Andrew Pepper - The Detective Branch

The landlord looked at the pistol and nodded.

Pyke found Septimus Clapp where he could be found most afternoons; the taproom of the Cheese tavern on Fleet Street. Clapp occupied a table at the back of the room and no one dared venture anywhere near him. This was partly because he stank — of stale tobacco and sweat — and partly because people were terrified of him. Clapp was one of the most successful and ruthless moneylenders in the city. For each day a payment was late, Clapp instructed his men to snap one of the debtor’s fingers. He was also no respecter of age or gender; women and the elderly were just as likely to have their fingers broken as young men.

‘I’d like to sell you a debt.’ Pyke removed the document Tompkins had signed from his coat pocket and slid it across the table. ‘The debt’s for twenty pounds. I’m willing to sell it to you for ten.’

‘And why would you want to do something like that, Detective Inspector?’ Clapp cast his eyes across the piece of paper in front of him.

‘You don’t need to know. I just want you to treat this debt as you would any other.’

Clapp seemed amused by this proposition. Staring down at the name on the document, he said, ‘And where does this Mr William Gerrett reside?’

‘You can visit him at his place of work.’

‘Which is?’

‘Scotland Yard.’

The moneylender clapped his hands together in evident delight. ‘So he’s a policeman, is he?’

‘A detective sergeant.’

Clapp folded up the document and tucked it into his pocket. ‘Usually I wouldn’t bother with such a trifling sum but the nature of this enterprise appeals to me.’

‘Do what you do, Clapp, but keep my name out of it.’

Clapp grinned, revealing bloodied gums and two good teeth. ‘You’re a worse man than you look, sir. And I mean that as a compliment.’

When Gerrett finally showed up for work the following morning, Pyke could still smell gin on his breath. He said nothing to Pyke about his financial predicament and sat morosely at his desk. Pyke had been out when Clapp and two of his collectors had come to the office the previous day but he’d heard about it later from Shaw. Gerrett had been unable to settle the debt on the spot and had begged Clapp for a week to do so. Clapp had given him until the following evening. Gerrett came to see Pyke and broke down. Pyke told him he would look into the matter and passed it on to Wells, who dealt with all disciplinary issues. At the end of the day, Gerrett was summoned to Wells’s office and dismissed, as Pyke knew he would be.

‘I didn’t have a choice,’ Wells said to Pyke afterwards. ‘He knew the rules, he’d read the code of behaviour.’

‘You did what you had to.’

Wells looked at him astutely. ‘Of course, if you’d wanted to protect him, you could have kept the information to yourself.’

Pyke held his stare but said nothing.

‘The man in question made what I considered to be an unfortunate remark yesterday. I hope it didn’t have any bearing on your decision.’

Pyke was in Wells’s office and he went over to the shelves, which were lined with books he didn’t believe Wells had ever read. ‘It’s true I didn’t fight for him, as I would have done for Whicher or Shaw.’

‘And Gerrett’s leaving means that Eddie Lockhart is now isolated in the department,’ Wells commented.

Pyke was surprised Wells had been able to work it out. ‘Yes, I suppose you could say that.’

‘And that’s good for you because Lockhart may find it harder to pass information back to Pierce.’

‘I don’t know for sure that Lockhart is Pierce’s spy.’

Wells nodded easily. ‘Perhaps it was Gerrett.’ This thought made him smile.

‘At bottom, he was a poor detective, Walter. That’s all we need to be worried about here.’

The train to Colchester left the Eastern Counties terminus at Shoreditch at 12.30 precisely, the carriages lurching forward, porters and hawkers on the platform trying to keep up with them. Steam from the engine hung in the air like cannon-smoke, then they were moving through the same tenements where they’d chased a man, possibly Francis Hiley, a week earlier. From inside the train, the buildings seemed even smaller and dirtier than they had done previously. Relaxing into his cushioned seat, Pyke let his gaze drift out of the window. Soon they’d passed the worst of the slums and the landscape opened out, brick kilns and allotments replacing row upon row of terraced housing. This was not the first time Pyke had travelled on a train, but he had not used the railways as much as he could have done. Maybe it was because he associated them with his wife’s death; in the end, she’d been killed because of her efforts to unionise navvies building the London-to-Birmingham line. Pyke shut his eyes and wondered how his life would have turned out if Emily had lived, how different it would’ve been.

Soon the city was behind them and they were moving through farmland and green fields. The sky was blue and hard, and the frost on the ground sparkled like tiny diamonds. The view, and the motion of the carriage, soon put Pyke to sleep.

By the time he had caught the stagecoach from Colchester to Ipswich and persuaded a hackney carriage to take him to the colony a few miles outside Stratford St Mary, the light was starting to fade. The land was barren and oppressively flat, mile upon mile of cornfields lying fallow for the winter, broken by the occasional tree or windmill with crows hovering menacingly in the air. It was an empty landscape, sparsely populated, and unwelcoming to the outsider. It put Pyke in mind of marshes and ancient Druids, low clouds rolling in off the North Sea so you could hardly tell the land and the sky apart.

The vegetarian colony was located at the end of a muddy track and it was a more orderly and, indeed, permanent community than he’d been expecting. There were tents erected on the grassland closest to the river but there was also a series of mud-and-stone shacks on the slightly higher ground. From the gate, Pyke counted twenty men and women still hoeing the fields. He stopped a woman and asked her where he could find Sarah Scott. The woman said she didn’t think that Sarah had returned from London but directed him to one of the larger mud-and-stone cottages. He peered into the interior and saw someone with their back to him. It took him a few moments to realise the woman was standing at an easel, a paintbrush in her hand. The room was lit by candles and a wood fire smouldered in the brick grate, smoke drifting upwards towards a hole in the roof.

‘I’m looking for Sarah Scott,’ he said, waiting for her to turn around.

‘You’ve found her.’ She took a step towards him, brush still in hand. Her cheeks were smudged with paint. ‘And who, may I ask, are you?’

‘Pyke.’ He waited. ‘Detective Inspector Pyke of Scotland Yard.’

She stepped to one side and said, ‘You had better come in, then.’

There were two simple wooden chairs arranged around the fire. She invited him to take one of them and waited until he was seated before doing likewise.

She wasn’t beautiful by the standards of genteel society; she was too petite for a start, no more than five feet tall. Her skin was smooth but dark, suggesting she spent too much time outdoors, and her hips were straight and almost boyish. It was her hair which marked her as different, though. Rather than scraped back off her face or arranged in loose curls, her ink-black hair cascaded in every direction, a tangled, unruly mess, untamed by a comb or even a bonnet. It put him in mind of Medusa. Clearly she didn’t dress her hair for anyone apart from herself. In spite of her height, she didn’t seem overawed by Pyke’s presence and held his gaze for so long that he had to look away first. When she smiled, laughter lines appeared at the edges of her face, her curious, intelligent eyes taking everything in without giving away what she was thinking.