The Detective Branch

by Andrew Pepper

  Pyke swore under his breath. The last thing he wanted to do was deal with a stranded pig.

  ‘I should have let you know where I was. I had to work late last night . . .’

  Felix shook his head. ‘I heard you crashing around downstairs when you came in. The whole street probably heard you.’

  Pyke couldn’t face another argument so he let himself out of the back door, making sure Copper remained in the house.

  It was a cool, damp morning and the ground was soft, the sky above sealed with clouds. He found Mabel, the fine-boned short-legged pig, in the middle of his neighbour’s lawn. The animal had sunk into the hole it had created and was clearly distressed, its short legs unable to propel it out of the muddy morass. From time to time the pig would wriggle, to no avail, and then squeal as if to underline its predicament. The neighbour, Percy Leech, was out there as soon as he saw Pyke, striding down the garden in his boots, his pet spaniel trotting at his heel.

  ‘I really have to object in the strongest possible terms, sir, about the damage that your vile swine has caused in my garden. I insist that you deal with the matter forthwith and make the appropriate reparations.’

  The spaniel was circling around the stricken pig, yapping and taking the occasional nip at its tail. It had an irritating, high-pitched bark that was aggravating Pyke’s headache to such an extent that he thought he might have to take a shovel to the dog or at the very least aim a kick at its head.

  ‘It would seem that the pig is stuck,’ Pyke replied, having wandered around it a few times.

  ‘I didn’t ask for a description of what is obvious to me, sir. I told you to do something about it.’ Leech’s face was hot with anger.

  ‘What can I do? The pig’s stuck. If you’d taken better care of your lawn, this wouldn’t have happened.’ Pyke looked at the grass; his pig had clearly gone to work on it and now it looked as if an entire regiment had marched across it.

  ‘You dare to accuse me, sir? Before your swine ran amok in my garden, the lawn was in perfect condition.’

  The spaniel was still yapping at his heels and Pyke edged it away from him with a sideways move of his boot. ‘Can you be sure it was the pig? Perhaps your little dog was trying to find a bone he’d buried earlier.’

  ‘You think my beloved King Charles would be capable of such an act as this?’ He pointed at the damaged lawn.

  But Pyke wasn’t listening. Instead, he was trying to remember what he’d said to Sarah Scott and why she’d asked him to leave. He was also thinking about what he’d done to Pierce, what the ramifications of it might be, and the damage he’d caused, not just to Pierce personally but also to the investigation. In the cold light of day, Pyke could see that his actions had been rash and stupid.

  Retracing his steps back to his own garden, and more particularly to the shed where he kept his tools, Pyke collected a shovel and a hatchet then rejoined Leech, who was still trying to pull his spaniel away from the stranded pig. Pyke’s thoughts returned to Whicher. It was a hard, unforgiving world and the sooner he remembered that, the better. Standing over the animal and ignoring the sudden protestations of his neighbour, Pyke took the hatchet, lifted up the pig’s head and sliced the blade across its throat. Mabel’s squeals were quite unlike anything he had heard before. When he looked down at the blade of the hatchet, he saw it was dripping with fresh blood and it made him want to vomit. The pig, which just a few moments ago had been writhing in the mud, had stopped moving. Now a vast pool of blood had extended around its head and was still flowing from the wound. It was really quite obscene. Even in the stiff breeze, you could smell it: at once rich, sweet and rancid.

  ‘There,’ Pyke said, wiping the blade of the hatchet on a patch of grass. ‘I won’t charge you for the meat. Think of it as reparation for the lawn.’

  Leech was speechless, and even the dog had stopped barking.

  Pyke turned suddenly and saw that Felix had followed him into the garden and had been watching from the other side of the wall. It was hard to make sense of the look on his face but later Pyke kept coming back to the same words. Revulsion. Fascination. Horror.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Pyke had organised and carried out the searches of many houses, and some time during the previous day it had struck him what a cursory, even half-hearted, job he had made of the search at St Botolph’s. He hadn’t thought to look up the chimney or search behind the skirting boards or lift up the floorboards or get down on his hands and knees and work his way from one end of the cellar and loft to the other. In light of his suspicions regarding the Churches Fund, or at least the fact that Guppy and Hogarth might have known one another via Palmer, this failure now seemed like a glaring oversight.

  On Monday morning, Pyke arrived at the rectory before eight and banged on the door. No one answered, and through one of the windows he noticed that dustsheets were now covering the large items of furniture. He knocked again, then took out his picklocks and had the door open in less than five minutes. The air in the hallway was musty, and the house eerily quiet.

  Pyke had decided to start his search in Guppy’s study. Pausing at the door, he looked at the desk, now emptied of papers, and the shelves, cleared of books. Perhaps there had been evidence of malpractice hidden there, but it was too late to worry about it. Pyke cleared the room of the remaining items of furniture, took the jemmy he’d brought with him and prised off the skirting boards one by one. He didn’t find anything so turned his attention to the chimney. It wasn’t a large one and he couldn’t fully stand up inside it, so he had to reach in and pat the walls with his hands. Taking up the floorboards was a much larger job, and he moved across the floor looking for any loose ones first. When he didn’t find any he returned to the corner nearest to where the desk had stood and started there. Using the jemmy, he had got six rows along when he reached down into the space below and touched what felt like a cloth package. Pulling it up, he put it on the floor and started to unwrap it.

  Pyke wanted to believe that his motives were transparent, and that his actions could be explained in terms of the particular task he had to perform. So when he entered St Paul’s Cathedral via the west door, and after some minutes found the archdeacon, Adolphus Wynter, dressed in his ceremonial robes, talking to parishioners, he told himself that he was simply going where the investigation took him. But at some deeper level, he knew this claim to neutrality was a lie and that he wanted to cause the archdeacon as much discomfort as possible: to tear off the mask of piety that men like Wynter hid behind.

  Sometimes it was best to come at your adversaries from an oblique angle, in a way they least expected. At other times it paid to adopt a more direct approach: to shake the tree and see what fell out. Wynter doubtless believed that he was safe, standing there in his place of worship, wearing his colourful robes, surrounded by people who hung on his every word. Pyke intended to disabuse him of this notion. Wynter saw him as he was walking up the aisle but kept talking to his circle of admirers, as though Pyke wasn’t worth bothering about. Pyke pushed his way through and said, his voice slightly raised: ‘I want to know exactly what Guppy did for the London Churches Fund and why he was permitted to steal from under your noses.’

  For a moment, no one in the circle spoke, all looking towards the archdeacon for reassurance. Wynter seemed unable to comprehend that he had been treated with so little respect not merely in a place of worship - his place of worship - but in the most sacred place in the entire city. Pyke couldn’t have done a better job if he’d unbuttoned his trousers and relieved himself on the floor.

  ‘Are you insane?’ Wynter whispered finally, his small, quick eyes darting around the group.

  ‘Did you know one of your flock was nakedly corrupt? Did you just decide to turn a blind eye, or were you an active participant in his corruption?’

  ‘This, sir, is a place of God,’ the archdeacon murmured. ‘Take your grubbiness and leave at once.’

  Another man, also in robes but older than Wynter, approached Pyke, a
shen faced. ‘Who are you, sir, and what do you want?’

  This interruption gave the archdeacon a chance to recover. His lips puckered with barely repressed anger. ‘Your superiors will hear about this.’

  Pyke didn’t doubt that Mayne would hear about this confrontation, and perhaps also his interrogation of Palmer, but now he had what he’d found under the floorboards in Guppy’s study as ammunition, he could throw it back at his accusers. Still, he knew that he was taking a risk, and that his position was now vulnerable. As he pushed his way through the crowd and walked back up the aisle, he could hear the consternation among the parishioners. As he stared up at the cavernous ceiling, his thoughts turned suddenly, and without apparent explanation, to the man he’d known as the Owl.

  It took a little over three hours for Sir Richard Mayne to hear about the incident in St Paul’s and another hour for him to assemble the necessary people to deal with the situation. When Pyke was finally called up to Mayne’s office, he was surprised to see that his friend and the former assistant commissioner, Fitzroy Tilling, was there, together with Rowan and Mayne. There was nothing accidental about the way in which the room had been arranged either. The chair left for Pyke was directly opposite the ones occupied by Tilling and Rowan: they were the jury; Mayne, sitting behind his desk, was the judge. As Pyke entered, they were discussing the injuries that Benedict Pierce had sustained in an assault that had taken place near his place of work.

  ‘Detective Inspector Pyke,’ Mayne said, coldly. ‘Please take a seat. Of course, you know Commissioner Rowan and Fitzroy Tilling, who is here in his capacity as private secretary to the prime minister.’ Mayne paused. ‘It would seem that the prime minister was visited a day or two ago by Bishop Blomfield and was forced to reassure the bishop that the Metropolitan Police was not investigating the activities of the London Churches Fund which the prime minister represents as a member of the executive board.’ The commissioner’s face was hot with anger. ‘I also received a visit from a good friend of mine, Sir St John Palmer, who told me that you had interrogated him regarding his associations with Hogarth and Guppy.’

  Pyke exchanged a brief look with Tilling. He had known Tilling for fifteen years and during this time their mutual suspicion and, at times, antipathy had slowly changed into something approaching friendship. Tilling was a big, clumsy man with olive skin, a receding hairline and dark, bug-like eyes. For most of his working life, he’d faithfully served Sir Robert Peel in one capacity or another, first in Ireland and then in Whitehall. More recently he had served as the assistant commissioner, but after Peel had won the election in ’41, Tilling had been called back into the fold.

  ‘Perhaps you would care to tell us what possessed you to walk into a place of worship and accuse one of the most important clerics in the city of corruption?’ Mayne asked. His face was tight and hard.

  ‘I didn’t accuse the archdeacon of corruption. I asked him why he hadn’t acted to curtail the corrupt practices of a person in his charge.’

  ‘But in St Paul’s Cathedral, man?’ Rowan interrupted. ‘And in front of the congregation? Have you no discretion?’

  ‘As the commissioners, Detective Inspector, we’ve had to field visits from a respected businessman and the archdeacon himself. Both of these men have categorically demanded your head on a pole,’ Mayne added.

  ‘Your behaviour, as an ambassador of the Metropolitan Police, has been unacceptable. Totally unacceptable,’ Rowan spat. ‘I’m proposing that we suspend Detective Inspector Pyke with immediate effect and move to dismiss him, if the accusations made against him are found to be true.’

  In spite of the seriousness of these threats Pyke chose to ignore them and direct his remarks to Mayne. ‘Perhaps the question you should be asking, Sir Richard, is what drove me to make these accusations in the first place.’

  ‘Defaming a churchman in his place of worship is sufficient to warrant your immediate dismissal,’ Rowan said.

  ‘I’ve just been doing my job, Sir Charles,’ Pyke said, turning to look at him. ‘But if you’d rather I take what I’ve found elsewhere, to the newspapers, for instance, that of course is your prerogative.’

  Almost at once, Pyke noticed a subtle shift in the mood of his inquisitors. For the first time Tilling spoke. ‘I think we should hear what Detective Inspector Pyke has to say and assess his findings on their own merit.’

  ‘Elaborate, Detective Inspector,’ Mayne said.

  Pyke removed what he had found under the floorboards in Guppy’s study and slammed the documents down on Mayne’s desk.

  ‘Did you know that Isaac Guppy, the recently deceased rector at St Botolph’s in Aldgate, had managed to accrue a little over forty-three thousand pounds in six different bank accounts by the time of his death?’

  Tilling shifted uncomfortably in his chair and looked at Mayne, who was inspecting the documents Pyke had presented to him. ‘I’d say this changes the situation somewhat.’

  ‘The question is: how did the rector of a moderately wealthy parish manage to squirrel away that amount of money? It would be quite impossible to do so simply out of parish funds. The gross annual income of the parish, I’m told, is no more than four thousand pounds, and out of that salaries are paid and expenses defrayed. It would take many, many years to build up as much as forty thousand from general funds, and Guppy had only been rector for three.’

  An uneasy silence descended while all three men digested the information that Pyke had just presented them with.

  ‘But I’m assuming you have nothing to indicate that Guppy took this money from the London Churches Fund,’ Tilling said eventually.

  Pyke now understood why Tilling had come to the meeting.

  ‘Guppy served in an administrative capacity on the Churches Fund, I believe. It should be investigated.’

  ‘A very minor capacity, as I understand it,’ Tilling retorted. ‘But I’m told that Bishop Blomfield is happy for the Fund’s accounts to be inspected.’

  Pyke nodded. He grasped what he was implicitly being told: you won’t find anything amiss. ‘I also want to interview a prisoner who was transferred from the Model Prison at Pentonville to an undisclosed location by order of the Home Office.’

  Mayne was about to speak but Tilling cut in and said, ‘I think that can be arranged.’ It told Pyke all he needed to know; that Druitt’s transfer had been sanctioned at the very highest level.

  ‘You have to learn some tact, Detective Inspector, some basic respect for the offices of church and state,’ Rowan stated, glancing over at Mayne. He had clearly wanted to wound Pyke and seemed disappointed.

  Mayne nodded vigorously. ‘Further outbursts such as the scene today in St Paul’s will not be tolerated. Is that understood?’ He waited a moment then added, ‘And you’re to leave Sir St John Palmer alone.’

  Pyke composed himself then said, ‘Children have been killed. Do you understand? Children. And no one cared because they were poor. All you seem to be concerned about is not upsetting men like Palmer and Wynter . . .’

  Neither Mayne nor Rowan seemed to know how to respond. Perhaps, Pyke speculated afterwards, no one had ever spoken to them in such a manner. He stood and walked over to the door. He’d reached the bottom of the stairs when Tilling called out his name.

  ‘It isn’t a good idea to antagonise a man like Sir Richard,’ he said, once he’d caught his breath.

  ‘Nice to see you too, Fitzroy.’ That elicited a wry smile. Pyke added, ‘Even if your role here is to make certain nothing untoward about the Churches Fund ever comes to light.’

  A flash of irritation passed across Tilling’s face. ‘You always did have a flair for making others feel morally soiled. And you never did have much time for the Church.’

  ‘I’ve never found piety and crookedness to be an attractive combination, if that’s what you mean.’

  Tilling took out his fob-watch and checked the time. ‘You’re quite right that Peel won’t tolerate the Fund’s good name being dragged through the
mud.’

  ‘Is Peel telling me how to do my job?’

  ‘No one could possibly do that.’ Tilling laughed bitterly. ‘Peel knows that, as well as I do.’

  Pyke acknowledged the barbed compliment with a nod. ‘Tell me, Fitzroy. How did you know about the prisoner being moved from Pentonville?’

  ‘Who said I did?’

  ‘I want to know who put in the request to have him moved.’

  Tilling stared at him, as though assessing how much he knew. ‘I was concerned to hear about the horrendous assault on Superintendent Pierce.’ When Pyke didn’t respond, he added, ‘You were never on friendly terms with the man, were you?’

  Pyke had been wearing gloves to hide the cuts and bruises on his knuckles. Instinctively he put his hands behind his back. Tilling gestured at Pyke’s gloves. ‘I wonder what I might find if I asked you to take them off.’