Kill-Devil and Water

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘And how will I recognise her?’

  ‘Medium height, blonde hair, well-proportioned figure. She’d be quite attractive if it wasn’t for her hare-lip.’

  Pyke looked around at the blood-splattered walls. ‘What if I found a way of paying you back the money I owe you?’

  ‘I’m afraid that option is no longer available to you, Pyke.’

  ‘And if I decided to carry on with my life and pretend we’d never had this conversation?’

  ‘Then you would be dead within a week. It’s as simple as that.’ Field put his hand on Pyke’s shoulder. In another context, it could almost have been a fatherly gesture. ‘It wouldn’t give me any real pleasure to have you killed, but I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it either. You’re a resourceful fellow and I need your help. Think of it that way. I’ll expect to hear from you by the weekend.’

  EIGHT

  Pyke must have been out for longer than he’d thought because it was almost light when he emerged from Field’s slaughterhouse. It wasn’t a market day and the giant field was almost deserted. Even so, the air smelled of the mephitic fumes produced by the nearby glue renderers and tripe-boilers. Thankfully it hadn’t rained in the night and the ground underfoot wasn’t the usual slush of mud and manure. For a moment, he stopped and looked out across the expanse of open space, a thin layer of mist rising up from the ground. This was the place where, five years earlier, Emily had died in his arms; where a rifleman’s bullet had torn a hole in her throat and the blood, the life, had leaked out of her. He looked over towards the exact spot where it had happened and tried to will some kind of sentiment but none would come. It didn’t seem to matter who was to blame any more - Emily was dead and she wasn’t coming back. That was the only thing that mattered. In the distance, a stray dog trotted through the mist, its head and tail just visible above the layer of white. It was strange, in a way, that he had chosen to live only a few streets from the place she’d been killed, but somehow he felt comforted by this proximity. It was also where his father had fallen under the boots of a stampeding mob and where his ex-mistress had been stabbed in the stomach while he slept next to her. That he, of all of them, should still be breathing seemed more than wrong, and even though he didn’t believe in the existence of an all-powerful deity, he often wondered whether fate had somehow conspired to let him live while those he cared for, those he loved, perished.

  As the sun peeked over the roofs of the buildings, Pyke checked to make sure the charcoal etching was still in his pocket. He closed his eyes and felt the stiff breeze against his face. In his mind, a shadowy figure was hunched over Mary Edgar’s body with a cloth, liberally splashing it with rum. He worked quietly and methodically, cleaning every speck of dirt from her dark skin. When he was done, he took a scalpel and knelt down next to her face, drops of perspiration dripping on to the purple welt on her neck. The first incision sliced into the skin around her eye, the blade lodging deep into the bone. Calm nerves and a steady hand were needed. After a few minutes, he had cut out one of the eyeballs and wrapped it up in a clean handkerchief. Ten minutes later, the other eyeball had been extracted ...

  Pyke felt something brush past his leg. He looked down to see the same dog he’d noticed earlier, padding towards a gas-lamp. Perhaps he was wrong that no one else cared about Mary Edgar. Maybe Pierce was just as committed to apprehending and punishing her murderer as he was. But as the sun cast its pale light over the field, it was hard not to think he was as alone in his task as Mary Edgar had been in her death. In that sense, it felt as if the two of them were joined.

  Pyke was waiting on the pavement in front of Godfrey’s apartment when Jo and Felix appeared, a little after nine o’clock. Felix was dressed for school and Jo wore a woollen shawl over her cotton print dress. This time Felix’s greeting was a little less diffident than it had been either at Hatchard’s or the first time Pyke had shown up after his release from prison. And when he suggested that his son might miss school just this once, and proposed spending the morning together, the three of them, the lad sparked into life. By the time they’d walked to the zoological gardens in Regent’s Park, less than ten minutes from Godfrey’s apartment, Felix had listed the numerous ways in which the malefactors from the Newgate Calendar had been punished by the state.

  ‘William Gregg, traitor, hanged at Tyburn, 1708; Jonathan Wild, hanged at Tyburn, 1725; Catherine Hayes, burned alive at Tyburn, 1726; Captain John Porteous, convicted of murder but killed by the mob in 1736; William Stroud, whipped through the streets of Westminster, 1752.’

  Even when they had paid their admission fee, and were moving between the various exhibits, Felix appeared less interested in the animals than in regaling Pyke with the exploits of the characters he’d read about.

  ‘Did you know that after Sawney Beane killed his victims, he quartered them, and then salted and pickled their flesh and ate it?’

  They were standing in front of the giraffe enclosure. Pyke glanced over at Jo, who gave him an exasperated shrug.

  ‘Come on, Felix, let’s walk over to the monkeys.’ He indicated to Jo that they would be back presently. She smiled and went to sit on a bench in front of the giraffes.

  ‘So why are you so interested in the stories from the Newgate Calendar?’ he asked, when they were alone. He put a gentle hand on the lad’s shoulder.

  ‘It was Uncle Godfrey’s idea. He told me that’s how you’d learned to read, when you were a boy.’ There was a mixture of defiance and admiration in his voice.

  ‘He did, did he?’ Pyke kept walking. ‘So tell me what you like about the stories, then.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you like the descriptions of the crimes or the fact that the bad men are always punished in the end?’

  ‘I suppose they did bad things and they deserve to be punished.’

  ‘But?’ Pyke waited.

  ‘I don’t know. Some of them I felt sorry for. Some of them I even liked. I wanted them to get away with it. But none of them ever did. They were all hanged in the end.’

  Pyke looked down at Felix whose face was rigid with concentration. He was surprised at how nuanced the boy’s understanding of the stories was.

  ‘They were all put to death to prove a point.’

  ‘What point?’

  ‘That crime doesn’t pay; that the laws of the land need to be obeyed and that the state is all-powerful.’

  ‘What’s the state?’

  ‘The government.’

  Felix considered this and then looked up at him. ‘You know what you said about the things in Uncle Godfrey’s book not being true? Were you lying to me?’

  ‘Why would I lie to you?’ Pyke bent over slightly, so he could see Felix’s face.

  ‘In the book, you did some very bad things.’

  ‘That character isn’t based on me. He isn’t based on anyone. He’s someone your Uncle Godfrey made up.’

  ‘Oh.’ Felix dug his hands into his pockets. Ahead of them, two monkeys were climbing up the side of the cage, but Felix didn’t seem to be too interested in them. ‘Why did you take Copper to live with you and not me?’

  For a moment, Pyke tried to think how Emily might have answered this question, but nothing came to him. The truth was actually simpler than this: she would have taken Felix with her. Briefly Pyke thought about the long, rickety staircase up to his garret, and the unsavoury figures who lived in the building, and the roughness of the general area. Clearly it was no place to bring up a child but it was also true that with the purse he’d won at the card table he could have rented a house or apartment in a better area. He tried to think of some way of explaining to Felix that he still didn’t feel quite ready to take on this responsibility again; that he didn’t yet trust himself to be the father he knew that Felix needed and yearned for.

  ‘The place I’m living in at the moment is too small for all of us. But soon we’ll be together again. I promise.’

  Felix stared at the monkeys for a while. Neither of the
m spoke.

  ‘The man I fought the other night was a coward and a drunkard. He tried to harm me, and he was hurting a woman.’

  ‘I saw the blood on your fists,’ Felix said.

  Pyke couldn’t tell whether he thought this was a good thing or not. He changed tack. ‘A woman has been killed and I’m trying to find the man or men who killed her. That’s what I do. Or what I used to do.’

  ‘And if you find the murderer, can I watch him hang at Tyburn tree?’ Felix’s eyes were gleaming.

  ‘They don’t hold executions at Tyburn any more.’

  ‘Newgate, then,’ Felix added, quickly.

  Pyke had wanted Felix to know what he was doing but now he felt uneasy about the direction in which the conversation was heading. He suggested that they go and find Jo, and Felix seemed to think this was a good idea.

  Back at the giraffe enclosure, Pyke sat down next to Jo while Felix went to inspect the animals in the cage. ‘He seems happier,’ she said, giving Felix a wave.

  ‘I know I’ve neglected my responsibilities ...’ He stopped, not sure what else to say. He didn’t want to make promises he couldn’t keep but, equally, he was beginning to see how his absence had affected the lad.

  ‘You don’t have to justify yourself to me.’ Jo turned around to face him. Her skin glowed in the morning sunlight.

  ‘It’s funny,’ he said, as though the connection between his fatherly responsibilities and Confessions was self-evident, ‘but I never wanted Godfrey to write that damned book in the first place.’

  It took her a few moments to realise what he was talking about. ‘Then why did you agree to help him?’

  ‘Because I owed him; because I gave him my word that I’d help him with his research; because he helped me when no one else would. I suppose it’s what families do.’ As he said this, he wondered whether Felix regarded Jo as family or not.

  She studied his expression for a short while. ‘You have a son who adores you. I should know. You must have done something right.’

  That made him smile. He wanted to reach out and touch her, to show his gratitude, but did nothing in case she misunderstood his gesture.

  The entrance to the West India Dock was heavily guarded, and when Pyke tried to pass himself off first as a docker and then as a warehouseman, he was rebuffed and told to ‘get lost’. When he tried a second time, about half an hour later, the foreman was summoned and Pyke had to retreat to a nearby side street to plan a new means of gaining entry. He had heard two stevedores chatting about the Island Queen - which was apparently still in the dock - and this snippet of information made Pyke double his efforts to find a way into the premises.

  The fifteen-foot brick wall that ran around the perimeter was too high to scale, at least without drawing attention to himself, which left the river as the only remaining route. Half an hour later, Pyke found a waterman sitting in his wooden skiff near Limehouse and he told the man he’d pay him a crown if he rowed downriver as far as the entrance to the West India’s export dock.

  It was a cool, clear morning and the murky brown water of the Thames was dappled with rays of sunlight so that it almost looked attractive. The gnarled waterman wasn’t interested in having a conversation and rowed in silence, apart from the occasional grunt, leaving Pyke to enjoy the sensation of being out on the river, the sound of choppy water slapping hard against the skiff’s wooden hull. Above them, seagulls glided and swooped in the sky, their squawks punctuating the sound of the oars moving through the water.

  It took the waterman the best part of an hour to row as far as the outer entrance to the docks and, once there, Pyke had to pay the man his crown, and then another half-crown, to tie up the skiff and wait for him. From there, his route into the dock was unimpeded, and he found the Island Queen without any difficulty. A gang of stevedores was busy transferring a collection of wooden crates stacked up on the quayside down into the ship’s belly. This was how the system worked, Pyke thought as he watched them: you plundered another country’s resources, shipped whatever you could lay your hands on - coffee, sugar, rum, teak - back to the mother country and then sent those same ships back to the colonies packed with overpriced goods for the people there to buy.

  One of the stevedores pointed out the ship’s captain, McQuillan, and when Pyke met him on deck, he was inspecting the rigging on the port side of the vessel.

  ‘They told me you were the captain of this ship.’

  ‘Aye, they told you right.’ McQuillan put his hands up to his eyes to protect them from the sun. He was a disconcertingly short man with a wobbling chin that disappeared into the folds of fat under his neck.

  ‘Belfast,’ Pyke said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You’re originally from Belfast, aren’t you?’

  ‘So I am.’ McQuillan stopped what he was doing and looked at Pyke. ‘How in God’s name did ye know that?’

  ‘I was there about ten years ago. It’s not a brogue you can easily forget.’

  ‘People here in London often mistake me for a Scotsman. No one’s ever guessed I’m from Belfast.’

  ‘Am I right in thinking you docked here on about the twenty-third of last month?’

  ‘The twenty-fourth.’ McQuillan glanced up at the sky. ‘And if this breeze holds, we’ll be sailing tomorrow or the day after.’

  ‘Back to the West Indies?’

  ‘Jamaica.’ Lines appeared on his forehead. ‘Mind if I ask why you’re so interested in my ship?’

  ‘I’m interested in one or possibly two passengers you brought with you from Jamaica. Mary Edgar and Arthur Sobers.’ He noted the lines in the captain’s forehead deepen. ‘I can tell from your reaction you know who I’m talking about.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ McQuillan said, squinting.

  ‘Mary Edgar and Arthur Sobers. She’s a mulatto, he’s black.’

  ‘Am I supposed to know them?’

  ‘I suspect you’ve been warned about speaking about them.’ When McQuillan didn’t say anything, Pyke added, ‘Was it Rowbottom who approached you, by any chance? You see, he’s already told me everything he knows so I don’t think he’d mind if you talked to me.’

  ‘And why would he do that?’ McQuillan asked cautiously.

  ‘Because I held a knife to his throat and told him that unless he did, I’d slit it.’ It was gamble, telling him this, but Pyke didn’t think that a seafaring man like McQuillan would have much time for Rowbottom.

  For a while, McQuillan stared at him, as if trying to make sense of what he’d said, but then, all of a sudden, he broke into a loud laugh. ‘I’d like to have seen that, surely I would.’ Then he seemed to remember his instructions and his eyes glazed over. ‘So what is it you want to know?’

  ‘Did Rowbottom ever tell you why you weren’t supposed to talk to anyone about Mary Edgar or Arthur Sobers?’

  The captain shook his head.

  ‘Mary Edgar’s dead. She was murdered, strangled. Her body was found a few days ago near the Ratcliff Highway.’

  From his reaction, Pyke could tell this was news to McQuillan. It was as though the wind had been kicked from his stomach.

  ‘Aye, she came with us from Falmouth,’ he said eventually. ‘Her and the other fellow, Sobers.’

  ‘Why? I mean, what reason did they have for wanting to come to London?’

  McQuillan shrugged. ‘She didn’t say and I didn’t ask her.’ He waited for a moment and added, ‘I was told by an attorney in Falmouth, Michael Pemberton, to look after her and keep my crew away from her. I got the impression from him that she was spoken for, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘But not by Pemberton?’

  McQuillan just shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And Sobers?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘How well did they seem to know each other?’

  McQuillan considered this. ‘They knew one another, that’s for sure, but I wouldn’t say they were lovers. They didn’t share a cabin. In spite of his size, he se
emed in awe of her. He deferred to her, rather than the other way around.’

  ‘What else can you tell me?’

  The captain sighed. ‘Not a great deal. Like I said, they didn’t reveal too much. I didn’t ask. I was glad to have him onboard, though. He was strong and willing to work.’

  ‘And her?’

  McQuillan didn’t answer him immediately. ‘Mind if I speak bluntly?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘To be honest, I couldn’t work her out. Most of the time, she’d keep herself to herself. No trouble at all. But with a little rum in her, she was a different person.’