Pyke 01 - The Last Days of Newgate

by Andrew Pepper

  Pyke’s taunt registered in Swift’s eyes but he said nothing.

  ‘A seat in Parliament. The daughter’s hand in marriage. And the prospect of one day inheriting a country estate. That’s quite a reward, particularly from someone as ungenerous as Lord Edmonton.’

  For a moment, Swift was distracted by the sound of the rats. He was tied to the cage in such a way that he couldn’t see them, but he could hear them.

  ‘You’re going to kill me anyway, so why should I tell you what you want to know?’ His face betrayed some of the dread that he was, doubtless, feeling.

  Pyke took out his pistol and fired a shot into the sea of rats. He must have wounded or most probably killed one of them because the others began to swarm around its twitching form and feed on its carcass.

  ‘You hear that sound?’ he said to Swift. ‘There are three hundred rats in the cage, three hundred sets of pincer-like teeth. Can you even imagine what short work that many teeth would make of your flesh? You would be dead in a matter of seconds, of course, but imagine those final moments of your life, rats crawling on your face, chewing out your eyes.’ He aimed the barrel of his pistol at Swift’s head. ‘But if I felt you were telling the truth, I might consider simply shooting you.’

  Swift watched him carefully but said nothing. He was listening to the rats beneath him.

  ‘Perhaps I might outline what I think took place,’ Pyke said. ‘You can interrupt me if I have made a mistake or if I require your assistance.’ Again Swift did not respond.

  Pyke began by indicating how he believed Swift’s relationship with Edmonton had started. He said they had probably met through the Orange Order and the Brunswick Club and corresponded regularly over issues of mutual concern. The unappealing prospect of Catholic emancipation had certainly been one such issue, and Edmonton had asked Swift to be vigilant for anything they might use to thwart or disrupt the smooth passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill through Parliament. This had taken place some time in October or even November of the previous year. Six months earlier, Swift had employed the services of Davy Magennis to tend his small plot of land. Magennis had been dismissed from the Irish Constabulary for violent misconduct but had been recommended to Swift by someone in the order. Swift had never particularly liked Magennis but his interest in the big man was piqued by a story he told about his brother, Stephen, who had fallen in love with a Catholic girl and had absconded to London. Magennis had spoken about his brother’s betrayal with an anger that bordered on mania. When Magennis had also revealed that he had once been personally recruited into the constabulary by Tilling, Peel’s emissary in Ulster, Swift had seen an opportunity that was too good to pass up, especially as Peel was openly talking about changing his position on the Catholic question and throwing his support behind the push for emancipation.

  But Swift had had to move quickly. He had contacted Edmonton in London and explained what he had discovered and how this information might be used in such a way as to further their cause. Edmonton had been delighted by the idea: that Swift would accompany Davy Magennis to London and talk him into, if any talk were required, killing his brother. For their plan to work, any subsequent investigation would have to establish a connection between Peel and Magennis. They could then claim that Peel had staged the murder in order to bolster support for the police bill that he was attempting to push through Parliament at the same time as Catholic emancipation. In any case, if it could be leaked to the newspapers that a Protestant man from Ulster had been murdered, seemingly by a Catholic, then such news would, no doubt, spark a wave of anti-Catholic protests that might end up blowing Peel’s plans out of the water. Edmonton had assumed responsibility for planning events in the capital. He had paid someone to track down Stephen Magennis and his mistress and given some consideration to how he might ensure that the subsequent investigation into the murders would unearth the connection between Davy Magennis and Peel.

  This was the moment when Edmonton had struck upon the notion of using Pyke. He had known, for a fact, that Pyke was a formidable investigator. If it could somehow be arranged that Pyke discovered the dead bodies, he would have to be a part of any investigation, and given his tenacity and contrariness, he might begin to suspect some kind of conspiracy. If not, he could always be pushed in such a direction once the investigation had commenced. In any case, Pyke could be used and then discarded once his purpose had been served.

  Pyke paused for a moment. Swift seemed to be more preoccupied by the sound of rats. Pyke continued with his narrative.

  Swift was, by no means, a papist sympathiser. After all, he had grown up in the Orange Order and had been initiated into a way of thinking that saw Catholics as both a threat and a menace. Nonetheless, he was not a rabid Catholic-hating extremist like Edmonton. For him, there had to be prospect of significant personal and material advancement to compensate him for the dangers he would have to face in actually executing the plan. Hence Edmonton’s generous offer of a parliamentary seat, his own daughter’s hand in marriage and the prospect of one day inheriting the family estate. The unpredictable element had been Davy Magennis. For the plan to work, Swift would have to prime his anger and transform the big man’s violent threats into something tangible.

  ‘But you weren’t aware that Clare, Stephen’s mistress, had just given birth, were you?’ Pyke said.

  Swift looked at him with growing contempt.

  ‘And when Davy saw the baby, the whole plan fell apart.’ Pyke ran his knife across the open wound on Swift’s chin and saw him wince. ‘Suddenly, he couldn’t go through with it. Davy didn’t kill them. Did he?’

  Swift shrugged, as though the issue were a trifling one.

  ‘So it was down to you. Either go through with the murders yourself or risk losing everything you’d been promised by Edmonton.’ Pyke watched his sullen reaction. ‘You made Magennis stay, initially at least. You made him help you tie up Stephen and Clare, and then you slit their throats with a razor.’ Pyke did not need to close his eyes to recall the sight of their severed throats. ‘But what I don’t know, what I still can’t work out, is why you had to kill the baby as well.’

  Swift licked his blood-caked lips. ‘It wouldn’t stop crying.’

  Pyke stared at him. He felt his innards tighten. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘The other two were dead. Magennis was blubbering. He wanted to leave. Then we heard a sound at the door. I’d forgotten to lock it behind us. It was the cousin, Mary. She saw Davy, who she obviously knew, and saw the blood on the floor and screamed. Magennis ran after her. I told him to. I thought he would know what to do. Later, I realised that he wasn’t coming back and that, perhaps, he hadn’t taken care of the girl as I’d hoped. At the time, I was left in that God-forsaken room with the crying baby. I picked it up. I hadn’t thought about killing it until it started to bawl even louder, and I couldn’t bear it. I shook it a few times but it wouldn’t stop. So I shook it again, much harder this time, but the screams still wouldn’t stop. That was when I decided I’d had enough. I throttled it and dumped it in the pail.’ He looked up at Pyke and shrugged. ‘That’s it. That’s everything.’

  It was as though he had described throwing away a pot of boiled meat bones.

  There it was. Pyke could not help but feel a little deflated by Swift’s revelations, as though they made all his own efforts to conceive of Swift’s crimes as degenerate and monstrous seem wholly misplaced. His moment of vindication had somehow floundered on the banality of Swift’s evil. In particular, Pyke felt foolish for having imagined a gruesome scenario in which the killer had deliberately tortured the parents by forcing them to watch their baby’s murder. Through such acts of imagination and fantasies of revenge, Pyke had given the murders a status that far exceeded their squalid reality. Swift had killed the baby simply because it would not stop crying. Pyke did not know whether the mundanity of this explanation was less upsetting than the macabre constructions of his own imagination, but, in the end, it didn’t really matter. For six m
onths, he had pursued phantoms inside and outside his head, and now that those phantoms had been rendered visible, given recognisable shape and form, in the figure of Swift, he felt only drained and soiled as a consequence. Somehow, too, this made his revenge seem less legitimate than it had been, at least in his own mind. More than anything else, Pyke just wanted Swift to be dead. Swift saw this, too, and any lingering hope evaporated in his eyes.

  ‘Just one more question,’ Pyke said, lifting the hatch next to Swift’s bound form. ‘How did you know where to find the cousin, Mary Johnson? I mean, I presume it was you who strangled her and her boyfriend?’

  Swift tugged at the bindings around his wrists and ankles and strained to look beneath him at the rats that covered every inch of floor and wall space at the bottom of the cage.

  ‘How did you find her?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Swift said, sounding panicky. ‘I don’t know. Edmonton must have told me.’

  Pyke took his knife and cut through Swift’s hand bonds. He gouged his thumb into the wound on Swift’s chin. Swift gurgled and momentarily passed out. Pyke cut the bonds around his ankles and shunted Swift’s prostrate body across towards the open hatch. Beneath him, the carpet of rats seemed to move as one.

  He waited until Swift came round. His hands were gripping Swift’s ankles. The rest of his body was dangling upside down inside the cage. The rats could almost touch his scalp. He was screaming now, screaming and pleading with Pyke for pity and for mercy. Pyke held him there for as long as he was able to. Finally, however, his grip weakened; he let go of Swift’s ankles and watched as he fell into the mass of rats, at least six or seven deep, watched as Swift’s body - first his legs and then his arms, torso and, finally, his neck and mouth - seemed to disappear as the rats swarmed over him. He watched - fascinated and sickened - as a body of wet, black fur and long, twitching tails engulfed Swift’s disintegrating form, and he listened as the almost unbearable carnivorous screeches finally drowned out the stomach-churning gurgles emerging from Swift’s body. Eventually, the only sound in the cellar was the unmistakable noise of ten thousand teeth tearing into bloodied flesh. Pyke would remember that terrible sound for as long as he lived.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘My God, you look terrible, m’boy. Come in.’ Godfrey looked up and down the street outside his apartment. It seemed quiet enough. Certainly there was no sign of the men who had been stationed there but it was late, after two in the morning. Still, Pyke had taken great care to slip into the building unnoticed.

  He had not been able to face the prospect of another long, cold night in the church and had walked the three miles from Holborn to his uncle’s apartment in Camden Town.

  In the front room, Godfrey poured him a large brandy and threw some more coal on to the fire. The room was as untidy as Pyke remembered it: piles of books, pamphlets and papers covered every inch of floor space. It had been a while since he was last there, perhaps as much as a year. Pyke felt himself begin to relax. This had been as much a home for him as he had ever known: even the vaguely musty smell was reassuringly familiar.

  ‘So you gave Emily my address, then?’ Godfrey was wearing his silk dressing gown.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I know because she’s here. She turned up on my door-step a few hours ago in quite a state. Told me she’d tried to find you in the church but you weren’t there. Thought you might have been arrested. Or worse.’

  Pyke found Emily, half-asleep, curled up in his old bed. For a few moments, she stared at him, as though she did not know where she was, but her anxiety soon gave way to relief; she threw her arms around his neck and pulled him into an embrace.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ she said, wiping tears from her eyes. ‘I really thought you were dead.’

  As he rubbed the tears from her cheeks, he wondered whether she could smell the pungent vermin odour on him.

  ‘I can’t do it any more,’ Emily said, once the relief at seeing him had worn off.

  ‘Can’t do what any more?’

  ‘It’s such a mess.’ Emily sighed. ‘The man my father expects me to marry . . .’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ Emily stared at him, bewildered.

  ‘James Sloan, otherwise known as Jimmy Swift, is dead.’

  Briefly, a look of relief registered on her face. Emily had identified Sloan as Swift from Pyke’s earlier description. This was the reason she had fled from his home.

  ‘Dead how?’ she mouthed.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Pyke said. ‘That’s all you need to know.’

  ‘When?’

  Pyke stood up and looked around his old bedroom, expecting more of a reaction, but he felt neither validated nor unsettled by the feelings and memories that surfaced.

  ‘I presume it’s a naive question, but did you . . . kill him?’

  ‘No.’

  She screwed up her face and gave him a quizzical stare. ‘But he’s dead,’ she repeated.

  He waited for a few moments. ‘Will you marry me?’ There. He had asked the question.

  ‘Pardon?’ She did not seem to have understood what he had asked her.

  Pyke exhaled loudly. In the silence, he could hear his own heart beating. He wanted to tell her how he felt but his willingness to do so was foundering on her apparent indifference.

  ‘You just asked me to marry you, didn’t you?’ she exclaimed, as though the notion were an absurd one.

  ‘It’s perhaps a stupid question, but do you . . .’ He couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  ‘Do I love you?’ Her expression softened. She even smiled a little. ‘Of course I do.’ The way she said it sounded so pained, so heartfelt, so doomed, he couldn’t help but reach out to her.

  ‘Perhaps I could talk to him.’ He threaded his fingers through hers.

  ‘Who? My father?’ She laughed in a derisive manner.

  ‘I can be quite persuasive.’

  ‘He won’t countenance it.’ She shrugged. ‘He would never relent. He detests you.’

  He pretended to ponder this notion for a while. ‘But can he stop you?’

  ‘No, but he can disinherit me,’ she said, as though this put an end to the discussion.

  Pyke nodded, as though he appreciated the problem. ‘But what if I were to confront him?’

  ‘For what purpose?’ Emily seemed almost irritated by such a suggestion. ‘Anyway, he’s holed up in Hambledon, protected by his own private militia. You wouldn’t get as far as the main gates.’

  ‘But it’s a large house. There must be other ways of getting in.’

  ‘There are, I suppose. But what would you say to him?’

  ‘I would ask him for your hand in marriage.’

  That drew an incredulous laugh. ‘And you think he would readily agree to such an arrangement?’

  ‘Let me ask you a question. If it was not for the terms of your father’s will, would you marry me then?’

  ‘But that’s a hypothetical question, isn’t it?’

  ‘A hypothetical question?’ He tried not to appear annoyed by her answer. ‘What’s hypothetical about it?’

  Emily just shrugged.

  ‘Then perhaps we should address the dilemma from a legal perspective.’

  Emily looked at him, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Perhaps I should talk to your father’s lawyer instead.’

  ‘You think he’d divulge anything to you?’

  ‘You know him, then?’

  Emily shrugged. ‘We’ve met on occasions. Gerald Atkins. He’s as mean as my father.’

  Pyke wondered whether he had already said too much. Emily’s brown eyes were unreadable.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It all seems so hopeless.’ They stared at one another for a while.

  ‘Hopeless,’ he repeated listlessly.

  ‘But you know, it means a lot to me, that you even asked,’ she said, smiling belatedly, as though the subject were no longer worth
discussing. She kissed him gently on the mouth.

  Pyke wanted so badly to reciprocate, to give in to the kiss, but he managed to pull back from her embrace. In the ebbing candlelight, he could tell from her puzzled reaction that she did not know what he was thinking.

  ‘What is it?’ Her voice was taut with expectation.

  Pyke waited for a moment. Outside on the street, a man and woman were shouting at each other. ‘But if it’s all so hopeless,’ he said, no longer trying to hide his frustration, ‘I don’t understand why you came here tonight.’

  It was Emily’s turn to look confused.

  ‘I understand that you want what is owed to you . . .’

  ‘What was stolen from my mother,’ Emily said, this time with real anger in her voice.

  ‘Not simply for yourself but perhaps for your work,’ he agreed.

  She nodded gently.

  ‘It is certainly hard to explain our inclinations and actions in straightforward ways.’ He hesitated and took a deep breath; he knew that now was the time to tell Emily about her mother, but at the very last moment he could not bring himself to do so. It had been his plan to tell her what he had done in order to elicit some kind of favourable response. She would want him because of what he had done. Now, though, he wanted her to want him without knowing what he had done. Perhaps it was stubbornness but dangling her mother in front of Emily seemed, all of a sudden, like a cheap bribe.

  ‘But?’

  ‘In the end we all have to make choices.’ Pyke could not bring himself to look at her. ‘And with choices come consequences.’

  ‘You’re saying I have to make a choice between you and my rightful inheritance?’ She sounded pained.

  ‘No,’ he said, as softly as he could. ‘That’s what you seem to be saying.’

  Emily turned away from him and stared at the wall.

  ‘Just now, when I said choices bring consequences . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ But she did not turn around.

  ‘One might be that when I walk out of this door, we never see one another again.’