Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

Pyke watched through the smudged glass of Tilling’s carriage as his son, Felix, now bounded down the steps of his uncle’s apartment in Camden Town, closely followed by Jo, his nursemaid, who had served first Emily, then Pyke, for the previous fifteen years. She was now in her early thirties and had proved to be a loyal friend as well, even visiting Pyke in prison. It had been nine months since Pyke had last seen Felix — he’d been adamant about the lad not visiting him in prison — and he was shocked at how different his son looked; he was taller and more gangly for one thing. For a moment, the urge to open the door and greet Felix was overwhelming, but then Pyke caught a glimpse of his torn coat sleeve and smelled his unwashed body and felt a stab of shame at his circumstances. His gaze was drawn to Jo; she was a good head shorter than him and, though by no means beautiful, her thin, angular face, dotted with freckles and her flame-red hair cut in the style of a pageboy, meant she was always noticed. At the bottom of the steps, Felix turned to Jo and held out his hand. She took it and smiled. Pyke exchanged a silent glance with Tilling; what Felix had just done had been almost an adult gesture — a man coming to the assistance of a woman. On the street, Felix fell in beside Jo and the two headed off in the direction of Camden Place.

‘Aren’t you going to say hello to them?’ Tilling hesitated. ‘I thought it was the purpose of this detour.’

‘I’ll come back tomorrow or the day after.’ Pyke tried to swallow but there was hardly any moisture in his throat.

‘Are you sure?’

Pyke frowned but didn’t want Tilling to know what he was thinking. ‘I’m quite sure. We can go now.’

Tilling tapped on the roof and a few moments later the carriage jerked forward. Pyke stared out through the glass and thought about the shame that had stopped him from greeting his son.

‘All right, now you can tell me what it is you want, Fitzroy. Why have you gone to all this effort to arrange my release from prison?’

‘A body was found yesterday morning by a stream running alongside the Ratcliff Highway.’

Pyke digested this news without visible reaction. It still didn’t explain why Tilling had freed him from prison. ‘And that’s where we’re going now?’ He looked at the passing buildings, trying to get his bearings after nine months in confinement. He knew the Ratcliff Highway. It was an ancient thoroughfare running through the East End, skirting the northern perimeter of the London Dock, and was lined with taverns, gin shops, brothels and cheap lodging houses that catered to the needs of sailors on shore leave.

Tilling checked his watch. ‘We’re meeting the coroner at the tavern where the autopsy will take place in half an hour.’

A moment’s silence passed between them. ‘You know that even if you hadn’t gone to all this effort, I would have been let out of prison next month.’

Tilling’s glance drifted over Pyke’s shoulder. ‘This way, you get to see your son a month earlier than you expected.’

The corpse was that of a young woman. At a guess, Pyke supposed she had once, or as recently as a week ago, been beautiful. Her black hair was wet and matted but her legs were long and her body, shapely and well proportioned. What was left of her face reinforced this impression. Still, none of this really registered, at least not the first time Pyke saw her. Instead, all he could look at was her skin, already eaten away by a coating of quicklime, and her eyes, or the two holes bored into her lifeless face where her eyes had once been. All that remained was a few torn vessels in the empty sockets.

‘Who is she?’ Pyke asked, drawing his shirtsleeve across his mouth. They were waiting for the coroner in a room above the Green Dragon public house on the Ratcliff Highway, a few hundred yards from where the corpse had first been discovered.

Tilling pulled at his collar, seemingly uncomfortable in his dark blue coat. ‘That’s what I want you to find out.’

Pyke allowed his gaze to fall back to the woman’s face. ‘Has anyone reported a daughter or wife or friend as missing?’

Tilling shook his head.

‘And no one, as yet, has come forward to claim the body?’ Pyke went on.

‘We’ve done our best to keep a lid on the matter. I don’t want folk traipsing out here on a macabre pilgrimage to see where she was mutilated.’

Pyke looked again at the remains of the woman’s face and her long black hair and wondered who had done this to her.

A few minutes later, the coroner arrived, put his bag on the table next to the dead body and began to prepare for the autopsy. John Joseph Hart was young, clean shaven, with a cherub-like face, and a grumpy, condescending manner that belied his years. He had a high opinion of himself and conducted himself in a prissy manner that rankled with Pyke. After shaking Pyke’s hand, Hart produced a large, white handkerchief and wiped his palm clean.

They watched as he made a few incisions above her breast-bone. The sight of the scalpel slicing easily through the woman’s flesh made Pyke wince inwardly.

‘I can say for a fact that she didn’t drown. No trace of any water in her lungs, you see,’ Hart said. The coroner looked at them, as if waiting for a round of applause.

Pyke pointed at the contusions on her neck. ‘At a wild guess, I’d say she was strangled.’

Irritated by Pyke’s intervention, Hart sighed. ‘But would you have known that for sure, if I hadn’t conducted my examination of her lungs?’

‘So we can put down the cause of death as strangulation, then?’ Tilling asked.

‘I’d say so,’ Hart muttered, casting a scalding look in Pyke’s direction.

‘And that’s it? That’s all you can tell us?’

‘I’m a coroner, not a mind-reader,’ Hart retorted, continuing to inspect the bruises around her throat.

‘Well, let’s hope her landlord will be a little more illuminating.’

In the pocket of a dress which had been discovered in marshy ground a few yards from the corpse, along with a half-empty bottle of Jamaica rum, was a scrap of paper giving the address of the Bluefield, a lodging house on the Ratcliff Highway. The landlord had already been summoned.

‘If you look at the bruises here and here,’ Pyke said, pushing the coroner to one side and pointing at the marks on either side of her slender neck, ‘those would have been his thumbs.’ He removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and turned to Hart. ‘Just stand still for a moment,’ he said to the bemused coroner. Before the man could answer, Pyke had wrapped his hands around Hart’s throat and dug his thumbs into the area just below the glands, keeping them there for a little longer than was strictly necessary to illustrate the point. ‘That’s how he killed her.’ He held up his hands. ‘But you can see from the size of those marks that whoever did this had bigger hands than mine.’ What he’d said was purely conjectural, something to irritate Hart rather than impress Tilling, and as he said it, Pyke wondered whether he still really had what it took to undertake such an investigation.

Somehow he doubted it. After all, it had been a long time — more than ten years — since he’d regularly done this kind of work; since he’d resigned from his position as a Bow Street Runner.

Having been released from Pyke’s grip, Hart made exaggerated choking sounds to indicate his discomfort. ‘Really, this is the most unacceptable behaviour I have ever witnessed…’

‘You can see,’ Pyke said, pointing to the woman’s face and chest, ‘that the quicklime has eaten away the skin… here and here.’ She was lying face up on the table. ‘But if we roll her over on to her front…’ He paused while performing this manoeuvre. ‘You’ll see how clean and unblemished her back is.’ Her biscuit-coloured skin felt cold and hard to the touch.