Bloody Winter: A Pyke Mystery

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘And then?’ she asked, finally.

  Knox nodded. She was quite right. The verdict wasn’t in doubt: murder by a person or persons unknown. How could it be declared otherwise? The real question was whether Hastings would want the matter investigated further.

  James gurgled a little and continued to suckle on her breast.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not my decision.’

  ‘Then why are you so worried about it?’ Martha tried, not entirely successfully, to keep the judgement from her tone.

  The previous day Knox had trudged around the inns and guest houses of Cashel, asking if anyone had taken in a man – very possibly an Englishman – whose description matched that of the corpse. No one admitted to having done so.

  He stood there, staring out of the window that overlooked the yard. ‘I can’t explain it, Martha. I just feel like I owe it to him.’

  Knox could tell that his wife didn’t like his answer.

  ‘I understand, Michael.’ Her expression softened. ‘Remember, we’ve been married nearly five years now.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Moore gave you orders to drop the matter. What do you think he’ll do if he finds out you’re still digging around?’

  Knox saw her discomfort. It was true that Martha was just as vociferous in her criticism of Moore as he was, at least in private, but now there was something else in her eyes. Could it be fear?

  ‘If I say and do nothing, that man will have died alone and unmourned. Is that what you would want?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ She sighed and turned her attention back to the child. ‘But I don’t see how this one man is any different from the countless other men, women and children who are starving to death even as we’re talking.’

  Knox stared down at his muddy boots and listened to the rain outside.

  ‘What you’re doing, what you’re proposing to do, is right. I’m not denying that. It’s just we have other things, other people, to think about.’

  After breakfast, Knox walked the mile and a half into town. It took him along a narrow track flanked by hedges as tall as he was, past the ruins of Hore Abbey on one side and the Rock of Cashel on the other. He entered the town and turned on to Main Street near the fountain. The barracks was a squat two-storey building that sat at a ninety-degree angle to the courthouse. He was instructed to report immediately to the sub-inspector.

  ‘Constable Knox,’ Hastings said, after he’d presented himself at the sub-inspector’s door.

  ‘Sir.’

  Hastings was a dour Protestant, forty-one years old, married with three children, and as fair-minded as it was possible to be in the post he occupied. His moustache was trimmed and flecked with grey, and he made a point of donning the same uniform as the rest of them: a blue swallow-tailed coat and a pair of matching woollen trousers. His one remarkable feature was a glass eye: he had lost the real one in a brawl some time before Knox had joined the constabulary.

  ‘Constable Knox, I wanted to ask about your plans for the disposal of the corpse lying in the cellar.’

  ‘I intend to take it to the cemetery this morning.’

  Hastings gave him a perfunctory nod. ‘I’m afraid it won’t be possible to bury the body there. They’ve dug a pit at the back of the workhouse. You’re to take it there.’

  Knox knew better than to question the man. ‘Of course. Will that be all, sir?’

  Hastings looked up from a document he’d been browsing. ‘I believe the inquest is due to take place today.’ Not waiting for an answer, he said, ‘A verdict of murder will be returned. Since Lord Cornwallis asked you to attend to this matter, I see no reason to make alternative arrangements. It’s Thursday today. You can have until Monday.’

  Knox moistened his parched lips. ‘You do know I’ve never conducted a murder inquiry before.’

  Hastings had picked up a quill but he put it down on his desk and then sighed. ‘Just do what you think is best, Constable.’

  Knox nodded. The implication was clear: he was not expected to find out who’d killed the man or even who the victim was. He had been given the case because it was deemed not to be important.

  ‘Good. That will be all.’ Hastings turned his attention to the piece of paper in front of him but Knox didn’t move. ‘Is there something else, Constable?’

  ‘There was one thing, actually, sir. There’s a man in town called James Sullivan, owns a draper’s shop. In his spare time, he has developed an interest in daguerreotyping. I thought I might ask him to capture an image of the dead man in case we need someone to identify him at some future point.’ Knox waited. ‘I imagine we would have to pay the man a small fee …’

  Hastings sat back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘Have you been listening to me at all, Constable?’

  ‘Sir?’ Knox felt a trickle of sweat snake its way down the side of his body.

  ‘I want you to take that corpse to the pit at the back of the workhouse and dispose of it forthwith. Is there any part of that statement you still don’t understand?’

  Knox stiffened his back. ‘No, sir. I’ll attend to it right away.’

  ‘See that you do it,’ Hastings said, dismissing him with a wave of the hand.

  The horse and cart were unavailable so he had to make do with a borrowed hand-barrow. The dead body had started to smell so Knox had to cover his mouth with a clean handkerchief before dragging it up the stairs to the rear of the barracks.

  The route to the workhouse didn’t take him past Sullivan’s shop so he had to make a slight diversion. Knox passed a hatter, a brogue-maker, a stone-cutter and a tailor before he stopped outside the draper’s window. There he covered the barrow with an old piece of cloth and entered the shop.

  Inside, out of the cold wind, he told Sullivan – whom he knew quite well – what he had in mind and asked whether he would be interested in helping.

  ‘Well, that’s a mighty unusual request, sir, but I fancy I see your point.’ The draper hesitated. ‘We’d have to close the shop for a while. That would incur some cost. Then there’s the matter of the copperplates, the iodine, the mercury.’

  Knox tried to swallow. ‘How much would two good plates cost?’

  ‘Two?’ Sullivan wiped his hands on his apron and did a quick calculation in his head. ‘Shall we say a guinea, since it’s coming out of the public purse?’

  Knox had already decided to foot the bill himself but this was more than he had been expecting. He had saved three pounds, which was buried in the yard at home, but in light of the current difficulties, the idea of frittering away a third of this sum on two daguerreotypes seemed reckless to the point of stupidity.

  ‘I was told not to go above twenty shillings.’

  Sullivan eyed him suspiciously. Perhaps he thought that Knox had been given a budget and was trying to barter him down in order to keep some of the money for himself. ‘I’ll do it for twenty-three, not a shilling less.’

  ‘You’re not to mention this business to another soul. I mean it, James. Not even to your wife.’ Knox folded his arms. He could feel his heart thumping against his chest.

  ‘I can hold my tongue,’ Sullivan said. ‘Twenty-three shillings?’ He spat on his hand and offered it to Knox.

  ‘Agreed.’

  After laying down the corpse in the back of the shop, Knox waited outside as Sullivan set to work.

  The workhouse gates were locked but after he’d rattled them, Bill McDonagh appeared from around the side of the building, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. ‘No more room,’ he said, before he’d realised who it was and why Knox was there.

  Knox looked up at the workhouse, which had been raised five years earlier on ground a few hundred yards south of the town. It was a building intended to deter rather than welcome: its austerity a reminder of the strict regime that awaited the men and women who had nowhere else to go. It had been full for a number of weeks but in defiance of the commissioners’ strict instruction to cease all outdoor relief, hundreds of non-inmates were
still being fed there.

  ‘Yellow Bill’ McDonagh was a gravedigger hired by the Board of Guardians to collect and bury stray bodies. Knox didn’t know where the name ‘Yellow Bill’ had come from but it was how everyone in the town referred to him.

  ‘That for me?’ Bill asked, gesturing at the hand-barrow Knox had set down next to the gate. He spoke in Irish, even though Knox knew that he understood English quite well.

  ‘I was told there was a pit here,’ Knox said, making a point of answering in English.

  Bill glanced down at the body covered by the piece of cloth. ‘I’ve just come from it.’ This time he had spoken in English.

  ‘This one needs to go in the ground as a matter of urgency.’

  Bill sniffed the air. ‘Been a while, has it?’

  Knox shrugged. ‘I’ll push the barrow, you lead the way.’

  Bill wiped his nose on his sleeve. Like most Catholics, he distrusted the army more than he did the police, and seemed happy to take men like Knox at their word. ‘I should warn you, Constable. It isn’t pleasant in there.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ve seen as bad.’

  Knox let Bill walk ahead of him along a mud path that skirted the left side of the workhouse. It terminated at the edge of a giant pit which had been dug into the ground. On Bill’s advice, Knox had already tied a handkerchief around his nose. Despite this, the stench of putrefying flesh was appalling. He stared into the pit and felt his legs buckle. There were, quite literally, dozens of bodies, limbs tangled together, flesh covered by quicklime. Rats crawled among the corpses. Nauseous, Knox had to look away. He took a couple of breaths and watched as Bill pulled back the cloth covering the body in the barrow.

  ‘If it’s all the same to you,’ Bill said, ‘I’ll strip off his clothes before I toss him in the pit.’

  Knox shook his head. ‘No, he goes in as he is. Clothes and all.’ He didn’t want the gravedigger to see the stab wound in the dead man’s stomach.

  Bill looked up at him, squinting, and then shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ He went over to the barrow, scooped up the body and carried it to the edge of the pit. With a grunt, he pushed the body forward. Knox watched it fall. Bill went to collect some quicklime and sprinkled it over the clothed body. Now Knox understood why Bill had wanted to undress it.

  Reading his mind, the gravedigger said, ‘I wouldn’t worry. A few more bodies, and they’ll close up this pit and dig another one.’

  Knox just nodded.

  ‘Who was he, anyhow?’

  ‘A vagrant.’

  The older man’s eyes narrowed. ‘Aren’t they all?’

  The previous afternoon, Knox had taken the Tipperary Free Press to his nearly blind neighbour, Jeremy Brittas. Knox rented his smallholding from the Brittas family and twice a week read for the grandfather, who lived alone in the Mount Judkin house’s lodge. Despite the old man’s curmudgeonly manner, Knox relished these moments, as it was a chance to engage with a world beyond his front door.

  Brittas liked him to read everything, even the notices for cold creams, macassar oil and pills to treat gonorrhoea. The previous day, the paper had reported more deaths in Skibbereen. On the same page, a notice for the new edition of the Economist magazine lauded the role that free trade had played in bringing about the moral and intellectual advancement of society. To Knox, it seemed like a bad joke.

  ‘Has free trade put bread on anyone’s table?’ he had asked Jeremy Brittas. ‘Well, has it?’

  The old man hadn’t an answer.

  Knox had read some more of the newspaper. ‘Why don’t they report the deaths we’re suffering here?’ He had looked up almost accusingly at his neighbour.

  Brittas had taken his stick and banged it into the floor. ‘Read on, man. Read on.’

  Knox had got to the end of the report about US President Polk’s promise to increase his country’s famine relief. He’d found himself nodding in agreement. ‘Does America live under laws made by herself? She does. Does Ireland live under laws made by herself? She does not! Ireland pines, and starves and dies beneath the Upas tree of British Legislation.’ At that point Brittas coughed and Knox had looked up.

  ‘Free trade might’ve made a rum job of feeding people but do you really think democracy would’ve improved the situation?’

  ‘I’d prefer to die poor but with my head held high than poor and enslaved,’ Knox replied.

  ‘And if food was just handed out to folk, who would ever bother to work for a living?’

  ‘But there is no work. That’s the problem. No work and no food, at least at prices that poor folk can afford.’

  Knox was still thinking about this exchange when Duffy, a constable from Roscommon, shouted from the door. ‘Finally found you. They want us at the workhouse straight away. There’s a mob gathered outside.’

  Six policemen assembled in front of the barracks. All except for Knox were Catholics from hard-working families; they had come from all over Ireland and lived together in the barracks. It made him an anomaly, and while nothing was ever said aloud, Knox knew that none of them really trusted him, believing that he’d been appointed as an informer to the Protestant commanders. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. In fact, Hastings and the other head-constables had always regarded Knox with suspicion, wondering why he had been willing to work for the same pay and conditions as the Catholic constables.

  Hastings appeared from the station and told the men to go to the workhouse at once and disperse the mob. He did not say how they were meant to do this or what would happen if the mob refused to go quietly. He didn’t mention the word ‘force’ but it was implicit in everything he said. Why else had he instructed them to take their carbines?

  A couple of days earlier, Knox had read about food riots in Clonmel. Now, it seemed, the same thing was about to take place in Cashel.

  They trudged in silence along Boherclough Street past the Old Court building on their left, and then the Fever Hospital. Knox couldn’t speak for the others but he had already made a promise to himself that he wouldn’t open fire on his own countrymen.

  A mob of about fifty or sixty had gathered outside the gates of the workhouse and Knox and the constables had to push their way through, using the butts of their carbines to get to the gates. There, they found Michael Doheny, chairman of the Board of Guardians, trying to plead with the men. Some were brandishing pickaxes, others brickbats. Earlier that afternoon, it transpired, the workhouse had stopped issuing any outdoor relief. Doheny was promising to see whether any food could be found for them. He was a hero to these men. A few years earlier he had stood up to one of the largest landowning families and forced them to make good the rate they owed the town. He’d used the money to fund relief projects in Cashel which, in turn, had kept many men and women from starvation. Now, this source of income had dried up and the mood was desperate. Hands aloft, Doheny was pleading with the men to go home to their families.

  ‘Home?’ one of them yelled. ‘We don’t have a home. Not since we were turned off our land.’

  ‘The workhouse can’t take any more.’ This time it was James Heany, vice-chairman of the Union, who’d spoken.

  ‘We just want to eat.’

  ‘My wife and baby haven’t fed in a week,’ another man shouted. ‘If I don’t get food, they’ll die.’ Further pleas were drowned out by the shouting.

  Knox and the other constables fanned out in front of the gates. They were holding their carbines but hadn’t yet turned them against the crowd. Knox tried not to think about what might happen if one or two of the mob tried to storm the gates. Were they desperate or hungry enough to do such a thing? He stared at the crowd, saw his own terror mirrored in their faces.

  ‘I will personally make sure that supplies of corn are made available tomorrow for you to buy,’ Doheny yelled through cupped hands, trying to magnify his voice.

  ‘We can’t afford the prices the traders are charging,’ someone shouted back. There were murmurs of agreement.

  Doheny
held up his hands and waited for complete silence. ‘I will personally make sure you’ll be charged no more than two pennies for a pound.’

  The market rate was now almost five pence for a pound of corn. Knox wondered how Doheny would make good on his promise but it seemed to do the job. Slowly the mob began to disperse, and the relief among the constables was palpable. Knox went over to congratulate Doheny. Grim-faced, the chair of the Board thanked him but said he still had to secure an agreement from the traders to sell the corn – if they had any left – at the low price.

  A meeting to discuss the relief effort was due to start in the town hall on Main Street at eight, he added. It promised to be another stormy affair, as Lord Cornwallis and a representative of another large landowning family were due to attend. They would be asked to explain their unwillingness to pay for further supplies of corn, and Doheny wondered whether Knox and the other men would mind attending, in their capacity as defenders of the peace.

  ‘They’ll heckle Lord Cornwallis to start with, but mark my words, when he finishes, he’ll have the whole room eating out of his hand.’ Doheny – a man who had once organised a giant meeting in Cashel to agitate for the repeal of the Union and who fervently believed that Ireland should fight for independence – seemed more sad than angry at this prospect.

  Knox hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast but said he would be there. Doheny patted him on the back. ‘It’s hard, isn’t it, when the side you’re on is not the side you want to be on.’

  Knox wondered whether Doheny knew that he, too, was in favour of Irish independence and had even named his dog after a man who had done as much as anyone to further this particular cause.

  The town hall was full to capacity by the time Knox had pushed his way to the front of the room; a heaving mass of pale flesh and damp kerseymere exuding the smell of stale sweat and tobacco. On the stage with Doheny and the Board of Guardians were representatives of the Pennefather family and Lord Cornwallis, who’d travelled from Dundrum to address the meeting. The Pennefathers and the Moores were the largest ratepayers in the county and therefore enjoyed a de facto right to sit on the Board.