Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

‘Twenty pounds, you say?’ Spratt sucked the air in through his teeth. ‘I might be able to raise such a sum but it’s not a bottomless well, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘You’ll do it, then?’ Pyke swapped a quick glance with Saggers, who looked as if he might explode with happiness.

‘Indeed I will,’ Spratt said, ‘but on one condition.’

‘Oh?’

‘To give the story credibility, I’ll need to include the name of this senior figure in the New Police who approached you to run the investigation.’

Pyke felt a sudden tightness in his throat. ‘Why’s that?’

Spratt shrugged. ‘His name corroborates the story.’

‘For what it’s worth, he’s a friend of mine.’

‘Then you have a difficult choice to make.’

‘It might seem odd to you but the idea of humiliating this person strikes me as wrong.’

‘Then you can find yourself another newspaper.’

Pyke wetted his lips. ‘What if I told you he gave me the work as a favour, because he thought — rightly as it turned out — that I needed something to do?’

‘So you don’t want to hurt someone who’s given you a helping hand. That makes you a fine human being. Now take off your halo and see things from my perspective. Paying civilians from the public purse to do the work of the police is wrong.’

‘It’s your job to see things in terms of right and wrong. For the rest of us, fault isn’t so easy to apportion.’

‘Listen, Pyke, I don’t have time to debate the ethics of journalism. Either you agree to my condition or we shake hands and go our separate ways. Which is it to be?’

Pyke stole another glance at Saggers and briefly weighed up his debt to Tilling against his desire to find Mary Edgar’s murderer and vindicate himself in his son’s eyes. ‘His name’s Fitzroy Tilling.’ Pyke hesitated, still contemplating his betrayal. ‘He’s the deputy commissioner.’

Outside Spratt’s office, Saggers turned to him and whispered, ‘For a moment I thought you were going to piss our deal up against the wall for the sake of, what, a friendship?’

Pyke had to fight the urge to grab the fat man by his neck and squeeze it until he choked.

Pyke sat at the counter in the smoky confines of Samuel’s taproom drinking rum and water. As the man had predicted, the atmosphere of the place was different. Perhaps it was the babble of different languages which made it so: Scandinavians drunkenly toasting each other and dark-skinned Italians smoking their pipes and cheroots. The rest of the faces belonged to Negro and Lascar sailors, each keeping to their own, the different nationalities and races in the cramped room rubbing shoulders with one another, but never mixing.

A part-time dock labourer called Johnny — a man in his forties with blue-black skin and forearms as thick as sapling trees corded with veins — recognised Mary Edgar from the charcoal drawing. He told Pyke he’d seen her in the window of a gentleman’s carriage on Commercial Road about two or three weeks earlier, coming from the direction of the West India Docks. He didn’t recognise anyone resembling Arthur Sobers’ description but told Pyke that a ship from Jamaica called the Island Queen had docked there around the same time.

But that wasn’t the end of Pyke’s good fortune. Samuel directed him towards a woman in her sixties with dark, wrinkled skin who was sitting on her own at a table in the corner of the room. He showed her the drawing and told her the woman had been killed. That provoked very little reaction, but when he suggested that her body might have been embalmed with rum, a glimmer passed across her hooded eyes.

She picked up a glass and swallowed the drink he’d bought her in a single gulp. ‘We call it kill-devil. These days I like it with a little water.’

‘Is it a practice you’re familiar with?’

‘Not since I been living in this country.’

‘But you have heard of it?’

Her glance drifted over his shoulder and her eyes glazed over. ‘Folk reckoned it could ward off the duppies.’

‘Duppies?’

‘Ghosts. Evil spirits.’

‘As in witchcraft?’ Pyke waited to catch the old woman’s eyes and thought about Mary Edgar’s mutilated face.

‘Obeah.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Some black folk reckon Obeah men and women can commune with the dead; they have the power to curse and cause harm, as well as cure and uplift.’

‘And rum is part of what they do?’

‘Where I grew up, rum’s a part of what everyone does. It’s what kept us going, made the hard times feel better.’ For the first time, she scrutinised Pyke’s expression carefully and added, ‘You sure this girl was embalmed with rum?’

‘I think so. A bottle of rum had been left by the body and even though it was muddy, the body was spotless, as though it had been washed.’

‘With rum?’

Pyke nodded.

‘And this would have been after she was killed?’

‘Does it make a difference?’

As the woman looked away, the light left her eyes, as if someone had blown out a candle. ‘You kill someone, maybe you want to find a way of appeasing their spirit…’

Pyke waited for a moment, wondering whether he should say anything about Mary Edgar’s facial mutilation or not. ‘What if someone had cut out her eyeball?’ he whispered. ‘What might that mean?’

She looked up at him, unable to hide her interest. ‘The whole eyeball, you say?’

It was dark when Pyke took Copper for a walk around Smithfield, though in fairness to the mastiff, Copper didn’t need Pyke’s sanction, or company, to enjoy the attractions of the field. It had always amazed Pyke how well the animal had adjusted to the loss of one of his legs and how nimble he was in spite of his injury. It had also surprised him how gentle Copper was around Felix — especially since he’d been trained to kill other animals. The field was almost deserted but Copper wasn’t interested in traversing it, preferring instead to forage for scraps around the perimeter. While he did so, Pyke stepped into the Queen’s Head on the south side of the field and ordered a gin. He drank this and then another, watching the tables of revellers without envy or self-pity. At one of the tables, he joined a game of Primero and on the third hand dealt he drew two sixes, so he decided to bet the rest of the money from Tilling’s purse and what he’d been given by Spratt. A lawyer’s clerk and a butcher matched his bets and when they all turned over their cards, Pyke’s two sixes beat the lawyer’s sevens and the butcher’s aces. That earned him between fifty and sixty pounds, enough to cover his expenses in the coming weeks. To the chagrin of his opponents, Pyke excused himself before he could give them the chance to win their money back.

At his garret, he found Copper waiting for him on the steps, gnawing a bone. The mastiff barely looked up from his prize but managed to wag his tail. Inside the door was a bottle of claret with a note attached to it — ‘No hard feelings. Fitzroy’. He picked up the bottle and followed Copper up the narrow staircase, wondering why friends were so hard to make yet so easy to lose.

That night, Pyke lay in his garret, thinking about Felix, Jo and the murdered woman, though not necessarily in that order. A couple of tallow candles burned on the mantelpiece and, at his feet, Copper dozed contentedly. Unable to sleep, he took his copy of Hobbes’ Leviathan and began to read it from the beginning. It relaxed him and helped to turn his thoughts from the events of the past few days. Even Hobbes’ grim portrait of nature failed to disturb him unduly. In fact, he found himself agreeing with its sentiments; that men were engaged in a desperate struggle of all against all, and that life, as Hobbes had so aptly put it, was ‘nasty, brutish and short’. So it had been for the dead woman.