Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

‘Threaten is an ugly word. Let’s just say I’ve simply given you a friendly warning.’

‘And if I don’t choose to take it?’ Pyke hesitated. ‘And if my wife chooses not to take it?’

Bellows looked at him and shrugged. ‘Then you’ll only have yourselves to blame, won’t you?’

As Pyke watched the carriage disappear along the street, he couldn’t get rid of the sour taste their exchange had left.

A fine mist had drifted up the Thames by the time Pyke reached the creaking old wharf at Cowgate, a mist that just obscured the tops of the ships’ masts as they bobbed up and down in the choppy waters of the river. It was late, maybe as late as midnight, and the wharf was deserted. Early morning was the time to see warehousemen carrying crates of sugar, rum, rubber, tea and coffee to the stores, and gangs of coal-whippers unloading the colliers lined up along the river. Pyke looked over towards the Southwark bank, the giant brewery just about visible through the dense forest of rigging, cables and masts, though it, too, was silent. What never changed, he thought, was the smell. The river was at low tide and when this happened, the raw sewage that flowed into the river from the cess trenches that criss-crossed the city gathered on exposed banks to form mountains of slime; slime that produced gas bubbles whose stench was bad enough to make your teeth rattle.

Pyke found the former crimping house easily enough. In fact, he had once tracked down a man who had returned from transportation to one of its rooms and remembered its inside a little. During the Napoleonic wars, the building had been used to hold ‘pressed’ seamen before they were transported to vessels, and afterwards it had briefly been used as a place where sailors wounded in combat could convalesce. But money made available by the Admiralty had long since dried up, and in recent years the building had become home to every kind of docker, mudlark and scavenger that depended upon the river to earn their living. Downstairs, there was a long, narrow passageway that led to a communal kitchen, if he remembered correctly, and upstairs was a rabbit warren of interconnecting rooms and passageways. He would have to be lucky to surprise Trotter, if he was there, and even if he was, the chances were that Trotter would hear him coming and escape to somewhere else in the building.

There was another possibility, of course, one he didn’t like to think about, and to ward it off he had brought with him two fully loaded flintlock pistols and a knife that he had strapped to his left ankle. Even then, he felt somehow underprepared, as though the weapons at his disposal were a poor match when pitted against the ferocity and cruelty of the man he was attempting to capture. Villums’s warning was still ringing in his ears when he pushed open the front door.

The smell was a familiar one: damp, stale food and human sweat. At the end of the long passageway, he stepped into the kitchen, both pistols hidden under his black cutaway coat. Four men were sitting on makeshift furniture around a fire that burned warmly in the grate; all looked up at him but none with very much interest. Their clothes were dirty and torn and their faces smudged with soot. Checking behind him, Pyke walked a little farther into the dilapidated room and cleared his throat. ‘I’m looking for Jimmy Trotter,’ he said, in barely more than a whisper. If Trotter was somewhere in the building, Pyke didn’t want to alert him.

No one looked across at him. Rather, the four continued to stare gloomily into the fire, minding their own business.

‘I said I’m looking for Jimmy Trotter. I was told he sometimes puts his head down here.’ This time, he pulled back his coat and let the four men see his pistols. He put some metal into his voice, too.

‘That blackguard ain’t been here in months,’ one of them muttered.

‘Do you know where he’s gone?’

The man shrugged. ‘Didn’t ask and don’t care. But it’s good riddance as far as I’m concerned. Man was nothing but trouble.’

‘How about the rest of you? Anyone know where I can find him?’ Pyke waited for a moment. ‘There’s a reward in it.’

‘How much?’ one of them asked.

‘Do you know anything or not?’ Pyke rested his fingers on the wooden butt of one of his pistols.

But the man shook his head; the others did likewise. One told him that Trotter had boasted about coming into some money and said he wasn’t likely to be back.

‘Did he have any friends or acquaintances when he was here?’

A man with fat cheeks and vermilion lips looked at him, frowning. ‘A cully like that don’t make friends.’

‘Which room did he use when he stayed here?’ Perhaps Trotter had left something that might be of use.

‘Top floor, along the passageway, last door on the right.’

Feeling the tension drain from him, he thanked them for their time and turned to leave the room. One of them shouted after him, ‘What about that reward?’ Pyke ignored him. But the man with fat cheeks and greasy lips shuffled after him and said, ‘Mostly we don’t go up there. It’s meant to be kept for men who fought in the war but the real reason is none of us much care for the smell. Ripe flesh and camphor don’t make for a pleasant odour.’ He was carrying a lantern and offered it to Pyke, who rummaged in his pocket for a few coins. The man accepted them gratefully and shuffled along the passageway back to the kitchen.

But there was nothing of interest in the room that had been described to him and Pyke was just about to make his way back along the passageway when he noticed a light in the room opposite.

He knocked on the door and pushed it open. The room was tidy and warm, a fire blazing in the grate. Sitting in front of it was a grey-haired gentleman in a rocking chair. A blanket warmed his legs. He introduced himself as Midshipman Salt and proceeded to complain about the ‘thieves’ and ‘vagabonds’ that had taken over what had once been a respectable convalescence home. Since men like him who had not been badly injured in the war did not merit a place at Chelsea, he explained bitterly, this was the only place left to them. He spoke about the war as though it had happened the previous year rather than more than twenty years earlier. Pyke found himself feeling sorry for him.

He asked the old man whether he’d known Jimmy Trotter, who had once used the room opposite him. Salt shook his head, muttering that Trotter was a ‘bad egg’ who liked to hurt people out of a misplaced sense of enjoyment. He added that he was happy Trotter had gone and said, no, he didn’t know where he had gone to and, quite frankly, didn’t care. ‘If someone had gouged out his eyes with a spoon,’ he said, reflecting on the matter, ‘it would have been too good a death.’ But when Pyke asked him why he felt so strongly about the man, Salt wouldn’t answer him.

Pyke looked around the well-ordered room. There were framed prints of ships on the wall. That was when he had the idea. ‘What about a man called Jake Bolter? Never goes anywhere without his mastiff, Copper.’

The older man’s face reddened, his hands starting to shake. He tried to recover his composure but Pyke had seen the reaction and the ex-sailor knew that he had seen it.

‘Bolter had a room here?’ Pyke tried to keep his excitement in check. This was what he’d been looking for, something that tied Trotter to Bolter and Rockingham.

The old man stared down at his blanket. ‘For a long while, Jake lived in the room across the hall.’

‘And then Trotter moved in too?’

‘I thought we were friends.’ The midshipman’s eyes filled with water. ‘For years, we’d sit here in this very room and talk about the old days.’