Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

‘You’ve only just got here,’ she said, fiddling with her silver bracelet. ‘Stay a little while longer.’

A few moments of silence passed between them. Pyke took another sip of wine. ‘Did he talk about me when I was away?’

‘A little.’

‘In what sense?’

‘I think the fact that you were in prison frightened him.’ She saw his face and added, ‘He was scared you wouldn’t come back.’

‘And yet now I am back, he won’t talk to me.’

‘Just give him time. Losing his mother and then losing you, it was a lot to cope with.’

‘For a while, after she died, I thought he was coping quite well. I thought we all were.’ Pyke looked up at Jo and remembered some of the things they had done as a threesome; the long walks in the grounds at Hambledon, plucking pheasants that Pyke had shot with a rifle, and telling ghost stories around the fireplace in the old drawing room.

‘I’m sure we all still miss her terribly,’ Jo said, staring down at her boots.

‘But it was five years ago.’

For a moment the only sound in the room was the ticking of the grandfather clock. ‘He so wants your approval, Pyke,’ Jo said, as she ran her fingertip around the rim of her wineglass. ‘I’d say that’s why he’s been reading the Newgate Calendar.’ She hesitated. ‘Rightly or wrongly, Felix believes that the stories represent the world you come from.’

Pyke had learned to read from the pages of the Newgate Calendar, scouring it for tales of murder, piracy, highway robbery, theft and even cannibalism, and the idea that Felix was doing the same made him feel oddly satisfied, even if the reading matter itself was upsetting.

‘But now, in addition to that, Felix seems to have found a copy of Godfrey’s damned book.’

Jo shrugged her shoulders. ‘That wasn’t my doing.’ She saw that Pyke was looking at the book she’d been reading when he arrived. ‘For obvious reasons, I’ve tried my best to keep it from Felix.’

‘I’m not blaming you, but the other night he came within a whisker of accusing me of being that character.’

‘I wasn’t even aware he’d read it, but when I asked him why he was so interested in the Newgate Calendar, he told me he’d been trying to find a story about you.’

‘About me?’ Pyke let out an exasperated sigh. ‘But I sat him down and explained I was only going to prison because I owed people money.’

‘Like I said, he’s ten and he has an active imagination. I think he wants to prove himself to you, though. Show you can be tough, too.’

It was at times like this that Pyke missed Emily the most. Somehow she had always known what to say to Felix in order to reassure him. But he guessed that Jo now performed this role with equal aplomb.

‘Do you think it would help if I told Felix that I’m helping the police investigate the murder of a young woman?’

Jo looked up at him. ‘Is that why they let you out of Marshalsea early?’

‘In part.’ Pyke shrugged. ‘But do you think he’d look at me in a different way, if he felt I was trying to defend the law?’

‘Spend some time with him; talk to him; tell him what you’re doing. It can’t do any harm. He’s quite resilient these days.’

Pyke picked up the bottle of wine, and before she could stop him he had filled both of their wineglasses once more.

‘I see you’ve been reading up on me, too.’ He pointed to the copy of Confessions that she had tried to hide under her chair.

But instead of an embarrassed silence, his comment drew a throaty laugh. ‘I thought you just said it wasn’t about you.’

‘It isn’t, but since I haven’t actually read it, I don’t know how often it skirts up against the truth.’

‘You haven’t read it?’ She seemed intrigued.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe because I’d be angry at the liberties Godfrey has taken with the truth. Maybe because I don’t like to be reminded of my past.’ He shrugged. ‘Or maybe because I think I’m both a better and a worse man than the one my uncle has written about.’

‘How do you know if you haven’t read it?’

‘I know my uncle.’

That made her smile. ‘The character, he is rather… coarse.’

‘And I’m not?’

‘I can see a little of you in him…’

‘But?’

‘But he doesn’t come across as particularly intelligent. He does things, he acts, but he never stops to think about why he’s doing them.’

‘And I do? The man who squandered his fortune and ended up in prison.’ He laughed, self-deprecatingly. ‘But thank you. I’d hate for you to think ill of me.’

‘Why should you care what I think of you?’

‘Because you’re important to Felix.’ Pyke considered what he’d just said. ‘And you’re important to me.’

Pyke had said this instinctively and, for a moment, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Jo seemed flustered by this comment and buried her face in her wineglass. She mumbled, ‘I was always under the impression you hardly thought of me at all.’

‘Why would you think that? For the last few years, you’ve been the rock I’ve come to depend on. I don’t know what I’d do without you. More to the point, I don’t know what Felix would do.’

‘I enjoy my work.’ She hesitated and bit her lip. ‘And you pay me very well.’

Pyke stood up, faster than he’d expected to, and the sudden rush of blood to his head made him feel disoriented. ‘I have to go.’

Jo stood up, too, and followed him to the front door. ‘Shall I tell Felix you’ll come and see him soon?’

He turned to face her. ‘Perhaps the three of us could do something or go somewhere. The zoological gardens perhaps.’ He was aware of how close she was. All he had to do was reach out and touch her hand.

‘He would like that.’

At the bottom of the steps Pyke turned around, expecting Jo to have disappeared back into the apartment, but she hadn’t moved and was contemplating him with an expression he couldn’t make sense of.

By the time a hackney cab had dropped Pyke at the steps of the police building on Whitehall, it was eleven in the morning and the sun had risen high enough in the hazy sky for the air to feel warm on his skin. The sky wasn’t exactly blue — the pall of ash and dust that lingered in the air throughout the spring and summer took care of that — but a light breeze had cleared away the worst of the particles, and for the first time in as long as Pyke could remember, he felt a lightness in his step.

‘There have been some exciting developments in Lord Bedford’s murder investigation,’ Tilling noted with evident satisfaction from behind his mahogany desk. They were sitting in his office on the first floor, an airy room with high ceilings that was filled with imposing items of furniture and offered an impressive view across Horse Guards Parade.

‘Really?’ Pyke yawned, not very interested.

‘We’ve made an arrest. Bedford’s valet. A young Swiss chap called Morel-Roux. He’d only been with Bedford for five or six weeks, it turns out.’

‘What’s the motive?’

‘Pierce and his team searched this chap’s room and found a five-pound note and half a dozen sovereigns. They also found the same chisel that had been used to open Bedford’s desk. So they widened their search, brought in a carpenter and a plumber, and found a ten-pound note and two of the deceased’s gold rings behind a skirting board in the butler’s pantry — the room used by this valet.’

Tilling stood up and wandered across to the window, inspecting the view. Something was wrong. Tilling’s manner had been cold and formal from the start and yet now he was divulging intimate details about another murder investigation. It didn’t make sense. And he hadn’t asked a single question about the search for Mary Edgar’s murderer.