Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

The mood in the games room was a jolly one, as Bolter chatted happily about his dog’s achievements and attributes. They didn’t seem to notice Pyke at first or, if they did, it didn’t puncture their high spirits. It was Rockingham who saw him first, a peculiar smile appearing on his cadaverous face, as though the surprise was a pleasant one. Bolter lifted up his cue and moved around to the other side of the billiards table, his eyes never leaving Pyke for a moment.

Later Pyke would try to convince himself that the young lad he had rescued from Groat’s sweat houses was at the forefront of his thoughts as he strode across the room and picked out a wooden cue from the holder. In fact he just felt numb, the laudanum infusing his insides with a deadening warmth.

Holding the cue with the tapered end, he swung it through the air and struck Bolter on the side of his face, his cheek splitting open from the blow, his eyeballs bulging from their sockets. A streak of crimson arced across the green baize. Bolter went down, his legs buckling as if they were made of paper, and Pyke bent over him, holding the cue at either end and pressing the middle part down against Bolter’s neck. For a moment he thought he might throttle him.

‘How do you know Rockingham?’

He lifted the cue, enough for Bolter to croak, ‘He’s involved with the regiment.’

Immediately Pyke remembered a story that had been told to him by the magistrate in Huntingdon. ‘You were on the Kent when it caught fire and sunk in the Bay of Biscay, weren’t you?’

Bolter’s eyes bulged as Pyke pressed down on the cue but he managed a desperate nod.

‘Did you kill Morris?’

Bolter shook his head.

‘I said, did you kill Morris?’

‘No.’

He released the cue and Bolter rolled over and retched, his whole body convulsing through lack of air.

Standing up, Pyke turned to face Rockingham, who had sought neither to intervene nor call for help. Rather the older man had stood there, rooted to the spot, and watched as Pyke had struck his companion with the wooden billiards cue, as though it had been a form of entertainment put on only for his benefit. Others had drifted into the room, attracted by the whiff of trouble, but as Pyke walked past Rockingham, the old man opened his mouth, a blast of fetid breath leaking from it, and whispered, ‘I’ll see you in hell.’ And it was this, more than what he had done to Bolter, which made Pyke contemplate what he had done and wonder whether he was as damned as he felt.

The following morning, as he walked through Regent’s Park, Pyke could still smell traces of blood on his clothes. It was a beautiful November day and, away from the choking miasma of dust and smoke that hung over much of the city, Pyke could see the cornflower blue of the sky and feel the pleasant crispness of the air against his skin. It was the kind of day that should have made him feel happy to be alive, but as the giant portico and rotunda of the Colosseum loomed in the distance, above the line of trees, he couldn’t rid his mind of an image of Morris plummeting to his death.

It was only half-past eight and the attractions weren’t yet open to the public, but he found the caretaker mopping the floor in the central rotunda. His figure looked as if it had been bent out of shape and he needed the mop to prop him up. He watched Pyke cross the floor towards him, his paintbrush moustache twitching and his armpits already dark with sweat.

Perhaps he recognised Pyke from the coroner’s inquest or perhaps he didn’t. But it was only when Pyke asked the question that a trace of caution, even concern, appeared in his face.

‘If you toured the building at one, before you locked up, and didn’t see Morris or his body anywhere, how is it possible that you found it lying here on the floor when you opened the building the following morning?’

The caretaker pulled himself up straight and shrugged. ‘Like the man said, maybe the cully that died hid himself in the building and then jumped after I’d done my rounds.’

‘That would be one explanation.’

‘And the other?’ The caretaker seemed amused by something.

‘You waited until all the guests and workers had gone and then turned a blind eye while someone dragged Morris’s drink-addled body over to the edge of the promenade and hauled him up over the railing. Perhaps you even helped.’

‘The man’s death was ruled as suicide. You’d do as well to remember that, before spreading your lies.’

‘How much did someone pay you to keep your mouth shut? Ten guineas? Maybe twenty?’

‘I’ve got work to do. If you’ll excuse me.’ He started to walk off in the direction of the entrance.

‘Who killed him? Was it Bolter? Or perhaps a man with a glass eye?’

But the caretaker didn’t turn around and Pyke caught up with him only on the very edge of the main floor. ‘Did you see anything unusual or strange that night, sir? Please, it could be important.’

His unexpected politeness softened the caretaker’s indignation. ‘Now you mention it, I did see the gentl’man who died arguing with a cull up on the promenade. There were still a few guests left but none up there. Well-dressed cull, black hair, same as yours. I’d say he was younger than you, mind.’

‘You didn’t hear what the argument was about?’

The caretaker scratched his head. ‘No, I don’t reckon I did.’

Pyke described Jem Nash as best he could and asked whether this was the man he’d seen arguing with Morris.

‘Aye, it could have been.’ The caretaker looked towards the entrance. ‘You’d better go. My supervisor catches me chinwagging, I’ll be shown the door faster than you can say Jack Robinson.’

Outside something had disturbed the jackdaws from their treetop perches and the sky was momentarily turned black by a flapping of wings. Pyke thought about the man’s claim to have seen Morris and Nash arguing and wondered whether it had been true and, if so, what it indicated.

From the outside, Bartholomew Prosser’s pauper’s ‘school’ looked like any other genteel residence on the outskirts of the metropolis, a well-maintained Palladian mansion with a plain stucco facade and Regency bow windows concealed behind a sturdy wrought-iron fence. But inside was a different story. All the effort and money had been spent on maintaining the exterior of the building and keeping the lawns spruce. Inside was a rabbit warren of damp, gloomy rooms connected by long passageways that put Pyke in mind of a prison. In fact the carceral analogy was entirely appropriate because upstairs Pyke found out that the boys were kept under lock and key, with at least ten shivering, emaciated bodies crammed into rooms that were barely larger than a privy. In all he counted twenty such rooms, meaning the school or, rather, juvenile prison housed more than two hundred boys aged between five and fifteen. Pyke could not find Prosser himself, nor Jake Bolter, who apparently hadn’t been seen since the day before, but at gunpoint he forced an elderly matron figure to unlock all the doors and allow the boys to roam freely in the corridors and rooms.

From her, and his own intuition, Pyke gleaned how the establishment operated. In light of the recent Poor Law amendment, Prosser had written to the workhouse managers telling them about his ‘school’ and requesting that they send him any unwanted boys, for which he would charge a fee of three shillings and six pence a week, which represented a small saving on what it cost to keep a boy at the workhouse. Instead of feeding and educating the boys as he’d promised, however, Prosser then sold them on to various sweaters in the East End and continued to claim the money from the workhouse managers who’d sent him the boys in the first place. It was a lucrative operation that might have earned Prosser as much as five hundred or even a thousand pounds a year.