The Last Days (13 page)

‘Am I just another woman to fuck?’

Pyke rolled over, out of the bed, and reached down to pick up his shirt, strewn across the floor. In the dimness of the candlelight he had to strain to see where he had left his shoes.

‘You’re right.’ He was by the door, with his back facing her. His tone was as soft as he could manage.

‘Right about what?’ There was hope in her voice. He hated himself for it.

‘I’m sorry.’ He pulled the door open but still did not turn around to face her.

‘Is that it? You’re sorry?’ She sounded angry. ‘What the fuck are you sorry for?’

‘You deserve better.’ He made to leave.

Lizzie exhaled loudly. ‘God, you’re a cold bastard.’ Pyke guessed she probably had tears in her eyes but did not turn around to see whether he was right.

Much later, when he could not sleep, Pyke ascended the staircase up to the garret under the tiles where George Morgan’s crippled form lay on the bed. Often, Pyke had wondered why Lizzie insisted upon tending her father, when he hardly seemed to know who or where he was, but equally he could not imagine casting the old man out on to the street or into an asylum.

Pyke stood by the window cut into the roof and looked out at the brick chimneys of the slumbering city.

In the darkness, George’s chest expanded slightly as he slept, the only indication that he was alive. Until his stroke, he had been an impressive figure, but now he seemed as frail as a rose petal.

Under George’s tutelage, Pyke had developed from ingénu into a hardened professional and he could still hear the man’s raspy voice: The law is what men want it to be. Only a fool or a coward fails to take advantage of the opportunities available to him. Between them, they had once set up and arrested the capital’s most notorious robber. As George put it, afterwards, that they had prospered from the spoils of this man’s crimes was incidental to the fact that someone who had once bitten a prostitute’s ear clean from her head, and pummelled an apprentice to death with his bare fists, had hung by the rope.

Stroking George’s sweat-matted hair, he said, ‘You were never concerned whether what you did was right or not, were you, old man?’

George, near comatose, had not spoken a word in two years.

‘Do what you need to do and to hell with the consequence, that was always your motto.’

Outside, it had begun to rain and the drops of water fell on to the tiles of the roof like small pebbles.

‘Take what you can but don’t lose sight of who you are.

And, above all, don’t get caught.’

The darkness hid the fact that the stroke had immobilised one side of George’s face. He seemed almost normal.

‘So why am I bothered, old man?’

Pyke didn’t know why Lizzie had never produced children, whether she was barren or not, but as he stood up beside the old man, he wondered whether he would ever be in a position to affect someone’s life in the manner George had affected his.

 

Fox’s cheeks were flushed and his moustache was ruffled and unkempt.

Newspapers were spread across the surface of his desk. He was reading a particular report. He ushered Pyke into the chair across from him and said that special police constables had arrested an escaped lunatic for the St Giles murders and would be charging him with these crimes. He read from the newspaper. The report made it appear that the man’s guilt had already been proven beyond all doubt. This sense of certainty was matched only by the hyperbolic relief the newspaper’s readers were no doubt supposed to feel at the prospect of this man being behind bars.

The journalist looked forward to the spectacle of the hanging and wondered whether the seriousness of the crime merited some additional form of punishment.

Still, news of the man’s arrest had done little to stem the growing wave of anti-papist violence. A Catholic church on the Whitechapel Road had been burned to the ground. Another had been ransacked and desecrated.

Fox, though, was not interested in stories about mob violence. His ire was directed at Charles Hume’s ‘botched’ investigation.

Briefly Pyke told him about his own argument with Hume and about his hypothesis that the murdered couple were from different religious traditions. Fox muttered something about cover-ups and deception.

He was about to excuse himself when Gerrard, Fox’s personal secretary, appeared in the room, closely followed by a young boy, dressed in rags, who explained he had been told by Miss Lizzie to pass a very ‘hymn-portant’ message to Mr Pyke and that he had been promised a shilling in return. He wanted the shilling before he gave Pyke the message. Pyke procured the money from Fox’s indignant secretary. He glanced down at the note and saw Lizzie’s scribbled writing. Gerrard chased the young boy out of the office and closed the door behind them.

‘Anything important?’ Fox said.

‘I might’ve found the woman.’ The note instructed him to contact Polly Masters at the Rose. Briefly he wondered how much longer Lizzie would continue to come to his assistance when he treated her so poorly.

‘You mean Mary Johnson?’

Pyke just nodded. Fox had remembered her name. ‘Then you must go at once to talk to her.’ Fox’s tone was insistent. ‘Take my personal carriage. It will be quicker than flagging one down. Less costly, too. There’s not a moment to lose.’

Pyke wondered how far he might push Fox’s untypical generosity. ‘I have promised a reward for information leading to Mary Johnson’s whereabouts.’

‘A fee?’ Fox’s expression darkened. ‘What kind of a fee?’

‘A hundred.’

‘Pounds? ’

‘You told me finding the girl was our main priority. I took you at your word.’

‘A hundred pounds?’

‘It’s a lot of money, I know,’ Pyke shrugged. ‘If you don’t think it’s wise to pay it, we can always wait.’

‘Wait? Who said anything about waiting?’ Fox winced, as though he were in pain. ‘But you need to keep a check on your expenditure, Pyke.’

‘I’ll go and see Gerrard.’

‘We’re not awash with money.’

Pyke waited for a moment. ‘Can I ask you a question, Sir Richard?’

‘What is it?’

This time Pyke turned around to face his old mentor. ‘Have you ever had any dealings with Lord Edmonton?’

Carefully Fox placed his pen down on his desk and looked up. ‘Edmonton, you say?’ He ran his finger over the tip of his moustache. ‘He’s one of the Tory Ultras, isn’t he?’

‘All day, I’ve been asking myself how Edmonton knows Flynn has been making certain false accusations against me.’

‘I’m sorry, Pyke, but I fail to see how Lord Edmonton is relevant here.’ But he would not meet Pyke’s gaze.

‘But you haven’t had any communication with him?’ Pyke folded his arms and tried to gauge Fox’s reaction.

‘Why on earth should I have had communications with that Tory bigot?’ Fox was a well-known Whig. He sounded personally hurt by Pyke’s question.

Pyke shrugged. ‘If you hear that anyone has been passing information about me to other . . .’

‘Then I will, of course, tell you about it.’ Fox sighed. ‘Flynn has already been before the grand jury. He’ll stand trial within the week. The scoundrel is currently being held inside Newgate.’ He hesitated. ‘Listen to me, Pyke. I know that you’ve had dealings with this man in the past and I accept that such arrangements are . . . necessary. This is the issue that Peel utterly fails to grasp. Policing can never simply be about prevention. As I’ve tried to impress on Peel many times, prevention makes absolutely no sense without detection. And effective detection, I know, means rubbing shoulders with the likes of Flynn.’ Pyke thought Fox was going to say something else but he picked up his pen and added, almost as an afterthought, ‘Find the girl. That’s the most important thing, Pyke.’

 

‘Gimme the money and I’ll tell you where you can find the Paddy girl. That’s what we agreed.’ Polly Masters crossed her forearms, as though to affirm the seriousness of her intent.

Pyke removed a ten-pound note from his pocket and held it out for her to see. ‘For now. You’ll get the rest if your information’s good.’

Polly’s frown deepened. ‘If I tell you what I ’eard, I ain’t gonna see you ’gain.’

‘And if I just give you the money and I don’t find this girl, I might not see you again.’

‘I got me business to run. Where am I going?’

‘What we have here is a failure of trust.’ He let the note fall from his fingers and flutter to the floor. They were standing in her drab office. Even though it was only ten in the morning, he could hear a man’s voice through the thin walls, grunting with desire.

As she bent over to retrieve the note, Pyke reached out and gathered up the skin around her neck and pulled her upright, ignoring her chokes and threats. Her plump fingers gripped the ten-pound note as though her life depended on it. He adjusted his one-handed grip around her neck and started to squeeze, and watched as her eyes filled with water and waited for her yells to subside to whimpers.

‘Listen to me, you old hag. You know where the girl is.

I want that information. I find the girl, I might contemplate giving you what I promised. You don’t give me that information right now, then I’ll kill you. Simple as that.’ He squeezed her neck a little harder and kept his stare hard and dry, like a hangman’s or one of the butchers’ who frequented his gin palace and told stories of disembowelling terrified cattle with three swift moves of the cleaver. He felt her limbs loosen, life draining from her.

He slackened his grip, to allow her to speak. He heard her fart. The stink filled up the office.

‘Jonathan Wild was strung up for less than what you do.

And people spat on his dead body.’ But there wasn’t any fight left in her.

He let go of her neck and wiped his hand clean with a handkerchief.

Sullen and beaten, Polly told him that the girl was hiding out at a small lavender farm owned by James Wren on the river at Isleworth.

‘Did you tell anyone else about this?’ He slapped her hard around the face with his open palm. She bit her lip and licked off the blood.

‘Answer me.’

‘No.’

‘You mention this to anyone and I’ll kill you. Do you understand?’

She stared at him, humiliated, but as Pyke left she didn’t once mention the forty pounds he owed her.

 

Sir Richard Fox’s private carriage, an old-fashioned wooden cab adorned on the inside with silk window curtains and velvet cushions, was pulled by two horses and driven by Gaines, a sour-faced man who seemed to resent having to transport Pyke to his destination, as though the act were somehow beneath him. The carriage transported Pyke through the traffic along Oxford Street and past crowds of people milling around the huge plate-glass windows of new luxury stores. The recently macadamised surface afforded them a smoother passage, as they passed parkland adjoining the Uxbridge Road and Paddington’s grand-looking terraces, decorated with pilasters and ironwork balconies and finished with stucco.

Past Bayswater and Holland House, they rattled on new turnpikes into the countryside, with small farms replacing the West London mansions. The city, which always seemed endless when you were in it, now felt as insignificant as a twig dropping over the edge of a waterfall.

Out here, Pyke felt a sense of release that he had not experienced for a long time. He had once served for three years on the Bow Street horse patrol pursuing thieves and housebreakers along turnpikes and across open land and had, ever since, hankered for country air.

As a boy Pyke had witnessed the execution of two men who had murdered a man travelling to a lavender warehouse in Feltham. Now, many years later, he was journeying to meet a girl hiding out on a lavender farm in nearby Isleworth. Idly mulling over the web of connections that criss-crossed people’s lives, Pyke found himself returning to the murdered baby and wondering what might have become of its life, had it lived.

As the frozen landscape flashed past him, he tried to remember what his own father looked like but could not summon forth a picture in his head. Often, he had watched as Lizzie tended to George, her bedridden father, and thought about his own father and mother and whether it mattered that he knew little or nothing about them, whether it hampered his progress through the world.

They found the entrance to Wren’s farm with little difficulty and Pyke alighted from the carriage, instructing Gaines to wait in the same spot for his return. He decided to approach the farm itself on foot, not wanting to give away his position and frighten the runaway girl.

Keeping an eye out for man-traps - metallic contraptions that could snap one’s arm or leg - Pyke undertook a preliminary tour of the farm, no more than a couple of acres in total. It was early March and there were no workers to be found anywhere. The ground was as unyielding as marble. There was smoke rising from the chimney of the main house, indicating that the owner and his family were perhaps still living there. If Mary Johnson was hiding on the farm without Wren’s knowledge or consent, then it meant she had taken up a position in one of the two small greenhouses situated on the river side of the farm. Pyke dug his hands deep into his pockets, to protect them from the cold, and hid himself in a large bush that offered him a vantage point to both greenhouses.

He did not have to wait for long.

NINE

M
ary Johnson was too frightened to speak.

In a ramshackle building that was both a shed and a greenhouse, she cowered under her blanket like a whipped dog. There was no warmth in the building and Pyke wondered whether she had already contracted pneumonia. Her brown hair was straggly and wet, her freckled skin almost translucent, and her lips had turned an eerie shade of blue. Her frame shook underneath the blanket. Under different circumstances, she might have been attractive, but on this occasion Pyke felt only pity for the girl. The smell of stale cut lavender was as oppressive as the freezing temperature.