Andrew Pepper - The Detective Branch

‘Whatever else you were working on, gentlemen, this now takes priority. There will, of course, be immense pressure on us to find and arrest the person, or persons, who committed this act. I’ll expect your full co-operation. Is that understood?’

They all nodded. The air around them was still thick with the scent of fresh blood.

‘Let’s start with Cullen, then. From the look of his shop, I’d say he wasn’t too successful as a pawnbroker. Was he a fence, too? Perhaps. The wife as good as admitted he sometimes dabbled in stolen goods. I’ll need a volunteer to visit Bow Street first thing in the morning, go through the records there, and find out if he was ever convicted of a crime.’

Shaw put up his hand. ‘I’ll do it, sir.’ He was always the first to volunteer and insisted on calling Pyke ‘sir’, even though Pyke had repeatedly told them to call him by his name.

‘Good.’ Pyke paused, looking at his men. ‘We don’t know who the other two victims are. We need to identify them as quickly as possible, and find out what they were doing in the shop.’ Pyke said this even though it was clear to him that a man like Harry Dove wouldn’t have been there to buy a gnarled pair of boots or a broken umbrella.

‘After the inquest, I’ve arranged for the bodies to be laid out in an upstairs room at the Queen’s Head, just across the road. When news of this spreads, people will want to come and look. Someone, somewhere will know the identity of these two men, so I need one of you to remain with the bodies.’

When no one else put their hand up, Gerrett made a half-hearted gesture. Secretly Pyke was relieved; it was the least taxing of the tasks and hence the one most suited to Gerrett’s capabilities. Pyke thanked him and moved on.

‘The fact that the safe was open and its contents had been removed suggests robbery as the likely motive. But the three men were shot dead after the gunman or gunmen had got what they wanted. Why would they do that? Did Cullen or one of the others try to disarm the gunman and fail?’

Pyke stared at their faces. He didn’t get an answer, nor did he expect one. ‘If it was, in fact, a robbery, we need to work out what was taken.’ He looked at Whicher. ‘I want you to have a look at Cullen’s books. Talk to the wife, if you have to. Make a list of what was stolen. There’ll also be a record of what people brought in to be pawned. Look for anything unusual or valuable and make a note of it.’

Next, Pyke turned to Lockhart. ‘I want you to knock on doors and speak to the neighbours. The man or men we’re looking for might’ve entered the shop from the street or from Drury Lane. Someone might have seen them. Similarly I’m guessing they left through the backyard. Again, someone living in one of the tenements might have seen something. Talk to people, try to jog their memories.’

Lockhart nodded curtly but said nothing. He seemed almost jittery and couldn’t bring himself to look at the corpses.

‘Whoever did this,’ Pyke said, ‘came prepared. They came with loaded pistols. The witness heard three shots in rapid succession. That tells us they didn’t have any qualms about pulling the trigger.’

Pyke thought about the bodies laid out in the adjacent room. Briefly, he tried to imagine someone walking into Cullen’s shop, pistol already drawn; imagined this man ordering Cullen to open the safe and empty the contents into a bag; imagined him turning on Cullen and firing. Perhaps it had been a double-barrelled pistol, in which case he could have turned it on Dove or the other man and fired again. But a man like Harry Dove wouldn’t have given him the time to reload. So maybe the gunman had used two pistols, or maybe there had been two gunmen after all?

Killing someone was never easy, but whoever had done this had moved from man to man, seemingly firing at will. Pyke closed his eyes and tried to picture the scene: the jolt of the pistol as the shot was discharged, the tearing of flesh, the screaming, the acrid whiff of burnt powder. None of this had put off the gunman. Rather he had gone about his task with methodical precision. One shot, followed by another, followed by another.

It struck Pyke later that he wasn’t looking for a robber. He was looking for an assassin; someone who liked to kill.

‘How’s your uncle?’ Edmund Saggers asked. He had managed to push his considerable bulk to the front of the barricade and persuade one of the uniformed constables to let him talk to Pyke.

‘He’s been better,’ Pyke said, glancing at the shining faces of the mob gathered behind him. ‘He’s been worse, too.’

As a reporter for the London Illustrated News and, before that, a freelance penny-a-liner, Saggers had met up with Godfrey Bond every month for the past ten years to talk about literary tittle-tattle over a table full of food and as much wine as both men could pour down their throats. He had also become Pyke’s friend — or a friend of sorts. From time to time, Pyke found it useful to get Saggers to highlight stories arising out of particular investigations and most of the time Saggers was willing to oblige, in return for an exclusive at some later date.

‘I heard he’s given up his apartment in Camden and moved in with you,’ Saggers said.

‘That’s right.’ Pyke hesitated, wondering whether to voice his concerns about his uncle. ‘How did Godfrey seem to you, the last time you met for lunch?’ In Pyke’s opinion, his uncle’s health had deteriorated since the start of the year but he didn’t want to articulate this to Saggers. He didn’t even want to acknowledge it to himself. Although Godfrey was in his seventies, the notion that the old man’s health might be failing was too much for Pyke to bear.

Saggers considered the question. He was wearing a tweed coat and matching trousers that had been made for him and which he rarely, if ever, changed out of. ‘Between the two of us, he didn’t finish his wine.’

Pyke nodded. It confirmed what he’d suspected for a while. The idea panicked him, as much for Felix’s sake as his own. His fourteen-year-old son was devoted to the old man. It was also true that Godfrey was the only father he, Pyke, had ever known.

Saggers gestured at Cullen’s shop. ‘I heard there are three dead including the owner. Shot by a person or persons unknown.’

‘What else did you hear?’

Saggers let his gaze drift over Pyke’s shoulder. ‘Hard to understand ’em, to be honest.’ He stared up at a soot-blackened building. ‘This place shouldn’t be called Little Dublin. From the accents I’d say Little Cork would be more accurate.’

‘People gossip,’ Pyke said. ‘You must have overheard something.’

‘Have you heard of the Raffertys?’

That got his attention. ‘No. Should I have?’

‘Three brothers from County Cork, or so I gather. Talk is, they’ve started their own gang.’

Pyke looked into Saggers’s eyes; they were almost translucent in colour, half buried in two deep pits of flesh. ‘Do people think they might be responsible for the murders?’

‘I’ve been standing here for about an hour and I’ve heard the same name whispered three or four times. Draw your own conclusions.’

Ned Villums was sitting at his functional desk in his plain office in a residential street in the middle of Clerkenwell. He barely looked up when Pyke was ushered into the room by one of his assistants.

‘I’m here about the Shorts Gardens robbery.’

Villums finished what he’d been reading and raised his eyes. ‘I’ve already heard about it. Three dead, if my information’s correct. Nasty business.’ He waited for a moment, then added, ‘For what it’s worth, Cullen was a stupid, shambling wreck of a man.’

Pyke wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Ned, but Harry Dove was one of the victims.’