Andrew Pepper - The Detective Branch

The air was rotten and the stench produced by drying cow skins and the astringents used to clean them made his eyes water. Pyke made his way to the top of Bermondsey Street and entered the first place he came to, but neither the landlord nor any of the servers knew of a man called Gibb. Next door, the taproom was equally packed, and yet again no one admitted to knowing a Luke Gibb. On the street, refuse from nearby scum-boilers, tripe-scrapers and bladder-blowers collected in the gutters. A wagon with a cargo covered with a wet tarpaulin rattled past, followed by a wolfish dog trotting behind a man with a limp. Pyke walked past an eating house where a big-armed woman was stirring a large pot of tripe stew. Next door, he stepped into the Duke of Argyle and asked the landlord whether he knew Luke Gibb. The man shook his head, but when Pyke explained that Gibb had once been a policeman and that he’d been dismissed for drunkenness, the landlord seemed to perk up. ‘You could ask for him at the King’s Arms; the one with a blue door about three or four houses along.’

At the zinc counter, Pyke asked one of the aproned pot-boys to fetch the landlord, and cast his gaze around the room. Unlike the other places he’d visited, this one was nearly empty, a few early afternoon drinkers huddled around the old wooden tables.

‘I’m looking for an ex-Peeler, name of Gibb, likes to wet his throat,’ he said to the landlord when the man appeared behind the counter.

The landlord gestured to a man sitting on his own, a forlorn pot of ale in front of him. He was younger than Pyke but his skin was rough and his face overgrown with whiskers. Up close, Pyke could smell the beer on his clothes and his breath.

‘Is your name Gibb?’

‘I ain’t been called that since the summer.’ The man grinned, revealing a gap in his front teeth large enough to put your thumb through. ‘I’d say you must be a Peeler, cock. That right? One of ’em Jacks, don’t ’ave to wear a uniform?’

‘Why would you assume that?’

‘Gibb was my name when I was a Peeler.’

Puzzled, Pyke asked, ‘Luke Gibb?’

‘Aye, that was it.’ The man stretched his arms above his head. ‘I never liked the name Luke, mind.’

‘And what name are you calling yourself nowadays?’

‘You ain’t lookin’ for me. You’re looking for the other cully.’

‘And which other cully would that be?’

‘The one I swapped my name with. Met on the day we signed up and he paid me well for it, too. What did I care what folk called me? I was new in the city and I didn’t know a soul.’

Pyke tried to appear uninterested. ‘You don’t want to tell me what your real name is?’

‘I could do but you’re gonna ’ave to let me wet my beak first.’ Pyke dug into his pocket, retrieved a five-shilling coin and put it on the table. ‘Your name?’

The former constable took one look at the coin and grinned. ‘May as well give me a kick in the teeth while you’re about it.’

Pyke had checked his pocket watch before he’d entered the taproom and it was already three. He didn’t have time for this, so he produced a sovereign. He let the man see its colour, see the gold, but kept it in his hand. ‘That’s the carrot. I want the name. But if you try to draw this out, I won’t think twice about showing you the stick.’

‘Tough sort, eh? Let’s say you make it a couple of ’em megs, we might just ’ave a deal, cock.’

Pyke flicked the sovereign into his lap. ‘I’ll give you the other one when you’ve told me the name.’

The man picked up the sovereign, bit it with his teeth and finally started to smile.

Whicher was in his apartment, pacing up and down the living room as he waited for Pyke.

‘I checked the visitors’ book.’

‘And?’

‘The name said Gibb but the division and number didn’t match the one I saw in his file this morning.’

‘What was it?’

‘A25,’ Whicher said.

‘Do you recognise it?’

Whicher looked nervous. ‘Do you?’

Pyke nodded. He told Whicher what he’d found out from the man in Bermondsey, whose real name was Eddie Lockhart. ‘I didn’t suspect him for a minute.’

‘Neither did I.’

‘But then I remembered Shaw telling me that Lockhart had tried to bury the identity of Johnny Gibb during the Shorts Gardens investigation. And there was the time he came to my rescue, over the confusion surrounding Hogarth’s death. It’s obvious now: he needed me; needed me to keep digging. And he would occasionally do something to push me, us, in the right direction. Shaw came to me with the suggestion I look into the murder of the two boys but he gave Lockhart some of the credit.’

Whicher still seemed in shock.

Pyke gave what he’d just said a little more thought. Lockhart could have tried to bring Guppy and Hogarth before the law but had instead chosen to exercise an older form of justice. He’d tried to steer their investigation in a particular direction, not to expose the various perpetrators to the strictures of the law, but rather to try to smoke out the parties he couldn’t identify. Men like Wells and Russell. In doing so he’d risked his own freedom.

‘He was always very private, never said a word about his family, where he came from, what he did before,’ Whicher said.

Lockhart must have been the one who gave Druitt the information about him keeping pigs, and he could easily have gained entry to Pyke’s home. But why? All he could think of was that Druitt had somehow put him to it; that Druitt had been able to convince Lockhart that provoking and unsettling Pyke would produce results.

‘So what do we do about Gibb? Or should I say Lockhart?’

Pyke said, ‘We go to the Guildhall and we try to find him.’

‘And then?’

Pyke looked down at Whicher’s old police uniform, already laid out on the table for him. ‘Did you manage to lay your hands on a pistol?’

Wordlessly Whicher went across to a cupboard and pulled out a wooden case. Placing it on the table next to the uniform, he unsnapped the fasteners and opened the lid. Inside was a flintlock pistol with a smooth walnut butt.

‘Do you really think you’ll just be allowed to walk in there with this gun, no questions asked?’

‘Inspectors are permitted to carry pistols. I’m an inspector, or I was until about a month ago.’ Pyke picked up the weapon. ‘No one will be looking out for a policeman in uniform. I’ll be as good as invisible.’

A moment passed between them. ‘Pyke?’

‘What is it, Jack?’

‘I know my betrayal hurt you and I’ve done my best to make amends

…’

‘But?’

‘But I want no part of whatever you’re planning to do tonight.’

‘And what do you think I’m planning to do?’ Pyke stood there, wondering how honest he could be with Whicher. ‘It’s tempting to let Gibb finish what he started, I suppose, but that would be to abdicate our responsibilities as police officers. Do you want him to kill again?’

Whicher didn’t answer the question. ‘And when you come face to face with Palmer? And Wells?’

Pyke said nothing.

‘These were the men who set you up. For all I know you could still be facing the noose. You’re just going to shake their hands and let bygones be bygones?’

‘What do you think I should do?’

‘I can’t answer that. I’ll just say this. I sincerely hope to see you back in the department before too long, sir.’

The Guildhall was an imposing stone structure in the middle of the City that looked like a cross between a church and a castle, its Gothic entrance, pre-dating Wren, juxtaposed with a frontage built at the end of the previous century. Coming at the building from King Street, Pyke passed through the first ring of police constables unchallenged, and walked briskly past a second line at the point where the cobblestone street gave way to an open yard in which carriages and liveried broughams were depositing soberly attired men and women dressed in flounced, brocaded silk.