Andrew Pepper - The Detective Branch

Grief affects people in different ways but Pyke had always thought that it was a luxury of the indolent. The next morning, he found Cullen’s wife at the front of the shop. On her hands and knees, and wearing a tatty apron, her hair tied up in a bun, she was scrubbing the floor with a wire brush. Her face was rigid with concentration as she drew the bristles back and forth across the dark stains, as though the act itself could somehow erase the memory of what had happened. Pyke let the door close behind him and coughed. She looked up, startled, and then allowed her gaze to return to the stain in front of her. ‘What do you want?’

‘Tell me about the Rafferty brothers.’

Pyke saw at once that his words had rattled her. She stared down at the damp, soapy residue on the floor. ‘What about them?’

‘You know who I’m talking about, then?’

‘There’s not many folk around ’ere what don’t know the name.’

‘Yesterday I asked you whether anyone had threatened your husband. You gave me an equivocal answer.’

This time she stopped scrubbing, put down her brush and looked up at him. ‘ Equivocal?’

Pyke nodded, acknowledging her subtle rebuke. She wouldn’t have known it from the way he spoke, he thought, but he came from the same background she did. ‘The Raffertys or someone from their mob came to the shop, didn’t they?’

Cullen’s wife hauled herself up off her knees and stretched. ‘You seem to have all the answers.’

She started to walk away but Pyke grabbed her wrist. ‘I’m trying to find the man or men who killed your husband.’ The woman tried to shake him off but he wouldn’t let go.

Her small, quick eyes hardened. ‘Folk like us don’t say no to the likes of the Raffertys.’

Pyke let go of her wrist. ‘What did they want with your husband?’

She put her hands on her hips and sniffed. ‘Fence some of their loot.’

‘And he agreed?’

‘’Course he agreed. What choice did he ’ave?’

Pyke paused for a moment, listening to the jangling of knives and spoons from the eating house next door. ‘Maybe your husband tried to pull the wool over the Raffertys’ eyes and they came here to teach him a lesson?’

That elicited a hollow chuckle. ‘My Sammy weren’t a brave man but he weren’t stupid, neither. If the Raffertys told him to dance a barefoot jig on a bed of hot coals, he woulda done it with a smile on his face.’

‘You don’t think it was the Raffertys who killed your husband, then?’

Cullen’s wife dug her hands into the pouch of her apron. ‘Like I said yesterday, Sammy was excited ’bout something, a cull comin’ to see him. If he was expecting the Rafferty boys, he would’ve been quakin’ in his boots.’

It was still early but the street outside was thronging with people and no one was paying much attention to the shop, as though what had happened the day before had already been forgotten. Pyke walked under a line of dripping clothes and stepped out on to Drury Lane, where an endless procession of cabs, drays and costermongers’ barrows were crawling in both directions. The pavements were full, too; navvies in their white moleskins and laced boots idling on the corner, an old man blowing on Irish pipes, a younger man carrying a sign advertising a camphor emetic. From the upper-floor windows, Pyke could hear crying and screaming, men still drunk from the night before berating their wives and children. All around, men and women dressed in work clothes were readying themselves for the day ahead; some would find work pulling up potatoes or picking hops in Bromley and Bow, others would lump coal or lay bricks. Some would set up makeshift stalls on the city’s streets selling oranges and potatoes. In the window of a baker’s there was a placard declaring ‘No Popery’. Next door, outside a ginnery, was a board advertising Dublin stout. A newspaper seller stood on the next corner holding up a copy of the London Illustrated News. Doubtless its revelations, and its lurid description of the murders, would further fan the flames of discord: Catholic Ireland bringing its barbarian ways to the streets of Protestant England. Pyke knew there were around fifty or sixty thousand Irish in St Giles alone. What would happen, he wondered, if the Catholics and Protestants living alongside each other in the rookery really did turn on one another?

On the other side of the street, Pyke saw Lockhart emerge from a butcher’s shop. Cutting in between a brewer’s dray and a hackney carriage, he caught up with the man outside the Queen’s Head.

‘I’ve just talked to an old man who lives in one of the tenements at the back of Cullen’s shop,’ Lockhart said, breathlessly.

They looked at one another warily as Pyke waited for Lockhart to catch his breath. Personally Pyke felt his colleague’s face was too gaunt and his eyes were too close together but he’d heard it said, by Gerrett when he was drunk, that he, Pyke, was jealous of Lockhart’s youth and good looks.

On this occasion, Lockhart seemed excited rather than diffident. He told Pyke that a witness, a retired coal-whipper, had seen a well-dressed man, tall, with dark hair and swarthy skin, in the alley behind the pawnbroker’s just after the shooting. The man had been carrying a large pistol. The coal-whipper reckoned he’d be able to recognise the gunman if he ever saw him again.

A cart piled high with wooden crates rattled towards them, the harness clanking loudly as the iron-shod wheels rolled over the cobblestones. Pyke waited for it to pass. ‘That’s fine work, Detective.’ He thought he saw Lockhart smile. ‘Keep it up and I’ll see you back in the office at five.’

About lunchtime it started to rain and by early afternoon a brown slush had collected at the sides of the street and was sprayed up on to the pavements by the passing traffic. It meant there was standing room only in the taproom of the Blue Dog, traders from the nearby market taking refuge from the downpour alongside knife-grinders, basket sellers, hawkers, balladeers, oakum pickers and costermongers. Steam rose from wet clothes, creating a fug that smelled almost as bad as the rotten vegetables on the pavement outside. Pyke approached the zinc-topped counter and asked to speak to the landlord. No one took much notice of him until he said he was there to ‘rattle the cage’ of the Rafferty boys. The pot-bellied landlord folded his arms and smiled. Almost immediately, conversation in the vicinity of the counter stopped.

‘And who, sir, are you?’ The landlord’s moustache twitched.

‘Pyke.’ He waited. ‘Detective Inspector Pyke.’ As he said it, he could almost feel the walls closing in on him.

‘A Jack, eh?’

‘You want to point me in the direction of the Raffertys or do I have to arrest you for being fat and ugly?’

‘Tough-talking, too.’ The landlord’s eyes were as dead as a filleted mackerel’s. ‘You here on your own?’

‘I see you can count to one. I’m impressed.’

That drew a smirk. ‘A brave man. Or a stupid one.’ A few men within earshot laughed.

‘You can talk, surely you can, friend, but I wonder if that’s all you’ve got,’ a voice said behind Pyke. An Irish brogue.

Pyke turned and found himself staring at a man in his forties, with unkempt, reddy-brown hair, a sunburnt face with a six-inch scar running down one side of it, a neck as thick as the stump of a small tree, and arms that had doubtless crushed men to death. He was the kind of man who could plunge a knife into your belly as easily as he could drink a mug of ale. Pyke noticed, too, that a path had cleared around him.

‘Your name Rafferty?’

‘Might be. Then again it might be O’Shaunessy or Cleary depending on who’s askin’ the question.’ A few nervous laughs rippled around the taproom.