Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

‘Did you know that after Sawney Beane killed his victims, he quartered them, and then salted and pickled their flesh and ate it?’

They were standing in front of the giraffe enclosure. Pyke glanced over at Jo, who gave him an exasperated shrug.

‘Come on, Felix, let’s walk over to the monkeys.’ He indicated to Jo that they would be back presently. She smiled and went to sit on a bench in front of the giraffes.

‘So why are you so interested in the stories from the Newgate Calendar?’ he asked, when they were alone. He put a gentle hand on the lad’s shoulder.

‘It was Uncle Godfrey’s idea. He told me that’s how you’d learned to read, when you were a boy.’ There was a mixture of defiance and admiration in his voice.

‘He did, did he?’ Pyke kept walking. ‘So tell me what you like about the stories, then.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you like the descriptions of the crimes or the fact that the bad men are always punished in the end?’

‘I suppose they did bad things and they deserve to be punished.’

‘But?’ Pyke waited.

‘I don’t know. Some of them I felt sorry for. Some of them I even liked. I wanted them to get away with it. But none of them ever did. They were all hanged in the end.’

Pyke looked down at Felix whose face was rigid with concentration. He was surprised at how nuanced the boy’s understanding of the stories was.

‘They were all put to death to prove a point.’

‘What point?’

‘That crime doesn’t pay; that the laws of the land need to be obeyed and that the state is all-powerful.’

‘What’s the state?’

‘The government.’

Felix considered this and then looked up at him. ‘You know what you said about the things in Uncle Godfrey’s book not being true? Were you lying to me?’

‘Why would I lie to you?’ Pyke bent over slightly, so he could see Felix’s face.

‘In the book, you did some very bad things.’

‘That character isn’t based on me. He isn’t based on anyone. He’s someone your Uncle Godfrey made up.’

‘Oh.’ Felix dug his hands into his pockets. Ahead of them, two monkeys were climbing up the side of the cage, but Felix didn’t seem to be too interested in them. ‘Why did you take Copper to live with you and not me?’

For a moment, Pyke tried to think how Emily might have answered this question, but nothing came to him. The truth was actually simpler than this: she would have taken Felix with her. Briefly Pyke thought about the long, rickety staircase up to his garret, and the unsavoury figures who lived in the building, and the roughness of the general area. Clearly it was no place to bring up a child but it was also true that with the purse he’d won at the card table he could have rented a house or apartment in a better area. He tried to think of some way of explaining to Felix that he still didn’t feel quite ready to take on this responsibility again; that he didn’t yet trust himself to be the father he knew that Felix needed and yearned for.

‘The place I’m living in at the moment is too small for all of us. But soon we’ll be together again. I promise.’

Felix stared at the monkeys for a while. Neither of them spoke.

‘The man I fought the other night was a coward and a drunkard. He tried to harm me, and he was hurting a woman.’

‘I saw the blood on your fists,’ Felix said.

Pyke couldn’t tell whether he thought this was a good thing or not. He changed tack. ‘A woman has been killed and I’m trying to find the man or men who killed her. That’s what I do. Or what I used to do.’

‘And if you find the murderer, can I watch him hang at Tyburn tree?’ Felix’s eyes were gleaming.

‘They don’t hold executions at Tyburn any more.’

‘Newgate, then,’ Felix added, quickly.

Pyke had wanted Felix to know what he was doing but now he felt uneasy about the direction in which the conversation was heading. He suggested that they go and find Jo, and Felix seemed to think this was a good idea.

Back at the giraffe enclosure, Pyke sat down next to Jo while Felix went to inspect the animals in the cage. ‘He seems happier,’ she said, giving Felix a wave.

‘I know I’ve neglected my responsibilities…’ He stopped, not sure what else to say. He didn’t want to make promises he couldn’t keep but, equally, he was beginning to see how his absence had affected the lad.

‘You don’t have to justify yourself to me.’ Jo turned around to face him. Her skin glowed in the morning sunlight.

‘It’s funny,’ he said, as though the connection between his fatherly responsibilities and Confessions was self-evident, ‘but I never wanted Godfrey to write that damned book in the first place.’

It took her a few moments to realise what he was talking about. ‘Then why did you agree to help him?’

‘Because I owed him; because I gave him my word that I’d help him with his research; because he helped me when no one else would. I suppose it’s what families do.’ As he said this, he wondered whether Felix regarded Jo as family or not.

She studied his expression for a short while. ‘You have a son who adores you. I should know. You must have done something right.’

That made him smile. He wanted to reach out and touch her, to show his gratitude, but did nothing in case she misunderstood his gesture.

The entrance to the West India Dock was heavily guarded, and when Pyke tried to pass himself off first as a docker and then as a warehouseman, he was rebuffed and told to ‘get lost’. When he tried a second time, about half an hour later, the foreman was summoned and Pyke had to retreat to a nearby side street to plan a new means of gaining entry. He had heard two stevedores chatting about the Island Queen — which was apparently still in the dock — and this snippet of information made Pyke double his efforts to find a way into the premises.

The fifteen-foot brick wall that ran around the perimeter was too high to scale, at least without drawing attention to himself, which left the river as the only remaining route. Half an hour later, Pyke found a waterman sitting in his wooden skiff near Limehouse and he told the man he’d pay him a crown if he rowed downriver as far as the entrance to the West India’s export dock.

It was a cool, clear morning and the murky brown water of the Thames was dappled with rays of sunlight so that it almost looked attractive. The gnarled waterman wasn’t interested in having a conversation and rowed in silence, apart from the occasional grunt, leaving Pyke to enjoy the sensation of being out on the river, the sound of choppy water slapping hard against the skiff’s wooden hull. Above them, seagulls glided and swooped in the sky, their squawks punctuating the sound of the oars moving through the water.

It took the waterman the best part of an hour to row as far as the outer entrance to the docks and, once there, Pyke had to pay the man his crown, and then another half-crown, to tie up the skiff and wait for him. From there, his route into the dock was unimpeded, and he found the Island Queen without any difficulty. A gang of stevedores was busy transferring a collection of wooden crates stacked up on the quayside down into the ship’s belly. This was how the system worked, Pyke thought as he watched them: you plundered another country’s resources, shipped whatever you could lay your hands on — coffee, sugar, rum, teak — back to the mother country and then sent those same ships back to the colonies packed with overpriced goods for the people there to buy.

One of the stevedores pointed out the ship’s captain, McQuillan, and when Pyke met him on deck, he was inspecting the rigging on the port side of the vessel.

‘They told me you were the captain of this ship.’