Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

‘Or left them with her parents,’ Pyke added, grimly.

Godfrey considered this for a short while. ‘Do you think Conroy might have sent them?’

‘Let’s assume for a minute that Kate Sutton really did steal some letters from him, letters of great significance, letters he desperately needed to get back…’

‘Desperate enough to kill for?’

Pyke studied his uncle’s jaundiced face. ‘What else do you know about him?’

‘Conroy?’

Pyke nodded.

‘He’s originally from Ireland, County Roscommon, I think. He served in the Royal Artillery before becoming the Duke of Kent’s private equerry. After the duke perished, he slipped into the dead man’s shoes in more ways than one. Became the duchess’s lover and comptroller, if Kate Sutton’s to be believed. I’m told he’s handsome, charming and totally unscrupulous. And quite a hothead, if his reputation is to go by. Perhaps he reckons that when Victoria becomes queen, as she soon will do, he’ll be the puppet-master pulling the strings of the young woman and her mother.’

Pyke rubbed his chin. ‘Perhaps there’s something in the letters that threatens this possibility.’

Godfrey fell back on to his flimsy mattress. ‘I feel I’ve brought this whole situation upon myself. After all, I gave encouragement to the girl’s attempts to sell her information regarding Conroy. She seemed desperate for money.’

‘Don’t blame yourself for other people’s cruelty. You didn’t put a knife to Freddie Sutton’s throat.’

This did little to improve his uncle’s mood. ‘Actually, now I think of it, there was something else. Something one of them said.’

‘In the shop?’

Godfrey nodded. ‘I’m fairly sure I heard the taller, burlier one tell the other one, “He won’t be happy,” when it became evident I didn’t have the letters. Except he didn’t say he.’

‘So what did he say?’

‘I don’t know,’ Godfrey said, scratching his head. ‘To be honest, it sounded like he said H.’

‘As in the letter?’

‘Exactly.’

‘So whose name begins with the letter H?’

‘I’ve racked my brains and I can’t come up with a soul.’

They talked in this roundabout manner for another few minutes before reaching a dead end. To fill the silence, Pyke asked Godfrey whether a young lad had come to the shop asking for work as a delivery boy. Godfrey shook his head, said, no, he didn’t think so, and forced Pyke to tell him about the circumstances surrounding the lad’s escape from the sweatshop. When he’d finished, there was a glint in his uncle’s eye. Changing the subject, Pyke asked him whether he’d heard any rumours about Sir Henry Bellows buying up land in the vicinity of New Road.

Godfrey shook his head but said that he would look into the matter. Gloomily, he added that, even though the libel charges against him had been dropped, he still felt duty bound to keep looking for Kate Sutton.

‘We know Bellows is friendly with Conroy,’ Pyke said, thinking out loud. ‘But we also know that he has, or rather had, an interest in declaring Morris’s death a suicide. Is there a connection?’

Godfrey looked up at him frowning. ‘What sort of a connection?’

Shrugging, Pyke told his uncle about his suspicions about a conspiracy involving Bolter, Yellowplush and Rockingham, and then about the anonymous note he’d received warning him of Rockingham’s arrival in the capital.

‘So someone wanted you to follow him and perhaps see who he met and what he did?’

Pyke nodded. It had already crossed his mind that someone had meant him to see Rockingham in Bolter’s company. It also struck him that he hadn’t managed to determine why the landowner had visited London: the visit to the gaming tavern had surely just been a brief diversion.

‘You have any ideas who might have wanted this?’

Pyke shook his head.

‘I’ve heard of this Rockingham chap. An ex-slaver from the West Indies, made his fortune from a sugar plantation and has, subsequently, tried to buy respectability with the proceeds.’

Nodding, Pyke told him about Rockingham’s Queen Anne mansion and thousand-acre estate.

‘You want to get under this fellow’s skin, you hit him where it hurts.’ Godfrey sat up, grinning. ‘What does he most like doing? What gives him the respectability he seems to crave?’

Pyke considered this for a moment. ‘He has a stable of thoroughbred racehorses.’

‘And you say his estate is just north of Huntingdon? Then he’ll be a member of the Jockey Club at Newmarket.’

Shrugging, Pyke said he didn’t know this for certain.

‘If he owns and breeds racehorses, he will. Trust me.’ Godfrey’s cheeks glistened with excitement. ‘What we do is knock up some handbills that make certain humiliating claims about the fellow, and then pay someone to circulate them in and around Newmarket.’

‘What kind of claims?’

‘I don’t know, dear boy. Use your imagination. Perhaps he fucks his grooms or his horses or his daughter. Take your pick.’

‘And if the allegations are entirely false?’

Godfrey shook his head vigorously, as if Pyke had missed the point. ‘That’s never stopped me in the past. Listen, am I right in thinking this blackguard had something to do with Morris’s death?’ When Pyke muttered, ‘I think so,’ Godfrey added, without changing his tone, ‘So rattle his cage, hit him where it hurts and see what he does. You unsettle him enough, he’ll make a mistake. Smoke the rabbit out of his hole and wait around to mop up the mess.’

As he walked along the Waterloo Road, Pyke was stopped at almost every street corner by women with painted faces propositioning him. Some did so from the steps of their ramshackle dwellings, others called out to him through broken windowpanes. It was early evening and the air had turned so cold he could see his breath in front of him. This was one of the grimmest streets in London with its open cess trenches and pervasive stench of poverty and despair. But worse still was New Cut, a street that ran perpendicular to Waterloo Road, where the daily market left a stink of such immense magnitude that it was hard to negotiate its pavements without being sick. In one short stretch, Pyke counted five ginneries, a beer shop, four brothels, three slop shops and a dozen doss houses. In front of each, dishevelled men and women guzzled home-brewed gin straight from the bottle and would do so until the early hours, because the alternative, lying on open floors while rats nibbled their frostbitten fingers, was too unattractive a prospect. Above them, the smoke from the breweries and factories that clung to the south bank of the river had turned the skies black.

This was also the street where Maggie Shaw had grown up and where her parents had once tended a barrow in the market.

Looking at the piles of rotting vegetables and offal lining the gutters, it was hard to believe that Maggie had once graced this street. It was hard to believe she had really moved among the rickety barrows stacked with cagmag, oilskin caps, rancid fish, soiled clothes, mildewed boots and second-hand corduroy coats, and hard to believe that she had once belonged to the same tribe of people Pyke now passed — drunken, toothless creatures who would slit your throat in a minute if they believed you had money and they could get away with it. Perhaps Maggie was right. Perhaps she had never really belonged there, just as he had never really belonged in St Giles. Having lifted themselves out of poverty, they had found security and prosperity in their middle years, but this wealth did not necessarily breed a sense of entitlement and, for Pyke at least, the feeling that it might at any point be snatched from his grip remained with him constantly. Maybe it was the same for Maggie, he mused.