Andrew Pepper - The Detective Branch

Pyke lay on the floor next to the dock, gasping for air. His hands, his stomach, his clothes were all covered in blood. He could hear the screams around him and his first thought was of Felix, the fact that the boy would have to see him like this. There were faces crowded around him, peering down at him, concerned at the amount of blood he’d lost. He stared at the tallow rings on the ceiling and heard men barking orders at each other. Jack Whicher was one of the first to reach him and he kept the others at bay. Someone shouted for a stretcher and out of nowhere one appeared; a policeman carrying one end of it, a civilian the other end. Whicher and the man in civilian clothes, who’d identified himself as a doctor, lifted Pyke on to it. He clutched his stomach and groaned. The doctor looked around for the constables who’d escorted Pyke from the station house and shouted, ‘They’ll need to operate; can someone please remove the irons.’ It wasn’t a question, and one of the constables duly obliged.

Whicher went ahead of them, clearing a path. The doctor was carrying one end of the stretcher, the policeman the other. Pyke heard someone say, ‘We need to get him to St Bartholomew’s as quickly as possible.’ As they carried him through the crowd, he could hear Felix screaming, ‘That’s my father, let me through.’

Outside, it was still raining but there was a carriage already waiting. Its doors were open and, still on the stretcher, Pyke was pushed inside. He could hear raised voices, a debate about who would accompany him. Eventually the two who had carried the stretcher joined him and the carriage moved off. They all waited until it had turned from Bow Street on to Long Acre, before Pyke looked up at Conor Rafferty, dressed in the policeman’s uniform Whicher had procured for him, and at his accomplice, dressed as a doctor, and smiled. Sitting up, he wiped off the pig’s blood that he had smuggled into the court in a wineskin, and looked out of the glass at the back of the carriage. There would be others following. Conor Rafferty banged on the roof and the carriage shuddered to a halt. Even before it had stopped, the three of them had leapt through the door, landed on the pavement and darted into one of the side alleyways that criss-crossed Long Acre.

Golden Square

FEBRUARY 1845

Up to his knees in excrement, Pyke used the tub to scoop up another load of shit and signalled for Peter, the rope-man, to haul it up out of the cesspit. Somewhere above, the two tub-men, Jimmy and Matthew, were waiting to collect it and empty it into the cart. It would take another fifteen or twenty tubfuls before the cesspit was empty, which, Pyke estimated, meant he would be wading around in faeces for at least another hour. And this was only their second call of the night. By his estimation there were another three pits to clear before they were finished. The tub came scuttling down to him and Pyke filled it again then signalled for Peter to haul it back up. It was monotonous, backbreaking work, but as awful as it was, after two weeks as a hole-man shovelling shit into a bucket, Pyke could honestly say he had stopped noticing how badly it stank. They had been reluctant to employ him at first, even though their hole-man had left to work in a tannery. They didn’t know him; no one they knew could speak for him, either. But Pyke had persisted and it had been his efforts to find new business that had finally won around Matthew, one of the tub-men and the leader of the team. In the two weeks since they had taken him on, Pyke had worked hard, spoken little, complained even less, and had proved himself to be a valuable member of the crew. Each night they worked from 11 p.m. until five in the morning; the first part of the night involved emptying the cesspits into a cask attached to the back of their cart; the second part was the transportation of this load to a farm in Hackney, where it would be used as manure. For each cesspit they cleared they were paid five shillings and a bottle of gin, and they might get another shilling or two from the farmer. At the end of the night, after Matthew had taken what was owed to him for providing the cart and horse, they would divide what remained into equal amounts.

That morning they didn’t finish until well after five; they had been held up at a house in Shoreditch where it had taken a pickaxe to remove the stone slab covering the cesspit and the entire cellar floor had been thick with the overflowing soil. Matthew kept his horse, Henry, in a stable just north of Golden Square, and if it was especially cold, as it was that morning, they would sit on the straw and pass around the gin they’d been given. Otherwise they would go and sit in Golden Square itself and watch the market traders arrive and set up their stalls. This was the part of the day they liked best; watching other folk start their working day when theirs had just finished. Sitting in a warm pub would have been even better, but no landlord would allow them through the front door on account of the stench from their clothes.

On this occasion, Peter, who was married and whose wife had just given birth for the third time, left after just a few swigs of gin, and Jimmy went shortly after, claiming a headache and fatigue. That left just Pyke and Matthew, and with the gin warming their stomachs, they fell into easy conversation.

‘You’ve settled in well, Johnny.’

That’s what Pyke had called himself: Johnny from Northamptonshire. Or the Doc. All he’d told them was he’d once been a doctor until he’d fallen prey to the bottle and had killed a patient in his care. They hadn’t asked him further questions. It was what he liked best about them; they accepted him because he worked hard and didn’t complain.

Matthew was still handsome in his forties, with short brown hair and boyish dimples when he smiled. All Pyke knew about him was that he lived with a woman called Laura. He untied his boots, slipped them off and rubbed the soles of his feet. Pyke swallowed a mouthful of gin and shuddered.

‘You’re the best hole-man we’ve had since Morris.’ Instinctively Matthew looked for the others to confirm what he’d said before realising it was just the two of them.

It had been three weeks since Pyke’s escape from Bow Street, and this was the moment he’d been waiting for.

Since Matthew was the one who’d mentioned Morris Keate, Pyke now had the opportunity to ask about him. He’d tried to steer the conversation towards the subject of the murders before, but no one had taken the bait.

‘Who was Morris?’ Pyke asked, casually, scratching the beard he’d grown to conceal his identity.

‘Morris Keate, but he’s no longer with us.’

‘Did the fumes get too much for him?’ Pyke smiled, trying to make a joke of it.

‘You would’ve been curing the sick in Northamptonshire at the time it happened, Doc.’

Pyke took another swig of gin and passed the bottle back to Matthew. ‘What did he do?’

‘Since it’s just the two of us I’ll tell you. But don’t tell the others I’ve mentioned it. They still don’t like to think about what happened.’ Matthew drank from the bottle then wiped his mouth. ‘They reckon he killed two boys; one not far from here in Soho. Found him guilty, and put him to death on the scaffold.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘I know. Terrible times for all of us. Especially his family.’

‘You reckon he was guilty?’

‘Guilty? No. No way. Morris was always a little odd. You have to understand, he was a simple man… gentle, sweet natured, more of a boy than a man, really. But he had these odd beliefs, about God and the Devil. I’d say that’s why they picked on him. You see, the second boy was stabbed and nailed to a door. They tried to paint Morris as some kind of religious lunatic — a Devil worshipper.’