Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

Outwardly, little had changed on the street since Elizabethan times — it had escaped the worst ravages of the Great Fire and the lath-and-plaster houses with their lofty gables, overhanging eaves and deep bays were throwbacks to another era — but the air of gloom and disrepair had a modern countenance, as did the open manner in which some of the proprietors peddled their smut. None went as far as to display lewd engravings in their windows or place the latest ‘limited edition’ from Paris on the lean-tos outside the shops, but the lingering scent of grubby licentiousness pervaded the immediate environment. Pyke had even heard it called ‘the vilest street in the civilised world’.

Jemmy Crane’s bookshop occupied a tall, four-storey building on the north side of the street. Outside, wooden trestles supported neatly stacked piles of antiquarian books and above the door a crescent moon sign gave the shop a veneer of respectability.

‘What can I do for you, sir? May I say you look like a connoisseur of bedroom scenes. Am I warm, sir?’ The elderly man behind the counter had a shambling gait and studied Pyke through the monocle attached to his left eye.

‘I want to see Crane.’

The man gave him a kindly smile. ‘Oh, I’m afraid that won’t be possible.’

‘He’s not here?’

‘Mr Crane has asked not to be disturbed.’

Pyke pushed past him and made for the back of the shop, shouting Crane’s name. He had made it as far as the staircase when a man appeared at the top of the stairs, his face displaying a mixture of curiosity and irritation.

Crane cut a dashing, rakish figure and looked younger than his forty years. His hair was ink-black and his skin was smooth and free from wrinkles. He had full, plump lips and a leering, sensuous smile that put Pyke in mind of Pierce Egan’s Corinthian rakes Tom and Jerry: the kind of man who both looked down on the filth and degradation around him, yet wallowed in it, too. Dressed like a dandy, he wore a tight-fitting brown frock-coat, a frilly white shirt, blue cravat and matching waistcoat over brown trousers.

Behind Crane, silhouetted at the top of the stairs, was a much burlier, rougher creature, waiting to be told what to do.

‘To what do I owe this pleasure, sir?’ Crane spoke in a clipped, polished accent, his tone, dripping with condescension.

‘My name’s Pyke…’

‘I know who you are.’ Crane paused. ‘You once owned a ginnery on Giltspur Street. I used to be an acquaintance of your uncle, Godfrey Bond.’

Pyke studied Crane’s expression, wondering what Godfrey would have to say about this man. ‘A week ago, you accompanied three men to a guest house on the Ratcliff Highway. Your men were heard arguing with one of the guests. I need to know why you went there and what the argument was about.’

Crane’s expression betrayed nothing. ‘You like to get straight to the point, don’t you? I admire a man who knows his own mind.’ He seemed to be the kind of man who enjoyed the sound of his own voice.

‘What business did you have with Arthur Sobers and Mary Edgar?’

‘It was the old man who saw me, wasn’t it? I didn’t recognise him at the time but later it came to me. I used to watch him fight, back in the old days, a real bruiser, but I can’t for the life of me remember his name.’

‘Thrale.’

‘That’s it.’ Crane’s face lit up for a moment. ‘These days my tastes are more refined. I have a box at the Theatre Royal and I attend concerts at Somerset House.’ His smile was without the faintest hint of warmth.

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘And I’m not going to.’

Pyke could see the coldness in his eyes. He removed the drawing of Mary Edgar from his pocket and handed it to Crane. ‘You know her?’

Crane glanced down at the drawing and just for a moment his mask slipped and a look of curiosity, even puzzlement, crossed his face. ‘No.’

‘That’s Mary Edgar, the woman you visited.’ Pyke paused. ‘She was strangled and her body dumped a few hundred yards away on the Ratcliff Highway.’

Crane assimilated this news. ‘And what is your interest in this affair, sir?’

‘I’m investigating her murder.’

‘Out of a sense of civic duty?’ His tone was vaguely mocking.

‘What took you to Thrale’s lodging house that day?’

‘A private matter. In other words, none of your business.’

‘You don’t deny you were there, then?’

‘How could I? Thrale saw me. And now you’re here.’

‘And I’m not leaving until you’ve answered my question.’

‘I’ve told you all I’m going to tell you. I suggest you leave before the situation becomes unpleasant.’

‘Unpleasant for me or for you?’ Pyke’s stare didn’t once leave Crane’s face.

‘I might appreciate a Beethoven symphony more than a bare-knuckle fight these days but if I give the word, Sykes here will do to you what Benbow did to Thrale. And I’ll watch, as I did then.’

Pyke looked up at the muscular figure at the top of the stairs. ‘Does he speak as well as glare?’

That drew the thinnest of smiles. ‘I admire courage up to a certain point, but after that it becomes stupidity.’

‘If you know who I am — if you know me from the old days and what I’m capable of — you’ll know I’m not likely to give up until I’ve found what I’m looking for.’ Pyke waited and sighed. ‘She had just arrived from Jamaica. They both had. How would a piece of dirt like you know them?’

The skin tightened around Crane’s eyes. ‘My patience has run out. You can find your own way out.’ He turned and started back up the stairs.

‘One way or another you’ll tell me what I need to know,’ Pyke shouted up the stairs but Crane, blocked by his burly assistant, had disappeared from view.

At the front of the shop, Pyke passed the elderly assistant who looked at him as though he’d heard at least some or all of their conversation.

For the rest of the afternoon, once he’d ascertained that Arthur Sobers hadn’t returned to the Bluefield lodging house, Pyke patrolled the sunless court outside the building asking anyone who entered or emerged from the front door whether they knew or had seen Arthur Sobers. He had no luck for the first hour or so and was just about to give up — it had started to drizzle and he needed to eat — when a fat man with whiskers shuffled out of the door.

‘Yeah, I ’member the cull,’ he said, once Pyke had explained who he was looking for. ‘Saw him a few times with a mudlark goes by the name Filthy on account of his stink.’

‘You know where I can find this man?’ Pyke looked down at his bruised knuckles and thought about the scene his son had witnessed the previous night.

‘Filthy? A cull like that don’t have no home, just sleeps rough, wherever he can lay his head.’

‘Then how can I get in touch with him?’

‘How should I know? You often see him on the Highway, hanging round the docks or the river at low tide.’

Pyke tried to rein in his frustration. ‘Could you give me a description, then?’

The fat man rubbed his whiskers. ‘Older ’n me, wizened little fellow. Grey hair. But you’d know him on account of the patches he wears over his eyes, like a pirate, and the long bamboo cane he carries.’

‘This man is blind?’

‘Didn’t I say that? He’s blind. That’s right. Why else would he be wearing patches an’ carrying a cane?’

Pyke walked back up the hill to the Ratcliff Highway thinking about what he had just been told and whether this mudlark’s condition was, in any way, linked to the manner of Mary Edgar’s death.

Even for a country teetering on the brink of full-scale economic depression, the scene outside the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs was a remarkable one. There must have been a thousand people clamouring for the attention of the foreman and his crew; in addition to the regular porters, stevedores, coopers, riggers, warehousemen, pilers and baulkers who had already been admitted into the docks. The explanation for the crowd, if not its size, could be seen over the top of the high brick wall that circumnavigated the docks: a three-mast ship had docked overnight and word had quickly spread that the company intended to employ around fifty casual dockers to unload crates of sugar, rum and coffee on to the quayside. The mood of the would-be dockers was anxious, and even from the fringes of the crowd, Pyke could scent their desperation. Jobs were scarcer than smog-free days and the deluge into the city of farm labourers, identifiable by their dirty smocks and kerseymere coats, and navvies, unemployed since the railway boom had faltered, had made the situation even worse. The merest whiff of a job would attract tens, sometimes even hundreds, of dead-eyed men; workhouses across the city were turning people away; petty theft and begging were on the rise; and men and women were sleeping rough in numbers Pyke had never seen before.