Kill-Devil and Water pm-3

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘What kind of a man is he?’

  ‘That would depend on who you’re asking.’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  ‘To a complete stranger, I’d say he was ambitious and hard working.’

  That made Pyke smile. ‘I think I understand.’ He sat forward on his chair. ‘What about Mary Edgar?’

  Harper’s expression remained unchanged. ‘What about her?’

  ‘You do know who I’m talking about, then.’

  The big man’s eyes never once left Pyke’s face. ‘This is a small community, sir. People tend to know each other.’

  ‘But did… do you know her in particular?’ Pyke waited, hoping Harper hadn’t noticed his slip.

  A short silence hung between them. ‘Perhaps I should ask why you’re so interested in these people.’

  Pyke considered telling him the truth but didn’t yet know whether he could be trusted. ‘If I said I was an old friend, would you believe me?’

  ‘No, but I’m curious none the less. You do know Mary Edgar sailed for London about three months ago?’

  ‘And Pemberton arranged her passage.’

  The newspaperman frowned. ‘Pemberton?’

  ‘I’m told he saw her off at the wharf.’

  ‘Pemberton might have made the arrangements but Charles Malvern would have been there to see her off.’

  Pyke tried not to show too much interest but felt his skin prickle with excitement. ‘So Charles Malvern and Mary Edgar are attached?’

  ‘Engaged to be married, as far as I know,’ Harper said.

  ‘And Charles is Silas’s son?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Briefly he assimilated this new piece of information. He wondered whether it explained why Elizabeth Malvern had sent Crane and his men to try to frighten Sobers and Mary Edgar into fleeing the city. He certainly couldn’t see Silas Malvern welcoming Mary into his family with open arms. But it raised other questions, too. If Mary had been engaged to Charles Malvern, why had she taken a room in a lodging house on the Ratcliff Highway? And why had she been dallying with Alefounder?

  ‘I was told Silas’s daughter, Elizabeth Malvern, had sailed for this part of the world.’ By Pyke’s calculations, she would have left two or possibly three weeks before him, and if she’d come by steamer, she should have been there for a number of weeks already.

  ‘Not as far as I’m aware.’ Harper’s elbows were resting on the desk. He was trying to appear relaxed but Pyke could see the tension in his shoulders.

  ‘Are you certain about that?’

  ‘You want her, ask for her up at Ginger Hill.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Pyke said, still trying to work out whether he liked the big newspaperman. ‘It can’t have been easy for people to take, a mulatto girl being engaged to a rich white planter.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘I’m guessing his family have objections, too. The father, for example. You knew him when he was here?’

  ‘Not personally.’ Harper’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘I wouldn’t think you’d be one of their supporters.’

  ‘Who said I was?’

  ‘Then what’s to stop us from having a private chat?’

  But Harper was rubbing his chin and looking at Pyke with ill-concealed suspicion. ‘You know something? This conversation is beginning to make me feel uncomfortable. So either you tell me what you want and why you’re here or I ask you to leave.’

  Pyke nodded. ‘All right.’

  From his desk, the newspaperman produced a bottle of rum and two glasses. He filled them with the murky spirit and pushed one of them across the desk. Pyke took it, closed his eyes and swallowed the rum in a single gulp. The fiery liquid burned the sides of his throat. Harper laughed when he saw Pyke shudder. ‘Most white folk take it with water,’ he said, still grinning.

  ‘Kill-devil and water.’

  The words hung in the air. Pyke thought about McQuillan’s claim that ‘kill-devil’ had been some kind of code word used by Mary Edgar and Arthur Sobers.

  ‘That’s right,’ Harper said, eventually. ‘So what were you about to tell me?’

  Pyke started with news of Mary Edgar’s murder and proceeded with a summary of his investigation to date. He left nothing out, apart from Alefounder’s involvement with the dead woman and the fact that the sugar trader would shortly be arriving in Falmouth. He also didn’t say anything about his suspicions regarding Elizabeth Malvern or indeed about the manner of Mary Edgar’s death; for now, this was something he wanted to keep to himself. When he’d said all there was to say, Pyke took a sip of the fresh glass of rum Harper had poured him then swore the newspaperman to silence.

  ‘I didn’t know Mary Edgar personally but I’m sorry she’s dead. Like you said, she was a beauty.’ Harper hesitated, not quite meeting Pyke’s gaze. ‘Do you know who killed her?’

  This time it was Pyke’s turn to be reticent. He tried to swat a fly that had landed on his arm.

  ‘What I meant to ask was why, given she was killed in London, have you made the trip all the way out here?’

  This was also a question Pyke wasn’t prepared to answer. Instead, he waited for a moment and said, ‘I wonder whether Charles Malvern knows his fiancee has been murdered.’

  Harper poured himself another rum. ‘I publish a daily newspaper and I hadn’t heard about it. But someone might have written him a letter, his father or sister…’

  Or someone might have travelled from England to break the news to him in person…

  ‘Tell me about the father.’

  ‘At one time Silas Malvern was the largest slave-owner in the county. About four or five years ago, just after the first emancipation act, he decided to move to England. Perhaps he saw the writing on the wall. In any case, he sold everything but Ginger Hill and moved to England with his daughter Elizabeth.’

  ‘And Charles stayed here?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What kind of man is he?’

  ‘Silas or Charles?’

  ‘Silas.’

  Harper looked at him and shrugged. ‘Well, he wasn’t the worst of them, not by a long way.’ Then he rose to his feet and told Pyke he wanted to show him something, if Pyke had a few moments to spare.

  It had already fallen dark in the short space of time they had been talking, although the air was still warm and filled with the trilling of cicadas. They walked in silence along Market Street. It was noticeably quieter, eerily so, and when Pyke mentioned this to Harper, and asked why all the shutters and windows of the houses had been boarded up, Harper assured him that all would soon become clear.

  Pyke heard them before he saw them; a mob of men, white men, gathered in a semicircle around a fight or some kind of spectacle in front of the courthouse. It turned out not to be a fight, though. Harper, who for obvious reasons kept his distance, said, ‘This is Jamaican justice.’ A black man, stripped naked to his trousers, was lying on the ground chained to a rock. Next to him, a burly white man holding a whip was catching his breath, as were the crowd who had assembled to witness the spectacle. ‘The Custos found him guilty of theft, so this is his punishment.’ The next lash of the whip, when it finally came, made Pyke look away. The following made him wince; twenty-five lashes later, he wanted to be sick. The mob roared their approval at every one of them and by the end there was almost nothing left of the man’s back.

  ‘There’ll be retribution later,’ Harper said, as they made their way to a place that he’d euphemistically called ‘the hole’. ‘That’s why all the shutters have been closed. Once the white folk have all gone home, they’ll move in from the edge of town and untie the man you saw being whipped. You can smell the anger in the air. I wouldn’t go for a walk later, if I were you.’ Pyke noticed Harper had referred to the town’s black population as ‘they’.

  In fact, the ‘hole’ was not as euphemistically named as Pyke had imagined. The space had been dug into the ground and was covered by a roof made of corrugated
iron and bamboo. It was the only place in the town, as Harper later explained, where whites and blacks could mix without causing upset. Harper also said it served the cheapest and best rum. Pyke sat on an overturned crate while Harper bought the drinks at the counter. In spite of the late hour, the room was like a furnace and Pyke’s new cotton shirt was already damp with perspiration.

  ‘The fellow with the whip,’ Harper explained, after he’d put two glasses of rum filled to the brim down on the crate between them. ‘That was the Custos.’ When he saw Pyke didn’t understand the term, he clarified, ‘The chief magistrate.’

  ‘And the man being whipped — were the charges against him fair?’

  This made the big man laugh. ‘They reckon he stole two goats from a landowner near Martha Brae.’ Harper sat forward, his gigantic forearms resting on the crate, so that Pyke could smell the rum on his breath. ‘Actually, you know him, or know of him. Your friend Michael Pemberton made the accusation.’

  They sipped their rum. It was certainly more palatable than the drink Pyke had imbibed at Samuel’s place in the East End. ‘What had this man really done?’

  The newspaper proprietor considered Pyke’s question. ‘How much do you know about this island?’

  ‘I know the apprenticeship system was abolished two years ago.’ As Pyke understood it, this was a system introduced after slavery had been outlawed three or four years previously, mostly to appease the planters. Former slaves were ‘apprenticed’ to their masters for a period of time which, in effect, meant they had to work in conditions similar to slavery in order to ‘earn’ their freedom. Pyke had read that abuses were commonplace and the system had been almost as unpopular as slavery itself, or perhaps more so; under slavery those working on the estates had at least received medical care from trained doctors.

  ‘And how have your newspapers reported this emancipation?’ The irony was difficult to miss.

  ‘Are you saying nothing much has changed?’

  ‘Everything and nothing.’ Harper swallowed what remained of his rum and shuddered slightly. ‘You can’t put a price on a man’s freedom. I still remember the first day I bought my freedom; the air tasted cleaner, the sun shone more brightly, the sky was that much bluer. But the landlords still have all the power and they expect us to work on their estates for next to nothing.’ His eyes were shining. ‘Under slavery, they were obliged to provide housing and provision grounds so that we could grow our own food. These are places where folk have lived their entire lives, where their relatives and their ancestors are buried. Now, under this new system, the landlords are charging rents almost as high as the wages they’re prepared to pay. So it’s true, folk ain’t happy, and rightly so. The man you saw being whipped, Isaac Webb, was trying to do something about it. He’s organised a strike up at Ginger Hill — they’re refusing to bring in the harvest until their wage demands have been met — and now the dispute’s threatening to spread across the island.’

  Harper paused to wipe his face with a handkerchief. ‘You see, the cane’s ripe and ready to be harvested. If it ain’t cut down and pressed in the next week or so, the whole crop will be lost. Malvern’s workers know this and they’re holding out against going to the fields, hoping he’ll buckle and agree to pay them a fair wage.’ From nowhere, two more rums appeared on the table. Harper grinned.

  Pyke hadn’t finished the one in his hand and already felt a little drunk. ‘So Malvern, Pemberton, the Custos, there’s no difference between them?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ Harper picked up the full glass of rum and drank it in a single gulp. ‘The dispute started at Ginger Hill because they reckon he’s a soft touch.’ His eyes were a little bloodshot and his accent was stronger now, too. ‘Like I said, Silas wasn’t the worst of them and neither is his son.’

  Pyke took a sip of the next rum. Harper watched him, smiling. ‘But I heard Charles is looking to leave, sell up and join his fiancee in London, or at least that’s what his plans were before…’ Harper hesitated, suddenly not sure what to say. But there was a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. ‘In fact that’s who I thought you were, when you first walked through my door, asking questions about Pemberton and Mary Edgar.’

  ‘Who?’ Pyke asked, confused.

  ‘A potential buyer.’

  ‘A potential or a particular buyer?’

  ‘Malvern’s had lots of potential buyers over the past year and a half; all have pulled out. I’m told a gentleman from Antigua is expected here soon. I’m also told Malvern has high hopes for this one. He’s desperate to sell the estate. I have no idea how your news will affect his plans.’

  Pyke turned this information over in his mind, while Harper ordered another round of drinks. ‘You know this buyer’s name?’ he asked when Harper returned, this time carrying four glasses of rum between his calloused fingers.

  ‘Not off the top of my head but I can find out. Why you ask?’

  ‘This buyer is expected here soon. And if he’s coming all the way from Antigua, it isn’t likely anyone’s actually met him, is it?’

  ‘Exactly what I was thinking.’

  Later Pyke would wonder why the newspaperman had been so keen for him to do what they eventually agreed upon, but at the time they were both swept up on a giddy tide of rum.

  ‘What I still don’t understand is why, if Mary was killed in London, you came all this way to Jamaica.’

  Pyke noticed Harper had just called her ‘Mary’ but didn’t comment. ‘I came for the sunshine.’ He upended the glass into his mouth and shuddered involuntarily. ‘And the rum.’

  Harper’s bloodshot eyes contracted slightly and his smile curdled at the corners of his mouth. ‘You don’t look or act like a policeman. You should take that as a compliment, by the way.’

  ‘I’m not, but I was hired by a policeman to try to find out who killed Mary Edgar.’

  ‘Why?’

  Pyke went to finish the latest of his rums. He closed his eyes and the dark, unfamiliar room began to spin. ‘It’s a long story, but I used to be a Bow Street Runner.’

  ‘A Bow Street Runner, eh?’ Harper said it as if he knew what a Bow Street Runner was. ‘So you ever had to kill another man?’ As he said it, he tried to grin but the effort was stillborn.

  After Harper had guided him back to Mrs McAlister’s guest house on Seaboard Street, Pyke sat for a while on the veranda staring out at the ocean and listening to the waves breaking over the rocks. He felt more than pleasantly drunk, and as he sat there, listening to the cicadas and watching the stars dotted across the entire night sky, he almost didn’t know where he was, or what he was supposed to be doing. He also knew that sleep was beyond him and decided to walk, or stumble, along Seaboard Street as far as the courthouse. The men with torches who’d been there earlier had gone elsewhere but the man who’d been whipped, Isaac Webb, was still lying there chained to a rock. Pyke had a small bottle of rum that Harper had pressed into his hands when they’d left the hole, and he bent over Webb’s battered body and brought the bottle to his lips. The smell of the rum seemed to revive the man a little. Webb was lying on his front. His back, meanwhile, was criss-crossed with a lattice of raw and just about healed scars; clearly it wasn’t the first time he’d suffered such a punishment. He opened his mouth and Pyke wetted his lips with some of the rum. Just for a moment, he managed to lift up his head sufficiently to see who was doing this for him. He managed a smile and croaked, ‘T’anks, man.’ The smell of fresh blood, together with all the rum he’d consumed, made Pyke want to vomit. Pressing the bottle into Webb’s hand, Pyke stood up and looked around him, into the darkness. He noticed something move, someone; a group of people, in fact, edging towards him from the other side of the courthouse, their faces hidden by the darkness. It was only then that he remembered Harper’s warning and stepped away from Webb. He held up his hands, as though to distance himself from what had happened.

  The first stone hit him squarely in the chest and after that Pyke remembered running; not in any par
ticular direction and not to the relative safety of his guest house because the mob was blocking his path back along Seaboard Street. He just ran, and behind him he could hear shouts and the sound of people following him. He ran along one street and up another, where the row of houses came to an end. Then he followed the dirt track as it disappeared into a dense mass of unfamiliar trees and vines and went as far as the seashore, where he stopped and listened. Over his own panting he could hear the muffled sounds of his pursuers and saw that some of them were carrying machetes. Pyke quickly took off his boots and socks, pulled up his trousers and waded into the sea, navigating a path around a rocky promontory. The water was warm and the sand soft against his bare soles. He was sweating profusely but kept moving along the beach, and soon he couldn’t hear anything apart from the waves gently lapping against the sand and the mosquitoes buzzing in his ear. Using the moonlight to guide him, he followed the beach as far as it took him and stopped at a rocky peninsula. There was no one following him now, and everything was perfectly still. The chase had sobered him up a little but the rum had done something to his mind; shapes shifted in and out of focus. He felt disoriented. Up above him the sky was filled with more stars than he had ever seen before in his life. Staring up at them, Pyke thought about Felix and whether he would ever see his son again.

  FIFTEEN

  Pemberton’s office was located on the ground floor of a Georgian-style building on the corner of Victoria and Rodney Streets, across the track from the police station. The lower floor was built from stone and the upper floor from wood. The veranda, which ran along the front of the building, was supported by wooden columns and afforded the man who was sitting there a view across the ocean. Pyke called up, asking where he could find Michael Pemberton.

  ‘You’re looking at him,’ the man said, standing up and leaning against the wrought-iron railing. ‘And who might you be, sir?’ Even from a distance, Pyke could tell he cut an imposing figure; six and a half feet tall, broad, with well-developed shoulders, a wide neck and hairy, sunburnt forearms.