Andrew Pepper - The Last Days of Newgate

This was the moment when Edmonton had struck upon the notion of using Pyke. He had known, for a fact, that Pyke was a formidable investigator. If it could somehow be arranged that Pyke discovered the dead bodies, he would have to be a part of any investigation, and given his tenacity and contrariness, he might begin to suspect some kind of conspiracy. If not, he could always be pushed in such a direction once the investigation had commenced. In any case, Pyke could be used and then discarded once his purpose had been served.

Pyke paused for a moment. Swift seemed to be more preoccupied by the sound of rats. Pyke continued with his narrative.

Swift was, by no means, a papist sympathiser. After all, he had grown up in the Orange Order and had been initiated into a way of thinking that saw Catholics as both a threat and a menace. Nonetheless, he was not a rabid Catholic-hating extremist like Edmonton. For him, there had to be prospect of significant personal and material advancement to compensate him for the dangers he would have to face in actually executing the plan. Hence Edmonton’s generous offer of a parliamentary seat, his own daughter’s hand in marriage and the prospect of one day inheriting the family estate. The unpredictable element had been Davy Magennis. For the plan to work, Swift would have to prime his anger and transform the big man’s violent threats into something tangible.

‘But you weren’t aware that Clare, Stephen’s mistress, had just given birth, were you?’ Pyke said.

Swift looked at him with growing contempt.

‘And when Davy saw the baby, the whole plan fell apart.’ Pyke ran his knife across the open wound on Swift’s chin and saw him wince. ‘Suddenly, he couldn’t go through with it. Davy didn’t kill them. Did he?’

Swift shrugged, as though the issue were a trifling one.

‘So it was down to you. Either go through with the murders yourself or risk losing everything you’d been promised by Edmonton.’ Pyke watched his sullen reaction. ‘You made Magennis stay, initially at least. You made him help you tie up Stephen and Clare, and then you slit their throats with a razor.’ Pyke did not need to close his eyes to recall the sight of their severed throats. ‘But what I don’t know, what I still can’t work out, is why you had to kill the baby as well.’

Swift licked his blood-caked lips. ‘It wouldn’t stop crying.’

Pyke stared at him. He felt his innards tighten. ‘Is that it?’

‘The other two were dead. Magennis was blubbering. He wanted to leave. Then we heard a sound at the door. I’d forgotten to lock it behind us. It was the cousin, Mary. She saw Davy, who she obviously knew, and saw the blood on the floor and screamed. Magennis ran after her. I told him to. I thought he would know what to do. Later, I realised that he wasn’t coming back and that, perhaps, he hadn’t taken care of the girl as I’d hoped. At the time, I was left in that God-forsaken room with the crying baby. I picked it up. I hadn’t thought about killing it until it started to bawl even louder, and I couldn’t bear it. I shook it a few times but it wouldn’t stop. So I shook it again, much harder this time, but the screams still wouldn’t stop. That was when I decided I’d had enough. I throttled it and dumped it in the pail.’ He looked up at Pyke and shrugged. ‘That’s it. That’s everything.’

It was as though he had described throwing away a pot of boiled meat bones.

There it was. Pyke could not help but feel a little deflated by Swift’s revelations, as though they made all his own efforts to conceive of Swift’s crimes as degenerate and monstrous seem wholly misplaced. His moment of vindication had somehow floundered on the banality of Swift’s evil. In particular, Pyke felt foolish for having imagined a gruesome scenario in which the killer had deliberately tortured the parents by forcing them to watch their baby’s murder. Through such acts of imagination and fantasies of revenge, Pyke had given the murders a status that far exceeded their squalid reality. Swift had killed the baby simply because it would not stop crying. Pyke did not know whether the mundanity of this explanation was less upsetting than the macabre constructions of his own imagination, but, in the end, it didn’t really matter. For six months, he had pursued phantoms inside and outside his head, and now that those phantoms had been rendered visible, given recognisable shape and form, in the figure of Swift, he felt only drained and soiled as a consequence. Somehow, too, this made his revenge seem less legitimate than it had been, at least in his own mind. More than anything else, Pyke just wanted Swift to be dead. Swift saw this, too, and any lingering hope evaporated in his eyes.

‘Just one more question,’ Pyke said, lifting the hatch next to Swift’s bound form. ‘How did you know where to find the cousin, Mary Johnson? I mean, I presume it was you who strangled her and her boyfriend?’

Swift tugged at the bindings around his wrists and ankles and strained to look beneath him at the rats that covered every inch of floor and wall space at the bottom of the cage.

‘How did you find her?’

‘I can’t remember,’ Swift said, sounding panicky. ‘I don’t know. Edmonton must have told me.’

Pyke took his knife and cut through Swift’s hand bonds. He gouged his thumb into the wound on Swift’s chin. Swift gurgled and momentarily passed out. Pyke cut the bonds around his ankles and shunted Swift’s prostrate body across towards the open hatch. Beneath him, the carpet of rats seemed to move as one.

He waited until Swift came round. His hands were gripping Swift’s ankles. The rest of his body was dangling upside down inside the cage. The rats could almost touch his scalp. He was screaming now, screaming and pleading with Pyke for pity and for mercy. Pyke held him there for as long as he was able to. Finally, however, his grip weakened; he let go of Swift’s ankles and watched as he fell into the mass of rats, at least six or seven deep, watched as Swift’s body — first his legs and then his arms, torso and, finally, his neck and mouth — seemed to disappear as the rats swarmed over him. He watched — fascinated and sickened — as a body of wet, black fur and long, twitching tails engulfed Swift’s disintegrating form, and he listened as the almost unbearable carnivorous screeches finally drowned out the stomach-churning gurgles emerging from Swift’s body. Eventually, the only sound in the cellar was the unmistakable noise of ten thousand teeth tearing into bloodied flesh. Pyke would remember that terrible sound for as long as he lived.

‘My God, you look terrible, m’boy. Come in.’ Godfrey looked up and down the street outside his apartment. It seemed quiet enough. Certainly there was no sign of the men who had been stationed there but it was late, after two in the morning. Still, Pyke had taken great care to slip into the building unnoticed.

He had not been able to face the prospect of another long, cold night in the church and had walked the three miles from Holborn to his uncle’s apartment in Camden Town.

In the front room, Godfrey poured him a large brandy and threw some more coal on to the fire. The room was as untidy as Pyke remembered it: piles of books, pamphlets and papers covered every inch of floor space. It had been a while since he was last there, perhaps as much as a year. Pyke felt himself begin to relax. This had been as much a home for him as he had ever known: even the vaguely musty smell was reassuringly familiar.

‘So you gave Emily my address, then?’ Godfrey was wearing his silk dressing gown.

‘How did you know?’

‘I know because she’s here. She turned up on my door-step a few hours ago in quite a state. Told me she’d tried to find you in the church but you weren’t there. Thought you might have been arrested. Or worse.’