Andrew Pepper - The Detective Branch

Pyke saw how badly he’d failed the lad and how much he must miss Godfrey’s steady hand. He was about to apologise when Felix said, ‘Mr Leech knocked on the door earlier. I’m surprised you didn’t hear him. It seems one of the pigs has escaped again and is stuck in his garden. I said I’d pass on the message. He wasn’t very happy.’

Pyke swore under his breath. The last thing he wanted to do was deal with a stranded pig.

‘I should have let you know where I was. I had to work late last night…’

Felix shook his head. ‘I heard you crashing around downstairs when you came in. The whole street probably heard you.’

Pyke couldn’t face another argument so he let himself out of the back door, making sure Copper remained in the house.

It was a cool, damp morning and the ground was soft, the sky above sealed with clouds. He found Mabel, the fine-boned short-legged pig, in the middle of his neighbour’s lawn. The animal had sunk into the hole it had created and was clearly distressed, its short legs unable to propel it out of the muddy morass. From time to time the pig would wriggle, to no avail, and then squeal as if to underline its predicament. The neighbour, Percy Leech, was out there as soon as he saw Pyke, striding down the garden in his boots, his pet spaniel trotting at his heel.

‘I really have to object in the strongest possible terms, sir, about the damage that your vile swine has caused in my garden. I insist that you deal with the matter forthwith and make the appropriate reparations.’

The spaniel was circling around the stricken pig, yapping and taking the occasional nip at its tail. It had an irritating, high-pitched bark that was aggravating Pyke’s headache to such an extent that he thought he might have to take a shovel to the dog or at the very least aim a kick at its head.

‘It would seem that the pig is stuck,’ Pyke replied, having wandered around it a few times.

‘I didn’t ask for a description of what is obvious to me, sir. I told you to do something about it.’ Leech’s face was hot with anger.

‘What can I do? The pig’s stuck. If you’d taken better care of your lawn, this wouldn’t have happened.’ Pyke looked at the grass; his pig had clearly gone to work on it and now it looked as if an entire regiment had marched across it.

‘You dare to accuse me, sir? Before your swine ran amok in my garden, the lawn was in perfect condition.’

The spaniel was still yapping at his heels and Pyke edged it away from him with a sideways move of his boot. ‘Can you be sure it was the pig? Perhaps your little dog was trying to find a bone he’d buried earlier.’

‘You think my beloved King Charles would be capable of such an act as this?’ He pointed at the damaged lawn.

But Pyke wasn’t listening. Instead, he was trying to remember what he’d said to Sarah Scott and why she’d asked him to leave. He was also thinking about what he’d done to Pierce, what the ramifications of it might be, and the damage he’d caused, not just to Pierce personally but also to the investigation. In the cold light of day, Pyke could see that his actions had been rash and stupid.

Retracing his steps back to his own garden, and more particularly to the shed where he kept his tools, Pyke collected a shovel and a hatchet then rejoined Leech, who was still trying to pull his spaniel away from the stranded pig. Pyke’s thoughts returned to Whicher. It was a hard, unforgiving world and the sooner he remembered that, the better. Standing over the animal and ignoring the sudden protestations of his neighbour, Pyke took the hatchet, lifted up the pig’s head and sliced the blade across its throat. Mabel’s squeals were quite unlike anything he had heard before. When he looked down at the blade of the hatchet, he saw it was dripping with fresh blood and it made him want to vomit. The pig, which just a few moments ago had been writhing in the mud, had stopped moving. Now a vast pool of blood had extended around its head and was still flowing from the wound. It was really quite obscene. Even in the stiff breeze, you could smell it: at once rich, sweet and rancid.

‘There,’ Pyke said, wiping the blade of the hatchet on a patch of grass. ‘I won’t charge you for the meat. Think of it as reparation for the lawn.’

Leech was speechless, and even the dog had stopped barking.

Pyke turned suddenly and saw that Felix had followed him into the garden and had been watching from the other side of the wall. It was hard to make sense of the look on his face but later Pyke kept coming back to the same words. Revulsion. Fascination. Horror.

Andrew Pepper

The Detective Branch

Pyke had organised and carried out the searches of many houses, and some time during the previous day it had struck him what a cursory, even half-hearted, job he had made of the search at St Botolph’s. He hadn’t thought to look up the chimney or search behind the skirting boards or lift up the floorboards or get down on his hands and knees and work his way from one end of the cellar and loft to the other. In light of his suspicions regarding the Churches Fund, or at least the fact that Guppy and Hogarth might have known one another via Palmer, this failure now seemed like a glaring oversight.

On Monday morning, Pyke arrived at the rectory before eight and banged on the door. No one answered, and through one of the windows he noticed that dustsheets were now covering the large items of furniture. He knocked again, then took out his picklocks and had the door open in less than five minutes. The air in the hallway was musty, and the house eerily quiet.

Pyke had decided to start his search in Guppy’s study. Pausing at the door, he looked at the desk, now emptied of papers, and the shelves, cleared of books. Perhaps there had been evidence of malpractice hidden there, but it was too late to worry about it. Pyke cleared the room of the remaining items of furniture, took the jemmy he’d brought with him and prised off the skirting boards one by one. He didn’t find anything so turned his attention to the chimney. It wasn’t a large one and he couldn’t fully stand up inside it, so he had to reach in and pat the walls with his hands. Taking up the floorboards was a much larger job, and he moved across the floor looking for any loose ones first. When he didn’t find any he returned to the corner nearest to where the desk had stood and started there. Using the jemmy, he had got six rows along when he reached down into the space below and touched what felt like a cloth package. Pulling it up, he put it on the floor and started to unwrap it.

Pyke wanted to believe that his motives were transparent, and that his actions could be explained in terms of the particular task he had to perform. So when he entered St Paul’s Cathedral via the west door, and after some minutes found the archdeacon, Adolphus Wynter, dressed in his ceremonial robes, talking to parishioners, he told himself that he was simply going where the investigation took him. But at some deeper level, he knew this claim to neutrality was a lie and that he wanted to cause the archdeacon as much discomfort as possible: to tear off the mask of piety that men like Wynter hid behind.

Sometimes it was best to come at your adversaries from an oblique angle, in a way they least expected. At other times it paid to adopt a more direct approach: to shake the tree and see what fell out. Wynter doubtless believed that he was safe, standing there in his place of worship, wearing his colourful robes, surrounded by people who hung on his every word. Pyke intended to disabuse him of this notion. Wynter saw him as he was walking up the aisle but kept talking to his circle of admirers, as though Pyke wasn’t worth bothering about. Pyke pushed his way through and said, his voice slightly raised: ‘I want to know exactly what Guppy did for the London Churches Fund and why he was permitted to steal from under your noses.’