Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

A solitary drop of sweat leaked from his armpit and snaked its way down his side, as it dawned on him what was happening.

Pyke searched some more but the documents weren’t there. Someone had taken them.

When he staggered to his feet, his head was spinning. He blinked, closed his eyes and tried to focus. If the documents were missing, and the ten thousand pounds he’d lent Morris couldn’t be traced, he would be liable for the full amount of the loan. The thought terrified as much as it enraged him. He could stand to lose everything.

‘Who else has been down here since yesterday afternoon? ’ His voice teetered on the precipice of rage.

‘No one, as far as I know.’

‘Have you been here?’ Pyke stared at him; there was no one else who had a key.

Blackwood sensed something was wrong but didn’t appear to know what it was. ‘I brought the money taken by the cashiers down here as usual…’

‘I put some documents in here yesterday at close of business. They’re now gone. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘I hope you’re not insinuating I had anything to do with it,’ Blackwood replied in a rush.

‘There are only two keys that open this safe. Yours, and one that was stolen from me yesterday.’

Sweat had broken out around Blackwood’s temples.

‘Yesterday I made a private loan to Morris of ten thousand pounds.’

Blackwood looked at him, open mouthed. Finally the seriousness of the situation was beginning to dawn on him. ‘I take it there was a witness.’

‘Nash.’

‘Then you’ve covered yourself, haven’t you? We can always recover the money from Morris’s estate.’

Pyke nodded but he couldn’t shake the feeling of unease that lurked in the pit of his stomach.

‘Of course, if Nash doesn’t verify your story then we might have a very serious problem,’ Blackwood added.

Pyke’s punch landed squarely on Blackwood’s nose, knocking him backwards, blood spurting freely from his nostrils. ‘Why wouldn’t Nash verify it?’ Pyke lifted him up by his collar. It was like picking up a skeleton. ‘I said, the documents were stolen. Didn’t you hear me?’

Blood glistened on the end of Blackwood’s nose. He was too nonplussed to speak but his eyes burned like hot coals behind glass, as though he couldn’t quite put a name to the humiliation he felt.

The entrance to Moor’s Yard was blocked by two policemen and when Pyke tried to push past them, the taller of the two men held out his arm and told him that no one was allowed to enter the yard. Other people wanted to know why both ends of the yard had been blocked and what the policemen had found there. The mere sight of the police made Pyke even more jumpy than he’d been before. He tried to explain that he had important business with one of the residents, business that couldn’t possibly wait.

‘You ain’t going in there, squire,’ the policeman said, squinting at him.

A small crowd had gathered on the pavement around him, forcing passers-by on to the road. The midday bells of St Martin’s began to chime. Pyke couldn’t wait. The worry was eating him up. He had to find Nash. Seeing his chance, he shoved the other officer to one side and broke into a run. Behind, he heard shouts and cheers but he didn’t look back. He ran along the narrow alley until it opened up into a yard. Nash lodged at number eight, above the farrier, an apartment on the first floor that overlooked the horse pond. But there were more policemen in the yard and, alerted by the shouts of their colleagues, they were ready for him.

‘Nash. I need to talk to Jem Nash. He lives at number eight.’

A few of them exchanged looks.

‘What is it?’ Panic iced Pyke’s stomach.

‘I don’t think you want to see him, the state he’s in, sir.’ The policeman was blocking the doorway leading up to Nash’s apartment.

‘Is he dead?’ Pyke felt his throat tighten.

‘Dead?’ The policeman laughed. ‘If you can survive without a head, then I’d like to know how.’

Pyke’s legs buckled.

The policeman nodded. ‘That’s right, cully. When word starts to spread, as it will, there’ll be panic on the streets.’

With a sudden movement, Pyke shoved past him and bolted up the stairs ignoring the shouts of the policemen behind him. At the top of the stairs, he pushed open the door to Nash’s apartment and stepped inside. He didn’t get beyond the entrance hall. Nash’s body lay there on the floor, still dressed in the outfit he’d worn to the ball. The air smelled cloying. The stump where Jem Nash’s head had been was bloody and raw. Pyke tried to get a better look at the body, but policemen had chased up the stairs and dragged him out of the apartment.

Were there burn marks on the body? That was what he wanted to know. And was the head there? Had the killer taken the head?

It took six of them to drag him down the stairs. One of them tried to arrest him for disturbing the peace. Outside it had started to rain but Pyke hardly noticed it. Everything he’d done, everything he’d achieved, everything he’d earned since he’d taken over at the bank, was hanging by a thread. He thought about the old crone, the dead navvies, Freddie Sutton and his wife, and now Morris and Nash. Were they all part of the same thing? All that blood spilt and for what?

The policemen left him alone. Doubling up, he spat bile on to his boots. He could still see Freddie Sutton’s dried blood on them.

He would find out who had done this and make them pay. Someone, somewhere, would pay dearly for what had happened. Staring up at the rain, he repeated these words like a mantra.

In the days after the discovery of Nash’s mutilated corpse, the mood in the capital was anxious and expectant. The murderer had struck once in Cambridgeshire and again in London, and many seemed to think it was only a matter of time before he murdered again. The theories most often repeated were the absurd ones: that the murders were the work of an escaped Bedlamite unable to control his impulses or else that they had been committed by devil worshippers. To Pyke’s surprise, no one had thought to connect the first headless corpse, pulled out of a river near Huntingdon, with the brutal clashes that had taken place between the navvies and special constables in the town itself. But then again no one apart from Pyke knew that the same burn marks had been found on the first victim and the old woman whose senseless rape and murder had sparked the navvies’ anger. Pyke didn’t yet know whether Nash’s body had been afflicted with the same marks and couldn’t begin to think how his death might be linked to the body found in a river near Huntingdon. For a start, the coincidence seemed too glaring. Just a week after he had been asked by Peel to investigate the first headless corpse, his assistant had been murdered in exactly the same fashion.

Perhaps more perplexing were the circumstances linking Nash’s murder, the death of Edward James Morris and the sudden disappearance of the loan papers from the bank’s vault, and it was this matter which constituted Pyke’s most immediate concern. For without a witness or any supporting documentation, there was no evidence that a loan had indeed been made. Pyke had arranged for one of the cashiers to bring ten thousand pounds up to his office and, as such, the missing sum could be traced back to him. All of which meant that his partner, William Blackwood, would be within his legal rights to demand that the money be paid back to the bank in full. Ten thousand pounds. His savings, which he had struggled to build up for the past fifteen years, didn’t even meet this figure. If he failed to recover the stolen papers or indeed the money, then his financial future looked bleak. The moment Blackwood demanded the money be repaid, Pyke would be sunk. But at the same time, he knew that even if he did have the money in his bank account, he wouldn’t give it up without a fight. He had to get back what had been stolen from him. What he needed to do was work out how someone had gained access to the safe; whether they had used the key purloined from him, possibly by the gypsy, or Blackwood’s duplicate key, and whether his partner had played any role in the burglary.