The Last Days (36 page)

Pyke did not meet his stare. ‘Did I ask you to find out whatever you could about a man called Jimmy Swift?’

‘Three times. You described him for me, too.’ Godfrey shook his head and waited for a moment. ‘I don’t know what to say . . . I just . . .’ He stared at Pyke awkwardly. ‘I’m just worried about you, that’s all.’

Pyke reached down and picked up the bottle of gin. He opened it and took a swig. ‘Thank you for bringing this and the blankets.’

 

The serrated edge of the blade cut into Polly Masters’ leathery throat and drew a few droplets of blood. Standing behind her, Pyke locked his left arm around her neck.

It was a dank, windowless room. The walls had been stained black with coal dust and on the ceiling there were large circular smudges from where candles had been left to burn. Close-up, Polly Masters’ skin smelled of camphor and rancid mutton. Barely twitching, she muttered, ‘That you, Pyke?’

‘Who else did you tell about Mary Johnson?’ He repeated the question he had just asked.

‘I don’t ever show my feelings, Pyke, but when I heard they was gonna kill you, I did a little jig,’ she whispered hoarsely.

‘Someone tracked Mary and her boyfriend Gerald down to an inn in Isleworth. This person strangled them and dumped the bodies on Hounslow Heath.’

‘I din’t tell no one ’bout Mary.’

Pyke pressed the blade deeper into her neck. More blood bubbled up from the wound. ‘No one else, apart from you, knew where they were hiding.’

‘I swear, I din’t tell a soul.’ Her tone remained defiant.

‘Mary Johnson was a nice girl who didn’t deserve to die. I don’t care whether you liked or hated her. I know you’re a greedy woman and you would have sold her out in the blink of an eye. But I want to hear it from you. I want to know who you told about Mary’s whereabouts. I want a name or I want a description.’

Polly Masters tried to wriggle free from his armlock but couldn’t manage it. Eventually she exhaled loudly and croaked, ‘You’re a marked man, Pyke. Downstairs, there must be close to a hundred men who’d kill each other for the chance to pummel you with their bare knuckles and collect the reward what’s been offered. There’s men givin’ out handbills with your likeness across the whole city. All I have to do is scream . . .’

‘And I’d slit your throat and leave you to bleed to death on the floor like a slaughtered pig,’ Pyke said, jabbing the knife even deeper into her flesh. ‘Like you said, I’m a marked man. I don’t have anything left to lose.’

Her bruised lip quivered with anticipation.

‘Tell me the truth this time,’ he said, slowly. ‘Did someone come here asking about Mary Johnson?’

‘No.’

‘Polly, I want the truth. Did a man with a brown mole on his chin come here asking for Mary?’

‘No.’

‘One last time. Did you tell anyone where Mary Johnson was hiding?’

‘Fuck you, Pyke.’ Polly Masters was crying now. ‘You’re a monster. Fuck you, fuck you and fuck you again.’

Later, as Pyke wandered through the mud-crusted alleyways and cobbled streets around Covent Garden, comfortable in his disguise, he thought about Polly’s defiance and decided she had probably been telling him the truth. But just because Swift had not found out about Mary Johnson from Polly Masters did not mean he hadn’t strangled her. No one else apart from Pyke had known which guest house she had been staying at.

So how had they found her? How had Swift found her? Pyke sensed that the answer was staring him in the face but he still couldn’t work it out.

It was raining and mud clung to his boots, weighing them down as he walked. Ignoring the outstretched hands of a sooty-faced beggar and walking past an old man who was chewing on a bar of soap in order to simulate having a fit, he tried to arrange his thoughts.

Pyke liked the grimy anonymity the city afforded him but knew he belonged neither to the world that Polly Masters inhabited - that grubby, hand-to-mouth existence he’d known for much of his early life - nor to Emily’s comfortable world, where propriety and social mores determined what was and wasn’t permissible. Pyke wasn’t naive or rich enough to romanticise the poverty he had once known, but nor was he blind to the suffocating aspect of privilege that seemed to characterise Emily’s circle of acquaintances. It was a curse and a blessing, being able to move between different worlds without feeling a sense of belonging. This adaptability was an advantage, but in his darker moments he wondered whether the loneliness he often felt would be a permanent condition.

Emily came from aristocratic stock and it was folly to contemplate a different life with her. Nonetheless, he felt drawn to her in a way that assumed, perhaps foolishly, that such desires were reciprocal. Part of him wanted to give in to his yearnings, but he was also aware of the dangers this course of action posed. Like it or not, he couldn’t get Emily out of his mind. In his pocket, he ran his fingers over the bottle of laudanum to check it was still there.

 

‘Hello, Sir Richard.’ Pyke stepped into the light being emitted from candles resting on the mantelpiece. Above the fireplace, on the wall, was a portrait of Sir Henry Fielding.

Fox stopped writing a letter, and looked up at Pyke, suddenly ashen-faced. The quill fell from his trembling ink-stained fingers. He started to say something but the words wouldn’t form on his tongue. ‘My God,’ he finally managed. ‘It is you.’ He looked older and frailer than Pyke remembered. He had lost some weight, too, and the skin seemed to hang off his face and neck. Fox stood up, grimaced a little, pulled down his frock-coat, and shuffled around his desk to greet him. Pyke wasn’t sure whether the old man wanted to hug him or shake his hand. In the end, they managed an awkward mix of the two. ‘You are alive,’ Fox said, not wanting to let go of his arm.

Pyke disentangled himself from Fox’s embrace. ‘So it would seem.’

‘I had given up hope,’ Fox said, guardedly.

‘I wasn’t aware you were hopeful.’ He stared at the old man. ‘But I see you’ve been keeping up with recent developments. ’ He pointed at the newspapers laid out on Fox’s desk.

‘I heard you were in the capital, of course, but I didn’t know whether to believe the stories or not.’ Fox’s expression was polite and opaque. ‘Was that you? The robbery?’

‘I came back to take care of some unfinished business.’

‘Not with me I hope,’ Fox said, with a chuckle.

Pyke raised his eyebrows and folded his arms.

‘There was nothing I could have done, Pyke. Nothing at all. Peel wanted you dead. There was no way of overturning the sentence.’

Pyke thought about this for a while. ‘Did you even try?’

‘You might not have noticed, Pyke, but my authority, such as it is, has been much curtailed these days.’ He sounded both aggrieved and irritated.

‘I see the new police everywhere.’ Pyke walked over to the window and looked out at the Brown Bear tavern on the other side of the street.

‘Bodies on the street only matter in times of civil unrest. What this city needs, what I have always hoped that Bow Street might become, is a central clearing house for information regarding crime and criminals. Prevention without detection is as worthless as a pistol without powder.’ Fox looked up balefully at the portrait of Sir Henry Fielding. ‘But Peel’s having none of it. In ten years’ time, nothing of the old ways will remain.’ He shook his head. ‘Listen to me. I sound like a Tory.’

Pyke turned from the window and said, ‘I want two things from you. Then I’ll never bother you again.’

‘What things?’ Fox looked at him suspiciously. His eyes narrowed to pale grey slits.

‘I want you to provide me with two home addresses. That’s all.’

‘Addresses?’

‘Fitzroy Tilling and Brownlow Vines.’

‘What do you want with Brownlow?’

‘That’s my business, not yours.’

‘I don’t have Tilling’s home address.’

‘But you can get it, can’t you?’

Fox waited for a moment, pondering Pyke’s request. ‘I might be able to.’

‘What about Vines?’

‘Brownlow?’ Fox laughed nervously. ‘I’m afraid he’s out of town at the moment.’

‘Where’s he gone?’

‘I’m not entirely sure. Scotland, I think. For a family wedding.’

Pyke digested this information. ‘When will he be back?’ ‘Another week, perhaps.’

‘What’s his address, anyway?’

‘Can’t you tell me what this is all about, Pyke?’

‘His address.’

‘He lives in Bloomsbury somewhere. I can’t remember offhand which street it is. Gerrard would know.’ He smiled apologetically.

‘Tomorrow, then. I’ll come for both addresses at the same time.’

‘Of course.’ Fox fiddled with his moustache, as he did whenever he was nervous. ‘But tell me where I can contact you. I’ll send someone with the information.’

Pyke thought about this for a moment. ‘No, I think I’ll contact you.’

‘Really, Pyke, all this cloak-and-dagger stuff . . .’

Pyke cut him off and turned to leave. As he did so, the old man called out his name. Pyke spun around just as Fox was saying, ‘You’re much . . .’

‘Much what?’

‘You were never a warm person. I fancy the same could be said about me. Maybe that’s why we were able to work together. But even compared to that, you’re colder somehow, colder and harder . . .’

Fox’s eyes glowed like hot coals behind amber glass, as though his righteous sense of disappointment were beyond Pyke’s comprehension.

 

The stout physician peered down at Sarah Blackwood’s wizened frame and gently tapped his hand against her chest. Throughout his examination, the old woman said nothing; nor did she appear to know where she was, or even that she had been moved from the asylum in Portsmouth. From the threshold of the small room, Pyke watched the proceedings with interest. Behind him, in the adjoining kitchen, the nurse he had hired was preparing dinner. The apartment was situated on the south bank of the river within a stone’s throw of Blackfriars Bridge. He had paid three months’ rent in advance. The nurse had cost him an additional ten guineas a week.

‘You say she has been housed in an asylum for the past fifteen years?’ the physician asked, once he had completed his examination.

‘As far as I am aware.’

‘And you do not know of the circumstances that led to this state of affairs in the first place?’

‘I have been told her malady, if indeed she was ill at all, was not a serious one.’

The physician nodded. ‘She displays no signs of active cogitation. She doesn’t seem to be cognisant of the outside world.’

‘In your opinion,’ Pyke asked, ‘is she mad?’

That drew a short chuckle. ‘It would depend on what you mean by mad, sir.’ He went to retrieve his hat and coat. ‘But if she was not affected by any illness when she first entered this asylum fifteen years ago, your mother is by no means a well or sane woman today.’

Pyke let the remark about ‘his’ mother pass. ‘Is her condition likely to change?’

‘You mean is it likely to improve or worsen?’

Pyke nodded.

‘In my opinion, your mother’s malady is so deep rooted that she will never be roused from her torpor.’

After the physician had left and the nurse had retired for the night, Pyke sat with Emily’s mother in the dark and held her bony hand in his own.

TWENTY-TWO

T
he stone-clad exterior of Newgate prison, long since blackened by smoke and filth, did an acceptable job of concealing what lay inside: the dirty wards, the cold, barren cells and the stink of despair. To the uninitiated, it may have seemed like an ordinary building, but to those who lived in the nearby maze of streets and alleyways, the prison’s imposing walls and brooding Palladian architecture cast a dark shadow over the entire neighbourhood. Even the name conjured up dread. Bare-footed children who scampered alongside cabs and the new omnibuses, begging for coins, did not seem to notice its horrible pall. But others, like the group of labouring men gathered outside the Fortune of War tavern, or the hunchbacked man selling Yarmouth herring from an old wicker basket, or the drunken ballad singer who visibly swayed from side to side as he regaled whoever would stop and listen with songs, seemed to be visibly affected by their proximity to the prison.

Fifty years earlier a Protestant mob had rampaged through the streets around the prison and, armed with crowbars and pitchforks, had attacked it in order to free fellow rioters who had been imprisoned within its walls. Some three hundred prisoners had escaped, but at least as many had died in the resulting fire. It had taken the army a number of days to restore calm to the streets of the capital, and the recriminations had been as brutal as the disturbances; more than fifty rioters had been hanged on different scaffolds across the city.

Despite attempts to rebuild and modernise the prison, it remained a dirty, overcrowded, dark and stinking place. As he waited on Old Bailey, Pyke stared up at the fortress-like walls and wondered whether the prison, which had outlived baying mobs, would soon fall victim to reformist zeal, and whether such an eventuality was to be welcomed or mourned.

Of more immediate concern was the presence of two police constables wearing their familiar dark-blue uniform. The constables were fifty yards away, walking towards him on the same side of the street, when Emily emerged from the prison and looked up and down, perhaps for her carriage. It was Thursday afternoon, the allocated time for her weekly prison visit, and whatever problems or difficulties she may have been facing at Hambledon, she would not miss this appointment. Taking her gently by the arm, he led her down one of the alleyways that ran into Old Bailey. Emily was both agitated and pleased to see him. He took off his cap and wiped soot from his face.

‘We can’t be seen together,’ Emily whispered. At the other end of the alleyway, two figures, one male and one female, lurked in the shadows. ‘I am to be met outside the prison and taken back to Hambledon.’ Her eyes darted nervously back to the street.