The Detective Branch
( Pyke mystery - 4 )
Andrew Pepper
Andrew Pepper
The Detective Branch
Paternoster Row
NOVEMBER 1808
He had been looking for his mother among the prostitutes and brothels of the Ratcliff Highway when they had seized him; two pairs of hands that had clasped his coat at the shoulder and lifted him clean off his feet.
A week later, he had been taken to a gloomy building in the shadows of the giant dome of St Paul’s which he later discovered was an orphanage. He hadn’t known at the time that he was an orphan. He hadn’t known what an orphan was.
The dormitory where he and fifty other boys slept, two or three to a bed, was cold and damp. The wind blew right through it and even though they huddled together under a thin blanket for warmth, it was never enough. That first night had been the worst; he hadn’t snivelled or cried like some of the boys but he had been so cold that he hadn’t been able to stop shaking. Every hour bells would chime and it was difficult to sleep. Occasionally they whispered to one another under the blanket, even though talking at night was strictly prohibited. They lied about their circumstances and what had brought them there; the truth, for most of them, was too painful to bear. Nobody said what they all knew to be true: that they had no one; they had been abandoned and were alone in the world.
The Owl didn’t make his rounds the first night he was there. It was said by some of the boys, maybe out of wishful thinking, that the man was suffering from a fever, since he never missed his rounds. But the next night the Owl was back. Alongside the other boys, he shivered and hid under the blanket. They heard the door first of all, creaking on its hinges, and then a thin shaft of light cut through the darkness filtering through the thin fibres of the blanket. After the door had groaned to a close, returning the room to darkness, they could see nothing but they could hear him; the same steady, deliberate footsteps that, over the following year, would become terrifyingly familiar to him. The Owl, he was told, always took his time. He would undertake a couple of lengths of the room, up and down past the beds that were arranged in rows, heads facing the walls, before the footsteps came to a halt; before he had made his choice. As he walked past their bed, they held their breath; no one flinched; no one even blinked. They could smell the pipe tobacco over the odour of floor polish. When the footsteps continued, when they didn’t stop, when he was far enough away so he wouldn’t hear, they let out a collective sigh of relief. You could see his eyes in the dark, it was said. That was why they called him the Owl. On that second night, he stopped somewhere up at the other end of the narrow room. They didn’t hear whose name he called out. The next morning someone told them that it had been Tamworth. As was the unwritten rule, no one sat next to Tamworth the following day while they scoffed their breakfast gruel. It was as though his unhappiness was contagious.
It was not until his third week there that the Owl stopped at the end of his bed. The smell of pipe tobacco was thick in the air, and no one in the bed moved. They heard the Owl take a step in their direction and next to him, Simms flinched. He had been there the longest and knew the most; he knew the worst. They waited. It was clear that the Owl was perched over them, for they could hear him breathing; it was just a question of which one of them he would choose.
Even before the Owl had spoken, somehow he knew that his name would be called out; and he was right.
‘Pyke.’
Pyke felt the other two relax but curiously he wasn’t afraid; he would face this man in person and he would not be afraid.
Drury Lane
JULY 1844
ONE
According to a passer-by, three pistol blasts shattered the calm of a trading morning on Drury Lane. They came from inside Cullen’s pawnbroker shop. According to the witness, Robert Morgan, a printer who had once served in the merchant navy and who’d been walking past the shop, the shots were fired in rapid succession. As he later told the police, he stepped into the dingy shop and through the waft of dust and powder he saw two bodies sprawled out on the tiled floor. The owner of the shop, Samuel Cullen, lay on his back in front of the counter, blood seeping from his stomach, his expression oddly resigned. The other man had been shot in the back and had tried to crawl towards the door, perhaps to get help, and a trail of his blood was smeared across the tiles. When Pyke inspected him a few hours later, his hair was matted with blood and his lips were caked with dust. Pyke found the third man under the stairs at the back of the shop, curled up like a baby, and when he laid him out, he saw that the blast must have caught the man in the face because there was almost nothing left of it. His chin, mouth, cheeks and nose had all been pulped by the ball-shot.
The shop was located on Shorts Gardens between a ginnery and an eating house where, on a normal day, a woman with black hair and thick ankles would have been ladling tripe stew into thruppenny bowls. The street name may have conjured images of bucolic tranquillity but in reality it was a narrow, dirty lane in one of the most run-down parts of the city, a tangled knot of decrepit tenements and open cesspools. Children with wan, malnourished faces squatted barefoot in the filth while wolfish dogs scoured the gutters for scraps. Usually the street itself would be choked with fish and vegetable barrows, and donkey carts laden with coal, but because of what had happened, barricades had been erected at either end, and although curious bystanders had begun to mass behind them, it was still eerily quiet.
The pawnbroker’s shop was where the neighbourhood’s poor came to trade their last possessions — silver lockets left to them by their grandmothers and, if they were desperate enough, the boots straight off their feet. The pawnbroker would give them a fraction of the true value of the item they brought in, and a slip of paper allotting sixty days in which to reclaim their property. People rarely did; in which case the items were sold for five or six times more than the pawnbroker had paid.
Cullen’s shop was typical of its kind and nothing about it suggested that its owner possessed — or had ever possessed — something that might be worth killing for. The makeshift shelves were stacked with pairs of old boots, petticoats, dirty cotton-print dresses, soldiers’ uniforms dating back to the time of Napoleon, braces, broken umbrellas, cheap metal combs, mildewed bonnets, torn books and magazines.
Having arrived with two of his sergeants, Whicher and Shaw, Pyke had cleared the shop and inspected the dead bodies. He didn’t know, and had never come across, Samuel Cullen — another indication of the man’s lowly status. Cullen had been identified by the owner of the neighbouring ginnery, who had peered down at the other victims and declared he’d never seen them before. But Pyke had. When he’d rolled over the corpse of the man who’d been shot in the back and had tried to crawl out of the shop, he found himself staring at a face he knew. He stood up suddenly, held his breath and wiped his upper arm across his forehead. Harry Dove was the friend of a friend. A friend, if that was the right word, who wouldn’t want his name dragged into a murder investigation.
‘Know him, then?’ Whicher said, perhaps because he’d seen Pyke’s reaction.
‘I thought I did, for a moment,’ Pyke said, turning away from Whicher to shield his expression.
‘Oh.’ If Whicher didn’t believe him, he hid the fact well.
‘You?’
Whicher shrugged. ‘What about the other fellow, the one you found under the stairs.’
‘What about him?’
‘Any idea who he is?’
Pyke opted to ignore the question. ‘Is Shaw upstairs with the passer-by?’
Whicher nodded. He was short, for a policeman. Just five foot eight, the minimum height to gain entry to the force. His dark hair was closely cropped a
nd his clean-shaven face was pitted with smallpox scars. But it was his eyes which stood out: they were emerald green and shone with understated intelligence. He didn’t say much but he had a keen eye for detail and a sharp memory. Although the man was young, Pyke already regarded him as his natural successor, or at least the one most capable of taking charge of an investigation. Whicher was cool, methodical and, equally important, he kept himself to himself outside work hours. The others, Pyke had heard, regarded him as aloof.
‘Shaw is taking care of the wife, too,’ Whicher said. ‘She was out running errands when the robbery took place. Came back to find her shop crawling with policemen. She collapsed on the floor and had to be restrained.’
‘You’re calling it a robbery, then?’
‘Why? You don’t think it was?’ He gave Pyke a sceptical look.
Earlier, they had come across the pawnbroker’s safe, behind the counter at the back of the shop. It had been opened and emptied. The key was still in the lock.
‘The passer-by said he heard three shots in quick succession. Said he entered the shop almost immediately.’
‘So?’
‘Let’s assume that the safe was cleared before the men were shot.’
Whicher put his hands on his hips while he considered Pyke’s hypothesis. ‘That sounds about right.’
‘So why did the gunmen open fire on Cullen and the other two after they’d got what they’d come for?’
Whicher shrugged. ‘You think there was more than one of them?’
‘Three shots were fired. In rapid succession. That’s what the witness said, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘In which case, a single gunman wouldn’t have had time to reload his pistol.’
Pyke turned his thoughts back to Dove and whether he should own up to recognising him, what the consequences might be. He looked down at the bodies, and tried to reconcile the conflicting sentiments assailing him. It was his job to remain detached, to see things as they were, but it was hard to look at the crime scene and not feel a twinge of excitement. An abomination had been perpetrated and it was his job to find the man or men responsible. At bottom, it was why he’d agreed to join the police force; because he loved the thrill of the chase.
A little later Cullen’s wife confirmed the identification of her husband with a nod and sniffle but said she hadn’t ever seen the other two men before.
‘And before you ask,’ she said, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her dress, ‘I don’t know nobody what’d want to kill my Sammy, neither.’
‘But he can’t have been a popular man, given how he earned his living.’
That made her snort. She was fifty, Pyke estimated, a few years older than her husband, and had probably done well to marry at all. Her skin was dark and tough, her eyes small and quick, like a magpie’s.
‘Sammy didn’t force folk to do business with ’im. And he gave ’em a fair price, compared to some of them others. Else they wouldn’t come back.’
Pyke nodded. Anyone with a petty grievance against Cullen wasn’t likely to go to the shop armed with a pistol or blunderbuss. ‘Had your husband ever been in trouble with the law?’
The wife glowered at him and folded her arms.
‘Was your husband ever convicted of a crime, Mrs Cullen?’
She refused to meet his stare or answer his question and Pyke decided not to force the issue. If Cullen had been arrested or convicted of fencing stolen goods, they would find out soon enough.
‘Has anyone made threats against your husband recently?’
This time Pyke saw that he’d struck a nerve and, before Cullen’s wife could deny it, he added, ‘If they didn’t find what they were looking for, they’ll be back, you know that.’
‘Like you said, some folk round ’ere don’t care for how we earn our bread. But we ain’t got no problems with our neighbours. Ask ’em if you don’t believe me.’
Pyke stole a glance at Whicher. ‘Was your husband expecting someone this morning? Did he say anything to you about a visit?’
She assessed him coolly. ‘He did say something over breakfast this morning. Said someone was comin’ to see him, an’ it might be good for business. Truth be told, he seemed quite excited.’
‘Did your husband mention any names?’
Biting her lip, Cullen’s widow looked into Pyke’s face, the extent of her grief apparent for the first time, and shook her head.
The full complement of the Detective Branch assembled in the back room of the shop just after five.
Two members had left or been promoted in recent months, which meant there were now just four of them, five including Pyke. Frederick Shaw was the youngest and the one who deferred to Pyke’s authority the most. Pyke didn’t encourage this and found it more irritating than endearing, but while he felt Shaw was too timid and too beholden to the rules, the man had a quick mind and was willing to learn. He also had the kind of uniform, nondescript features that were useful in their line of work, meaning he could disappear easily into a crowd. He was average height, average build, average weight, with short brown hair and no sideburns or whiskers, as was the fashion. William Gerrett, on the other hand, always drew attention to himself. In some ways, this wasn’t his fault. At six foot three inches, he was a head taller than anyone else in the room and had the kind of weak chin that disappeared into the flesh of his neck. He was flabby and heavy boned, too: a farmer’s lad who had never quite outgrown his natural talent for tilling the soil and who was quite unsuited to the careful, painstaking logic of police work. He had made a name for himself by being an intimidating figure on the beat, but those skills had little value in the Detective Branch and Pyke had often wondered why he’d been chosen as a detective in the first place. Pyke didn’t care for the man’s looks or his poor personal hygiene, but it was the man’s sloppiness that he couldn’t forgive. Often Gerrett would forget to file even the most rudimentary pieces of information and needed to be reminded, two or three times a day, what he was supposed to be doing.
Shaw, Gerrett and the fourth member of the Branch, Eddie Lockhart, all lived together in a boarding house with the other single officers in Great Scotland Yard. As far as Pyke could tell, Gerrett and Shaw were friends, but Lockhart was the linchpin of the group and, by some margin, the most charismatic and handsome of them. At six feet tall, he was about the same height as Pyke but he was thinner and wirier, and wore the thinnest of moustaches, which he doubtless had to trim each morning. He had a natural confidence and an easygoing manner which worked well for him in the job, as witnesses and even suspects felt comfortable talking to him. But he was also the member of the Branch that Pyke knew the least about and the one who kept his assessment of Pyke closest to his chest. In fact he had seemingly made a conscious decision to keep his distance from Pyke and perhaps resented the fact that Pyke tended to consult first with Whicher rather than him, even though he was older. Lockhart was also intelligent, which made him either a useful ally or a potentially awkward presence in the team. Thus far, Pyke had found him to be the latter.
Pyke told them to gather round and ran through what had happened. Their eyes glistened with alarm and excitement. They might all have worked on murder investigations before but Pyke suspected that none of them had been in such close proximity to three dead bodies. Even Lockhart had baulked when he’d first stepped into the shop. Pyke examined their faces. They were all men he had inherited when he’d assumed the position of head of the Detective Branch at the end of the previous year. At the time he had been told he would be able to recruit two additional men of his own choosing, but now he had been informed that he would have to wait for replacements for the two who had left.
‘Whatever else you were working on, gentlemen, this now takes priority. There will, of course, be immense pressure on us to find and arrest the person, or persons, who committed this act. I’ll expect your full co-operation. Is that understood?’
They all nodded. The air around them was still thick with the sc
ent of fresh blood.
‘Let’s start with Cullen, then. From the look of his shop, I’d say he wasn’t too successful as a pawnbroker. Was he a fence, too? Perhaps. The wife as good as admitted he sometimes dabbled in stolen goods. I’ll need a volunteer to visit Bow Street first thing in the morning, go through the records there, and find out if he was ever convicted of a crime.’
Shaw put up his hand. ‘I’ll do it, sir.’ He was always the first to volunteer and insisted on calling Pyke ‘sir’, even though Pyke had repeatedly told them to call him by his name.
‘Good.’ Pyke paused, looking at his men. ‘We don’t know who the other two victims are. We need to identify them as quickly as possible, and find out what they were doing in the shop.’ Pyke said this even though it was clear to him that a man like Harry Dove wouldn’t have been there to buy a gnarled pair of boots or a broken umbrella.
‘After the inquest, I’ve arranged for the bodies to be laid out in an upstairs room at the Queen’s Head, just across the road. When news of this spreads, people will want to come and look. Someone, somewhere will know the identity of these two men, so I need one of you to remain with the bodies.’
When no one else put their hand up, Gerrett made a half-hearted gesture. Secretly Pyke was relieved; it was the least taxing of the tasks and hence the one most suited to Gerrett’s capabilities. Pyke thanked him and moved on.
‘The fact that the safe was open and its contents had been removed suggests robbery as the likely motive. But the three men were shot dead after the gunman or gunmen had got what they wanted. Why would they do that? Did Cullen or one of the others try to disarm the gunman and fail?’
Pyke stared at their faces. He didn’t get an answer, nor did he expect one. ‘If it was, in fact, a robbery, we need to work out what was taken.’ He looked at Whicher. ‘I want you to have a look at Cullen’s books. Talk to the wife, if you have to. Make a list of what was stolen. There’ll also be a record of what people brought in to be pawned. Look for anything unusual or valuable and make a note of it.’
The Detective Branch pm-4 Page 1