The Detective Branch (2 page)
Read The Detective Branch Online
Authors: Andrew Pepper
Tags: #London (England) - History - 1800-1950, #Mystery & Detective, #Pyke (Fictitious Character: Pepper), #Pyke (Fictitious Character : Pepper), #Fiction, #General, #Mystery Fiction, #Historical, #Traditional British, #Suspense, #Crime
Whicher nodded. He was short, for a policeman. Just five foot eight, the minimum height to gain entry to the force. His dark hair was closely cropped and his clean-shaven face was pitted with smallpox scars. But it was his eyes which stood out: they were emerald green and shone with understated intelligence. He didn’t say much but he had a keen eye for detail and a sharp memory. Although the man was young, Pyke already regarded him as his natural successor, or at least the one most capable of taking charge of an investigation. Whicher was cool, methodical and, equally important, he kept himself to himself outside work hours. The others, Pyke had heard, regarded him as aloof.
‘Shaw is taking care of the wife, too,’ Whicher said. ‘She was out running errands when the robbery took place. Came back to find her shop crawling with policemen. She collapsed on the floor and had to be restrained.’
‘You’re calling it a robbery, then?’
‘Why? You don’t think it was?’ He gave Pyke a sceptical look.
Earlier, they had come across the pawnbroker’s safe, behind the counter at the back of the shop. It had been opened and emptied. The key was still in the lock.
‘The passer-by said he heard three shots in quick succession. Said he entered the shop almost immediately.’
‘So?’
‘Let’s assume that the safe was cleared before the men were shot.’
Whicher put his hands on his hips while he considered Pyke’s hypothesis. ‘That sounds about right.’
‘So why did the gunmen open fire on Cullen and the other two
after
they’d got what they’d come for?’
after
they’d got what they’d come for?’
Whicher shrugged. ‘You think there was more than one of them?’
‘Three shots were fired. In rapid succession. That’s what the witness said, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘In which case, a single gunman wouldn’t have had time to reload his pistol.’
Pyke turned his thoughts back to Dove and whether he should own up to recognising him, what the consequences might be. He looked down at the bodies, and tried to reconcile the conflicting sentiments assailing him. It was his job to remain detached, to see things as they were, but it was hard to look at the crime scene and not feel a twinge of excitement. An abomination had been perpetrated and it was his job to find the man or men responsible. At bottom, it was why he’d agreed to join the police force; because he loved the thrill of the chase.
A little later Cullen’s wife confirmed the identification of her husband with a nod and sniffle but said she hadn’t ever seen the other two men before.
‘And before you ask,’ she said, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her dress, ‘I don’t know nobody what’d want to kill my Sammy, neither.’
‘But he can’t have been a popular man, given how he earned his living.’
That made her snort. She was fifty, Pyke estimated, a few years older than her husband, and had probably done well to marry at all. Her skin was dark and tough, her eyes small and quick, like a magpie’s.
‘Sammy didn’t force folk to do business with ’im. And he gave ’em a fair price, compared to some of them others. Else they wouldn’t come back.’
Pyke nodded. Anyone with a petty grievance against Cullen wasn’t likely to go to the shop armed with a pistol or blunderbuss. ‘Had your husband ever been in trouble with the law?’
The wife glowered at him and folded her arms.
‘Was your husband ever convicted of a crime, Mrs Cullen?’
She refused to meet his stare or answer his question and Pyke decided not to force the issue. If Cullen had been arrested or convicted of fencing stolen goods, they would find out soon enough.
‘Has anyone made threats against your husband recently?’
This time Pyke saw that he’d struck a nerve and, before Cullen’s wife could deny it, he added, ‘If they didn’t find what they were looking for, they’ll be back, you know that.’
‘Like you said, some folk round ’ere don’t care for how we earn our bread. But we ain’t got no problems with our neighbours. Ask ’em if you don’t believe me.’
Pyke stole a glance at Whicher. ‘Was your husband expecting someone this morning? Did he say anything to you about a visit?’
She assessed him coolly. ‘He did say something over breakfast this morning. Said someone was comin’ to see him, an’ it might be good for business. Truth be told, he seemed quite excited.’
‘Did your husband mention any names?’
Biting her lip, Cullen’s widow looked into Pyke’s face, the extent of her grief apparent for the first time, and shook her head.
The full complement of the Detective Branch assembled in the back room of the shop just after five.
Two members had left or been promoted in recent months, which meant there were now just four of them, five including Pyke. Frederick Shaw was the youngest and the one who deferred to Pyke’s authority the most. Pyke didn’t encourage this and found it more irritating than endearing, but while he felt Shaw was too timid and too beholden to the rules, the man had a quick mind and was willing to learn. He also had the kind of uniform, nondescript features that were useful in their line of work, meaning he could disappear easily into a crowd. He was average height, average build, average weight, with short brown hair and no sideburns or whiskers, as was the fashion. William Gerrett, on the other hand, always drew attention to himself. In some ways, this wasn’t his fault. At six foot three inches, he was a head taller than anyone else in the room and had the kind of weak chin that disappeared into the flesh of his neck. He was flabby and heavy boned, too: a farmer’s lad who had never quite outgrown his natural talent for tilling the soil and who was quite unsuited to the careful, painstaking logic of police work. He had made a name for himself by being an intimidating figure on the beat, but those skills had little value in the Detective Branch and Pyke had often wondered why he’d been chosen as a detective in the first place. Pyke didn’t care for the man’s looks or his poor personal hygiene, but it was the man’s sloppiness that he couldn’t forgive. Often Gerrett would forget to file even the most rudimentary pieces of information and needed to be reminded, two or three times a day, what he was supposed to be doing.
Shaw, Gerrett and the fourth member of the Branch, Eddie Lockhart, all lived together in a boarding house with the other single officers in Great Scotland Yard. As far as Pyke could tell, Gerrett and Shaw were friends, but Lockhart was the linchpin of the group and, by some margin, the most charismatic and handsome of them. At six feet tall, he was about the same height as Pyke but he was thinner and wirier, and wore the thinnest of moustaches, which he doubtless had to trim each morning. He had a natural confidence and an easygoing manner which worked well for him in the job, as witnesses and even suspects felt comfortable talking to him. But he was also the member of the Branch that Pyke knew the least about and the one who kept his assessment of Pyke closest to his chest. In fact he had seemingly made a conscious decision to keep his distance from Pyke and perhaps resented the fact that Pyke tended to consult first with Whicher rather than him, even though he was older. Lockhart was also intelligent, which made him either a useful ally or a potentially awkward presence in the team. Thus far, Pyke had found him to be the latter.
Pyke told them to gather round and ran through what had happened. Their eyes glistened with alarm and excitement. They might all have worked on murder investigations before but Pyke suspected that none of them had been in such close proximity to three dead bodies. Even Lockhart had baulked when he’d first stepped into the shop. Pyke examined their faces. They were all men he had inherited when he’d assumed the position of head of the Detective Branch at the end of the previous year. At the time he had been told he would be able to recruit two additional men of his own choosing, but now he had been informed that he would have to wait for replacements for the two who had left.
‘Whatever else you were working on, gentlemen, this now takes priority. There will, of course, be immense pressure on us to find and arrest the person, or persons, who committed this act. I’ll expect your full co-operation. Is that understood?’
They all nodded. The air around them was still thick with the scent of fresh blood.
‘Let’s start with Cullen, then. From the look of his shop, I’d say he wasn’t too successful as a pawnbroker. Was he a fence, too? Perhaps. The wife as good as admitted he sometimes dabbled in stolen goods. I’ll need a volunteer to visit Bow Street first thing in the morning, go through the records there, and find out if he was ever convicted of a crime.’
Shaw put up his hand. ‘I’ll do it, sir.’ He was always the first to volunteer and insisted on calling Pyke ‘sir’, even though Pyke had repeatedly told them to call him by his name.
‘Good.’ Pyke paused, looking at his men. ‘We don’t know who the other two victims are. We need to identify them as quickly as possible, and find out what they were doing in the shop.’ Pyke said this even though it was clear to him that a man like Harry Dove wouldn’t have been there to buy a gnarled pair of boots or a broken umbrella.
‘After the inquest, I’ve arranged for the bodies to be laid out in an upstairs room at the Queen’s Head, just across the road. When news of this spreads, people will want to come and look. Someone, somewhere will know the identity of these two men, so I need one of you to remain with the bodies.’
When no one else put their hand up, Gerrett made a half-hearted gesture. Secretly Pyke was relieved; it was the least taxing of the tasks and hence the one most suited to Gerrett’s capabilities. Pyke thanked him and moved on.
‘The fact that the safe was open and its contents had been removed suggests robbery as the likely motive. But the three men were shot dead
after
the gunman or gunmen had got what they wanted. Why would they do that? Did Cullen or one of the others try to disarm the gunman and fail?’
after
the gunman or gunmen had got what they wanted. Why would they do that? Did Cullen or one of the others try to disarm the gunman and fail?’
Pyke stared at their faces. He didn’t get an answer, nor did he expect one. ‘If it was, in fact, a robbery, we need to work out what was taken.’ He looked at Whicher. ‘I want you to have a look at Cullen’s books. Talk to the wife, if you have to. Make a list of what was stolen. There’ll also be a record of what people brought in to be pawned. Look for anything unusual or valuable and make a note of it.’
Next, Pyke turned to Lockhart. ‘I want you to knock on doors and speak to the neighbours. The man or men we’re looking for might’ve entered the shop from the street or from Drury Lane. Someone might have seen them. Similarly I’m guessing they left through the backyard. Again, someone living in one of the tenements might have seen something. Talk to people, try to jog their memories.’
Lockhart nodded curtly but said nothing. He seemed almost jittery and couldn’t bring himself to look at the corpses.
‘Whoever did this,’ Pyke said, ‘came prepared. They came with loaded pistols. The witness heard three shots in rapid succession. That tells us they didn’t have any qualms about pulling the trigger.’
Pyke thought about the bodies laid out in the adjacent room. Briefly, he tried to imagine someone walking into Cullen’s shop, pistol already drawn; imagined this man ordering Cullen to open the safe and empty the contents into a bag; imagined him turning on Cullen and firing. Perhaps it had been a double-barrelled pistol, in which case he could have turned it on Dove or the other man and fired again. But a man like Harry Dove wouldn’t have given him the time to reload. So maybe the gunman had used two pistols, or maybe there had been two gunmen after all?
Killing someone was never easy, but whoever had done this had moved from man to man, seemingly firing at will. Pyke closed his eyes and tried to picture the scene: the jolt of the pistol as the shot was discharged, the tearing of flesh, the screaming, the acrid whiff of burnt powder. None of this had put off the gunman. Rather he had gone about his task with methodical precision. One shot, followed by another, followed by another.
It struck Pyke later that he wasn’t looking for a robber. He was looking for an assassin; someone who liked to kill.
‘How’s your uncle?’ Edmund Saggers asked. He had managed to push his considerable bulk to the front of the barricade and persuade one of the uniformed constables to let him talk to Pyke.
‘He’s been better,’ Pyke said, glancing at the shining faces of the mob gathered behind him. ‘He’s been worse, too.’
As a reporter for the
London Illustrated News
and, before that, a freelance penny-a-liner, Saggers had met up with Godfrey Bond every month for the past ten years to talk about literary tittle-tattle over a table full of food and as much wine as both men could pour down their throats. He had also become Pyke’s friend - or a friend of sorts. From time to time, Pyke found it useful to get Saggers to highlight stories arising out of particular investigations and most of the time Saggers was willing to oblige, in return for an exclusive at some later date.
London Illustrated News
and, before that, a freelance penny-a-liner, Saggers had met up with Godfrey Bond every month for the past ten years to talk about literary tittle-tattle over a table full of food and as much wine as both men could pour down their throats. He had also become Pyke’s friend - or a friend of sorts. From time to time, Pyke found it useful to get Saggers to highlight stories arising out of particular investigations and most of the time Saggers was willing to oblige, in return for an exclusive at some later date.
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