Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

Nash tried to laugh but it was flat and hollow and his eyes betrayed him. ‘I don’t know what you mean…’

‘ The watch,’ Pyke shouted, so loudly it made Nash jump.

Nash fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the timepiece, handing it to Pyke but not meeting his gaze. Pyke took it and inspected the diamond-encrusted case.

‘It’s fitting, in a way, that your greed was your undoing, don’t you think?’ When Nash didn’t answer, Pyke said, ‘What did you hope to get for the watch? A few hundred at most?’ He waited and added, ‘It’s not much, is it? If you consider what you’re going to lose as a result.’

‘Pyke, I know what you must be thinking…’

Pyke punched Nash in the face, splitting open his cheek and sending him spinning to the floor. ‘Don’t presume to know anything about me, you miserable little shit.’ He ordered Nash to get up, and when he did, Pyke pushed him down on to the chair. Nash clutched his bruised cheek and started to cry. It took every ounce of Pyke’s self-control not to beat him further.

‘There’s a price to pay for what you’ve done, Nash,’ Pyke said, ‘and this is your chance to atone.’ He waited for a moment. ‘Had Morris found out you were blackmailing him? And what did you have over him? A love letter he’d written to one of your friends perhaps?’

‘He was a sentimental old man. What he wrote didn’t leave too much room for the imagination. A jury wouldn’t have needed much else to put him up on the gallows.’

Pyke gritted his teeth. He wanted to hit Nash again but managed to restrain himself. ‘And you find it amusing?’

‘To be honest, I find it a little pathetic.’

‘That he had feelings for another human being and took the time to express them in words?’

Chastened, Nash gripped the edge of his chair.

‘I take it you’d had your eyes on Morris for a while,’ Pyke said, ‘but then you lost seven thousand on one of Barnaby Hodges’ tables and suddenly you needed some money quickly.’

‘If I didn’t pay him, Hodges would have killed me. Even if I’d run away, he would have paid someone to track me down.’

‘Did you know Morris would come to me for the money you were blackmailing him for?’

‘No.’ Nash shook his head vigorously as if to underline the point.

‘So what did you think when you found out that Morris was borrowing it from the bank?’

‘At first, I didn’t think about it. I mean, it didn’t matter to me where the money came from. Morris could afford it, and he didn’t know I had anything to do with the blackmail. If he borrowed it from the bank, then he’d have to pay it back, wouldn’t he?’

‘But then you saw this chance of fucking me and you grabbed it with both your grubby little hands.’

‘No! God. It was never about you.’ He sounded angry for the first time.

‘Not about me?’

‘Hodges sent one of his doormen to my lodgings. A brute called Miller. He was the one who’d beaten me before. This time I was ready for him. I didn’t intend to kill him until he took out a piece of lead pipe and told me he was going to smash my brains into a pulp. I had a knife on me and I used it. He bled all over the floor. I’d never seen so much blood. And I panicked. I didn’t know what to do with the body. There was no way I could carry it down the stairs, into the yard and somehow dispose of it. Someone would have seen me and, anyway, if Hodges ever found out I’d stabbed one of his men, he wouldn’t have left me alone. Not ever.’

‘That’s when you came upon the idea of faking your own murder.’ Pyke could see it now. It made a certain amount of sense.

‘I’d read about the headless corpse in Huntingdon like everyone else. I thought if I dressed Miller in my clothes and managed to hack off his head, everyone would mistake him for me and assume I’d been killed by the Huntingdon madman. That way, I’d solve the problem of what to do with the body in my lodgings. I’d still get the money from Morris and I’d get to keep it, too. Hodges would think I was dead. It was the only way out of the hole I’d dug myself.’

‘And when your body was stolen before the inquest, people would just blame the resurrectionists.’

Nash nursed his bruised cheek and nodded.

‘So why did you have to steal the loan documents from the vault? That’s when it became personal. Did you do it just to spite me? Because I’d humiliated you in front of the cashiers?’

‘Not at all,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But once I’d made the decision, you were always going to be my problem.’

‘Me?’

‘You told me you were going to Huntingdon. I guessed your visit there must have had something to do with the headless corpse.’

‘So?’

‘If my body was found in a similar state, I knew for a fact you wouldn’t accept the coincidence. That’s why I had to make it seem personal. I didn’t want to drag you into it but I didn’t have a choice.’ Nash managed a faint smile. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you tend to believe people are out to get you. If you believed what happened was part of a plot against you, you wouldn’t see my death purely as a coincidence. You’d see it as a concerted attempt to harm you…’

Pyke considered what he’d been just told and weighed it up in the light of his own discoveries.

‘So you paid the gypsy woman to harass me in front of the bank and steal the safe key from my chain.’

Nash bowed his head and nodded.

‘There were two keys: the key to the safe and another one. I want that other one back.’

‘I don’t know where it is,’ Nash muttered, still staring at the floor. ‘I think the old woman kept it or threw it away.’

Pyke felt a surge of anger rip through his body. The knife was in his hand and he jabbed the tip of the blade into Nash’s chin.

Hands trembling, Nash produced a different key from his pocket. ‘Please, take it. I’ve been living in lodgings in Fulham. Most of my share of the money is still there, hidden under the floorboards.’

Pyke took a sharp breath. He wasn’t irritated by Nash’s efforts to try to ingratiate himself or even by his callow efforts at self-justification but by the realisation that he’d once seen, or thought he’d seen, a little of himself in his young assistant. Could he have been that blind? To have imagined he shared anything with this petulant liar?

‘I said earlier it was time for you to answer for what you’ve done.’

‘And I have. I’ve told you the truth. And you can have the money back. All of it. I’ll make sure you get the whole ten thousand, too.’ Nash described where the lodgings were and let out a brief sob.

‘I’m not interested in the money.’

He looked up at Pyke, this time with a frown. ‘What?’

‘I said I’m not interested in the money. I’m not even interested in the fact that you betrayed my association with Ned Villums to Peel and Fitzroy Tilling.’

That made Nash’s eyes bulge. ‘What do you want, then?’ He seemed bewildered.

‘I want to know why you killed Morris.’

Nash fell silent and his legs stopped twitching.

‘You’ve got the watch. I know you killed him. I just want you to own up to your mistakes.’ Pyke made out he was about to strike Nash again and the young man cowered, his hands raised to protect himself.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said, on the verge of tears again. ‘Or I didn’t plan to.’

‘Then why do it?’

‘It was late. Most of the guests had left already. Morris was drunk. Drunker than I’ve ever seen him before and irate as well.’

‘Is it any wonder?’ Pyke said, interrupting. ‘You’d just blackmailed him out of ten thousand pounds.’

‘But Morris didn’t know it was me, did he?’