Andrew Pepper - The Detective Branch

‘I can’t do this any more,’ Clare Lewis said, as soon as she’d taken the chair opposite Pyke and removed her headscarf. She had sent a note to his room that morning, asking Pyke to meet her in a tavern just around the corner from her brothel.

‘Do what?’

‘This. All of this.’ She looked angry.

‘Tell me what’s happened.’

‘Nothing’s happened. Nothing and everything.’ She managed a thin smile. ‘I’m not making much sense, am I?’

‘Why did you ask to see me, Clare?’

She turned and surveyed the faces in the taproom. ‘I don’t want to see Culpepper ever again. Is that clear enough for you?’ Pyke saw that her hands were trembling.

In the end, it was easier than Pyke could have imagined. A few hours later, Culpepper arrived on Great White Lion Street and left two of his mob guarding the front entrance. He was escorted up the rickety stairs to the prostitute he liked to see, a strong, big-boned woman who called herself Emerald. All Pyke had to do was wait. As he did so, he imagined the scene unfolding in the room: Culpepper removing first his shoes, then his waistcoat, shirt, trousers and socks; Culpepper, naked; Culpepper, waiting for Emerald to do what he paid her to do; Culpepper, oblivious to what was about to happen to him.

As Emerald passed Pyke on the landing, she didn’t even acknowledge him. Perhaps, he thought later, she had come to like the man she was paid handsomely to service.

Pyke entered the room quietly and closed the door behind him. Culpepper made an odd, unedifying sight: a sinewy, almost emaciated figure curled up on a bed of crisp, white cotton. Emerald had blindfolded him and tied his wrists and ankles with a silk binding to each of the bed’s four posts. To Pyke, he looked older and more wizened than he’d been expecting, and it took some of the sting out of his anger, until he remembered what Culpepper had done.

The first thing he did was check that the binds on Culpepper’s wrists and ankles were tight. Culpepper sensed his presence for the first time and, thinking he was Emerald, said, ‘Are you going to punish me? I think you should. I deserve to be punished.’ Pyke looked at him and noticed his shrivelled penis had begun to stir.

‘I have to agree with you there, Georgie. I’m not sure I’ll live up to Emerald’s standards but I’ll do what I can.’

Pyke waited for Culpepper to flinch or struggle but the man remained absolutely still. Perhaps he was trying to place the voice or maybe he thought he could talk his way out of the situation. Pyke didn’t allow him the luxury of thought. Swinging the hammer he’d brought with him, he aimed a blow at Culpepper’s kneecap and felt the joint dissolve under the force of the impact. Culpepper’s cry put Pyke in mind of a cow being crushed under the wheels of a train.

‘You should understand, Georgie, that no one is going to come to your rescue. Not the men you left outside on the street nor any of your mob, who, as we speak, are being routed by Conor Rafferty.’

Culpepper’s body had gone limp and Pyke noticed that the man had soiled himself.

‘You’re finished, Georgie. You know it and I know it. But you still have a choice. I can act humanely and slit your throat with a single draw of my razor or I can set to work on you with my hammer the way you did to poor Johnny Gregg.’

‘At least take off this blindfold so I can see you,’ Culpepper said, his voice barely more than a whisper.

‘What’s it to be, Georgie? Are you willing to tell me what I want to know?’ Pyke reached down and yanked off the blindfold.

Culpepper’s eyes were tired and bloodshot. ‘I knew I should’ve killed you when I had the chance.’

‘I want to know why you carried out the murders of Johnny Gregg and Stephen Clough five years ago.’

Culpepper lifted his head off the pillow for a moment and tried to assess the damage to his kneecap. ‘I didn’t think that bitch had the guts to cross me.’

‘Well, I suppose this is her way of repaying you for rearranging her face.’ Pyke walked around to the other side of the bed, the hammer still in his hand, and gestured at Culpepper’s other kneecap. ‘I asked you a question, Georgie.’

‘There was a house on Cheapside, I think.’ Culpepper shut his eyes and winced. ‘I sent the boys there to turn it over. They saw this man leave, a gentleman, and thought he was the owner of the house. One of the boys chose to follow him, probably intending to pick his pockets. The other one broke into the house and found a body in the living room — turned out to be the nephew of the former owner, who’d left the place to the Church in his will. The cull was dead but still warm; he’d been strangled. The lad stripped the place of anything he could stuff into his pockets, brought it all back to me. Meanwhile, the other lad had followed this gentleman he saw leaving the place to a church in Aldgate.’

‘St Botolph’s.’

Culpepper wetted his lips and nodded. ‘That’s the one.’

‘Go on.’

‘I waited to read about the murder in the newspapers but there was nothing. Nothing about the robbery either. By then we knew the gentleman one of my boys had followed was a rector by the name of Isaac Guppy. So I paid him a visit, told him what I knew, what one of my lads had seen. The body and him scampering down the front steps. I told him I wanted to be properly recompensed for my silence.’

‘You didn’t know for certain whether Guppy had strangled this man or not?’

‘That didn’t matter to me. He’d left the scene of a crime without reporting it. It meant he was involved.’

‘Did Guppy tell you what had happened?’

Culpepper shook his head. ‘I never talked to him after my first visit. But about two days later I had a visit.’

Pyke nodded, trying to speculate about what may have happened: Guppy and the nephew arguing over the uncle’s will. Perhaps the nephew had threatened to go to the police, or the newspapers. Perhaps the argument had turned violent.

‘Who from?’

‘One of yours.’

Pyke felt his throat tighten — but he already knew what Culpepper was going to say.

‘Wells.’

Pyke nodded. ‘And he offered you a deal?’

Last summer, Wells had joined the operation in Buckeridge Street to find the men suspected of carrying out the Shorts Gardens murders. But instead of carrying out that detective work, Wells and his men had spent their time clearing the surrounding slums in advance of demolition work to be carried out by the contractor, Palmer, Jones and Co. It all pointed to a long association, and Pyke was sure that if he dug around, he would learn that Wells was the one who’d first put Palmer in touch with Sir Richard Mayne.

‘If I made the problem go away, if I was willing to get my own hands dirty, he promised I’d be allowed to run my affairs without interference from your mob. He also said if any freebooter caused me aggravation, he’d personally make sure the cull was stamped on from a great height.’

‘What exactly did he order you to do?’

‘Later I worked out that he’d already planned for that cully to take the fall…’

‘Keate,’ Pyke said, interrupting.

Culpepper nodded. ‘At the time, Wells just said he wanted something to scare the rest of the boys, make sure none of them blabbed. Told me he wanted it to look like a religious lunatic had done it.’ His eyes were blank, as if he was just describing what he’d eaten for lunch. ‘I was going to nail them both to a door but then the older one, Gregg, got a bit uppity so I had to finish him with a cudgel. I reckon the other one, Clough, got wind of what was happening and went on the run. I found him in the end. I had to finish him off with a knife first, of course. Didn’t want to cause the lad any unnecessary pain.’