Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

Pierce took a couple more steps, then stopped. ‘I want to know everything you’ve found out about the murder so far.’

‘Then I suggest you read the newspapers. I’m told the Examiner has taken an interest in this case.’ Pyke allowed himself a quiet smirk.

‘We already know you’re responsible for that, Pyke, and believe me, it’s left you dangerously short of friends.’ Pierce was, of course, referring to Tilling, and Pyke found himself wondering again how Tilling had reacted to the story in the Examiner and whether he had been punished for employing Pyke’s services. ‘You know it’s a crime to withhold information about a criminal act from a police officer.’

‘You do your job, I’ll do mine. And if you stay out of my way, I’ll stay out of yours. How does that sound?’ Pyke looked down at a mountain of rotting animal flesh quivering in the gutter.

‘The old way of doing things, your way, is over. Finished. Just crawl back to the stone Tilling found you under and stay there.’

‘Do your job, Pierce. Be a detective. Go and find things out. It’s what you’re paid to do.’

‘This is now a police matter. If I find out you’ve been withholding information or using your limited skills to inappropriate ends, I’ll make sure you go back to prison for good.’

‘You’ve never liked me, have you, Pierce?’

‘Liked you? I’ve always thought you were corrupt. I despised you and everything you stood for. I still do.’

‘For all your moral righteousness, I know you cut corners, Pierce. Too busy trying to impress your seniors. In this instance, I’m guessing you won’t look any farther than Arthur Sobers. Find him and you’ve found Mary Edgar’s murderer.’

Pierce tried to hide his surprise but didn’t quite manage it. ‘Do you know where he is?’

Pyke stepped over the rotting meat, avoiding the swarm of flies that was hovering over it. He left Pierce standing with a vacant expression on his face and joined Copper at the door of his building.

Later that evening, just as it was getting dark, and after Pyke had washed himself with a sliver of soap and a bucket full of water in the yard and changed his clothes, he set off along Cock Lane in the direction of Giltspur Street and Smithfield, where he would hail a hackney coach to take him to Camden Town. He would see Felix before he went to bed and then perhaps stay for dinner with his uncle and Jo. Whistling, he didn’t notice the men appear from a side alley and creep up behind him until they were almost upon him. Spinning around, he held up his hand and tried to parry the blow, but was pushed from behind, and struck over the head with a cudgel. The last thing he remembered was falling to his knees, and worrying about dirtying his clothes.

When he regained consciousness, he discovered he’d been hooded and his hands had been tied to the back of the chair he was sitting on. Disoriented, dry-mouthed and with a headache so intense his whole skull seemed to be throbbing, he tried to work out how long he had been unconscious and where his attackers had taken him. It took him a few moments to realise how quiet the place was and a few more to sense how cold and empty it felt. Then the smell hit him; the ripeness of putrefying flesh and the metallic scent of fresh blood. At a guess, he decided, he was being held in the back room of a butcher’s shop or one of the underground slaughterhouses in the vicinity of the market.

At the same time, when Pyke heard the clip-clop of footsteps and felt someone tug off his hood, he was still surprised to find himself looking up into the grinning face of one of the city’s most feared criminals.

Up close, the first thing he noticed was the careful manner in which Field had groomed his facial hair; his elaborate handlebar moustache was oiled and coiled, his broad, mutton-chop sideburns had been freshly trimmed and the thick tufts of red hair on top of his head smelled vaguely of perfume. Indeed, with his unnaturally red lips and long, wispy eyelashes, there was something almost feminine about Field’s appearance, and it was only when you looked into his eyes, like two dark holes drilled into his skull, that you realised something was missing in him, something that you recognised in others that made them human.

There were plenty of stories about Harold Field circulating around the slaughterhouses, tripe dressers, glue-boilers and butchers of Smithfield; some were true, others were distortions. But the very fact that everyone knew something about Field and that the something they knew invariably painted him in a nefarious light meant that he had achieved an almost mythical reputation in the area. Field owned and ran a slaughterhouse on the south side of Smithfield and was a butcher by profession. According to rumour, countless enemies had been killed in the vast underground chambers whose walls were covered in layer upon layer of putrefying fat; then dismembered and incinerated, to hide the evidence. Pyke’s own story about Field related to a time he had been drinking in one of the man’s many gin palaces. This had been a little over a year ago and Field himself had been present, counting the takings in a back room. Instead of pot-boys, Field employed young women to serve his drinks, a popular development with many of his customers, but for one man in particular, a man who didn’t know of Field’s reputation, the temptation of so much young flesh had been too much to bear. Inebriated, he had tried to grope one of the servers and when she resisted, he’d punched her in the face. Field hadn’t witnessed the incident personally but someone, of course, told him about it. Still wearing his cutting apron, stained red with sheep’s blood, he’d casually walked across the room to where the man was sitting, produced a gleaming meat cleaver and swung it down on the table, severing the man’s hand from his arm just above his wrist. Pyke had watched Field walk back to the counter whistling a tune, as though nothing had happened. He had passed close to where Pyke was standing, the meat cleaver in his hand dripping with blood, and when he spotted Pyke, he’d stopped, because he knew Pyke both by reputation and from a previous encounter, and began a conversation about the mild weather. But it wasn’t the cleaver which had stuck in Pyke’s mind most of all: it had been Field’s eyes, clear, almost translucent, but without the slightest hint of life, like a frozen lake in the middle of winter.

True to this memory, Field was carrying a cleaver now and he wiped the blade on his clean white apron.

‘Welcome to my humble slaughterhouse.’

Pyke took a moment to check the bindings around his wrists. The cleaver, he knew, was intended to intimidate him — but knowing this didn’t make it any less intimidating. Field circled around his chair.

‘I apologise for the manner in which I extended my invitation.’ Field stared at him. ‘I wanted to have a talk, just the two of us, with no chance of anyone eavesdropping on our conversation.’

‘Do you usually tie up people you want to talk to?’

‘Please excuse my manners.’ Field took his cleaver and sliced through the rope binding Pyke’s wrists to the chair. ‘Is that better?’

‘Thank you.’ Pyke touched the burns on his wrists.

‘Before you went to prison, you lost a sum of about one hundred pounds to a lawyer in a game of cards. Now he owes me and therefore you owe me.’ Field fiddled with one end of his moustache. ‘I’m prepared to offer you another way of paying off this debt.’

Pyke tried to cast his mind back to the card game in question. He could remember the lawyer’s face but not his name. He had been drinking heavily at the time and had lost the pot on the turn of the final hand, his kings losing to the lawyer’s aces. By that point, his gambling had got completely out of hand, and briefly he wondered how many other people he still owed money to.