Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

A horn sounded and the men surged towards the arched entrance to the docks, crushing those at the front. Hands were raised to attract the foreman’s attention and coins were offered, by way of a bribe. But rather than select men by pointing at them, the foreman threw a bucket of brass tickets into the mob and stood back to admire his handiwork. Scuffles broke out as men fought each other, desperate to catch or pick up the tickets, or indeed prise them from those who’d been fortunate enough to scoop them up. Some of the tussles turned violent; one man was stabbed in the eye; another had part of his ear bitten off. It was a difficult thing to watch: men fighting for a job that would earn them just a few pence an hour and that would be paid not in coins but tokens that could be redeemed only at taverns owned by the dock company, where prices were kept artificially high.

As the crowd began to disperse, Pyke contemplated what Emily would have said about such a spectacle and how little he had done since her death to honour her legacy.

Pyke passed through the stone archway and paused to survey the scene. Directly ahead of him, bobbing gently up and down in the water, was the tall ship with three masts and a thick forest of rigging. The stevedores, who were the most experienced and therefore the best paid of the workers, brought the crates and sacks up from the ship’s hold as far as the deck, where the ordinary dockers would carry them down gangplanks to the quayside. There the sacks and crates were taken by warehousemen and porters to the various storage buildings that surrounded the dock.

At the company’s clerical offices, Pyke showed the drawing of Mary Edgar to a bored clerk who had introduced himself as Mr Gumm and explained that she’d recently arrived in London from the West Indies.

Gumm didn’t feel able to handle Pyke’s query himself, so he fetched his supervisor, Nathaniel Rowbottom, who listened insincerely as Pyke explained why he was there. Rowbottom was a fastidious dresser, nothing out of place in his plain, sober outfit, and his beard and moustache were perfectly trimmed. He struck Pyke as the kind of man who would know, to the last penny, how much money he had in the bank.

‘I’m afraid I don’t recognise her,’ he said, barely looking at the picture. He put his hand to his mouth and yawned.

‘She might have arrived on the same ship as a black man called Arthur Sobers.’ Pyke offered a brief description of Sobers.

‘I still don’t recognise her and I’ve certainly never come across a gentleman matching your description.’

‘You barely looked at the drawing.’

Rowbottom glanced down at the drawing and looked up again, his face blank. ‘There. I’ve never seen her before in my life.’

‘Then maybe you could tell me how many ships from Jamaica have docked here in the last two months.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t have that information to hand.’ Rowbottom adjusted his collar. All of a sudden, he seemed a little unsure of himself.

‘But you could find out.’

Rowbottom eyed him carefully. ‘Take a look around you, Mr…?’

‘Just Pyke will do.’

‘This is a working dock, Mr Pyke. It’s not a place where passengers from the Caribbean embark and disembark.’

‘But the ships that depart from, and arrive, here must occasionally carry passengers.’ It wasn’t intended as a question.

‘On the odd occasion, perhaps.’

‘And given what a meticulous man you are, I’m guessing you would take a record of these albeit unlikely occurrences.’

‘Perhaps, but as I’m sure you’ll understand, it’s against our policy to permit non-company personnel to inspect company records.’ He drummed his fingers impatiently on the polished surface of his desk.

‘So you’re not prepared to confirm or deny that Mary Edgar disembarked from a ship that docked here?’

Rowbottom continued to tap his fingers against the desk. ‘Could I perhaps enquire as to the purpose of your visit?’

‘She was strangled and her corpse was dumped just off the Ratcliff Highway.’ Pyke paused to check Rowbottom’s expression, but even this piece of information failed to provoke a reaction. ‘I’m in charge of the investigation.’

‘You’re a police officer, then?’

‘Not as such, but I am working for the police.’

Rowbottom sat back in his chair, trying to show he wasn’t intimidated. ‘But you’re not actually a policeman.’

‘No.’

‘In which case, I’m going to kindly request that you leave these premises forthwith.’ He even managed a smile. Pyke wanted to pull his teeth out with pliers.

‘Is that all you’re prepared to do for me?’

‘To be perfectly honest, sir, I don’t much care for the tone of your questions or your impertinent manner.’

Pyke licked his lips. He could feel the heat rising in his neck. ‘You haven’t even begun to see impertinent.’ It wasn’t just Rowbottom he detested, it was what he stood for: a whole class of men — respectable, small minded and tyrannical in their pettiness — who were quietly taking over the country. You could find them in every government office, sallow and stiff lipped, processing and documenting the world without ever leaving their desks, affecting people’s lives with the stroke of a pen and the stamp of their official seal, never actually seeing the consequences of their actions in the wider world.

‘I’m going to have you escorted from the docks.’ He called out for Gumm, his assistant. ‘The last thing the men here need is unnecessary interruption of their duties.’

But Pyke took a few steps towards Rowbottom’s desk. ‘I can find out whether a ship docked here from Jamaica with or without your help.’

‘ Gumm,’ Rowbottom called out. He looked flustered now, even a little frightened. ‘Where are you?’

Pyke leaned forward, all the way over the desk, and whispered, ‘And if I find out that Mary Edgar docked here, and you knew and didn’t tell me, I’m going to come back and smash your head against the desk until your skull cracks.’

Rowbottom’s indignation got the better of his fear, but only just. His chest swelled up and he spluttered, ‘I shan’t be spoken to in such an outrageous manner in my own office…’

But by the time he had summoned up the courage to say these words, Pyke had already left the room.

‘An artist can only think, I mean truly think, in surroundings that befit him,’ Edmund Saggers said, glancing dismissively around the taproom at Samuel’s. ‘Do you imagine the Bard scribed King Lear while surrounded by gnawed chop bones, dead rats and sawdust that smelled like a hog’s arse?’ He tried to squeeze his giant backside into the wooden chair but it was like manoeuvring an omnibus into a space previously occupied by a wheelbarrow. ‘You’d better have a damned good reason for dragging me to such a lacklustre place at this ungodly hour of the morning.’

Pyke knew of cabmen who refused to take Saggers in their vehicles on account of his gargantuan girth, fearing he might permanently damage their vehicles’ axles. Their fears were not entirely misplaced, either. He wasn’t a tall man, standing at less than six feet, nor were his legs particularly broad and stout, considering the load they had to transport. What made the difference was his appetite and, as a consequence, a girth of quite staggering proportions. Roll upon roll of fat hung from the man’s midriff so that it seemed his whole body might sink into the ground. Feeding such a monstrosity mightn’t have been a problem for someone of George IV’s means but, for Saggers, who earned his living as a penny-a-liner, the task of satiating his appetite constantly preoccupied him. Because of his girth, he also had to have his clothes made for him: as a result, he possessed one outfit — tweed trousers, a tweed waistcoat and a tweed frock-coat — which he wore all the time, regardless of the weather, and which reeked of his unwashed body.