The Detective Branch

by Andrew Pepper

  Whicher nodded but didn’t seem convinced.

  ‘Keate is arrested, tried and eventually executed,’ Pyke said, confident in what he’d said so far. ‘His family and close friends don’t believe he did it but the evidence seems to contradict that belief. A few years go by. Then Keate’s family, his half-brothers, start to hear rumours. At some point Johnny breaks into the archdeacon’s safe; perhaps new information comes to light suggesting their brother’s innocence. What would you do? One thing I wouldn’t do, in their shoes, is go to the police. Let’s just say they opted to take matters into their own hands. Perhaps they learnt that Guppy was involved; Charles Hogarth, too. What we do know is that the deaths were planned to coincide with the dates on which the two boys were murdered. Why? It’s obvious, isn’t it? Whoever killed Guppy and Hogarth wanted to send us a message. They wanted to rub our faces in the truth. Morris Keate didn’t kill those two boys. But they also wanted us to look into the original murders again. They wanted us to find out what really happened.’

  Whicher nodded. ‘I suppose there might be a certain twisted logic to what you’ve just said.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘It still doesn’t explain where the theft of the Saviour’s Cross fits in.’

  Pyke could see Whicher’s point. ‘All right. Let’s think about what happened to the cross after it left Cullen’s shop.’

  ‘Suppose Gibb had the cross with him at the time, and Sharp killed him and the other two for it,’ Whicher said.

  Nodding, Pyke said, ‘We know Sharp tried, almost immediately, to sell the cross on to Alfred Egan. That’s when we interrupted them at the Red Lion.’

  ‘Six months later, the cross turns up in your garden,’ Whicher said, frowning. ‘So how did it get from Sharp to there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But Pyke had a good idea, even if he couldn’t prove it. Instinct told him that he had been set up, either by Wells or Pierce. Therefore, he suggested to Whicher, it followed that one of them had managed to retrieve the Saviour’s Cross from Sharp. Perhaps they had been in league with Sharp from the beginning and had taken the precaution of ending Sharp’s life before the man had been able to denounce them.

  Whicher looked at him, the concern apparent in his eyes. ‘You really think one of them is involved?’

  Pyke just shrugged.

  ‘Did you bring the daguerreotype we made of Sharp after his death?’ he asked, changing the subject.

  Whicher dug his hand into his pocket and produced the copperplate. The image looked almost real and Pyke was taken back to the fight he’d had with the man in an alleyway behind Field Lane.

  ‘Any news on Palmer? Or Wynter?’

  ‘By all accounts, Palmer is unwell. He’s taken to his bed and hasn’t been seen at his place of work for more than two weeks. I’m told his house is better guarded than the Tower.’ Whicher sniffed. ‘Sergeant Russell’s called in sick, too.’

  Pyke pondered this for a moment. ‘And the archdeacon?’

  ‘He’s left the capital on business. No one seems to know where he’s gone or when he’ll be back.’

  It seemed clear that all three men were afraid of appearing in public and had taken the necessary precautions. ‘How are things at the Detective Branch, then?’

  That drew a wry smile. After Pyke’s arrest, Wells had refused to sanction Whicher’s return to uniform and he’d been reinstated. Briefly, Whicher explained that Wells had taken temporary charge of the department. They’d been forbidden to bring up the subject of the Churches Fund; and had been told Charles Hogarth had died of natural causes, that Isaac Guppy had stolen from general parish funds and that this theft was to be treated as an isolated case. ‘Wells has gone back to trying to find Francis Hiley. Meanwhile, we’re investigating a house burglary in Clapham.’

  ‘What about Lockhart and Shaw?’

  ‘Everyone’s trying to keep a low profile. Wells is hardly ever there. It’s like a rudderless ship.’

  ‘I’d like you to do something for me, if you have the time. But it’s going to entail a trip out of the city.’

  ‘Aside from the burglary, my desk is clear.’

  ‘Keate’s stepbrother, Luke Gibb, served in the Dragoons. I don’t know, maybe he still does. I was told he was stationed somewhere in Cambridgeshire. I’m afraid that’s all I know, but there can’t be too many regiments in the county.’

  ‘You’d like me to find out which one he served in and talk to someone who knew him.’

  Pyke smiled. ‘Exactly.’

  Whicher stood up and stamped his boots on the frozen ground to warm his feet. ‘Same time tomorrow, then?’

  Pyke stood up, too, and looked at the slate-coloured sky. ‘I wanted to say how grateful I am, for all you’re doing. I’m sorry it had to be under these circumstances.’

  ‘I’m glad to do what I can.’

  Pyke thought about their previous encounter in the privy at work, when he’d punched Whicher and told him he never wanted to see him again. It was funny how quickly some things turned around. On that occasion, Whicher had told him awful things about his family circumstances and Pyke had said nothing to him about them since. All of a sudden, he felt ashamed.

  ‘Jack, I don’t want you to think I . . .’ He tried to find the right words. ‘What you told me before, about your wife and child . . .’

  Whicher seemed uncomfortable. ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you still go and see her?’

  Whicher looked around the square and exhaled loudly. ‘Sometimes. Not often, though. She’s still in the same . . . place.’

  ‘I just wanted to say how sorry I am. I can’t imagine how terrible the whole thing must have been.’

  Whicher bit his lip. ‘Sometimes life has a way of cutting off your arms and legs and then defecating on you from a great height.’

  Nodding, Pyke wondered whether he should mention the child, who’d died from cholera, but in the end he resorted to patting Whicher on the shoulder. ‘You’re a good man, Jack. A good man and a good detective.’

  In his dirty workman’s clothes, and with a soiled oilskin cap covering his shaved head, it took Clare Lewis a few moments to recognise him. When she did, she smiled and shook her head. ‘Somehow I knew you weren’t dead.’ But she wouldn’t turn around to face him and Pyke quickly saw why. The whole left side of her face was swollen and had turned purple and yellow, and her eyes were ringed by smudges of black. She held out her hands, as if to pacify him. ‘I know what you’re going to say and I’m not interested. Do you understand?’

  Pyke gently turned her face towards him. The bruising was worse close up. ‘I don’t need to ask who did this to you, do I?’

  ‘I’m glad you’re alive. I really am. But I want you to leave.’

  ‘And the next time he comes for you, this time with a knife or a cudgel, what will you do then?’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ She folded her arms and looked up at him for the first time. ‘Even your presence here in the building is putting me at further risk.’

  ‘I used the back entrance. Nobody saw me.’ As he said this, Pyke wondered how true it was.

  This seemed to make her even angrier. She took a few steps away from him and turned towards the window. ‘He did this to me because someone told him I was asking questions about those two boys.’

  Pyke tried to reconcile his curiosity with the guilt he felt for putting her in danger. ‘And what did you find out?’

  She shook her head as though she’d expected him to say this but was still disappointed. ‘No words of contrition? No “I’m so sorry my demands led to this”?’ Gingerly she touched the bruised side of her face.

  ‘Would it help if I was sorry? Would it make it more bearable?’ When she didn’t answer, Pyke said, ‘What did you find out?’

  ‘Culpepper is adamant that no one in his mob even whispers those boys’ names. The last anyone heard of them, they’d just turned over a house on Cheapside. Number twenty-three. That’s all I know; that’s
all I want to know.’

  Pyke decided not to push the issue. Instead he took the copperplate from his pocket and handed it to her.

  Reluctantly she took it and glanced down at the image of Sharp’s face. Her expression remained inscrutable.

  ‘Do you recognise him?’

  Without answering, Clare stared down into the yard. ‘I wondered why I hadn’t seen him around,’ she said, keeping perfectly still.

  ‘So he did work for Culpepper, then?’

  This time she turned around and nodded once. ‘He wasn’t part of the inner circle.’

  Pyke didn’t smile, but he felt an inner satisfaction spread through him. It was starting to come together, to make some sense. So it was Culpepper who had dispatched Sharp to retrieve the Saviour’s Cross, and maybe kill the three men in the shop on Shorts Gardens. But on whose orders?

  ‘I take it you didn’t like him.’

  ‘What gave you that idea?’ For the first time since he’d arrived, she seemed to relax. ‘No, you’re right. I always thought he was an animal.’

  ‘And Culpepper isn’t?’

  ‘If you’ve come to judge me, you can go to hell.’ Softening a little, she gestured at the marks on her face. ‘He did this to me with a leather strap.’

  Pyke felt his anger - and guilt - return. He took a step closer to her. ‘You have to understand, Clare, I’m not trying to judge you. But ask yourself this: do you still want to be answering to a man like Culpepper in a year or even five years’ time?’

  That made her laugh. ‘And you think I have a choice?’

  ‘We always have choices.’

  ‘In your world, perhaps. But in my world, you do what you’re told. And if you step out of line, you’re crushed.’

  Pyke looked around the nicely decorated room. ‘He comes here, doesn’t here? Perhaps not to you but he comes here as a client.’

  The fact that she didn’t answer straight away told him all he needed to know.

  ‘Just go, Pyke. Leave me alone. I’ve done what I can for you.’

  ‘And the next time he decides you’ve let him down? Because once this kind of thing starts, Clare, it doesn’t stop.’ He scribbled his address on a scrap of paper and pressed it into her hand.

  ‘Spare me the cheap sentiments, Pyke. I can make my own decisions.’

  It took a few minutes of grubbing around in the scrubland behind the Coach and Horses in St Giles to find what Pyke was looking for: a plank of wood that he could easily hold in his hands. Clutching it, he kicked down the same door he’d used about a month earlier, and swung the piece of wood into the face of the first man who tried to block his path. Another man stepped out of a room leading off the dank corridor and Pyke smashed one end of the plank into his stomach and watched him collapse to the floor. Feeling his fury gather momentum, he kicked open the door at the end with the heel of his boot and looked for any sign of Culpepper: there were two men he didn’t recognise from the previous card game but otherwise the room was deserted. From somewhere else in the building, Pyke heard the sound of urgent footsteps. Before the two men could get up, Pyke had taken the plank of wood and swung it against their respective heads. He looked around, the blood pulsing through his veins.

  ‘Culpepper. Come on, Little Georgie. Let me beat you like the dog you’ve always been.’

  He felt the jab of something hard and cold against his neck.

  When Pyke turned around, one of Culpepper’s lieutenants was aiming a pistol directly at his face. Soon there were four others in the room, all armed with pistols, and finally Culpepper appeared, his face relaxed, his gait almost languid.

  Pyke took stock of his situation, only now beginning to realise how badly he’d misjudged the situation.

  ‘Drop it,’ Culpepper barked. Pyke felt one of the lieutenants jab the end of his pistol into the side of his cheek.

  Opening his hand, Pyke let the plank of wood clatter to the floor. Grinning, Culpepper took a few steps towards him and aimed a sharp kick at his groin. It connected almost perfectly and, for a moment, Pyke felt as if he might pass out.

  ‘Go and fetch the police,’ he heard Culpepper grunt to one of his men. ‘There’s a reward for this one.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  Pyke stumbled to his feet and looked around him. The route back to the corridor he’d come along was blocked by three men, all armed.

  ‘As much as I’d like to cut you up with an axe, I have to be practical,’ Culpepper said, smiling. ‘It would be satisfying in the short term, but I’d be pissing good money up the wall.’

  One of the men turned and left. Pyke tried to focus. How long would it take him to fetch a police constable? Five minutes perhaps?

  ‘That was quite a performance you put on at the courthouse the other week. I’d say you’re about as famous as any man in the country at the moment.’ Culpepper paused and touched his chin. ‘I’m just trying to imagine the scene when you’re led out on to the scaffold.’

  ‘For that, Little Georgie, you need to have an imagination. But they say dogs can’t even see in colour.’

  Culpepper seemed amused rather than irritated by Pyke’s attempt to rile him. ‘The other day I was thinking about the street we used to live on. But you know what else I remembered? Your father. He used to coin for a living, didn’t he? He was a failure and a drunkard and when he perished in that stampede outside Newgate prison, hardly anyone went to his funeral. I heard folk talking about it afterwards. Said it was an embarrassment. For a moment I even felt sorry for you. I always knew you wouldn’t amount to much.’

  Pyke felt something as close to pure, undiluted hatred as he had ever experienced. He hadn’t thought about his own father in years and wasn’t even certain that he could remember what he looked like.

  Culpepper continued to grin. ‘I know you visit Clare Lewis’s place every now and again, just as I knew how you’d react when you saw what I had done to her. I’ve been expecting your visit.’

  Pyke looked around him and tried to ignore Culpepper’s taunts. They had backed him into a corner of the room: just a window behind him; no door and no way out.

  ‘Who paid you to set Sharp on those men in Cullen’s shop? And who paid you to go after Keate’s mother?’

  ‘You think you’re in a position to ask me questions?’

  Fighting off the fear in his stomach, Pyke ran through his options. The window behind him seemed to be the only viable choice but he didn’t know what lay beneath it, or whether the storey-high fall might, in the end, do more harm than good.

  ‘Was it Benedict Pierce?’

  Culpepper’s small, quick eyes gave little away.

  Without warning, Pyke suddenly turned and launched himself at the window, his arms wrapped around his head to protect it from the glass. He heard the blast of a pistol as the glass shattered into a thousand pieces. He landed, shoulder first, on a ledge before rolling over and falling ten feet into the yard below. This time he landed partly on his side, the force of the impact momentarily winding him. Up on his feet, Pyke stumbled through an open gate just as a ball-shot tore into the mushy ground where he’d landed. And then he was moving, half-running, half-limping, into the street behind the yard.

  But he wasn’t free, not by a long way. Behind him, he heard shouting and, somewhere beyond that, the tat-tat-tat of a policeman’s rattle. At the next junction, he turned into a narrow alleyway and followed it as far as it took him. He turned again and continued deeper into the rookery, the houses becoming more ramshackle. When he reached the end of that lane, Pyke tumbled out on to a much wider, busier street. It took him a moment to work out he’d come as far as High Holborn, and just for a moment the brightness and noise were almost too much for him.

  Up ahead, a drover and his two sheepdogs were herding a line of long-horned oxen in the direction of the market at Smithfield. Instinctively Pyke moved towards the group. He crossed the road, weaving between slow-moving drays, wagons and carriages, and noticed two constables with their stovepipe hats
in the crowd behind him. Pyke kept moving, his head down and hands in pockets. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself.

  Out of nowhere he felt a hand clasp his shoulder.

  Turning around, he saw the man’s dark blue swallow-tailed coat and brass buttons. The young constable had a truncheon in his hand and he swung it through the air. Pyke just managed to duck under it and kick the man’s ankles. Another constable saw the tussle and blew his whistle, and soon there were three or four stovepipe hats converging on him from different directions. Without thinking about it, Pyke scrambled into the middle of the herd and started to shout and flap his arms. The first animal reared backwards, its hind legs catching one of the sheepdogs, and another charged forward, ramming the ox in front with its horns. That set off a ripple effect, and soon the beasts were rampaging through High Holborn, panicked pedestrians pushing each other out of the way. It was hard to tell the human shouts from the petrified squeals of the animals as fully grown oxen slipped on the damp cobblestones and careered into traders’ barrows. Pyke took advantage of the confusion and slipped into an alleyway running perpendicular to the street. He could hear someone behind him, maybe the same man who’d tried to arrest him, but he didn’t stop. Finally, when he couldn’t run any more, he came to a halt in a sunless court, wheezing for breath. On the other side of the court was a slaughterhouse, but none of the men standing outside it paid him much attention. He walked past them, avoiding eye contact, and looked over his shoulder. The policeman had just entered the court. He heard the man’s whistle, darted into a passageway that ran along one side of the slaughterhouse and found himself in a yard surrounded by ten-foot-high brick walls. It was where the slaughterhouse discarded what they couldn’t use or sell - piles of hooves, teeth and cartilage. Flies hovered around the mass, feeding off the putrefying flesh. Pyke heard someone coming towards him down the narrow passage. There was no way out. Covering his mouth and nose, he dived into the mountain of flesh and quickly manoeuvred himself into the centre of the pile. The smell was so bad he retched instantly. He held his breath and counted at first to ten and then to fifty. Eventually he heard the footsteps receding.