Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

Field assimilated this piece of information without visible reaction. The pool of blood had spread across the table and had started to drip on to the carpet. ‘Can I ask you a question, Pyke?’

‘Do you imagine I’m going to say no?’

‘If people ever stopped fearing me, I might as well kill myself because someone else would soon do it for me.’ It was said, Pyke thought later, as a simple declaration of fact rather than as an explanation for what Field had just done.

‘Then, rest assured, you stand to live for a long time yet.’

That drew the faintest trace of a smile. ‘Come and work for me. I’ll make it worth your while.’

‘Next you’ll be inviting me to play cards with you.’

Field shrugged. ‘Do you think I’d have done that, if he’d been of any practical use to me?’

‘That puts me greatly at ease.’

‘I’m not such a philistine that I can’t detect the irony in your voice, Pyke. I also suspect you don’t much care for me and you certainly don’t respect me. I sometimes wonder whether you even fear me, but I find the idea that you don’t hard to fathom.’ He held up his hand, to stop Pyke from replying. ‘Allow me to finish. Personally I find you arrogant and entirely untrustworthy. I don’t like your manners or your easy charm. But at the same time, and in spite of myself, I have to admit a sneaking admiration for you. Isn’t that strange? Doesn’t that strike you as strange?’

Pyke remained silent.

‘Now please don’t insult my intelligence.’ Field wetted his fingers and smoothed the ends of his moustache. ‘What did you really find at the place in Bethnal Green?’

For a moment, Pyke considered continuing with the lie. ‘I found her. She was addled on laudanum — posing nude for one of Crane’s copperplates. She didn’t know her own name let alone what day it was. I heard footsteps. Someone came into the room. I had to fight my way out of there.’ He considered telling Field about Bessie Daniels’ reference to the Swiss valet but decided against doing so, at least until he’d had a chance to work out in his own mind what it meant.

Field leaned back in his chair, took out a cigar from his pocket and lit it on one of the candles. ‘So why didn’t you tell me that to begin with?’

Pyke looked towards the door. He didn’t doubt that if Field clapped his hands, there would be five or more men in the room, all willing to do whatever Field asked them. ‘I didn’t want you to think I’d failed you.’

‘You’ll go back there tomorrow.’ It wasn’t put as a question.

‘I tried to ask her what she knew but she didn’t seem aware of what I was talking about. If I knew a little more about your interest in Crane’s affairs and what I should ask her…’

Field put the cigar into his mouth and took a few puffs. ‘You’ll be told only what I want you to know. Is that clear?’

Pyke remained silent.

‘Right at this moment I’m trying to find a reason why I shouldn’t have you killed.’ Field blew a smoke ring into the air and watched it drift upwards and dissolve.

‘She was laid out on Crane’s sofa, naked, like a slab of meat.’ Seeing her like that had made Pyke think of Emily, who had devoted her life to fighting exploitation in all its guises, and had died, or been killed, for it. And yet what had he done? He’d left the woman in Crane’s ‘care’. Trying not to think about what Emily might have said to him, Pyke refocused his attention on Field.

‘Are you trying to rile me?’

Pyke waited for a moment. ‘Neither of us likes men who exploit members of the fairer sex for their own profit.’

Field’s irises contracted and his expression became very still. ‘Do you know what I’m going to do?’ As he puffed on his cigar, the hot ash glowed an intense red. Field waited for the smoke to dissipate. ‘I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told a living soul.’

Pyke licked his lips but didn’t say a word.

‘My mother was killed by violent men when I was just a babe. I’m told she was beaten and raped before they strangled her and left her body in a cattle trough.’

Field sat there, his expression implacable. Finally he opened his eyes and rubbed them. ‘There must be a hundred pounds there on the table,’ he said, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. ‘Take it. It’s yours.’

Pyke looked at the coins and banknotes on the table. They were covered with the fat man’s blood.

‘What? You think those two cowards who won it, fairly and squarely I should add, would dare set foot in this room again? Go on. Take it.’

Pyke went to pick up one of the gold sovereigns. He got as far as touching it, the gold slick with blood. In the chair next to him, the fat man’s body had slumped farther forward.

At the door, he turned around and studied Field’s expression, which was a mixture of incredulity and interest.

‘Can I just ask why you decided to throw what I offered you back in my face?’ The coins and notes were on the table where Pyke had left them.

‘I owe you enough as it is without wanting to add to my debt.’

Field shook his head. ‘You do know that if you’d answered that question differently, I would have killed you with my bare hands?’ He motioned for Pyke to go and added, ‘You still have a job to do for me. I’ll expect to hear back from you by the end of the week.’

But Pyke’s long, exhausting night wasn’t quite over. When he got back home, he found Saggers waiting for him. Copper lay sleeping at his feet. As soon as he saw Pyke, Saggers rose, his cheeks damp with excitement.

‘There’s another body,’ the penny-a-liner kept on saying, ‘there’s another body.’

The next day was the first really hot one of the year and even by nine in the morning the air was warm and filled with insects and the sky was hazy with soot. The sun was well up above the warehouse roofs and church spires, although it was hard to see it through the miasma of dust, and the surface of the river at Shadwell shimmered in the light breeze. In the distance Pyke could see people picking through the viscous sludge left by the river at low tide, looking for pieces of rusted iron, frayed rope and lumps of coal. Their poverty was an abstraction, something Pyke could not begin to appreciate in spite of his own precarious circumstances. But it wasn’t what they were doing which appalled him; it was the stink of the river produced by the sewage that gathered on both banks. Pyke loved the river, the sheer size of it, how it made him feel when he came upon it after the narrowness of the nearby streets, but he never got used to the smell, so he told Saggers he would wait for him in the Bunch of Grapes. There, he ordered and paid for a mug of ale rather than his usual gin because he was thirsty. He was surprised at how busy the place was at this hour in the morning. He sat at a table next to the window and watched the light streaming through the smudged panes, but there was no getting away from the stink. The floor had been sprinkled with sprigs of rosemary as well as sawdust, and baskets of lemons hung above the counter, yet all he could smell was the raw sewage from the river.

Pyke had just finished his second ale when Saggers joined him, this time accompanied by a mudlark, Gilbert Meeson, who from the look and smell of him had just waded out of the sludge, and a nervous coal-whipper who shook Pyke’s hand and introduced himself as George Luckins. Pyke bought drinks for all of them and Saggers helped carry them back from the counter.

George Luckins, it turned out, had read the column about Mary Edgar’s murder in the Examiner and had got in touch with Saggers through the newspaper. His own story was as sad as it was unexpected. The previous year, his daughter, who had worked as a servant and seamstress and who, as he later revealed, had also been arrested a few times for street-walking, had gone missing just as it seemed she was pulling her life back together. Someone had helped her to find a job, working in an East End factory as a seamstress, and she’d sworn to Luckins that she would never again sleep with men for money. A week after her disappearance, Luckins had been to see the police, who told him that since a crime hadn’t actually been committed they couldn’t help. After a month, he had become desperate. That was when he took up the search for his missing daughter himself. For another two months, in between loading and unloading crates of coal, he had searched for her in vain. He had looked everywhere: brothels, taverns, gin palaces, lodging houses, hospitals, even the Bedlam asylum for the insane. Nothing. He had been on the verge of giving up when a friend told him about a mudlark who’d apparently found a corpse in the river near St Katharine’s Dock. Luckins had paid the mudlark — Gilbert Meeson as it turned out — a visit, to discover that Meeson had sold the corpse to a surgeon from St Thomas’s hospital. But from the mudlark’s description of an unusual birthmark on the corpse’s neck, Luckins had been able to identify the body as his daughter.