Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

Insisting that Pyke go first, Yellowplush had prodded what felt like the end of his pistol into Pyke’s back before they had even departed the inn. ‘Tell me who you are and what you want right now,’ he whispered, ‘or I’ll squeeze the trigger and you’ll die a long, painful death.’

Outside, on the street, Pyke turned around to face Yellowplush, whose shining face was as large as a turnip, barely visible in the gloom. ‘I’m an emissary from Sir Robert Peel. He’s taken an interest in your corpse and he asked me to investigate the matter further.’ Pyke expected that Yellowplush might be surprised by this revelation but the magistrate merely shrugged as though the matter were of no consequence. ‘I have a letter confirming this,’ he added, quickly, ‘if you’ll allow me to find it.’

Yellowplush poked the pistol into Pyke’s chest. ‘I can’t understand why Peel’s so interested in our body.’

‘I don’t know. Like I said, he asked me to look into the matter and report back to him.’ Pyke waited, deciding not to say anything about Peel’s interest in Captain Paine and the threat posed by radicals.

‘Why didn’t you introduce yourself at the outset?’

‘Peel is a divisive figure,’ Pyke said. ‘In my experience, his name doesn’t always open doors.’

‘I know that, for a fact.’ Yellowplush reached out his hand. ‘Let me see the letter.’

Pyke retrieved it from his pocket and gave it to the magistrate, who surveyed the content without much interest. ‘It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t kill you, leave you to bleed to death for what you did in the inn.’

‘You think Peel wouldn’t find out? Or that everyone in the inn who witnessed our card game loves you so much they wouldn’t give you up, if and when Peel’s men have to come looking for me?’

That seemed to register with Yellowplush. He put the pistol back into his belt and shrugged. ‘You’d better come with me, then.’

It was a damp night and the air smelled of wet leaves. The street was deserted and they walked in silence as far as the watch-house where prison cells were visible from the street through iron grilles.

The watch-house was besieged, with men of all ages lining up in an orderly queue that snaked around the building. The magistrate explained they were waiting to be sworn in as special constables. Once this had been done, they would be allocated a weapon of their choice. The selection was a rich one. Lining the wall at the back of the watch-house were brickbats, muskets, shovels, swords, machetes, pick handles and even a few rifles. When Pyke likened the scene to an army preparing to go to war, Yellowplush looked at him and smiled.

‘I take it you’re expecting trouble,’ Pyke said, as he followed the magistrate down a flight of stone steps to the cellar of the watch-house, where the headless body was being stored.

The flickering light given off by the magistrate’s lantern barely illuminated the tomblike corridor.

Pyke smelled the corpse before he saw it, a ripe odour that filled the windowless room.

Yellowplush put the lantern down on the floor and said, ‘I’ll leave you the light. I don’t imagine you’re used to spending time with dead bodies.’

Pyke looked at him. ‘And you are?’ The air around them was cloying, fleshy and sickly.

‘I used to serve in the army. The regiment was travelling to India when the ship caught fire in the Bay of Biscay. A casket of rum split open and one of the ship’s officers dropped a lantern. The fire spread from the hold to the rest of the ship. I was tasked with the job of raising men from their cabins on the port side of the ship towards the stern but the fire spread too quickly for me. The screams of those men will live me with the rest of my days, sir. The next day, after the ship had finally blown up, we discovered the charred remains of a young child. I was there in the boat with his father when we came across it. The sound that came from the man’s mouth was not one I ever want to hear again. So to answer your question, sir, the idea of spending some time in the presence of a dead body doesn’t concern me in the slightest.’

The heels of Yellowplush’s leather boots clicked against the stone as he ascended the stone steps.

The air in the cellar felt cool against Pyke’s skin and it took him a few moments to adjust to his new surroundings. Holding his nose as best he could, Pyke pulled back the sheet, but the stench of rotting, decomposing flesh was too much and he snapped his head backwards, a hot spike of vomit spurting from his mouth. The next time, he whipped the sheet off with a single jerk. Underneath, the bloated corpse looked inhuman, a fatty torso already as stiff as a washboard and discoloured from decomposition, and just a bloody stump where the head had once been. Wiping bile from his mouth, he brought the lantern closer to the corpse and bent down to inspect it further. Pyke’s eyes passed across the corpse’s clammy skin but he couldn’t see an obvious cause of death. There was no stab wound and no visible scars or bruises of any sort except for a cluster of what looked like burn marks at the top of his arm. Four or five reddish circles, no larger than a five-shilling coin. Pyke prodded them with his thumb, trying to work out what might have caused them.

He walked around the corpse a few times, taking note of the thickness of the arms and thighs and the hairiness of the chest and arms. He’d been a young man, Pyke decided, no more than thirty years of age, and physically active, with well-developed leg and arm muscles. There was a zigzag scar running down the length of his forearm and a birthmark on his chest. From the length of the torso and the thick hairs on his chest, Pyke guessed he would have been about six foot, with dark hair. He inspected the cluster of burn marks again, wondering what might have caused them and whether they had, in fact, been inflicted by the killer. Why bother to do this to a man whose head you were about to cut off?

Pyke brought the lantern up to the neck stump and inspected it, trying to work out what instrument had been used in the decapitation. The wound seemed remarkably clean, as though the man’s head had indeed been removed with a couple of swings of an axe rather than hacked off in a less clinical manner. This suggested the act may have been premeditated, that the killer had planned to decapitate his victim, but it didn’t begin to suggest why he’d chosen to do so in the first place. Pyke could rule out torture: he was reasonably confident that the decapitation had taken place after the man had died. There were no rope marks around the wrists or ankles, for example, and to cut off someone’s head while they were still alive would definitely require restraints. This left the thorny question of motivation. Why had someone gone to the trouble of decapitating a man they had already murdered? The most obvious answer was that the killer or killers had wanted to conceal the victim’s identity.

‘Where was the body found?’ Pyke asked, once he’d rejoined Yellowplush at the back of the watch-house.

‘A farmer fished him out of the river just to the east of the town.’

Pyke considered this for a moment. ‘Would I be correct in assuming the river flows from west to east?’

Yellowplush nodded.

‘So the body was either dumped into the river where the farmer found it or, more likely, it ended up there having been discarded elsewhere.’ Pyke rubbed his eyes. ‘Who owns the land upstream from where the corpse was found?’

‘Is that relevant?’

‘It might be,’ Pyke said. ‘If you don’t tell me I can always find out from someone else.’

‘Sir Horsley Rockingham.’

‘A friend of yours?’

The magistrate stared at him but declined to answer the question.