Andrew Pepper - The Last Days of Newgate

‘Let’s just say, should the need arise and should Charles Hume be unable to assist you, you could contact me via Mr Tilling here.’

‘It means you can have it both ways.’ Pyke held Peel’s formidable stare. ‘Find out what I know and keep an eye on me at the same time.’

‘You think me too devious.’ Peel rested his large hands on his desk. ‘I’m going to be blunt with you, Pyke, and you might think me hard for saying this. I am not particularly concerned about the deaths that you’re investigating. I think them abhorrent, of course, but I am compelled to address my attention to a more general set of circumstances. If I am honest, I believe the Irish race to be an inferior one, at a lower stage of development than our own and, therefore, do not intend to alter any course of action already deemed by myself to be in the best interests of this country as a result of a few deaths, whether those who died were Catholics or Protestants. But I am, and have to be, concerned about the implications for public order, and the sooner this business is resolved the better it will be for everyone. I am not afraid to call in the armed forces because I am not afraid of being unpopular, but I see this course of action only as a last resort.’

When Pyke said, ‘It is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both,’ he saw the recognition register in Peel’s eyes.

He was about to follow it up with another quote from the same source when the door to Peel’s private office flew open and into the room strode a tall, muscular man, older than Peel by some years, dressed in a red riding coat, a silk cravat and buckskin breeches worn over stockings. He was striking rather than handsome, with grey hair, sideburns, a Roman nose and ear lobes that were as fat and long as half a pear. He limped ever so slightly. ‘The King really is the worst man I have ever had to deal with, the most false and with no redeeming qualities.’

The man still hadn’t noticed Pyke and continued, ‘And have you heard the King’s brother has recently returned from Hanover and is causing untold mischief?’ As he slumped into a chair next to Pyke, the man finally realised Peel was not alone.

That was how Pyke found himself sitting next to the Prime Minister, the grand old duke himself, and he smiled inwardly at the thought of what he could do in that moment. Pyke was not enamoured of the aristocracy, nor did the duke’s battlefield exploits impress him. He did not necessarily like or dislike the man, but simply because the opportunity had presented itself he imagined drawing out his pocket knife and driving it into the duke’s heart.

‘Arthur. Mr Pyke here and I were just discussing the relative merits of Machiavelli’s account of statecraft.’

‘Who? ’ The duke looked at Peel and frowned.

‘Mr Pyke is a Bow Street Runner.

‘Not him, dammit,’ the duke muttered, ignoring Pyke. ‘The other fellow.’

‘A Florentine consort, I believe. He wrote a book called The Prince.’

‘Oh.’ The duke turned back to face Peel and shrugged. ‘Why is this man relevant here?’

‘Machiavelli lived in the early sixteenth century. .’

‘I’m not stupid, Robert. I meant this chap here,’ the duke said, motioning without enthusiasm at Pyke.

‘Mr Pyke was the man who discovered the bodies in St Giles.’

‘What bodies?’ The duke seemed both confused and annoyed. ‘I’m the Prime Minister and no one tells me a bloody thing.’

Peel looked at Pyke and said, ‘I think the Prime Minister and I need to have a talk. .’

Pyke stood up and left.

Lizzie’s gin palace did not, as the name might suggest, belong to Lizzie Morgan, the woman who occasionally shared Pyke’s bed. Nor did it belong to her father, George Morgan, who had once been a Bow Street Runner and had first initiated Pyke into the ways of earning additional income from the job. The establishment, which occupied a position at the north end of Duke Street, at the back of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and adjoining the livestock market at Smithfield, was owned by Pyke himself — the happy byproduct of a business arrangement that had also led to the capture and imprisonment of a notorious criminal. For a while, after this man’s conviction, his base of operations had remained vacant. Pyke had bought the lease with reward money paid to him by the grateful owner of valuables Pyke had recovered. He had then transformed it into a drinking establishment replete with plate-glass windows and gilt cornices, ornamental parapets, spittoons, gas lights and illuminated advertisements announcing the ‘medicinal’ properties of the gin on sale. Initially George, who had just retired from the Runners, had assumed the day-to-day running of the bar, but a stroke had subsequently confined him to his bed and propelled Lizzie into the limelight.

Pyke had christened it the Smithfield gin palace, but ever since Lizzie had put on her apron and taken over the running of the bar, most folk simply referred to it as ‘Lizzie’s place’.

It was after three in the morning by the time Peel’s carriage dropped Pyke outside the entrance. The main bar was deserted — the gas lamps had been switched off — and Pyke went straight up to his room, ignoring the powerful scent of human sweat, sawdust and alcohol. To his dismay, Lizzie was curled up in his bed, gently snoring. He envied her peace. Without waking her, he closed the door behind him and went back downstairs to the bar.

Pyke knew that sleep was beyond him, just as he also knew that he did not want to wake Lizzie and have to field well-meaning questions about where he had been and what he had been doing. But he could not settle in the empty bar and found himself yearning for someone to distract him from the unpleasantness of his own thoughts.

Even the laudanum, which he kept hidden away in a bottle behind the counter, did little to alleviate his anxiety.

A while later, still numb from the drug, he found himself walking, unaware of his surroundings or the biting wind, not knowing where he was going until he had reached the cobbled streets surrounding St Paul’s. The giant cathedral stretched so far above him that he could hardly see the starless sky.

When he couldn’t help himself, Pyke tended to prowl the streets around Wellington Barracks on Birdcage Walk, looking for ‘dollymops’: maids, shop girls and milliners who moonlighted as prostitutes to earn additional money and perhaps find someone to support them in a flat of their own. But given that he was half an hour’s walk from the barracks, he didn’t expect to find anyone except a street-hardened prostitute. Usually Pyke did not much care for their crude ways, preferring the faux innocence of girls who still believed in the possibilities of true love. This time he had no intention of being selective.

To his surprise, in a grubby all-night coffee house, he found a nervous red-headed girl, no more than sixteen years of age, wearing a loose coat over a tatty wool dress. Her nails had been chewed but were clean, and before she could tell him in a soft voice that she didn’t do this sort of thing, he thrust a crown into her shaking palm. It was more than treble the going rate. He took her hand and led her, firmly rather than forcefully, outside. Her resistance crumbled when she saw the colour of the coin.

Outside, when she tried to speak, Pyke pressed his hand against her mouth, harder than he had intended, and saw the fright register in her dull eyes. In other circumstances, he might have stopped to say something to her, reassure her, but on this occasion he was too far gone to stop himself. As he pushed her against a wall in an alley adjoining the coffee shop and guided himself into her, he closed his eyes and tried to block the image of what lay inside that metal pail from his head. Moments later, as Pyke emptied himself into the nameless girl, rigid with terror, in a series of grim spasms, he felt as though he were standing over the metal pail peering down at his own corpse.