Andrew Pepper - The Revenge of Captain Paine

‘So you were told to deliver the cigars to a public house?’ When she nodded, Pyke added, ‘Do you remember which one?’

She screwed up her face and tried to think. ‘I’d say it was on Tooley Street, across the river in Bermondsey.’

Silently, Pyke kicked himself. ‘The Jolly Sailor.’ He should have thought about it without the girl’s prompt.

‘You know it?’ She looked at him, surprised. ‘It don’t seem like the kind of place a gentl’man would go.’

But he didn’t want to make the long journey down to Bermondsey that night and, having met Townsend at the house in Berkeley Square and been told there were no new developments, he couldn’t face its silence and emptiness and caught a hackney carriage from a stand on the south side of the square all the way to his uncle’s apartment in Camden.

Pyke had already told Godfrey the bad news about Emily and Felix in a note. His uncle ushered him into the parlour and put a glass of claret in his hand. ‘I haven’t heard a thing, either,’ Godfrey said, when Pyke told him there had been no word of them and no ransom letter. ‘We need to be careful, though, dear boy,’ he went on, peering through the curtains at the street. ‘I had a visit earlier from two very unfriendly peelers. They showed me a warrant for your arrest. I read it. It alleged you embezzled ten thousand pounds from your own bank.’

So Blackwood had come good on his promise, Pyke noted with grim satisfaction. Again he wondered who was pulling his partner’s strings.

Briefly Pyke explained what had happened while Godfrey listened, his lips rouged with claret. ‘And you think this might be related to what’s happened to Emily and Felix?’ he asked, when Pyke had finished.

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘But you suspect who might have stolen the documents and set you up?’

‘Apart from Blackwood, there isn’t anyone else.’

‘Then that’s where you start.’

Pyke explained he was paying Townsend to keep an eye on his partner but that his own priorities lay elsewhere.

‘Of course they do, dear boy, of course they do. And if there’s anything I can do to help, you know you just have to ask.’ Godfrey offered him a pained expression and shook his head. ‘A terrible, terrible business. I’ve been so worried. Emily, and that darling child of yours.’

Pyke felt another wave of tiredness engulf him. He had hardly slept at all since the abduction. ‘Townsend made an interesting comment. That Emily may have been targeted for something she’d done, rather than to hurt me.’

‘But to involve a young child as well,’ Godfrey said, shaking his head.

‘I know, I know…’ Pyke thought about her reluctance to tell him what she had been involved in. Looking up, he noticed that a peculiar expression had taken over Godfrey’s face. ‘What is it?’

‘I heard some bad news today. A couple of the lads who help deliver the Scourge came to tell me.’

‘About?’

‘Apparently the Standard of Liberty beer shop on Brick Lane was raided earlier this morning and closed down. Everyone they could find was bundled into one of those secure carriages and taken away. There were similar raids on the Albion coffee house in Shoreditch, the Spotted Cow on Old Kent Road and the Barley Mow on Upper Thames Street.’

Frowning, Pyke turned this new information over in his head and thought about something Tilling had told him. ‘Was Jackman’s brigade the main target?’

Godfrey’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down while he finished what was in his glass. ‘From what I understand.’

‘Sir Henry Bellows was planning a crackdown against the radicals. I was told it might get nasty.’

‘You mean the windbag magistrate who wanted to lock me up and throw away the key?’

Pyke nodded and asked Godfrey whether he’d had any joy chasing up information regarding the properties Bellows was alleged to have bought in Somers Town.

‘Not just yet, dear boy. But I have my feelers out there. Something will turn up. It always does.’

Pyke thought again about Bellows and his connections both to Huntingdon, where he seemed to know everything that had happened, and to Sir John Conroy, and wondered whether he had had anything to do with the kidnapping. The answer seemed to lie in front of him but just beyond his comprehension.

‘What is it, dear boy?’

‘Do you mind if I stay here tonight? I just can’t…’ Suddenly he felt overwhelmed by tiredness.

His uncle held up the palms of his hands. ‘No need to explain. You know this has always been your home, too.’

They sat in silence for a few minutes, both occupied with their own thoughts. ‘It’s hard to fathom, dear boy,’ Godfrey said, breaking the silence. ‘I do what I do because I no longer care. I like to rattle people’s cages. I can see the corruptness of government as well as anyone else but I don’t give a rat’s arse about the poor. Not really. Not like Emily. She wants to really change things and she thinks it’s still possible. A true believer. Always the most dangerous kind.’

‘Dangerous in what sense?’

Godfrey wiped away a strand of dribble that had escaped from his mouth. ‘I don’t mean to further alarm you, my boy…’

‘But?’

‘How can I put this?’ He sat up in his chair, drumming the arms with his fingers. ‘I just don’t think you should underestimate the seriousness of the wider situation we’re facing here. There’s a small, dirty war going on out there and I suspect Emily might be caught right in the middle of it.’

It had been more than three days since the kidnapping and still no one had heard or knew a thing about it. If it had, indeed, been a kidnapping.

The following morning, more from a sense of desperation than realistic hope, Pyke found himself waiting for Gore at the head office of his bank on Leadenhall Street.

As befitted the public face of London’s largest private bank, Gore’s banking hall was a cathedral to commerce and the power of money, a place that sought to display the wealth of its owner and customers. In architectural terms, the building was bettered in the Square Mile only by the head offices of the East India Company. The neoclassical facade, clad in brilliant white stucco, resembled an Italian palazzo, and inside, the ornate ceilings, the decorative pilasters and the giant silk damasks that hung on the walls, together with a glass chandelier that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Palace of Versailles, gave the impression of imperial majesty. In the hall itself, queues of well-fed customers were serviced by as many as twenty cashiers, and the whole room had an air of quiet efficiency and money that, at one time, Pyke might have found intoxicating.

He arrived alone and was escorted up the marble staircase to the top floor, where he was told to wait. In fact, he’d barely had the chance to get comfortable in the armchair before Abraham Gore himself burst through one of the doors and strode over to greet him, concern etched on his face. ‘What is it, old friend?’ he asked, as he led Pyke towards his private office. ‘Have you discovered something about Morris’s death?’

Pyke had expected Gore to occupy a large, palatial office more akin to something one might find at a gentleman’s club than a bank, and was therefore surprised to find himself in a room barely larger than his own, with just a medium-sized mahogany desk, two chairs, a half-empty bookshelf and a bureau as furniture. Gore invited Pyke to sit down on the other chair and said, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, my friend, you look terrible. Is something the matter?’

Somehow he found the utilitarian modesty of Gore’s office reassuring.

Pyke took a deep breath and told Gore about the abduction. Gore’s jaw dropped as he did so, the colour draining from his ruddy cheeks. He listened patiently to Pyke’s brief precis of what had happened and wiped his forehead with a pocket handkerchief while muttering, ‘My God,’ and then, ‘A monstrous business.’ When Pyke had finished, he got up, walked around the desk and tried to embrace Pyke, a gesture that turned into a rather awkward fumble. Still, his intentions seemed genuine enough, and as far as Pyke had been able to tell the news had been as shocking to him as it was unexpected. Either that or Gore was a better actor than Pyke imagined.