Kill-Devil and Water pm-3

by Andrew Pepper

  For a hundred yards, the tunnel was sufficiently tall and wide for him to walk unimpeded, but after that it became narrower and smaller, so much so that, eventually, he was forced down on to his hands and knees, the stream of piss and shit glistening in the greasy lantern light. He felt a rat scurry past his hands and leapt up, banging his head against the brick ceiling. About fifty or sixty yards farther on, the tunnel expanded again, allowing him back on to his feet, and he followed its course for another ten minutes. There was a nest of rats ahead of him and Pyke panned through the soil to find something to throw at them. In the end, he found a rusty piece of metal and hurled it at the quivering mass of fur. Shrieks momentarily filled the tunnel and then the rats scurried off deeper into the darkness.

  Fifty yards farther on, the tunnel widened again, and Pyke noticed a flight of steps cut into the wall; he decided to follow them. At the top, he found himself in what looked to be some kind of underground crypt or cellar, a large room with brick walls and a high ceiling. Placing the lantern on the floor, he looked around him and spotted a makeshift bed and a rotten table and chair in one corner, with a rusty copper pot perched on some charred embers.

  ‘Phillip?’

  His voice echoed around the cavernous chamber. He waited for a response but heard nothing.

  ‘ Phillip? ’

  Could someone really live in such a place?

  Moving towards the bed, Pyke’s wellington boots squelched through the slush.

  Next to the bed was an old wooden cabinet, guarded by a rusty padlock. He retrieved his jemmy and prised the door open. The cabinet was filled with a collection of glass jars, each one filled with liquid and some kind of matter. He picked up one of them and took it over to the lantern. Two eyeballs floating in water stared back at him. The shock of it almost caused him to drop the jar. As he unscrewed the lid, the smell of vinegar was unmistakable. Pyke prodded one of the eyeballs with his finger and watched it sink down to the bottom of the jar then rise up to the surface again. It looked as harmless as a hard-boiled egg. Taking the lantern across to the cabinet, he found another four jars, each with two eyeballs in them. Bile licked the back of his throat. Even the thought of what he might be looking at made Pyke feel weak. Something darted through the mud, a rat perhaps; the suddenness of the movement startled him and the jar slipped through his fingers, shattering on the ground. Bending over, Pyke picked up one of the stranded eyeballs and cupped it in his hand. It felt cold and slimy, not quite real.

  ‘Phillip?’

  He completed a brief search of the room but found nothing else of significance; he left the eyeballs where he’d found them.

  Having retraced his steps down into the tunnel, he decided to push on rather than turn around, to see where the tunnel led. He didn’t doubt that he’d just found Phillip Malvern’s living quarters but he tried not to jump to any conclusions. Given what he had just seen, though, it was hard not to. Had Phillip Malvern killed Mary Edgar, Lucy Luckins and perhaps others? The evidence, or what he’d seen in the jars, seemed to speak for itself.

  Ahead, he saw something, a large, unmoving object silhouetted against the ooze. Moving towards it, he brought the lantern up to his eyes, already fighting off a queasy feeling in his stomach.

  ‘Phillip?’

  Now he could see the outline of someone’s shoulders and also their head. He also saw a swarm of rats jostling for position around the corpse. Without thinking what he was doing, he ran at the rats, shouting. They dispersed as soon as they saw him. Putting the lantern down in the soil, Pyke turned the body over, expecting to see the weather-beaten face of an old man. In fact, it was hard to tell whether the corpse was male or female, such was the extent of the decomposition. In the end, though, he decided it was a woman. What little skin remained on the face was soggy and bloated and had been gnawed by rats. But it was the two eye sockets which drew his attention; empty holes that looked back at him where the eyeballs had once been. Removing the handkerchief from his mouth, Pyke turned away from the corpse and retched.

  A while later, he summoned up the strength to give the corpse a more thorough examination. One of the hands was buried in the soil and it was only after he’d excavated it that he noticed the ring; a silver ring adorned by a dirty amethyst stone bearing a serpent motif. He’d seen the same one on Bessie Daniels’s finger. He brought the lantern closer but the corpse was too decomposed for him to make a positive identification, so he turned his attention back to the ring. Without question, it was the one he’d seen Bessie Daniels wearing while she’d posed for Crane’s daguerreotypes. In itself, Pyke knew that the ring wasn’t conclusive proof that the corpse was, in fact, Bessie Daniels but for the moment there wasn’t any other apparent explanation for the ring’s presence on the corpse’s finger. Now, since much of the flesh had decomposed, the ring slipped off her finger with ease.

  The last time he had seen Bessie, she’d smiled at him and giggled, under the influence of laudanum. Now she looked like a carcass you might come across in Field’s slaughterhouse. He’d had a chance to help her and hadn’t taken it. Now she was dead. That was all he could think about as he retraced his path along the tunnel.

  Back on Dowgate Hill, he took the twine, tied one end of it to a post and let it unravel as he walked northwards along the narrow street, away from the river, in the direction of the Bank of England. Crossing Cannon Street, he continued towards the Bank, eventually passing Mansion House on his right before stepping out on to Cornhill. The ball of twine had nearly unravelled completely. Pyke crossed the road, walked right the way up to the Bank’s outer wall and cut the twine with his teeth, letting the remnants fall to the ground. From there, he retraced his path to the river, gathering up the twine as he went.

  At the mouth of the tunnel, Pyke tied one end of the twine around one of the legs of the wharf and set off in the same direction he’d headed in earlier, allowing the twine to spool through his hands as he went. It ran out before he’d reached the steps leading up to Malvern’s chamber. At the exact spot where the twine ended, he inspected the brickwork above him, moving forward inch by inch, looking for any gaps or loose bricks.

  It took him half an hour of painstaking scrutiny to find what he was looking for: a few loose bricks. Once he’d prised them out, he was staring at a hole almost the same size as he was.

  It was four in the afternoon by the time the driver of the hackney carriage dropped Pyke outside Fitzroy Tilling’s house, and already darkness was beginning to gnaw at the edges of the plum-coloured sky. It had been a cooler afternoon and there was a hint of rain in the air, the first drops since Pyke had returned from the West Indies.

  Pyke had washed in a tub in the back yard of his house and had changed his clothes, but he could still smell the raw sewage on his skin and inside his nostrils.

  Tilling answered the door as soon as Pyke knocked. His thinning hair was damp with perspiration and the worry lines on his forehead suggested that the news wasn’t good.

  In the front room, an old ginger cat was asleep on one of the chairs and it was joined by a younger cat, slim, with sleek grey fur.

  Shrugging apologetically, Tilling mumbled, ‘You have a child, I have two cats,’ as he poured them both a gin. There was something warmer about Tilling’s manner, as though their recent disagreements — and the way in which Pyke had betrayed him — had, for the time being, been put to one side.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I tracked down Lord Bedford’s butler. He was frightened of something but eventually I managed to get the truth from him.’ Tilling tipped back his gin, the spirit barely touching the sides of his throat. ‘It seems you were right about Mary Edgar staying with Bedford. The butler confirmed it, after I’d threatened him with prison if he didn’t cooperate.’

  ‘But that’s good news, isn’t it?’ Pyke said, still trying to make sense of Tilling’s sombre expression.

  ‘I found him in St Albans. I was going to bring him back to London and take him to see Mayne. But he gave me
the slip before we could board the stagecoach. Said he needed to go for a piss. I looked everywhere for him but couldn’t find him. He was scared of me, but he was definitely more frightened of someone else.’

  ‘You think he knows who killed Bedford?’

  ‘I asked him; he swore he didn’t. But he knows something.’

  Pyke absorbed this news, trying to work out what it could mean. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘I went to see Mayne, told him what I’d found out from the butler.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘My word on its own is not enough. Even with the butler’s corroboration, it wouldn’t be sufficient to earn Morel-Roux a reprieve. Mayne told me that unless I could find some hard evidence proving Morel-Roux was set up, he won’t be able to intervene and take the matter to the Home Secretary.’

  ‘So an official pardon is out of the question.’

  Tilling’s stare was listless. ‘It looks very much that way.’

  ‘In which case Morel-Roux will be executed first thing on Monday morning.’ It was already Saturday afternoon.

  Tilling stared down into the empty glass.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ Pyke looked directly at him. ‘Do you believe Morel-Roux murdered Bedford?’

  ‘ Me? What I believe isn’t important right now. It’s what can be proved.’

  Pyke nodded, as if this were the response he had been expecting. ‘The question is what we’re prepared to do about it.’

  ‘What can we do? Our hands are tied.’

  ‘Are they?’

  Tilling lifted up the sleeping cats, sat down in the armchair and rearranged them on his lap. He motioned for Pyke to sit in the other chair. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Could you arrange a visit to Morel-Roux’s cell tomorrow night, under the guise of trying to elicit a last-minute confession?’

  ‘Isn’t that the job of the ordinary?’

  ‘What I meant to ask was whether you could get me into the prison so I could talk to him.’

  ‘Out of the question.’ Tilling licked his lips. ‘How would I do that?’

  ‘You could always requisition a constable’s uniform for me. I could be your assistant.’

  Tilling shrugged, evidently not delighted by this prospect. ‘It’s possible, I suppose, but what good would talking to him serve?’

  ‘If you can get me into the prison, I’ll take care of the rest.’

  ‘The rest?’ But Pyke could see that Tilling was beginning to understand what he was suggesting. ‘Oh, no. God, no. They’d hang you if they caught you. Me, too, if I was stupid enough to help you.’

  ‘If Morel-Roux did kill Bedford and Mary Edgar, I’ll force a confession out of him. If he didn’t, an innocent man is going to die unless we do something. I can’t sit around and wait for it to happen.’

  For his part, Pyke had gone over and over the evidence in his head and he couldn’t see any reason why Morel-Roux would have murdered both Lord Bedford and Mary Edgar. And why would he have killed her in such a grotesque fashion?

  ‘It just isn’t possible to break into the prison and help a man to escape. Anyway, he’ll be under constant supervision.’

  ‘There is a way. There’s always a way.’

  ‘You’ve actually given this matter some thought, haven’t you?’ Tilling stared at him, incredulous.

  ‘I won’t deny it’s risky. And you’ll do well to come out of it with your position in the New Police still intact.’

  ‘What about the risk you’re running? You have a young lad who depends on you. I just have a couple of cats,’ Tilling said, stroking the ginger one’s ears. Pyke could hear it purring from across the room.

  He walked over to the window and stared out towards the heath. He’d always liked the view from Tilling’s front room. ‘What if I could offer you something by way of recompense — something that would make you look good in the eyes of your peers?’ He turned around to face Tilling.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Jemmy Crane wrapped up in a nice little box with a ribbon tied around it.’

  ‘You’ll have to be more specific.’

  ‘All right.’ Pyke took a deep breath. ‘What if I told you that Crane had managed to find a way into the Bank of England’s bullion vault via an old sewer tunnel that runs directly beneath it?’

  That made Tilling sit up and take notice. ‘That’s why you asked me about the Bank of England yesterday?’

  ‘It will happen some time tomorrow night, I’d guess, as people gather for the hanging. Certainly before the bank opens for business on Monday morning.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Tilling muttered. He stood up abruptly, spilling both of the cats and his empty glass of gin on to the floor. ‘Jesus,’ he said again, shaking his head. ‘You’d better sit down and tell me what you’ve found out.’

  ‘So you’re interested?’

  Tilling took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. ‘Of course I’m interested. The question is what do we do about it.’

  Pyke waited for a moment. ‘You need to call a meeting of all of the guards in the governor’s office first thing tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Then what?’ Tilling still seemed shocked by Pyke’s revelation.

  ‘Then you work out how you’re going to set a trap for Crane and his men.’

  Later that night, after he had arrived home, Pyke looked in on Felix and watched him sleep, an ache building in his gut. The idea of not being part of his life, of not seeing him grow up to be a man, made Pyke feel so ill at ease that he came within a whisker of calling off his plans.

  What did he really care about the Swiss valet anyway?

  As he passed in and out of sleep, his dreams took him back to Jamaica and, later, while it was still dark outside, he lay in his bed, listening to himself breathe. Images drifted through his mind like fast-moving clouds. He’d seen something in his dream; something significant. Drawing air into his lungs, he tried to relax, tried to remember what it was, but it wouldn’t come to him. Lying still, he closed his eyes and let his mind go blank. Later, just as he was drifting back to sleep, he heard a voice call out to him. Whatever happens, don’t think badly of me. I don’t think I could bear it if you thought badly of me.

  But there was another voice, too, and almost at once he realised it belonged to Harriet Alefounder.

  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.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  As he was crossing the street, a carriage came to a halt in front of him, almost blocking his path. The door swung open and Pyke found Harold Field pointing a pistol at his chest. Matthew Paxton, Field’s second-in-command, held a brass-cannoned blunderbuss in both hands and grinned.

  Pyke had just returned from the tunnel that ran under the bullion vault at the Bank of England and his trousers and boots smelled of decomposing flesh and faeces.

  ‘Get in, Pyke.’ Putting a cigar to his lips, Field inhaled, opened his mouth slightly and let the smoke drift out through the open glass. ‘Save my friend here the ignominy of having to kill you in broad daylight.’

  Pyke did as he was told and sat down next to Paxton. The carriage moved forward and Field pulled up the glass.

  ‘I was under the impression I’d paid off my debt,’ Pyke said, trying to keep his tone measured.

  ‘After your wilful destruction of Crane’s shop — which on a personal level I applaud, by the way — I couldn’t run the risk of you disrupting the man’s plans any further.’

  ‘Why? Are the two of you partners now?’

  ‘Reluctant ones, perhaps. Let’s just say we’ve arrived at a necessary agreement.’ Field sniffed the air in the carriage. ‘Is that you, bringing your stink into my domain?’

  Pyke ignored the question. ‘Necessary for whom?’

  ‘For Crane, of course. When he discovered I had his mistress in my possession, let’s just say he was persuaded to accept my terms.’

 
; Pyke felt his stomach jolt. ‘You’ve got Elizabeth Malvern?’ It explained why he’d found her front door unhinged and her house ransacked.

  ‘I believe I might have you to thank for that,’ Field said nonchalantly, inspecting the end of his cigar.

  ‘You had someone follow me.’

  ‘And you didn’t let me down. I’m told you spent a fair amount of time in her company.’ Field blew smoke into Pyke’s face and smiled. ‘I hear she has a rather… unusual sexual appetite — that she likes it hard and violent. I’m very much looking forward to satisfying her wishes.’

  Pyke lunged at Field but, before he was out of his seat, Paxton had brought the end of the blunderbuss up to his throat.

  ‘If you move again, my young friend here will pull the trigger.’ Field took the cigar and rammed the burning ash down on to Pyke’s knuckles.

  Pyke grunted rather than screamed, even though the pain was excruciating.

  Field was just a few feet from his face, his oiled whiskers shining in the half-light of the carriage. ‘I have to say, I’m a little disappointed in you, Pyke. I thought we understood each other perfectly.’

  Pyke tried not to let the pain, and a sense of panic, affect his thinking. ‘Bessie Daniels is dead. I think Crane killed her and tossed her away like a piece of rubbish.’

  Field’s stare was cold and lifeless. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I really am. She was a good girl. I’ll make sure her family are taken care of.’

  In spite of his predicament, Pyke couldn’t help himself. ‘That’s it? Once she’d been sold to Crane, you used her, put her in even more danger than she was already in and then you sat back and let her be sacrificed?’