Andrew Pepper - The Detective Branch

Two of them rushed towards him and bundled him on to the floor. The coffee cup fell from his hand and Copper started to bark and scratch at the living-room door. Two of the constables sat on him while the others attached handcuffs and leg-irons. It all happened in the blink of an eye.

‘Who authorised this?’ Pyke said, thinking it was all a terrible mistake.

One of the men, perhaps a sergeant, ignored him and said to the other men, ‘Bring him out into the garden.’

‘I’m Detective Inspector Pyke, head of the Detective Branch…’

The sergeant looked at him, his moustache twitching on his upper lip. ‘I know exactly who you are.’

Ignoring Copper’s increasingly frantic barks, the policemen dragged him through the house and outside into the garden. There, his neighbour Leech was waiting, together with his pet spaniel. Leech followed the dog to a flower bed on the left-hand side of the garden. The policeman in charge joined them, Pyke shuffling along behind, escorted by the four constables. Leech was holding a shovel and, when the sergeant nodded, he started to dig. Pyke didn’t have any idea what they were looking for, but he knew they were going to find something.

They all heard the shovel strike a hard object in the ground. It took Leech and two constables another minute to scoop out enough earth from the hole to retrieve whatever was there. Dry mouthed and fearing the worst, Pyke watched as they lifted out a wooden box he had never seen before. It was the size of a small chest. Carefully they placed it on the grass and one of the constables took a hammer and bashed off the padlock. The sergeant stepped in and opened the box; even before he’d done so he smiled, as though he already knew what he was going to find there.

Pyke recognised the object immediately. What he didn’t know was how it had come to be buried in his back garden. They had just found the Saviour’s Cross.

Bow Street

JANUARY 1845

Pyke pulled the threadbare blanket over his shoulders and tried to get comfortable on the floor of his cell. The stone was as hard and cold as ice and a bitter draught eddied around the confined space. It was dark but not completely; candlelight from the passageway trickled through the peephole in the cell door, which had been left open so the gaoler could check on him every hour. The handcuffs had been removed but not the leg-irons, and as an extra precaution they had been chained to the wall, which made sleeping difficult. Clearly they, whoever they were, were taking no chances. Given that he had been taken to the cells at Bow Street, where Pierce was the commander, it was clear to Pyke that Pierce must have orchestrated the arrest from his hospital bed, and had been planning it for some time. Still, the question of how Pierce had been able to lay his hands on the Saviour’s Cross was unclear, as was the question of who had sanctioned his arrest. Pyke assumed it had come from the very highest level and he thought about his last exchange with Mayne.

Since arriving in his cell, Pyke had tried to assess the strength of the case against him; how they would attempt to prove his involvement in the theft. He wasn’t naive enough to think his neighbour’s testimony alone would be sufficient to get a conviction, which meant there would be other so-called witnesses, and perhaps more fabricated evidence.

Pyke knew this row of cells very well. Little had changed in the fifteen years since he’d left the Bow Street Runners, and while the Runners themselves had long since been disbanded and the building taken over by the Metropolitan Police, the smell of the passage, the sound of clanking keys and the slamming doors reminded him of the time he’d spent there. Then, of course, he’d been the one in charge. It was revealing that none of the constables who’d accompanied him from Islington had wanted to meet his eyes or acknowledge him as one of their own.

It was also true that Pyke had been in this position before. Fifteen years earlier, he had been arrested, tried and convicted of murdering his mistress, Lizzie Morgan, and had evaded the hang-man’s noose only by escaping from Newgate prison and eventually earning a pardon from Peel himself. As a younger man, he’d had little faith in the legal system and hadn’t bothered to defend himself in court, believing that the jury had been instructed to return a guilty verdict irrespective of what he said. Now that he was a serving policeman, however, his view of the law was more balanced. The system was skewed towards vested interests, as all institutions were, but rarely was someone convicted of a crime like theft or murder without overwhelming evidence pointing to their guilt.

That first night, Pyke slept fitfully under the meagre blanket and thought often about Felix and what his son would do when he saw the scribbled note that Pyke had left for him. As watery daylight leaked through the barred window, Pyke listened to the sounds drifting down from the street: the rattle of the drays and carts, horses’ hooves, the clanking as street vendors set up their stalls. At seven or thereabouts, a bowl of cold, inedible gruel was shoved through the door, and half an hour later he was unshackled and led to a bare room where Superintendent Walter Wells was waiting for him. He waited for the gaoler to leave them alone.

‘I had to fight for this detail, believe me,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure that Sir Richard trusts me to act impartially, but in light of Pierce’s condition, and given that I am the acting superintendent, he couldn’t very well deny me the right to question you.’

Pyke thought about his first impressions of Wells, of a barely tethered aggression, but now he saw that the man’s heavy features were mitigated by a kindness in his eyes.

‘As I’ve been telling you for months, old man, I knew that our friend from this building had something planned for you but I had no idea what a thorough job he’d make of it.’

‘I presume my arrest was sanctioned by Rowan and Mayne,’ Pyke said, leaning back against his chair.

‘I’m told Sir Richard baulked at the idea initially. In his eyes, he’s made a great personal investment in you and knows he’ll be implicated in the mess.’

Wells was telling him that the evidence that Pierce had accrued, or that he’d managed to concoct, was strong. Otherwise Pyke’s arrest would never have been allowed.

‘How about you, Walter? When did you hear I’d been arrested?’

‘I only found out after the event. But as I said, I did my utmost to make sure I was the one who would carry out this interview.’

Pyke studied Wells’s face. ‘Tell me, Walter. How bad does it look?’

‘Bad enough.’ Wells took out his snuff box, brought a pinch of the powder up to his nostrils and sniffed. ‘But before we get to the evidence, I need to ask you a few questions.’ Wells gestured to the quire of foolscap in front of him on the desk. ‘For the report I’ll have to write.’

Pyke folded his arms and nodded.

‘Do you have any idea how the Saviour’s Cross, a highly valuable religious artefact stolen from the private domicile of the Archdeacon of London on…’ He glanced down at another piece of paper. ‘… on the seventh of March last year, came to be buried in your garden?’

‘Someone put it there to incriminate me.’

‘So it is your assertion that you were in no way responsible for its theft and the subsequent efforts to find a buyer for it?’

‘That’s correct.’

Wells took his pen, dipped it in the ink, and scratched a few words on to a piece of foolscap. ‘Of course, I know this to be so but I need to make quite sure I have asked all of the questions that Sir Richard will, at some stage, ask me.’ He waited for a moment and then continued, ‘So by the same logic, the testimony of your neighbour, Percy Leech, who claims he saw you digging in the same spot where the cross was found, is a bare-faced lie.’