Kill-Devil and Water

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘The reason I wanted to see you is that I might have found out the whereabouts of Lord Bedford’s butler.’

  Stopping, Pyke turned to face his erstwhile friend. If the butler admitted to knowing about Mary Edgar and the arrangement Bedford had struck with Charles Malvern, then they might be able to insist that the investigation into both murders be reopened. In any case it might be enough temporarily to halt the execution.

  ‘Can I come with you to talk to him?’

  Tilling put his hand up to his eyes. ‘I’d rather do it on my own. But come around to the house tomorrow afternoon. I’ll have more news for you then.’

  Pyke’s thoughts switched back to the robbery that Crane was, or might be, planning. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Is Mayne at all concerned by the prospect of fifty thousand men and women, mostly the poorest of the poor, pouring into the city on Sunday night and Monday morning?’

  ‘Concerned in what sense?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Pyke hesitated, trying to gather his thoughts. ‘That the crowd might be infiltrated by radicals intent on pursuing their own cause?’

  This time Tilling’s face creased with worry. ‘Have you heard something to this effect?’

  Pyke shrugged. ‘If I were you, I’d ask the Bank of England about additional security provisions taken in light of the crowds expected to gather on Monday morning.’

  That did nothing to ease Tilling’s concern. ‘Why the Bank of England? What exactly have you heard?’

  ‘Just ask.’ Pyke looked at him and waited. ‘Like you said, we can talk about it tomorrow afternoon at your house.’

  He watched Tilling walk off in the direction of Whitehall.

  About an hour later, Pyke found Samuel Ticknor in a coffee house on St John Street, just around the corner from the offices of the Vice Society. He was a timid, bald-headed man with rancid breath and a punctilious manner that put Pyke in mind of a headmaster or clergyman. Indeed, there was a well-thumbed copy of the King James Bible next to his empty plate. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who’d knowingly set out to profit from the exploitation of his charges.

  ‘Perhaps you might enlighten me as to the precise nature of your enquiries, sir? I am a busy man.’ He checked his gold pocket watch.

  ‘You’ve been a difficult man to find.’

  ‘A private matter demanded my attention in the West Country. But I’m here now, so perhaps you might be so bold as to tell me why this matter couldn’t wait until next week.’

  ‘Do you remember a woman called Lucy Luckins?’

  ‘Luckins, you say?’

  ‘From Shadwell.’

  That seemed to make the difference. ‘Ah, indeed. Lucy. If I’m not mistaken, I helped to find her work as a seamstress last year. Not the most glamorous or well-paid occupation, I’ll admit, but a good deal better for her soul than walking the streets.’ He gave the Bible next to him a supercilious tap. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Do you know Elizabeth Malvern?’

  Ticknor’s expression darkened. ‘I used to be acquainted with her.’

  Pyke felt his throat tighten. ‘What was the precise nature of your acquaintance?’

  ‘She used to raise funds for the society and on occasion she would accompany me on field visits.’

  ‘Did she ever accompany you when you visited Lucy Luckins?’

  ‘I can’t remember exactly.’

  ‘Then think.’

  ‘Excuse me, sir, but you’re going to have to tell me the precise nature of your interest in Miss Luckins ...’

  Pyke cut him off. ‘She’s dead. She was strangled and then both of her eyes were cut out.’

  Ashen-faced, Ticknor immediately retched on to the table. A spool of saliva hung from his chin.

  ‘I’ll ask you again. Did Elizabeth Malvern accompany you when you visited her?’ Ticknor stared at Pyke and nodded. ‘Miss Malvern was the one who found her work as a seamstress.’

  Pyke found himself gripping the edge of the table. ‘Just now, you said she used to raise funds for the society?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not any more?’

  ‘She was asked to leave.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘On account of the company she kept.’

  Pyke slammed his fist down on the table. ‘What, precisely, do you mean by that?’

  ‘A gentleman. A particular gentleman.’ Ticknor’s hands were trembling.

  ‘Was his name Jemmy Crane, by any chance?’

  Ticknor’s mouth fell open. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘And there’s no possibility you could have been mistaken about the nature of their association?’

  ‘I saw them with my own eyes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Some time in the spring. April, perhaps.’ Ticknor’s stare was solid, even defiant. ‘I saw them, sir. I saw them embrace.’

  When Pyke arrived at Pitts Lane Mews, someone had evidently beaten him to it. The back door had been kicked open and, inside, shards of broken glass and crockery covered the downstairs floor. Upstairs, wardrobes had been overturned and sheets had been ripped off the beds. In the kitchen, he paused at the table they had sat around the previous night. The table they’d fucked on. The room, the whole house, smelled of her.

  So Elizabeth Malvern was Jemmy Crane’s mistress. It was just as Field had said. Field and Ticknor.

  But what did that mean?

  What if Elizabeth had put Lucy Luckins in touch with Crane rather than finding her a job as a seamstress?

  And what had happened in the intervening period - from the time Elizabeth and Lucy met to the moment Lucy’s strangled corpse had been hauled out of the river by Gilbert Meeson?

  Why had Lucy’s eyeballs been cut from their sockets just like Mary’s?

  Pyke’s thoughts turned to Phillip Malvern. Somehow the two matters were related; they had to be. For a while, he sat at the kitchen table trying to remember all the bits of information about Phillip he’d come across. Eventually he came back to what the bone collector had said: He likes his women dark. But where would he find a black woman on the Ratcliff Highway? Pyke thought about Eliza Craddock’s brothel and about Jane Shaw, who had been abandoned because she’d contracted syphilis. It was a remote possibility but it was a possibility none the less. He left the house via the front door. At first Pyke thought that Jane Shaw was dead, but then she coughed and turned over, perhaps disturbed by the light from his lantern. Down below, in another part of the building, he heard raised voices and then a scream. He stepped into the tiny, airless room and waited. The air stank of faeces and death. Her eyes opened slightly and she tried to sit up. He thought he saw her smile but it could have been a grimace.

  ‘You came back.’ This time the disease had spread from her face to every part of her body. There was almost nothing left of her.

  ‘How could I keep away?’

  That seemed to make her laugh, but as she did so something caught in her throat and she coughed. ‘If I’d known you were coming, I would have combed my hair.’ She touched her bald head.

  He sat down next to her and took her hand. It felt like a skeleton’s. ‘I wanted to ask you a question.’

  ‘Lucky you didn’t wait too much longer.’ She grimaced each time she tried to move and Pyke guessed that her back was covered with sores. ‘You find the one who killed the mulatto?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Is that why you here?’

  ‘In part.’ Pyke waited. ‘When I was last here, you said you could remember the faces of all the men you’d ever slept with.’

  ‘I ’member. So?’

  ‘Were you ever visited by a blind man?’

  ‘Phillip.’

  Pyke didn’t try to hide his excitement. ‘That’s right. Did you see him often?’

  ‘While I was still working at Craddock’s. He was a little mad but he was also gentle and considerate, not like most of ’em.’

  ‘Mad in what sense?’

&nb
sp; ‘He believed there were evil spirits trying to harm him.’

  Pyke thought about what he’d learned about Phillip Malvern in Jamaica. ‘Did he ever talk to you about what he did, where he lived?’

  ‘He scavenged the sewers, reckoned he could make a living from it, too. That’s why they called him Filthy.’ She tried to smile. ‘You could smell it on him, too, but I didn’t mind. Better that he was gentle.’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’

  ‘No, not really. He wasn’t much of a talker, to be honest. Is he in trouble?’

  ‘He might be.’ Pyke waited. ‘I need to find him. It’s important. Do you know where he lives?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Or where he went to scavenge?’ Pyke waited. ‘He sold rats to a landlord in Saffron Hill.’

  Jane tried to move and grimaced again. ‘He did mention this sewer or tunnel he found under the City ...’

  ‘Yes?’

  Jane closed her eyes. ‘He told me he found a barrel of wine down there once. Said you could walk into it from the Thames at low tide underneath Dowgate Wharf.’

  As he moved away, she took his hand and tried to squeeze it. ‘You can’t leave me like this, Pyke.’

  ‘I have to go. I’ll come back, though. I promise.’

  ‘I meant, you can’t leave me like this. I want you to finish it. I’ve asked other folk but they’re all too afraid ...’ She motioned up towards the ceiling.

  ‘Eternal damnation.’

  ‘I was thinking you might be different.’

  ‘I was damned a long time ago.’ Pyke looked into her pale eyes. ‘You want me to end your life?’

  ‘Take my pillow, put it over my mouth. It won’t take more than a few seconds. I can’t go on like this any longer.’

  ‘Is that what you really want?’

  Jane nodded. ‘I’m so tired, in such pain.’

  ‘What you’re asking me to do,’ Pyke said, thinking about it, ‘some would consider it to be a mortal sin.’

  ‘I ain’t said my prayers for years now, if that’s what you’re asking me.’

  ‘And you’re ready to go?’

  She produced a bottle of gin from beside the mattress. ‘You’ll have a last drink with me, won’t you?’

  In the end she was so weak he had to help her hold the bottle to her lips. She sipped at the clear liquid like a suckling baby. Pyke took the bottle, put it to his mouth and drank until he needed a breath.

  ‘The funny thing is, I used to think I’d make something of my life.’ Jane looked around the dingy room and shook her head. ‘Everything I had, I’ve bartered away or it’s been stolen.’

  ‘We come into this world with nothing, we leave it with nothing.’ For some reason, Pyke found himself thinking about Felix.

  She touched his hand and tried to squeeze it. ‘You’re a good man.’

  They stared at one another for a few moments. ‘Are you quite sure you’re ready?’

  ‘Living here, like this,’ Jane smiled sadly, ‘I been ready for a while now.’

  Pyke cupped the back of her head in his hand, pulled out her pillow and helped her lie back down on the mattress.

  ‘You actually going to do it?’ Jane seemed scared all of a sudden.

  ‘Only if you want me to.’

  Pyke sat there and watched while she considered the decision. ‘I want you to,’ she said, eventually. Her eyes were as dry as a tinderbox.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Suddenly the pillow felt heavier than a bag of anvils.

  ‘Either do it or leave,’ she said, a hardness in her tone. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and whispered, ‘But whatever you decide, I’m ready.’

  Even though she’d been expecting it, and indeed had asked for it, the moment that he forced the pillow down against her bony face, her body seemed to jolt with surprise and after that, in spite of her weakened condition, she battled, arms and legs convulsing until there was no more fight left in her.

  Putting the pillow down, Pyke looked around the room. Apart from the empty gin bottle, there was nothing.

  Like the Fleet, which until the thirteenth or fourteenth century had been a navigable river that cut through Alsatia, Holborn and Saffron Hill before rising in Hampstead, Walbrook had once flowed into the Thames near Southwark Bridge, having followed a path from Moorfields directly through the City of London. Pyke was told this by a mudlark who showed him to the entrance of the tunnel. The river had long since been built over and had actually been reconstructed as a sewer, in order to transport the city’s soil directly into the Thames. It had served this function, of course, for as long as people had lived in the City.

  The tide was out and the smell emanating from the mudbanks was horrendous but, as the mudlark gleefully informed him, it was nothing compared to the stink inside the tunnel. The two of them clambered down under Dowgate Wharf and the mudlark directed Pyke to a small, dark entrance directly under the creaking wooden edifice. ‘That’s you, cock,’ he said, accepting the coin Pyke gave him, then added, ‘You got a stick to beat off the rats?’

  Alone, Pyke checked to make sure he still had his sheath knife, a handkerchief to cover his mouth, a nosegay, a lantern, a ball of twine, his jemmy and an old pair of gloves. Pinching his nostrils with the nosegay and tying the handkerchief around his mouth, he picked up the lantern and moved towards the tunnel entrance. A trickle of brown soil was emanating from the tunnel and the ground was marshy underfoot. At the entrance itself, he held up the lantern and peered inside. The walls and ceilings of the sewer had been built using bricks, and it was about as tall as he was and as wide as a brougham. He stepped into the tunnel and almost gagged, through the handkerchief, from the vileness of the stink.

  ‘Phillip?’

  He walked another few yards along the tunnel, trying to ignore both the stink and the feeling of entrapment that being in such a confined space induced, then hesitated. Holding up the lantern, he peered down at the thick soil blackening his knee-high boots. It was difficult to imagine how a man might live in such a place. Ahead, he saw his first rat, but it scuttled off in the opposite direction. The mudlark had mischievously told him that sewer rats liked to attack humans but Pyke had dismissed this as fantastical. Yet alone in this damp, foul-smelling tunnel, he found himself stepping more cautiously through the sludge, trying not to step on or disturb any vermin.

  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 glas
s 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.