Andrew Pepper - Kill-Devil and Water

Without the lantern, Pyke could barely see his hands, let alone Field. But he could hear him, footsteps sloshing in the soil. Field was running, Pyke following. With the rising tide, the level of the soil came almost to their knees, which made it even more difficult to run. Pyke raised the pistol and fired into the darkness. Briefly the explosion lit up the tunnel. Field was less than twenty yards ahead of him. Pyke heard a grunt, heard Field stumble, but he kept moving. Field’s footsteps had slowed, became more erratic. He was wounded. Pyke could hear him wheezing. Another few steps, and Pyke heard Field stagger and fall. He was less than ten yards ahead. Panting, Pyke stood over Field’s body. In the darkness, he could just about make out his face. He seemed to be smiling.

‘Better you than someone else.’

Pyke crouched down and pulled Field’s head up out of the soil. ‘It wasn’t personal. If I didn’t do it you’d have killed me.’ He now saw that his shot had struck Field in the middle of his back. Blood was leaking into the black ooze.

‘Tell Paxton…’ Field hesitated and coughed up some blood.

‘Tell him what?’

But Field died before he could finish his sentence. His eyelids fluttered and his body went limp. A long-tailed rat scurried past them, heading deeper into the tunnel.

On the riverbank, Pyke found Paxton and told him that Field was dead. Paxton took this news in his stride.

‘And the woman?’

Paxton was still holding his pistol and, just for a moment, Pyke thought he was going to use it. Instead he put it into his pocket and started climbing up the ladder. ‘If you give me what you promised me, I’ll take you to her.’

She was sitting at the dressing table, staring at her reflection in the looking glass. Field may have been holding her captive, but the room was comfortable and well appointed, with a proper bed and a place to read and write. She looked up as Pyke entered the room, then turned around, her lips parting and her eyes widening with surprise. He had to admit she looked fantastic. She had just combed her hair and it fell around her face and down her back. For a few moments they stared at one another, Pyke at her flawless complexion, long, slender neck and, above all, her eyes: brown with yellow flecks around the irises and rimmed with circles of black.

‘I was hoping you’d come for me,’ she said, a half-smile forming on her lips.

‘Hello, Mary.’ Pyke spoke the words boldly; even so, they sounded strange.

For a moment she stared at him, amazed. ‘How did you know?’

‘Elizabeth Malvern had green eyes.’

Mary Edgar remained perfectly still, perhaps trying to work out in her head what to say and how to say it. ‘I always knew you’d be the one who would find me out.’

Pyke felt dizzy just looking at her. He tried to suck down some air. ‘You should have killed me when you had the chance.’

‘You think I could do that?’ She seemed genuinely appalled.

‘You’ve done it before.’

Mary waited for a moment before she spoke. ‘Do you know what kind of a person she really was?’

Pyke’s expression remained implacable.

‘Elizabeth Malvern passed herself off as a virtuous woman — an upstanding member of society who volunteered her time to help others. But it was all a lie. She would find women, prostitutes mostly, for this man, Crane. When he was finished with them, he had someone kill them and throw them away.’

‘I know that, Mary. And I also know that you didn’t kill her because she offended your morals.’

Mary stared at him, as though caught in a lie.

‘I know why you and Sobers came here from Jamaica — to kill Elizabeth and take her place. Silas isn’t going to last much longer and, with him and Charles dead, the estate passes to Elizabeth.’ Pyke waited and added, ‘I never met Elizabeth, but Alefounder’s wife saw you with her husband and remarked on your resemblance to her. You would have seen it, too, growing up in her shadow. Once you’d killed Elizabeth, all you had to do was sit tight, make a point of not seeing anyone who knew her, and wait for Silas to die and the estate to be settled.’ Pyke whispered, ‘Did you really think it would work?’

‘No one thinks Elizabeth is dead. Soon Silas will receive a letter, posted from Jamaica, apparently written by Elizabeth. It will inform him of her decision to remain there.’

‘Then why are you still here?’

She looked up at him and held his gaze. ‘I wanted to see how everything turned out.’

‘And how, Mary, is it supposed to turn out?’

‘I don’t know, do I?’ Mary put the comb down and turned around to face the looking glass. ‘That’s up to you.’

They ended up talking for over two hours, and gradually Pyke, with Mary’s help, fitted all the pieces together. What Mary knew, she had discovered from Phillip: indeed, the two of them had evidently formed a close bond in a short time.

Whatever way one looked at the circumstances, it had started with Elizabeth Malvern. About the time she introduced Crane to the practice of daguerreotyping, Phillip Malvern had turned up on her doorstep. While he had initially presented himself as her uncle, he later tried to convince her that he was, in fact, her father. Elizabeth didn’t believe him at first, but he was persistent and his story was persuasive: he told her about his long-standing affair with Bonella, Elizabeth’s mother, about her mother’s death and about Silas’s vengeful act of blinding him. Elizabeth had always been close to her father, and Pyke wondered how she had dealt with this revelation.

Phillip had lived in London for up to a year before he’d summoned the courage to face his daughter. To earn a living, he had scavenged the riverbanks and sewers for rats, and, in doing so, had stumbled on the underground room that eventually became his home. An unassuming and quietly rational man, Phillip had also brought with him some of the darker beliefs he’d inherited from his Jamaican Creole ancestry. As such, he was, from time to time, disturbed by visions and believed his blindness to be a punishment that could be cured by making sacrifices to the dark spirits that plagued him. He’d shown Elizabeth his underground ‘kingdom’, as he’d called it, and let her see his collection of animals’ eyeballs. He also told her that if he could offer the ‘duppies’ a human eyeball as a sacrifice, they might be appeased and restore his sight. Elizabeth didn’t take Phillip’s hopes for a cure seriously, but she certainly pitied him, and when, a little later, Crane’s experimentation with daguerreotyping meant that a few unfortunate women had to be sacrificed, she came up with a plan to suit everyone’s interests. Instead of burying the corpses, she and Crane would allow Phillip to dispose of them, thereby indulging his ‘fanciful’ belief that his blindness could be cured with the help of human eyeballs. He could do whatever he liked with the corpses as long as he made them disappear.

When Phillip had first arrived in London — to try to initiate a reconciliation with Silas and Elizabeth — he’d written to Bertha, his former lover, in Accompong. It was at this point that Bertha had confessed to Mary, her daughter, what Mary had always suspected; that she was related to the Malvern family by blood. Until that conversation, she had always believed that Silas, and not Phillip, was her father, because of her close physical resemblance to Elizabeth. Therefore her mother’s revelation that Phillip was, in fact, her father, also threw into doubt Elizabeth’s parentage — at least in Mary’s mind. And when Bertha found out that Mary was going to London, she passed on the address Phillip had given her — the Bluefield lodging house — and told her to try to persuade Phillip to come back to Jamaica.