The Detective Branch pm-4

by Andrew Pepper

  One of the men, perhaps a sergeant, ignored him and said to the other men, ‘Bring him out into the garden.’

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Pyke, head of the Detective Branch…’

  The sergeant looked at him, his moustache twitching on his upper lip. ‘I know exactly who you are.’

  Ignoring Copper’s increasingly frantic barks, the policemen dragged him through the house and outside into the garden. There, his neighbour Leech was waiting, together with his pet spaniel. Leech followed the dog to a flower bed on the left-hand side of the garden. The policeman in charge joined them, Pyke shuffling along behind, escorted by the four constables. Leech was holding a shovel and, when the sergeant nodded, he started to dig. Pyke didn’t have any idea what they were looking for, but he knew they were going to find something.

  They all heard the shovel strike a hard object in the ground. It took Leech and two constables another minute to scoop out enough earth from the hole to retrieve whatever was there. Dry mouthed and fearing the worst, Pyke watched as they lifted out a wooden box he had never seen before. It was the size of a small chest. Carefully they placed it on the grass and one of the constables took a hammer and bashed off the padlock. The sergeant stepped in and opened the box; even before he’d done so he smiled, as though he already knew what he was going to find there.

  Pyke recognised the object immediately. What he didn’t know was how it had come to be buried in his back garden. They had just found the Saviour’s Cross.

  Bow Street

  JANUARY 1845

  TWENTY-THREE

  Pyke pulled the threadbare blanket over his shoulders and tried to get comfortable on the floor of his cell. The stone was as hard and cold as ice and a bitter draught eddied around the confined space. It was dark but not completely; candlelight from the passageway trickled through the peephole in the cell door, which had been left open so the gaoler could check on him every hour. The handcuffs had been removed but not the leg-irons, and as an extra precaution they had been chained to the wall, which made sleeping difficult. Clearly they, whoever they were, were taking no chances. Given that he had been taken to the cells at Bow Street, where Pierce was the commander, it was clear to Pyke that Pierce must have orchestrated the arrest from his hospital bed, and had been planning it for some time. Still, the question of how Pierce had been able to lay his hands on the Saviour’s Cross was unclear, as was the question of who had sanctioned his arrest. Pyke assumed it had come from the very highest level and he thought about his last exchange with Mayne.

  Since arriving in his cell, Pyke had tried to assess the strength of the case against him; how they would attempt to prove his involvement in the theft. He wasn’t naive enough to think his neighbour’s testimony alone would be sufficient to get a conviction, which meant there would be other so-called witnesses, and perhaps more fabricated evidence.

  Pyke knew this row of cells very well. Little had changed in the fifteen years since he’d left the Bow Street Runners, and while the Runners themselves had long since been disbanded and the building taken over by the Metropolitan Police, the smell of the passage, the sound of clanking keys and the slamming doors reminded him of the time he’d spent there. Then, of course, he’d been the one in charge. It was revealing that none of the constables who’d accompanied him from Islington had wanted to meet his eyes or acknowledge him as one of their own.

  It was also true that Pyke had been in this position before. Fifteen years earlier, he had been arrested, tried and convicted of murdering his mistress, Lizzie Morgan, and had evaded the hang-man’s noose only by escaping from Newgate prison and eventually earning a pardon from Peel himself. As a younger man, he’d had little faith in the legal system and hadn’t bothered to defend himself in court, believing that the jury had been instructed to return a guilty verdict irrespective of what he said. Now that he was a serving policeman, however, his view of the law was more balanced. The system was skewed towards vested interests, as all institutions were, but rarely was someone convicted of a crime like theft or murder without overwhelming evidence pointing to their guilt.

  That first night, Pyke slept fitfully under the meagre blanket and thought often about Felix and what his son would do when he saw the scribbled note that Pyke had left for him. As watery daylight leaked through the barred window, Pyke listened to the sounds drifting down from the street: the rattle of the drays and carts, horses’ hooves, the clanking as street vendors set up their stalls. At seven or thereabouts, a bowl of cold, inedible gruel was shoved through the door, and half an hour later he was unshackled and led to a bare room where Superintendent Walter Wells was waiting for him. He waited for the gaoler to leave them alone.

  ‘I had to fight for this detail, believe me,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure that Sir Richard trusts me to act impartially, but in light of Pierce’s condition, and given that I am the acting superintendent, he couldn’t very well deny me the right to question you.’

  Pyke thought about his first impressions of Wells, of a barely tethered aggression, but now he saw that the man’s heavy features were mitigated by a kindness in his eyes.

  ‘As I’ve been telling you for months, old man, I knew that our friend from this building had something planned for you but I had no idea what a thorough job he’d make of it.’

  ‘I presume my arrest was sanctioned by Rowan and Mayne,’ Pyke said, leaning back against his chair.

  ‘I’m told Sir Richard baulked at the idea initially. In his eyes, he’s made a great personal investment in you and knows he’ll be implicated in the mess.’

  Wells was telling him that the evidence that Pierce had accrued, or that he’d managed to concoct, was strong. Otherwise Pyke’s arrest would never have been allowed.

  ‘How about you, Walter? When did you hear I’d been arrested?’

  ‘I only found out after the event. But as I said, I did my utmost to make sure I was the one who would carry out this interview.’

  Pyke studied Wells’s face. ‘Tell me, Walter. How bad does it look?’

  ‘Bad enough.’ Wells took out his snuff box, brought a pinch of the powder up to his nostrils and sniffed. ‘But before we get to the evidence, I need to ask you a few questions.’ Wells gestured to the quire of foolscap in front of him on the desk. ‘For the report I’ll have to write.’

  Pyke folded his arms and nodded.

  ‘Do you have any idea how the Saviour’s Cross, a highly valuable religious artefact stolen from the private domicile of the Archdeacon of London on…’ He glanced down at another piece of paper. ‘… on the seventh of March last year, came to be buried in your garden?’

  ‘Someone put it there to incriminate me.’

  ‘So it is your assertion that you were in no way responsible for its theft and the subsequent efforts to find a buyer for it?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  Wells took his pen, dipped it in the ink, and scratched a few words on to a piece of foolscap. ‘Of course, I know this to be so but I need to make quite sure I have asked all of the questions that Sir Richard will, at some stage, ask me.’ He waited for a moment and then continued, ‘So by the same logic, the testimony of your neighbour, Percy Leech, who claims he saw you digging in the same spot where the cross was found, is a bare-faced lie.’

  ‘He’s been angry at me for a long time because my pigs keep escaping from their sty and ruining his garden.’

  ‘Good, so he can be discredited on the stand.’ Wells had moved seamlessly from being Pyke’s accuser to his advocate. ‘Perhaps we can talk about this fellow Sharp, then. You fought and arrested him earlier this year, apparently on suspicion of him having stolen the cross in the first place.’

  Pyke looked across the table at Wells and nodded.

  ‘The Crown is going to try to claim that you and he were partners-in-crime. That the two of you arranged the theft from the archdeacon’s home together and planned to split the proceeds.’

  Pyke knew Wells was taking a risk by telling him this.
‘But if that was true, why would I go to the effort of trying to arrest him? By doing so, I’d be laying myself open to his accusations.’

  ‘The Crown’s case is essentially that you decided to claim all of the spoils for yourself while putting the blame on Sharp. They will argue that you intended to kill Sharp before he got anywhere near a prison cell. They’ll call on the testimony of witnesses who saw you chase and fight with Sharp in an alleyway behind Field Lane. I’ve seen some of the statements: you’re variously described as an animal and a man hell-bent on murder. You get the idea.’

  Pyke turned his mind back to the struggle. ‘He punched, kicked and stabbed me; I was fighting for my life.’

  Wells smiled. ‘I know that. I’m just trying to tell you how the Crown’s lawyer is going to come at you.’

  ‘And I appreciate it, Walter. So what else have they got?’ He knew this couldn’t be the sum of their case against him.

  ‘After you failed to kill Sharp, the Crown is going to claim that you returned to the cells that night and finished him off; that you drugged and strangled him and then made it look like he’d hanged himself.’

  Pyke nodded; he could see where this was going, and the potential danger he was in. ‘Even though I was two miles away at the time, injured, in St Bartholomew’s?’

  ‘They’ll claim that since you were well enough to leave your hospital bed the next day, you would have been well enough to have taken a cab from the hospital to Scotland Yard on the night that Sharp died.’

  ‘They have a witness, do they?’

  Wells leaned forward over the desk, and whispered, ‘The gaoler, for a start. Apparently he’ll testify that he saw you go down into the cells on the night in question.’

  ‘So why did he wait this long to come forward; especially as he was dismissed from his position in the aftermath of Sharp’s death?’

  ‘I’m told he’ll claim he was too afraid of you to want to risk testifying against you.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Pyke suddenly felt a lot better about his prospects. The gaoler was a drunk and his testimony would be riddled with inconsistencies, and therefore be demolished in court.

  But Wells’s expression hadn’t brightened. ‘I’m reliably told we have a man called Alfred Egan, too.’

  An image of the slight, hatchet-faced fence he’d seen that night in the Red Lion flashed through his mind. Pyke knew immediately this was bad news: not only had Egan been in the cells at the time Sharp died; he would also be able to insinuate, from an insider’s perspective, that Pyke and Sharp were partners and that Pyke had done what the Crown were accusing him of. In effect, he could make their whole case. But like the gaoler, Egan hadn’t come forward with any of this at the time. More to the point, as a receiver of stolen goods with a criminal record, his testimony could not be treated as vouchsafe. A good lawyer would tear him apart on the stand.

  ‘Egan’s a fence. A common criminal.’

  ‘But he was there in the cells that night and he’s willing to testify that he saw you and that he heard you kill Sharp. He’s also going to confirm that you and Sharp were partners from the beginning.’

  So there it was. Pyke had to admit that Pierce had done a good job. But the situation wasn’t devoid of hope. Admittedly, it did look bad for him, but the evidence against him wasn’t as strong as it first appeared. The credibility of the witnesses left a lot to be desired; the length of time since the summer played in his favour; and there was no proof that Sharp had, in fact, been killed. The coroner’s inquest had returned a verdict of suicide. The fact that the cross had been found in his garden was a mark against him, of course, but his neighbour’s testimony could be discounted because of their long history of animosity.

  ‘So what happens next?’

  Wells took another pinch of snuff. ‘Well, the Crown’s lawyers feel they have sufficient evidence to move directly to trial. Of course, you have the right to a hearing and if you do decide to exercise this right, the various bits of evidence against you will be laid out. You can waive this right on condition that the Crown comes clean and tells you what they’ve got in their arsenal. In which case, they’ll tell you pretty much what I’ve just told you.’

  Pyke tried to make sense of what Wells had just said. ‘You’re implying I’d be better off going straight to trial?’

  ‘Look, old man, it’s my guess that the trial will go ahead anyway. As I’ve just said, they have enough evidence to convince a magistrate. If you agree to waive your right to a pre-trial hearing, I can arrange for you to stay here. As we speak, I’m having someone prepare the old felons’ room, a coal fire, a proper mattress, food, drink — whatever you want, within reason, of course. I can also arrange for you to see visitors here, again within reason. If you have a pre-trial hearing, it’s very likely the magistrate will send you to Coldbath Fields and I won’t be able to do anything for you there. And the greeting that awaits you, as a policeman, won’t be the warmest.’

  Pyke could certainly see the logic of what Wells was suggesting; how it would benefit him to remain where he was at Bow Street.

  ‘I’ll think about it, Walter,’ he said. ‘And thanks for everything you’ve done for me already.’

  Wells gathered up the papers on the desk. ‘Hang in there, old man. We’ll find a way of beating Pierce yet.’

  Pyke pondered what he should do next. Egan was the ace in their hand. All Pyke had to do was find a way of getting to him before the trial began.

  True to Wells’s word, Pyke was transferred to the felons’ room later that afternoon and the space had been prepared just as Wells had promised. A coal fire was burning in the grate, a flock mattress, with bedlinen and blankets, had been pushed up against one of the walls, and a tray of food and drink — cold meats, cheese, fresh bread and a tankard of beer — had been left for him. With its barred window and metal-plated door, the felons’ room was still as impregnable as any of the cells, but, presumably at Wells’s insistence, Pyke’s leg-irons were removed, meaning he was free to move around.

  Pyke’s first visitor was Felix. Pyke offered him the mattress but Felix said he’d prefer to stand. Proudly, he offered Pyke a hip-flask filled with gin which he’d smuggled past the guards.

  ‘Obviously I can’t ask him myself but I’d like you to go and stay with the Reverend Jakes, at least until the trial.’ Pyke paused. ‘Do you know if he has the room?’

  ‘I think so.’ Felix bowed his head, perhaps contemplating his future if Pyke didn’t earn his freedom.

  ‘Good. I’ll write to him and send a note to Mrs Booth. I’ll get her to look after Copper.’

  ‘Can’t I stay at the house, too?’

  ‘I think you’d be better off at the vicarage with Jakes and Kitty.’

  Felix seemed torn and remained silent.

  ‘I also need you to do something very important for me,’ Pyke said a few moments later. He didn’t like the lad to see him in these circumstances, but there were practical things he needed Felix to do. In the past Pyke would have relied on his uncle for assistance but now he’d been forced to turn to his son. The gaping hole that Godfrey had left in his life, in both of their lives, was even more apparent than usual.

  Felix nodded. ‘Anything. I’ll do anything.’

  Smiling, Pyke reached out and squeezed his son’s hand. ‘I need you to find a man called Ned Villums. He has an office on St John’s Square in Clerkenwell. I want you to tell him what’s happened; that I’ve been arrested for stealing something called the Saviour’s Cross. I want you to tell him the police have Alfred Egan. He’ll know what to do, what it all means.’

  In fact, Pyke had not seen or heard from Villums since the summer, and he still felt that Villums blamed him for letting Sharp die in police custody, therefore robbing him of the opportunity to avenge Harry Dove’s death. Dove had apparently gone to Cullen’s pawn shop to inspect the Saviour’s Cross. Most likely, Sharp had entered the shop, pistols blazing, and had stolen the cross for himself. So how had it fallen into Pier
ce’s hands, and how had it ended up in his garden?

  Pyke tried to remember the name of the third victim. Johnny Gibb. Was that the name Shaw had told him?

  In a small, quiet voice, Felix looked at the flint walls and said, ‘Is it true what they’re all saying? That you stole this cross and buried it in our garden?’

  ‘No, it’s not true. Someone put it there to make me look guilty. I plan to prove that in court.’

  Pyke could see at once that his son wasn’t entirely convinced. ‘But before… you did steal some gold bars and you buried them at the allotment near our old house.’

  Pyke pursed his lips. This much was true: he had acquired the gold during an investigation three or four years earlier and had made the mistake of showing the bars to Felix. Now the lad clearly believed he was in the habit of stealing valuable items.

  Clasping his hands around Felix’s shoulders, he looked into the lad’s eyes. ‘I didn’t take that cross. I swear it on your mother’s grave. I need you to believe me.’

  Felix relaxed a little. ‘I do believe you, Pyke.’ This time it sounded as if he really did.

  ‘I need you to find this man, Ned Villums. If he’s not in his office, you’ll have to go to his home. He lives on Park Road, overlooking Regent’s Park. I don’t know which house, so you’ll have to ask.’

  ‘Copper must have gone berserk after you were arrested. When I got home, he’d torn up the living room.’

  Pyke smiled. ‘Come back and see me tomorrow, if you can.’

  Felix lingered by the door, biting his lip. ‘What if you don’t manage to get out of here?’

  ‘I will; one way or another.’

  ‘But if you don’t?’

  This time Pyke had no answer.

  With some decent food and a pint of ale in his stomach, Pyke slept well that night and had already eaten breakfast by the time Fitzroy Tilling was ushered into the felons’ room at eight the following morning. Tilling embraced Pyke and regarded him with an expression that combined disappointment and concern. ‘God, what a mess you’ve got yourself into this time, Pyke.’