Andrew Pepper - The Last Days of Newgate

‘That sounds about right.’

‘I went looking for the house today. I think I found it.

It’s been boarded up. No one’s living there.’

‘Wha’s that got to do wi’ me?’

‘I asked in the town. No one wanted to talk to me about him.’

‘Folk in this part of the world don’t much care for loose talk with strangers.’

‘I’m not a stranger to you.’

Andrew Magennis shrugged.

Pyke nodded. He had expected to be stonewalled. ‘Davy’s dead. He cut his own throat. They buried him in an unmarked grave outside a church in Mullabrack.’

This was sufficient to break the old man’s resolve. ‘The big lad’s dead?’ His lip quivered. ‘My Davy?’ Tears welled up behind his glassy stare.

‘The man who Davy went to work for. .’

A solitary tear rolled down the old man’s face.

‘Let me assure you of one thing,’ Pyke continued. ‘He was no friend to Davy.’

Beaten now, the old man just nodded. His eyes were dark with exhaustion, his hair matted with sweat.

‘You met him, didn’t you?’

‘Once, about two years back,’ Magennis said, slowly. ‘I paid Davy a visit, when he was still workin’ there.’

Pyke took his time. ‘I just need you to answer one question for me.’

‘Then you’ll leave us to grieve?’ The old man stared at him through bloodshot eyes.

‘Did this man have a brown mole on his chin?’

Magennis seemed momentarily nonplussed.

‘Did he have a large brown mole on his chin?’

‘Jimmy Swift,’ Magennis said, nodding his head. ‘How did ye know?’

Pyke closed his eyes. It was as though an anvil had fallen on his skull from a great height. He felt sickened. How did he know? God, the real question was: how could he have been so blind?

London, England

SEPTEMBER 1829

It started when a curmudgeonly black bear, with fur shaved from its head to make it appear more human, broke free from its shackles outside the Old Cock tavern in Holborn. Perhaps wanting retribution for years of humiliation and ill-treatment, the bear lumbered up the creaking staircase at the back of the building and forced its way into the crowded upper room where red-faced market vendors were screaming their support for a seven-foot man wearing full military uniform to resemble the duke of Wellington. The outfit would have been too small on a man half his size. The giant had placed a dwarf, dressed as Napoleon, in a headlock, and was squeezing his neck with such intensity that the little man’s eyeballs seemed as though they might pop out of their sockets.

Pyke could not hear the dwarf’s chokes over the delighted cheers of the crowd, at least eight deep around every side of the gas-lit ring. That was until the bewildered bear paused briefly in the doorway to the upper room and surveyed the surroundings. It would have been a familiar sight: the tavern owner, Ned Villums, put the beast to work twice a week in that same ring, performing a version of Little Red Riding Hood, taking the part of the wolf. The crowd did not pay half a shilling each to watch the bear growl his few lines, though. They came for the ratting, bare-knuckle fights or a bout of wrestling. The bear sniffed the fetid air, saturated with the combined stench of cheap gin and unwashed clothes. The crowd gathered on the bear’s side of the room visibly parted and shrank into the room’s darker recesses, affording the bear a clear view of the ring.

Without giving it a second thought, the bear shuffled on all fours, ignoring the silent and evidently petrified crowd, and hauled itself over the ring’s waist-high wooden wall, with more aplomb than might have been expected from a beast that weighed fifty stone. By that time, the giant’s grip around the dwarf’s neck had slackened enough for some of the dwarf’s colour to return to his cheeks. For a few seconds, the bear and the giant wrestler stood rooted to their positions, no more than ten feet apart, each silently contemplating the other. Later, Pyke was not sure how it had started: whether the bear had attacked without provocation, or someone from the audience had thrown an object at the animal, but the result was the same. Ignoring the dwarf, who was slumped on the ground gulping for air, the bear launched itself at the stricken giant, who, in an instant, was transformed into a taller version of the dwarf he had just been strangling.

Almost at once, someone from the crowd cheered, either mistaking what was happening for part of the fight or simply enjoying the sight of the helpless giant being mauled by the powerful bear. These cheers produced a counter-response, this time in support of the giant, either out of patriotic duty, because the giant was dressed as the duke of Wellington, or because they had money staked on the outcome of the fight. Soon, there was bedlam. Villums himself was trapped by the baying mob on the far side of the room and was screaming at Pyke to take action — more to protect his tavern’s already dubious reputation than to save the giant. The bear was tearing flesh from the giant’s flayed torso when Pyke returned from Villums’s garret carrying a flintock blunderbuss with a long brass cannon barrel loaded with powder and ball shot.

From a distance of fifteen yards, Pyke rested the butt of the blunderbuss against his shoulder and took aim at the bear, but before he could pull the trigger someone knocked him from behind and the projectile exploded out of the barrel of the blunderbuss; instead of hitting the bear as planned, it struck the recovering dwarf squarely in the belly, lifting him clean off his feet and almost cutting him in two. People tried to flee the room, but Pyke took his time and reloaded the weapon. The first shot hit the bear in the chest; the second shot blew off the entire right side of its head. Bone, cartilage, tissue, blood, chunks of fur and even an eyeball splattered those who had not managed to leave the room. The bear seemed not to have been affected by the double blast at first, aside from the obvious loss of body parts. On all fours, it surveyed the carnage: the mauled giant, the dwarf’s twitching corpse and the vast carpet of blood and intestines that covered the floor of the ring. It tried to open its mouth but, as it did so, its will to live finally leaked from its gargantuan frame, and it collapsed on to the floor with a thud. The remaining audience, such as it was, turned and watched the gruesome spectacle. As soon as the bear had stopped moving, one of them broke into applause. Others joined in. No one seemed to know whether the applause was for the bear, the dwarf or the giant, but since the giant was the only one of them left alive, he presumed it must be for him and hauled himself to his feet to receive the accolades. A flap of skin the size of a large book hung down from his bleeding neck.

Once he had put the blunderbuss down, no one seemed to be interested in Pyke, just as no one appeared to have recognised him. But without his unkempt hair and bushy sideburns, this was to be expected.

‘I dunno whether to thank you or strangle you,’ Villums said later, while Pyke inspected his new outfit in the mirror. He had discarded his labourer’s clothes and changed into formal attire. ‘You don’t think it was too much of a risk, coming back to your old haunts?’

In addition to running a sizeable gambling operation in the Old Cock tavern, Villums fenced stolen property. Pyke had employed his services in this latter capacity on more than a few occasions. He would not have described him as a friend but he trusted Villums as much as he did anyone, and he was paying handsomely for the garret that Villums provided for him.

‘Perhaps, but then again, I don’t have a choice.’ Pyke shrugged. He knew as well as anyone that he was only one step, or mishap, away from being recognised and arrested. ‘And I can blend in here just as well as anywhere.’