Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

Outside by the stream, Pyke looked for further clues but found nothing except for a broken plate, a few pieces of wood and some furniture. It was a grim spot. Climbing up to the bridge, he looked down at the place where the body had been found and tried to put himself in the mind of the man who’d dumped her there. It would have been easy enough to drag the body from the cart across the road and then shove it over the edge towards the stream. The bank was muddy and yet the body, at least when he’d seen it upstairs in the tavern, had been almost spotless. This was further proof, in Pyke’s mind, that the corpse had been washed with rum. But why?

Next Pyke knocked on doors and stopped people on the street but no one admitted to having seen anything on the night in question. He showed people the drawing of the dead woman but no one recognised her.

At ten o’clock he attended the coroner’s inquest just a few yards away at the Green Dragon, where the jury, as expected, returned a verdict of wilful murder.

Strenuous efforts had been made to ensure that the jurors wouldn’t run to the newspapers with stories of what they had seen — the last thing Pyke wanted was a rush of pilgrims to the scene of the crime — but he also knew it was only a matter of time before the story leaked out into the public domain. Still, at Pyke’s insistence, the jurors had all been warned that if specific details of the mutilation made their way into the newspapers, there would be serious consequences.

A while later, returning to the old bridge, Pyke had a peculiar feeling he had known this place as a child. It took him a good few minutes to remember the exact incident and the date.

The bridge looked much smaller than he remembered, but this was to be expected. He had been eleven, maybe twelve, and he had made the journey to the Ratcliff Highway on New Year’s Eve to witness the corpse of the murderer, John Williams, being paraded in an upturned coffin attached to a wagon. Williams had apparently bludgeoned to death two families who lived on the Ratcliff Highway but had committed suicide before the court could pass sentence on him. The purpose of the parade, therefore, had been to satisfy the public’s demand that the murders be properly avenged. Standing on the bridge, at almost the same spot where he had stood almost thirty years earlier, Pyke could still picture the dead man’s hard, mummified face and the cold, staring eyes. Later he had followed the procession north up Cannon Street to a piece of scrubland where the body was to be buried. There, he had witnessed one of the burial party, a red-faced man wearing a billycock hat, drive a wooden stake through the corpse’s heart using a sledgehammer.

At the time he had been terrified — at the sight of the corpse and of the notion that the murderer, Williams, wasn’t in fact dead — and for weeks afterwards he’d dreamt that his mother, who had left when Pyke was just five, had been one of Williams’ early victims.

It was odd to think that the murders of two families from the Ratcliff Highway, one of the poorest and most notorious streets in the entire city, had caused such a stir throughout the metropolis. Thirty years later, an elderly aristocrat had been murdered in his elegant Park Lane home, and this was the murder that everyone was talking about. No one seemed to be bothered about the murder of an unknown mulatto woman. Of course, there was nothing especially surprising about this state of affairs but, in the circumstances, Pyke couldn’t help but think about the procession he’d witnessed thirty years earlier, and it made him wonder whether the city really was a safer, fairer place to live, as the politicians and civic leaders often tried to claim.

The Bluefield lodging house was neither blue nor situated anywhere near a field. In fact, it was located at the end of a thin, sunless court and had nothing to recommend it. The smell of fried fish and horse dung was pungent and a grey-flannelled mist drifted off the river. Inside, the ceilings were low and buckled and the plaster flaked off smoke-blackened walls. Pyke found Thrale in the kitchen. The former bare-knuckled fighter took him up the corkscrew staircase to the room Mary Edgar and Arthur Sobers had rented. They knocked but no one answered. Thrale took out some keys and tried them, one by one, until the lock turned. He let Pyke go ahead of him with the lantern. The room was empty.

After Pyke had given it a thorough search, and found nothing of interest, he joined Thrale in the kitchen.

‘I’m thinking they would both have come here with luggage,’ Pyke said, not posing it as a question.

‘I expect so.’

‘You must have seen whether they did or not when they first arrived.’

‘Yes, they both had cases.’

‘But you didn’t see them leave with their cases?’

‘That’s right.’

Pyke considered this. ‘Sobers stayed here for about three weeks, you said. During that time, he must have talked to some of your guests.’

‘Like I said earlier, they both kept themselves to themselves.’

‘But when they cooked their food, for example?’

‘No one wanted much to do with a blackbird, to be honest.’ Thrale rubbed his eyes and hesitated. ‘Actually, come to think of it, Sobers did have a visitor, or should I say a gang of visitors, about a week ago. Almost got nasty, so I heard.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘What’s to tell? A couple of free-booters turns up looking for Sobers and the woman. Someone points them in the direction of the room. They bangs on the door, barges in. There’s some shouting. They leave. I don’t even think she was there at the time. Sobers handled them on his own.’

‘You know what they talked about?’

Thrale gave him a look. ‘Ain’t you listened to a word I said? I respect me guests’ privacy.’ But a peculiar smile spread across his lips as though he knew more than he’d let on.

‘How many visitors were there?’

‘Three.’

‘Did you recognise any of them?’

Thrale shrugged. ‘Not the ones who confronted Sobers.’

‘But there was someone else?’

‘Aye.’

Pyke waited. ‘A name?’

‘Ain’t you going to allow me to wet me beak?’

Taking out his purse, Pyke selected a half-crown coin and thrust it into the older man’s outstretched hand.

‘That it?’ Thrale said, looking down at the coin.

Pyke doubled it. That seemed to improve Thrale’s mood. ‘Jemmy Crane,’ he said after a while.

Pyke thought the name sounded familiar. ‘Crane?’

‘You know, the pornographer.’ Thrale’s face glistened with excitement. ‘I used to know him a bit. He’d come and watch me fight, back in the old days.’

‘Do you think he recognised you?’

Thrale thought about it. ‘I stepped out into the court and he was waiting there. We looked at one another. He might have nodded at me.’

‘And you’re sure he was there with the men who’d come to see Sobers?’

‘I watched ’em all leave in a group.’

Pyke waited for a moment, trying to gather his thoughts. ‘Weren’t you just a little bit curious to know what they wanted with Sobers and Mary Edgar?’

‘Maybe.’ Thrale shifted from one foot to the other. ‘Afterwards I asked the culls who shared the room next to them if they’d heard anything.’

‘And?’

‘One fellow reckoned they was threatening Sobers but he didn’t hear nothing more than that.’

‘Could I speak to him?’

Thrale seemed put out. ‘He’s at work. You could come back a while later but he’ll tell you the same thing.’

Pyke looked at the older man’s weathered face. ‘Why didn’t you mention this yesterday when you identified the body in the Green Dragon?’

Thrale met his stare and held it. ‘What does it matter?’ The skin wrinkled at the corners of his eyes. ‘I am mentioning it now, ain’t I?’