed a handful of nails. Pyke didn’t look up at the window of the apartment but he could sense he was being watched.
‘I’m going to
count to five and if you’re not gone by the time I finish, I won’t be held accountable for my actions.’
But Eric folded his arms and remained where he was. ‘Who knows? In time, and with the right guidance, maybe Felix would make a good dipper.’
Pyke grabbed him by his throat and lifted him up off his feet. Choking, Eric tried to wriggle free from his grasp but Pyke held firm. He heard someone rapping on the window and looked up to see Godfrey and Jo. Then one of the neighbours appeared from their apartment and ordered Pyke to let the boy go. Pyke opened his hand and Eric fell to the pavement, holding his neck as though it were broken.
‘Given I’m used to eating horse or very possibly mule, this is a most welcome change indeed, sir,’ Saggers said, his mouth half open so Pyke could see the chunks of meat churning around inside. In front of him was the remains of a beefsteak that a few minutes ago had been as big as the plate itself. They were sitting at a table in the corner of the Cafe de l’Europe on Haymarket, well away from the rest of the early evening diners, as if to underline the fact that they didn’t belong in a place where the starched linen tablecloths were a brilliant white and the cutlery alone was worth more than Saggers earned in a month. ‘It’s not Halnaker’s venison but it’s a most acceptable cut of meat,’ he said, picking up the steak with his hands and gnawing the last bits of meat from the bone.
Pyke poured him another glass of claret. Saggers had already told him that Spratt, the editor, had refused to publish the story about the second body without corroboration from the surgeon, Mort, but that as yet he hadn’t been able to track the man down.
‘I tried to get George Luckins to go on the record about his daughter and even offered him a few groats for his effort but the man turned me down flat, said he didn’t want to profit from his daughter’s murder.’ Fat dripped down his chin. ‘Can you believe some people?’
Pyke didn’t know whether to laugh or despair. ‘So tell me what you’ve managed to find out about the West India Dock Company.’ This was the real reason Pyke had agreed to take Saggers to dinner.
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