The Last Days of Newgate pm-1

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘Tell me what you know about Davy.’

  ‘He was one of the first to join up to the new police force, the Irish Constabulary, when it was first set up in Ulster, ’bout seven years back. According to Stephen, your man was specially chosen. All it was, some fellow came visitin’, said the new force needed good strong Orangemen like Davy. I guess his da pulled a few strings. Made Davy feel important. Way of getting the boy out of the house. Stephen didn’t talk a whole lot ’bout his brother, Mr Pyke, but when he did, he spoke in a quiet voice, like he was terrified. .’

  ‘And this Davy fellow, he’s been in the police ever since?’ Her expression darkened. ‘For a while anyhow.’

  ‘He’s not any more?’

  Mary shook her head. ‘They had to discipline him. In the end, they threw him out just last year.’

  Pyke asked what had happened.

  ‘I don’t guess you read about too much news from Ulster in your London newspapers, do you, Mr Pyke? This all happened last autumn. There’s a fellow, Jack Lawless, a journalist in Belfast, one of O’Connell’s lieutenants in Ulster. You heard of O’Connell?’ Pyke nodded. Mary continued, ‘And you probably know, us Catholics, we’re in the minority in Ulster. Well, last autumn, Lawless announces he’s going to raise a force in the south and enter Ulster, march from town to town holdin’ meetings and the like, raisin’ support for Catholic emancipation and collectin’ Catholic funds. So Lawless gathers up maybe eighty thousand men and crosses from County Monaghan into Ballybay, which is nearly all Presbyterian and full of about ten thousand Orangemen with pitchforks and scythes ready to defend their town. All of the army and police in the whole area rush to the town. At first, they manage to get Lawless to avoid Ballybay and travel via another route. But then the two sides come face to face on the Rockcorry road and all hell breaks loose. There’s a pitched battle and the police wade in, too. According to Stephen, in front of a thousand witnesses, Davy beats this Catholic fellow to within an inch of his life. Normally that kind of behaviour would go unpunished but there were witnesses. After that, there wasn’t nothing that anyone could do for him, even if his da was a well-respected preacher. Stephen just said his brother had dropped out of sight. No one knew what happened to him.’

  ‘He didn’t go home?’

  ‘Not as far as Stephen reckoned.’ Mary sat up a little and stretched her arms. ‘Though his family hold on to much hate, they still think of themselves as respectable folk, friends in the right places. Those friends like their violence to be carried out under the cover of darkness, not in full sight of a thousand other men.’

  Pyke liked her analysis. ‘And that’s how you think Davy got the police job in the first place? Because his father had friends in high places?’

  ‘That’s what Stephen reckoned. Reckoned the da was friends with this fella, John Arnold, owns the biggest mill in Belfast, both of ’em up to their necks in Orange business.’

  ‘I take it you can’t remember any other names. Did Stephen ever mention specific names?’

  Mary frowned. ‘What kind of names?’

  ‘For a start, the man who came calling to the home, recruited Davy into the police in the first place.’

  ‘Not that I can remember.’ She winced a little. ‘I’m sorry. .’

  ‘I have to ask, Mary. Did you see any of what happened?’

  ‘You mean to Stephen and Clare and the wee baby?’ She was shaking, perhaps not just from the cold.

  Pyke nodded.

  A tear escaped from Mary’s eye and rolled down her cheek. ‘It was a small room. I didn’t always stay there. I didn’t like to get in their way and in the last month I had a room elsewhere. .’

  She did not want to elaborate and he decided not to push her. ‘You didn’t see anything, then?’

  ‘No,’ she whispered, staring down at the ground. ‘I just heard about it later. I heard about it and panicked. I collected up a few things and hid out with Gerry in his room but even there I didn’t feel too safe. I knew someone would want to talk to me but I didn’t want him to find out. Davy. Gerry knows a man who works on this farm in the spring and summer. We’ve been here a few days now. It’s brutal cold, too.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘In the name of Jesus, it was just a baby. Would you think it was even possible?’ She was crying now. Gerry sat down next to her, trying to offer comfort.

  Pyke wondered whether Mary was telling him the truth. There was no doubt she was terrified. But was she keeping something from him?

  ‘Are you certain there’s nothing else you can tell me?’

  This time she looked away. Gerry put a protective arm around her shoulder and glared at him.

  He waited for a while before saying, ‘Do you think Davy killed them? Was he capable of doing something like that?’

  ‘Do I think he was capable of it?’ Mary said, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of Pyke’s coat. ‘I wouldn’t imagine anyone was capable of doing something like that.’

  ‘But you do believe he killed them?’

  Mary shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Honestly I don’t.’

  ‘But it’s possible that he did it?’

  Her stare was devoid of emotion. ‘I fancy it is. The longer you live, the more you realise that anything’s possible. Even something as terrible as what happened.’

  Once Pyke had deposited a bedraggled Mary Johnson and a grateful Gerry in a guest house in Isleworth, paid for a week’s accommodation and warned them not to go anywhere or talk to anyone without his consent, he told Gaines to return him to Bow Street. As he sat in the carriage on the journey back to the city, Pyke considered what Mary had told him and thought about the implications for his own investigation.

  He was close, now, to finding the real killer, not the unfortunate lunatic who was currently being held by Hume. For a lot of reasons, Davy Magennis seemed to be the likely candidate. From the start, Pyke had believed that whoever had murdered Stephen, Clare and the baby had known his victims. Nothing about the scene suggested a random attack. It had been premeditated and, Pyke had felt all along, motivated by hate. And now, according to Mary, Davy Magennis had been sighted in London: Davy Magennis, who was uneducated, physically strong and driven by hate; a man who had perhaps lost sight of familial links to his brother.

  Mary Johnson was intelligent and credible. Pyke believed everything she had told him.

  Pyke was now certain that Charles Hume and his investigative team had arrested and charged the wrong man. But he didn’t necessarily believe that Hume was corrupt. Pressure for a quick arrest had, no doubt, been forthcoming from Peel and charging an escaped Bedlamite was politically expedient. So how might Hume, or for that matter Peel, react to Pyke’s news? It was hard to judge. Or rather Peel was hard to judge. Hume would reject his claim outright and would threaten Pyke, should he continue with his own investigation. Peel, though, would have to be sensitive to the political implications associated with convicting and, doubtless, killing the wrong man. For Peel knew about Pyke’s relationship with Fox and would be only too aware that Fox continued to wield enough political clout to cause him considerable embarrassment.

  Peel could not afford to ignore his claims.

  Pyke thought about taking his discoveries directly to Fox but he was concerned that Sir Richard simply wanted to use the investigation as a stick to beat the government with. Fox didn’t care about the dead. Nor did Peel or Hume. But out of all of them, Peel was the one who could assist or damage Pyke’s cause and, for this reason, Pyke made up his mind to present his findings, in the first instance, to the Home Secretary, and give him the chance to pull Hume into line.

  Pyke leaned out of the window of the carriage and shouted at Gaines, the driver, to take him directly to Whitehall. Outside, the branches of the trees were just beginning to thaw and the first signs of green were starting to show themselves. As he blew into his cupped hands to keep them warm, Pyke thought about the dead baby, more than anything irritated that it continued to unsettle him in a way he did not understand.


  Pyke knew it would be hard to secure an audience with Peel himself, at least in the first instance. Peel, after all, had instructed him to deal either with Hume or Fitzroy Tilling.

  Still, he did not imagine it would be quite so difficult to convince the guards outside the Home Office to even ask inside the building for Tilling. None of them seemed to know who Tilling was. Pyke explained that he was Peel’s private secretary and offered them a brief description. He introduced himself as a Bow Street Runner working at the behest of the Home Secretary himself. He said he had urgent business to share with Peel. He said they would have to shoulder the responsibility, should his news fail to reach Peel, via Tilling. It was only when he made it clear that it was a matter of the utmost importance to the security of the state that they were provoked into action.

  One of the guards said he would go and make some enquiries. The other, meanwhile, led Pyke into a dingy antechamber, set off the building’s main entrance hall.

  Pyke waited for almost two hours for Tilling to rescue him from the stares of the two guards. The burly man greeted Pyke without warmth and led him in silence through the main hall, past the same cantilevered staircase he had seen previously on his visit to Peel’s offices and down a flight of stairs, to a room in the basement of the building. It was furnished with two chairs and a wooden table. A gas lamp hissed quietly in the corner of the room.

  Tilling told Pyke he could spare him ten minutes. He wore a well-cut jacket over a silk neck stocking and styled dark trousers. Though he possessed neither beard nor moustache, his sideburns were thick and as dark as the hair on the top of his head. He seemed agitated and distant, as though the prospect of spending even a few minutes in Pyke’s company was the last thing he wanted.

  He listened, evidently bored, while Pyke explained what had happened and recounted, as briefly as he could, the course of his investigation.

  While he spoke, Pyke wondered whether Tilling, as someone who knew Ireland well and had served under Peel while he had been under-secretary there, would be in a better position to comprehend the nuances of his account. He wondered, too, whether Tilling had Irish blood in him. He didn’t speak with a brogue and if he was, in part, Irish, then it was almost certain that he belonged to the Anglo-Irish planter class. This would, of course, influence the way in which he made sense of Pyke’s tale of Protestant bigotry and violence. Tilling might be hostile to the assumptions behind his claims. But in the end it was just a name that seemed to rouse the man from his indifference.

  Pyke could not, of course, be certain that the name ‘Davy Magennis’ had registered as forcefully as he imagined, but it was also true that, as a rule, he rarely misread other people’s reactions.

  Afterwards, Tilling’s demeanour did become more agitated and he stopped listening to Pyke’s account and fidgeted in his chair. His manner did not become obviously aggressive but almost at once, and without warning, he stood up and told Pyke that he had important business to attend to. Assuring Pyke that his claims would be properly investigated, he thanked him for his efforts.

  Tilling left him with the two guards and did not bother to issue any form of farewell.

  TEN

  It was a long time since Pyke had spent any real time in his gin palace and it struck him what an unpleasant place it had become. Perhaps he had deluded himself when he had first bought and transformed the building, hoping it would become a sophisticated drinking venue, with a better class of customer attracted by brilliant interior gas lights that shone through large plate-glass windows. Pyke’s own reputation may have been successful in deterring society’s dregs from regularly drinking there — the scavengers, petty thieves, coal-heavers and prostitutes who gravitated towards the neighbourhood’s less salubrious alehouses and drunken ex-sailors who preferred the gin shops on the other side of the river. But offers of cheap gin were enough to lure all types of working men and women to the bar: porters from St Bartholomew’s, animal drovers, stable boys and meat cutters from the market and traders who sold fruit and vegetables from their barrows, all of whom wanted to get fall-down drunk and didn’t care about the ornamental parapets or the fact that the drinks were served in glasses rather than clay pots or pewter mugs.

  Pyke had no affinity with his customers and showed little interest in the daily running of the place. It was an investment and it gave him a modest additional income. And if Pyke had no affinity with his paying customers, nor did he have anything in common with the people who worked for him. Aside from Lizzie, who was upstairs in the attic room tending to George, the faces were unfamiliar or hostile to him. But Pyke did not expect gratitude from his staff: those who worked behind the bar, the glass collectors, the cleaners, the ex-bare-knuckle boxer who policed the bar and the three kitchen hands who served up a simple menu of chops, baked eggs, hot eel and pea soup. The pay was low, the work hard and at times dangerous, and the hours were long. He exploited them but he felt no guilt for doing so. If they wanted to work elsewhere, he never tried to stop them.

  Pyke sat on an overturned barrel at one end of the zinc-topped mahogany counter and looked at what his gin shop had become. Somehow the term ‘palace’ seemed too absurd for words. He looked at the painted barrels behind the bar, signs advertising ‘The Real Knock-Me-Out Firewater’ or ‘The Devil’s Own’ and the wooden floor covered with sawdust and vomit.

  There were two fights in the bar that night and Pyke wondered whether that was typical or not. One incident was relatively minor: a meat cutter, still wearing his bloodied work apron, swung at and missed a younger man, who stepped inside the punch and landed one of his own on the meat cutter’s jaw. The single blow sent the meat cutter sprawling on to the floor, and he was picked up and dumped outside by Billy, the ex-bare-knuckle fighter. The other fight was more serious. A ferret-faced man pulled out a pocket knife on a larger adversary and thrust the blade into the man’s abdomen. He got away before Billy could apprehend him but Pyke watched as the ex-boxer picked up the bleeding man, dragged his limp body across the crowded room and tossed him out of the side door.

  But Pyke’s attention had been focused elsewhere. As he sat alone, amid the grim tumult of the place, a sea of unfamiliar faces quietly whispering to one another, just out of earshot, he could not get over the feeling that he was being watched; not simply by the drinkers lined up two or three deep along the entire length of the counter but maybe by an agent of the state who was masquerading as a market trader or a hospital porter. But he did not know whether his suspicions were genuine or had merely been fuelled by the laudanum he had ingested.

  Pyke had other significant matters on his mind, too. He could not avoid the conclusion that he had somehow miscalculated or overplayed his hand with Tilling. Again and again, he tried and failed to make sense of the man’s strange reaction to his findings. He’d certainly expected some kind of message from Peel or Tilling but so far nothing had come, and he was unable to determine what this silence indicated.

  By the following evening, Pyke still had not received any message from Peel or Tilling and his feeling of anxiety had intensified: so much so that he had further increased his intake of laudanum. The drug numbed him a little but did nothing to lift his unease.

  What had Tilling’s changed demeanour signalled? That he knew Davy Magennis? Tilling had spent time in Ireland and Magennis lived there but the idea that they knew or had met one another seemed fanciful. But if Tilling did know or had met Davy Magennis and Magennis was responsible for the St Giles murders, did that, in turn, suggest that Tilling was somehow mixed up in them as well? The idea seemed too preposterous for words, not least because it implicated Peel himself. And whatever Peel was — cunning and ruthless — he didn’t strike Pyke as an assassin, even if the assassination had been carried out by someone else.

  Then there was the question of motive. Certainly the murders had strengthened the case for a new consolidated police force, but as far as he could tell that particular argument had long since been won. The murders had also galvanised o
pposition to the Catholic Emancipation Bill; a bill which Peel supported and was about to present to the Commons. As such, the idea that Peel might be involved with the St Giles deaths did not make sense, but on the other hand Tilling’s nervous reaction perhaps indicated otherwise.

  Pyke watched Lizzie serving drinks and, for some reason, thought about the woman in the Blue Dog tavern who had called out his name, to warn him of Flynn’s imminent attack. It bothered him that, although her voice had seemed familiar, he did not have an idea of who she was.

  There was a time when he had thought Lizzie to be the most desirable woman in the whole of London. This sentiment was augmented by the fact that Lizzie had promised herself to a housebreaker whom George, her father, did not approve of. In order to break up this union, and to earn George’s respect, Pyke had solicited the man’s assistance, to steal jewels and bonds from a house on Great Russell Street, and arranged for four constables to make the arrest, while the robbery was taking place. During the trial the robber, who had a headstrong manner and a vicious disposition, had leapt from the dock, retrieved a knife from an associate who was seated in the public gallery and attacked Pyke. Now, a few years later, Pyke could not exactly recall how he had disarmed this man but he was struck by the gallantry of his own long-ago actions; the fact that he had been willing to risk life and limb for the woman whom he now took entirely for granted.

  So engrossed was he in these thoughts that he did not notice Brownlow Vines until the man was practically breathing in his face. In his hat and gloves, Vines looked utterly out of place. It did not strike Pyke until later that Vines might be the emissary from Peel.

  In an awkward gesture, Vines made to shake Pyke’s hand, and when he saw that Pyke had no intention of doing likewise, he patted him on the arm. ‘This is where you like to spend your time. How. . colourful.’