Andrew Pepper - The Detective Branch

In the distance Pyke heard the sound of glass breaking. Something moved ahead of him and instinctively he stiffened; a stray dog darted out of the shadows and slipped into an alley on the other side of the street.

John Street petered out a few blocks later and Pyke cut through one of the open courts to Hare Street, where the main search was taking place. He showed his warrant card to one of the uniformed officers and was ushered through the checkpoint. Ahead was the church Wells had mentioned. St Matthew’s. It looked horribly out of place among the slums; its gleaming facade towering over every edifice in the area.

At the far end of Hare Street, near the Windmill and George pubs, Pyke could see that a sizeable crowd had now formed. He heard chants and glasses being smashed. A little later, a small group of men overwhelmed the police barricade, and they were followed by others, bellowing and waving whatever they’d been able to find: chair legs, tankards, knives and sticks. The policemen who’d been conducting searches of the houses spilled out on to the street, truncheons drawn, and then it was hard to tell who was hitting who, a mass of arms and bodies flailing in the dark. Pyke, who was at the far end of the street, opted to avoid the fighting. Instead, he crossed another yard and found himself on derelict land at the back of St Matthew’s. He paused and looked around him. The rain and the wind had eased and the air around him smelled of wet leaves. In the distance, he thought he saw someone or something move, and he shouted. Whoever it was looked up, dropped something, and bolted. Pyke followed the man around the church and over boggy ground as far as the Bethnal Green Road. The fleeing man had a limp and Pyke caught up with him easily.

Drawing his pistol, Pyke held it steady and said, ‘Get down on to your knees and hold your hands above your head.’

The man’s appearance was dishevelled and his clothes were filthy; if Pyke had to guess, he would have said he was a tosher or mudlark, even though they were a good half a mile from the river.

‘Don’t shoot, mister. I ain’t done nothing.’

Everything in Pyke screamed that this wasn’t their man.

It was midnight by the time Pyke made it back to St Botolph’s on Aldgate High Street. He showed his warrant card to the constable manning the entrance to the yard and was told that the body had been moved into the church itself. Earlier, he had learned that their suspect hadn’t yet been apprehended but they weren’t abandoning their search. Three constables had suffered cuts and bruises in the melee on Hare Street and a number of arrests had been made. Pyke found Walter Wells in the church’s nave, talking to one of the wardens. When he saw Pyke, Wells excused himself and came over to join him.

‘So it would seem the man who did this has managed to slip through our fingers.’ The blood was vivid in Wells’s neck and cheeks.

‘What exactly did he do?’

‘I’ll show you the corpse in a moment. I’m afraid it’s not a pleasant sight.’

‘They never are.’ Pyke looked around the church and yawned. He had hoped to be home by now. Felix would be expecting him and the lad had already spent too much time at Godfrey’s bedside since the old man’s heart attack. Being at work distracted Pyke from what was going on at home and at times he welcomed this respite; the chance to forget, if only temporarily, that his uncle was dying. But he also knew that his absence placed too much of a burden on Felix, and that his son had started to resent the lack of time he spent with them.

‘You have a name?’ Pyke asked.

‘The rector,’ Wells said. ‘Isaac Guppy.’ Even though they were out of the cold, Pyke could still see Wells’s breath in front of his mouth.

‘The superintendent from Stepney said he’d been attacked with a heavy implement of some kind.’

‘A hammer, we think. One was found next to the body.’

The body had been laid out in one of aisles and covered with a white dustsheet. Wells bent over and drew it back.

There was hardly anything left of the man’s face, and what remained was a grotesque amalgam of broken bones, dried blood and torn, bruised flesh. Nothing else, apart from the man’s face, had been affected: the rector’s body was pale, fleshy and unremarkable. They didn’t need a doctor to tell them how he had died: his skull had been shattered by repeated blows of a hammer.

The implement in question was retrieved by one of the constables.

‘Did this constable actually see the attack taking place?’ Pyke asked.

‘No, but he did see a man standing over the body. You can interview him yourself. I’m told he can provide a fairly detailed description. He shouted at the man not to move but the man ran. He followed him as far as Bethnal Green but then lost him.’

‘What did the churchwarden have to say?’ Pyke could see from the gleam in Wells’s eyes that he had additional information, either about the victim or the suspect.

‘The description of our suspect matches someone who works here and at the rectory. Francis Hiley. The warden let it slip that he already has a criminal conviction.’

‘For what?’

‘The warden didn’t know. Apparently Hiley slept rough in the church. There’s no sign of him, of course.’

Pyke understood that Wells had already made up his mind: Hiley was their man. It didn’t matter that there was no physical evidence to underscore this belief. The man was an ex-felon and he had run away from the scene of a crime. But what did this actually prove?

Wells, however, was in no mood to be put off. In his mind, the murderer was as good as caught and his entire demeanour reeked of self-congratulation.

‘We can visit the rectory any time we want. Guppy’s wife and his household are expecting us.’

Pyke looked at him and licked his lips. ‘I’ve sent word to Jack Whicher to meet me at the rectory.’

For a few moments, neither of them spoke. Wells’s face reddened slightly and his jaw tightened. His responsibilities, as they both knew, were primarily administrative. ‘Very well, sir. If you have no further call for my services…’

‘Walter.’ Pyke reached out and touched his arm. ‘Your good work tonight hasn’t gone unnoticed. Perhaps you could be persuaded to remain here for a while longer and talk to the coroner when he arrives?’

Wells seemed satisfied with this and even managed a wry smile.

The rectory was a good five-minute walk from the church and it wouldn’t have looked out of place in the manicured grounds of a country house. It was a gabled brick-and-flint building with stone dressing and mullion windows. As well as having a drawing room, library, study, ballroom and numerous living areas on the ground floor, there was enough room upstairs for Guppy and his wife, his three children, and an annexe for five servants, a gardener and two stable boys.

It wasn’t long before Whicher joined Pyke in the drawing room. Upstairs he could hear the children sobbing. He had been met by the same warden he’d seen in the church and shown into the drawing room. Whicher was now conferring with the parish beadle, a rotund, punctilious man called Tobias Nutt. In spite of the lateness of the hour, they were, Nutt informed them, awaiting a visit by the archdeacon himself, who had been told the terrible news.

Perhaps there was nothing out of the ordinary about the archdeacon’s visit. After all, one of his flock had just been murdered. And perhaps it was the archdeacon’s particular duty to deal with this kind of occurrence, though Pyke was reasonably sure that a man of the cloth had not been killed for a good number of years. But it reminded Pyke of his fractious visit to the man’s home earlier in the year and the objects that had been stolen from his safe; objects including the Saviour’s Cross, which still hadn’t been recovered.