Saggers had told Pyke Luckins’ story, and throughout it the coal-whipper just sat there, mute and unmoving, his eyes not blinking and his lips cracked and blistered.
‘If I’d known who she was, I wouldn’t have gone and sold her to the doctor.’ Gilbert Meeson’s skeletal face was criss-crossed with thick, purple veins and covered by warts the size of shilling coins. ‘But by the time I fished her out of the water, to be honest, there weren’t a whole lot left of her.’
Luckins stared down at the ground, as though the subject of their conversation was too painful for him.
‘But you’re certain she’d been strangled?’ Pyke asked.
‘I’ll tell yer what I told Mr Saggers ’ere.’ Meeson glanced over at the penny-a-liner and nodded. ‘I saw the marks around her neck. There was no question about it, and when the doctor seen it, he said the same.’
‘But we want to know about the eyes,’ Saggers said, breathless with excitement. ‘Tell him about the eyes.’
Meeson sniffed and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. ‘There weren’t none.’ He said it so matter-of-factly that it took Pyke a moment to comprehend what he’d just been told. Luckins, meanwhile, started to hum, a low tuneless noise that Pyke couldn’t help but feel was the last defence of a man who’d already succumbed to his fate.
‘What do you mean, there weren’t any?’
‘Like I said.’ Meeson glanced over at Luckins, who was still humming. ‘The doctor took one look at her body and told me they’d been cut out with a scalpel.’
‘But he was still prepared to pay for it?’ Pyke’s palms were moist. A gust of wind rattled the frame of the window and they all looked at it, startled.
‘Not much, seeing as how bloated it was, from all the time it spent in the water. But he weren’t so worried about the eyes. You see, he told me he was in the business of cutting off folk’s limbs.’
‘What was the doctor’s name?’
Meeson looked at Pyke and blinked. ‘He wouldn’t want me telling yer that.’
Outside, Pyke could hear the squawk of hungry gulls. ‘You’ll tell me his name because it’s the least you can do for this man sitting next to you. You made a profit from his daughter’s murder.’
The mudlark stared down at his muddy boots. ‘Since yer put it that way, his name was Mort.’
Pyke’s throat felt scratchy but he knew drinking more beer wouldn’t do it any good. He made a mental note of the doctor’s name. ‘Mr Luckins?’
The coal-whipper stopped humming and looked up at him, his eyes hard and clear. ‘Sir?’
‘You told this man here that someone helped your daughter find work as a seamstress.’ For some reason, Pyke raised his voice, as though Luckins were either a simpleton or partially deaf.
‘I did, sir.’
‘Can you remember the name of the man who helped her?’
‘His name?’
Pyke nodded his head and waited.
‘I saw ’im once, just briefly. But I never found out his name.’
‘Is there anything at all you can tell me about him, or about your daughter, that might help me find the man who killed her?’ Pyke could feel the sweat trickling down the small of his back.
‘I ’member her telling me he worked for a society what had the word vice in the title. I can’t think of the whole thing.’ He shut his eyes and put his hand up to his forehead.
Pyke looked up at him, dry mouthed. ‘Do you mean the Society for the Suppression of Vice?’
‘That were it.’ Luckins hesitated. ‘Why? Is that any help to you?’
‘Would you recognise this man if you saw him again?’
The coal-whipper’s eyes glazed over. ‘Perhaps. I don’t know. Yer see, I didn’t see him for long.’ His expression was both apologetic and suggestive of a pain Pyke remembered only too well and hoped he would never have to face again.
As they prepared to leave, Pyke took the mudlark to one side and asked him whether he knew or had heard of a blind man who sometimes scavenged on the river.
‘The one they call Filthy?’ Meeson said, his face screwed up.
‘That’s him. Do you know him or where I can find him?’
‘I just heard of him, sir. I ain’t never seen him, let alone talked to him.’
‘You don’t have any idea where I might look for him?’
Meeson stared down at his boots. ‘He don’t work this part of the river, that’s all I know.’
Outside, they watched the mudlark trudge disconsolately back towards his place in the sludge. The sun was hot and a group of bare-footed children was playing near by in puddles of mud. Pyke brought his hands up to his eyes to protect them from the glare of the sun off the water. Saggers stood at the edge of his vision, shuffling from one foot to the other.
‘If it’s true, if the mudlark is right, it must be the same man.’ Pyke waited, not sure whether he was excited or disappointed by this notion.
Saggers nodded vigorously. ‘Same cause of death, same facial mutilation, same part of London.’
‘The only difference this time is that the victim, Lucy Luckins, was white.’
‘Who cares? I’ll not go hungry for a whole year on the money I’ll make from this one.’ Saggers looked at him. ‘You still owe me a venison supper at the Café de l’Europe. Don’t think I’ve forgotten, sir.’
‘You can think of your stomach at a time like this?’
Saggers tried to appear hurt. ‘Imagine it, sir, as my stomach thinking about me. Do you suppose I like being subject to the whims of this monster?’ But he patted his stomach gently, as though proud of it.
‘So the man we’re looking for is indiscriminate about who he kills, black, white, it doesn’t matter to him,’ Pyke said, trying to keep his mind focused.
‘You sound disappointed.’
‘I’m not disappointed. I just can’t reconcile it with some of the other evidence.’
‘Such as?’
Pyke paused, aware he hadn’t told the penny-a-liner about the bottle of rum and what he’d found out about Mary Edgar’s flirtation with Obeah.
‘Far be it from me to suggest you’re being parsimonious with the truth, sir, but I do get the sense you’re keeping certain morsels of information from me.’ Saggers wiped spittle from his chin. ‘As an example, perhaps you’d like to explain why you were so interested in the Vice Society?’
‘I had an idea that the women might have dabbled in prostitution, that’s all.’
‘And do you think they did?’
Pyke shrugged. He didn’t want to tell Saggers about his suspicions regarding William Alefounder just yet. Maybe it was coincidental that he sat on the board of the same society whose agent had tried to help Lucy Luckins. Maybe this person really had tried to help her and was wholly innocent in the matter of her disappearance and murder. But Pyke had always been distrustful of coincidences, believing instead that there was usually, or nearly always, a rational explanation for instances that seemed, from the outside, to have been conjured solely by fate.
‘I’m going to take this story to Spratt and he’ll publish it on the front page of the Examiner.’
Pyke kept his gaze aimed at Saggers, though he had to squint. ‘Including the part about the eyes?’
‘I can tell you don’t want me to.’
‘You’ll bring a whole lot more pain into the life of George Luckins and anyone who’s close to him.’
‘But not writing the story isn’t going to bring his daughter back, is it?’
Pyke acknowledged this with a single nod of his head.
‘So you have another objection?’
‘If you sensationalise an investigation like this you’ll lose control of it. Suddenly everyone will want to be involved. Overnight you’ll have a hundred journalists fighting you for the story. Pretty soon, rewards will be offered. That will attract the scavengers and fortune-seekers who will, in turn, fabricate stories either for the money or just to be part of the thing. Before you can stop it, t
here’s too many people involved, too much information out there, and the truth will slip by unnoticed.’
But Pyke could see the gleam in the fat man’s eye. This was his chance. He didn’t care about the sanctity of the investigation. He would do what he wanted to do, regardless of what Pyke said.
‘Just promise me one thing,’ Pyke added. ‘Before you take this story to Spratt, confirm what the mudlark said with this doctor, Mort.’
Later, after Saggers had left him, Pyke turned back to face the river and thought about Emily; what she would have made of the mudlark’s story and what she would have done to assist women like Lucy Luckins or, for that matter, Bessie Daniels.
It took Pyke just under an hour to walk to Crane’s cottage in Bethnal Green, but the place was deserted; there was no sign of Bessie Daniels, Crane or any of his assistants.
This time, in the upstairs room, Pyke noticed that some chairs had been arranged in a semicircle around the sofa and on the floor he found a couple of cigar butts. It was almost as if someone - perhaps more than one person - had sat there and watched whatever had taken place on the sofa.
On his way to a luncheon appointment with Godfrey, Pyke paid another visit to Crane’s shop just off the Strand. Crane arrived shortly afterwards and swore blind he’d paid Bessie and she had left of her own accord. Later, as he approached the public house on Bow Street where he’d arranged to meet his uncle, Pyke was still pondering whether Crane had told him the truth.
‘The older lad who was hanging around outside my apartment the other day,’ Godfrey said, once they’d finished eating. He was mopping up the rest of his steak and kidney pudding with a hunk of bread. ‘I saw him chatting to Felix again yesterday. I don’t like him, I don’t like him one bit.’
They were sitting next to the window at the front of the Brown Bear, just across the road from the Bow Street magistrate’s office.
‘I told Felix he wasn’t to have anything to do with the lad.’
Godfrey finished chewing. ‘Whatever you said doesn’t appear to have sunk in.’ He paused to take a sip of claret. ‘You see, if you were there, with him, all the time, you could discipline him as a father is meant to.’
Pyke waited for his uncle to look up at him. ‘You never disciplined me.’
‘Exactly my point. And look how you’ve turned out.’ Godfrey chuckled to himself but quickly his face turned serious. ‘This mulatto girl, whoever she was, is dead. Can’t you see that? Your son is alive and he needs you, Pyke.’
‘I know he needs me but what am I supposed to do? I think about Mary Edgar’s corpse, what they did to her, and it makes me want to scream.’
‘How terribly morbid, dear boy. Sometimes I wonder where the dashing, cavalier chap I wrote about has gone, I really do.’
‘The figure in your book?’
‘Friend to the people, enemy of the well-to-do.’
‘I was never that.’
‘Riling the great and the good.’
‘I’m just trying to do a job.’
‘Leave it to the police. It’s what they’re paid for.’
‘I’ve been rotting in a prison cell for the last nine months. I want to do something that will make Felix proud of me. Something I can be proud of.’ Pyke paused, aware that he was raising his voice. ‘And anyway, the person in the book isn’t me.’
The real reason Pyke and Godfrey had met for lunch lay just across the street from the Brown Bear. The Swiss valet accused of Lord Bedford’s murder - Jerome Morel-Roux - was being held in the cells under the Bow Street magistrate’s office and he had written to Godfrey begging for an audience with Pyke.
Crossing the street, Godfrey commented, ‘Do you know what Morel-Roux’s admiration for Confessions has done for sales? You can’t find a copy of it anywhere in the capital or, I’m told, the provinces.’
As the gaoler, whom Godfrey had paid a king’s ransom to smuggle them into the cells, led them down a steep flight of stone steps Godfrey whispered to Pyke, ‘If he confesses to the murder, remember to get him to sign something.’
For ten years, until he’d retired from the Runners following his marriage to Emily, the gloomy rooms of the Bow Street magistrate’s office had been a home from home to Pyke. Now, more than ten years later, he was back, and the smells of the building, mildew and floor polish, were just the same. For a moment he was transported back to an earlier moment in his life.
The gaoler unlocked the door to Morel-Roux’s cell, slid back the iron bolt, and pushed open the door. He told Pyke he had ten minutes. Pyke stepped into the tiny cell and waited for the door to swing closed behind him. It took his eyes a few moments to adjust to the darkness.
Morel-Roux was sitting on the stone floor, his back against the far wall. He was twenty or twenty-five, Pyke guessed, and in other contexts he might have been considered handsome. His face was gaunt and angular, with a strong jaw, prominent nose and piercing green eyes that followed Pyke around the cell.
‘It seems you’ve caused quite a stir. I’ve heard stories about masters going to bed with their lanterns still burning.’
‘I presume you’re Pyke.’ For some reason, the valet sounded disappointed.
‘I’m not what you expected?’
Morel-Roux shrugged. ‘I just thought you’d be younger, that’s all.’ He spoke in a soft, almost effeminate voice, without a trace of a foreign accent. ‘I wanted you to know I didn’t kill my master.’
‘I’m flattered, of course, but you should really talk to the police.’
That produced an angry frown. ‘Do you think the police care about my guilt or innocence? A crime’s been committed and I’m their sacrificial lamb. I’m poor and I was born in Switzerland. No one will weep when I hang.’
Pyke looked around the small, cold cell. The valet had made a fair point. ‘But there has been an investigation. Evidence has been gathered. And without proper evidence, the prosecutor will never be able to convince a jury of your guilt.’
‘I’ve read your book,’ Morel-Roux said. ‘Your faith in the fairness of the legal process surprises me.’ For the first time, Pyke thought the valet sounded his age: stamping his foot about the unfairness of the world.
‘For a start, it’s not my book. And secondly, whether the evidence against you has been fabricated or not, you can’t be convicted without due process.’
‘Then we should start with the evidence.’
‘I’m listening,’ Pyke said.
‘Some of my master’s possessions, including an antique gold ring and two banknotes, were found behind the skirting boards in my room.’
‘You’re suggesting you had no idea they were there?’
Morel-Roux gave Pyke an icy stare. ‘If I’d stolen them, would I have hidden them in my own quarters?’
Pyke had posed the same question to Tilling and had received no satisfactory response. This time, however, he shrugged. ‘People are stupid, careless or complacent.’
‘I’m not,’ the valet said.
‘Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you were stealing from Bedford and he caught you red handed ...’
‘In the middle of the night?’
‘You were there in his room, to steal from him, and he woke up and saw you.’
‘If I’d startled the old man, if he’d caught me in the act, he would have cried out. Think about it. And do you think I’d have been able to stab him without disturbing any of the other servants?’
‘I don’t know the house. But if you’d surprised him and stabbed him before he’d had a chance to shout for help, it might have been possible.’
‘Well, I didn’t and that’s that.’
‘Not a defence that will get you far in court, I’m afraid,’ Pyke said. ‘And when it comes to the trial, they will paint you as an angry, spiteful man who hated his master, whether that’s true or not.’
‘I had nothing against the old man. It was the other servants I hated,’ Morel-Roux said, folding his arms. ‘You know what the most damning p
iece of evidence was? No sign of forced entry. That meant it had to be one of Lord Bedford’s servants, at least according to the police investigation. I was the newest member of the household and hence the most expendable. The others ganged up on me to save their own necks.’
Kill-Devil and Water Page 15
