Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

It had been a few years since Pyke had last seen Townsend and he was shocked by the much diminished figure that shuffled into his office. They had once served together as Bow Street Runners and Pyke remembered Townsend as a barrel-chested man with hands as large as grapefruits, knuckles like sovereigns and forearms that resembled the branches of a mature oak tree. He had once seen his former associate lift two fully grown pigs, one under each arm, without breaking into a sweat. Pyke had heard that Townsend had suffered some kind of fever but he hadn’t expected the dismal sight that greeted him. His head had been given a prison-crop shave, his shoulders and limbs had lost much of their power, his clothes were tatty, and his skin was dotted with pockmarks, the kind that suggested smallpox.

They chatted for a few minutes about the old days, but it quickly became apparent that any rapport they’d once shared had now been eroded by the strictures of money and class. Out of shame or perhaps resentment, Townsend could hardly bear to meet his stare, and it took Pyke’s act of passing an envelope containing money across the table to lighten the atmosphere. That cleared up a lot of the problems. Townsend realised Pyke was about to offer him some work and, on that basis, he appeared happy enough to remain where he was.

‘I’d like you to do a couple of things for me.’ He looked up and tried to assess his former associate’s reaction.

Townsend had made no effort to retrieve the envelope from the desk.

‘First, I’d like you to find out everything you can about a man called Jake Bolter. He works, in some capacity, at Prosser’s school in Tooting, and he never goes anywhere without a giant mastiff called Copper. I know he used to serve in the army and his face is horribly scarred. I want to know which regiment he served in, what he did after he left the army, who he associates with.’

Townsend scribbled some details down on a pad of paper Pyke had left for him on the desk.

‘And the other thing?’

‘I’d also like you to keep an eye out on my partner, William Blackwood.’

‘What’s he done?’

‘He may have stolen from me. I’m not sure.’

‘So what am I looking for?’

‘What he does when he leaves this building. Who he talks to and where he goes.’

‘Is that it?’ This time, Townsend picked up the envelope and opened it. His face remained composed.

A sharp knock on the door interrupted them and one of the clerks from the banking hall peered sheepishly around the door, holding out a letter. ‘This was left for you, sir,’ he said, taking a gulp of air.

Pyke beckoned him into the office, relieved him of the letter and read it. It simply said: ‘ Rockingham expected in the capital today. Coach due to arrive at Swan with Two Necks at six ’.

‘Who delivered it?’

The clerk shrugged. ‘No one saw. It was left on one of the tables, with your name on the front.’

Pyke thanked him and surveyed the note again to see whether he could glean any further information from the looped handwriting.

The Swan with Two Necks was an enormous coaching inn across the road from the General Post Office in St Martin’s-le-Grand. Between the Swan, as it was more often called, and the next-door Bull and Mouth, there was underground stabling for more than a thousand horses and the two establishments employed well over three thousand men and boys to groom the horses, prepare the coaches, attend to the passengers and carry luggage to and from the upstairs rooms. The scene may have appeared chaotic to some but Pyke knew it was a well-drilled operation: passengers would take their seats in the yards of the Swan or the Bull and Mouth and the coaches would then cross the road to the post office, where porters and liveried guards would load sacks of mail on to their roofs. To travel on the mail coaches was the quickest and most reliable form of transportation and passengers paid a premium for it. As a result the yard at the Swan was one of those rare places where the working poor rubbed shoulders with the very rich and, as such, attracted every type of petty criminal. Indeed, while it may have been a colourful sight to some, a riot of motion and noise as pot-boys, ostlers, grooms, coachmen and passengers jostled past one another, Pyke’s view took in only the pickpockets, footpads, rampsmen and prostitutes, each intent on scavenging from the other, inhaling the foul air and thrashing around like goldfish cast off into a puddle of water.

Pyke had no attachment to coaches and their yards and disliked the stink produced by the horses, the endless streams of dung that even the collectors could not keep up with, but he wondered whether he would miss them when they were gone. Railway mania was sweeping the country and within a few months the first line, from London to Greenwich, would be opened. Further lines would link London with Birmingham, the West Country, Brighton and (though this was becoming a dwindling possibility) York. That autumn had seen an additional seven companies consolidated by Acts of Parliament, and within five or ten years railway travel would be the norm, turning vibrant enterprises like the Swan into ghost towns. Pyke did not object to the coming of the railways per se, and in the hands of men like Morris he could see how they might transform the country and the world for the better, but the mania had also unleashed a tidal wave of greed and get-rich-quick schemes, many of which would doubtless come to nothing and leave people destitute and homeless. Not that Pyke cared about people who couldn’t look after their own concerns, but the idea that the naked pursuit of material betterment should become the sole ambition of people’s lives made even him feel queasy.

On the dot of six, four different coaches arrived almost at the same time, and Pyke almost didn’t see Sir Horsley Rockingham being helped out of one of them by the guard. As soon as he was back on terra firma, Rockingham barked some kind of unpleasantness to the guard and two pot-boys immediately appeared, one to carry his overnight case and the other to hail a Hackney coachman. Pyke had to act quickly to make sure that he’d be able to follow the landowner by carriage if necessary, and only just managed to find a cab in time to pursue Rockingham’s vehicle out of the yard. He settled down in the back of the carriage and, ignoring the smell of damp straw and stale tobacco, thought again about the note and why someone might have wanted to alert him to Rockingham’s arrival in the capital.

It didn’t take him long to find out. As Rockingham’s carriage pulled up in front of the Athenaeum club on Pall Mall, it was greeted by two porters who helped him out of the cab and took his case. There, too, was the unmistakable figure of Jake Bolter and his dog Copper. At first, Pyke couldn’t work out what was happening. Rockingham followed the porters into the Athenaeum while Bolter and the dog hopped into the waiting cab. Pyke remained where he was, about fifty yards farther back along Pall Mall on the same side of the street, and told the coachman to wait. The cab ahead of them didn’t move and in a few minutes Rockingham emerged from the club with one of the porters, this time without his case, and was helped into the waiting carriage. As it turned around in the street and rattled past them, Pyke concealed his face and told his driver to follow it, if possible at a discreet distance.

The journey across the city to their eventual destination, a public house on Tooley Street in Bermondsey on the south side of the Thames, took just over an hour, a stop-start trip during which they had to inch their way through streets and thoroughfares choked with other vehicles and pedestrians spilling off the pavements. To pass the time Pyke perused a copy of the Public Ledger and waded through further vitriol directed at the radicals and navvies who had instigated the riots in Huntingdon. Only briefly did it mention that two Members of Parliament, Joseph Hume and Thomas Wakley, had both asked questions in the House about the illegal use of untrained citizens as special constables. The report also mentioned that a march in support of the navvies was being planned by the two national trade union movements, after which a petition demanding an enquiry into the deaths of three navvies would be delivered to the prime minister’s Whitehall residence. There was no further mention of Nash’s murder and nothing about the brutal killing of Freddie Sutton and his wife at their home in Spitalfields. Outside, he noticed, it had started to rain. It would turn the mud and manure that coated the surfaces of the streets into a stinking brown slush, and for the time being Pyke was glad to be protected from the elements. On such a night, with winter fast approaching and a yellow fog rolling off the Thames, London could be a truly miserable place.