Kill-Devil and Water
( Pyke mystery - 3 )
Andrew Pepper
Andrew Pepper
Kill-Devil and Water
Virtue rejects facility to be her companion. She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
The chiefe fudling they make in the Island is Rumbullion, alias Kill-Devil, and this is made of sugar cane distilled, a hott, hellish and terrible liquor.
ANONYMOUS
PART I
London
MAY 1840
ONE
The rope mat did little to protect Pyke from the hardness of the stone floor, and the blanket afforded him no warmth, but somehow he had slept. At first light, he opened his eyes and looked around at the other figures in the ward. No one was moving. Sitting up, he rubbed his eyes and looked at the weak sunlight streaming through the barred window. He waited, to see whether he could hear birdsong — a blackbird perhaps or better still a thrush — but the only noise was the rough snoring of his fellow inmates. Casting aside the blanket, he stood up and stretched. He had slept in his clothes, as everyone did. This was the only time of the day Pyke enjoyed; aside from the sessions on the treadmill, which he had come to appreciate — the chance to push himself to the limits of his endurance. It was quiet now, peaceful even. Soon the wardsman would wake the others up and make his rounds, shuffling from prisoner to prisoner, looking for new ways to make money from them. The lad from the bake-house would arrive shortly after nine and at ten they would be allowed outside into the yard. At midday they would be given the chance to buy their lunch and at two they would take turns on the treadmill. This had been Pyke’s existence for nine months and there were times when he’d forgotten about the world beyond the four walls of the prison. But at this time in the morning, before anyone else had stirred, before the jabber of tiresome conversation and the rattle of chains filled the long, narrow ward, his head was clear enough that he could remember Emily’s smile and the way his son, Felix, had looked at him the last time they had been together. In the hard times, these were the things he held on to, the things that mattered.
Later that morning, Pyke was walking in the yard, staring up at the granite walls and the inward-facing iron spikes at the very top, when a turnkey approached him and told him he had a visitor.
‘Now?’ Pyke cupped his hands over his eyes to protect them from the glare of the sun. He tried not to show the turnkey that he was concerned.
‘A peeler.’
Pyke wondered why a policeman should be visiting him after all this time. He had done many things in his life; perhaps some other wrong was about to catch up with him. Pyke followed the turnkey through a heavy oak door, bound with iron and studded with nails, along a passageway and down some steps into the press-room, where Fitzroy Tilling was pacing back and forth. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, about the same age as Pyke, with raven-coloured hair, swept back off his high forehead, olive skin and piercing bug-like eyes.
‘So you’re a policeman now?’ The last time Pyke had seen Tilling, about a year earlier, he had still been in the service of Sir Robert Peel, leader of the Tory party. In fact, he had served Peel in one capacity or another for the previous twenty-five years, first of all in Ireland, when Peel had been stationed there, and then back in London.
Pyke had known Tilling for more than ten of those years, and while he couldn’t lay his hand on his heart and say he really knew the man well, they had become something more than acquaintances and less than friends in that time, particularly after Emily’s death almost five years ago. They had met up for the occasional dinner, and while they’d never openly pried into each other’s private lives, there had been, Pyke thought, a mutual if unacknowledged recognition that they were more alike than different: two middle-aged men who, if they had made different choices, might have been friends.
‘Deputy commissioner.’ Tilling hesitated. ‘Sir Robert wanted me to spread my wings a little.’
‘I suppose congratulations are in order, then.’ Pyke met Tilling’s stare.
Tilling reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. ‘This is a magistrate’s warrant authorising your immediate release.’
Pyke continued to stare at him. ‘And what have I done to deserve such good fortune?’ By his calculation, he had only another month and a half to serve. Or rather, a bond that he’d taken out when he had money was due to expire then, at which point he’d be able to clear sufficient debts to secure his release.
‘I need your help.’
Pyke let a short silence build between them. ‘What kind of help?’
Even with the benefit of hindsight, Pyke didn’t know exactly when it had all started to go wrong. Perhaps it was as simple as Emily’s death. Perhaps that fateful day at Smithfield when a crippled exrifleman had cut his wife down had been the moment it had all begun to fall apart. Perhaps Pyke still blamed himself for not having done more to ensure her safety, though it was true she’d been killed because of her crusading work for the nascent trade union movement. And she had always done whatever she had wanted to, irrespective of his fears for her safety.
But it was also perhaps too easy to blame everything on Emily’s death. There had been many happy times after she’d died; times when it looked as though he and Felix might pull through with only a few scars to show for it. If anything, Felix had adapted to their new situation better than Pyke had, and after a while, he barely mentioned Emily’s name. Pyke had tried to learn from his son, but he’d found it a good deal harder to move on. He didn’t know whether it was fair or appropriate to blame himself for Emily’s death but, in one sense, this didn’t matter. He was alive and she wasn’t. This simple truth never failed to impress itself on him, especially in the early hours when sleep was beyond him. Emily’s premature death had, however, made him utterly determined to realise her wishes for their son — that Felix be given the chance to adopt her late father’s title and claim Hambledon Hall as his own. So when one of Emily’s distant cousins had returned from America to stake his claim on the family estate, Pyke had hired the best legal counsel to defend Felix’s birthright; and when the case was referred to the High Court of Chancery, he had not only retained the services of this counsel but also hired other lawyers to further their chances. In total, the case had lasted almost three years, and by the time the Lord High Chancellor had ruled finally in favour of Emily’s cousin, Pyke had sacrificed a large chunk of his fortune, trying to hold on to a house and an estate he had never liked when Emily was alive.
Afterwards, Pyke had taken to speculating on the stock market with a recklessness that had astonished even him. No ‘get-rich-quick’ scheme had been too outlandish, too much of a risk. In under a year he’d squandered fifty thousand pounds for very little return, but by this point he had ceased to care. Much later, when he reflected upon his behaviour, it struck him that his actions might have been wilfully self-destructive. For much of his adult life, Pyke had laboured under the assumption that money protected you from the rank unpleasantness of existence, but in the end his considerable wealth had failed to prevent Emily’s death. More disturbingly, his pursuit of money may even have contributed to it.
So when the debts he’d accrued on the stock market and elsewhere had finally come home to roost, it had almost been a relief to have been sentenced to a year in prison. At the time, he had been numb to everything; to losing his fortune, even to losing his son.
Pyke watched through the smudged glass of Tilling’s carriage as his son, Felix, now bounded down the steps of his uncle’s apartment in Camden Town, closely followed by Jo, his nursemaid, who had served first Emily, then Pyke, for the previous fifteen years. She was now in her early th
irties and had proved to be a loyal friend as well, even visiting Pyke in prison. It had been nine months since Pyke had last seen Felix — he’d been adamant about the lad not visiting him in prison — and he was shocked at how different his son looked; he was taller and more gangly for one thing. For a moment, the urge to open the door and greet Felix was overwhelming, but then Pyke caught a glimpse of his torn coat sleeve and smelled his unwashed body and felt a stab of shame at his circumstances. His gaze was drawn to Jo; she was a good head shorter than him and, though by no means beautiful, her thin, angular face, dotted with freckles and her flame-red hair cut in the style of a pageboy, meant she was always noticed. At the bottom of the steps, Felix turned to Jo and held out his hand. She took it and smiled. Pyke exchanged a silent glance with Tilling; what Felix had just done had been almost an adult gesture — a man coming to the assistance of a woman. On the street, Felix fell in beside Jo and the two headed off in the direction of Camden Place.
‘Aren’t you going to say hello to them?’ Tilling hesitated. ‘I thought it was the purpose of this detour.’
‘I’ll come back tomorrow or the day after.’ Pyke tried to swallow but there was hardly any moisture in his throat.
‘Are you sure?’
Pyke frowned but didn’t want Tilling to know what he was thinking. ‘I’m quite sure. We can go now.’
Tilling tapped on the roof and a few moments later the carriage jerked forward. Pyke stared out through the glass and thought about the shame that had stopped him from greeting his son.
‘All right, now you can tell me what it is you want, Fitzroy. Why have you gone to all this effort to arrange my release from prison?’
‘A body was found yesterday morning by a stream running alongside the Ratcliff Highway.’
Pyke digested this news without visible reaction. It still didn’t explain why Tilling had freed him from prison. ‘And that’s where we’re going now?’ He looked at the passing buildings, trying to get his bearings after nine months in confinement. He knew the Ratcliff Highway. It was an ancient thoroughfare running through the East End, skirting the northern perimeter of the London Dock, and was lined with taverns, gin shops, brothels and cheap lodging houses that catered to the needs of sailors on shore leave.
Tilling checked his watch. ‘We’re meeting the coroner at the tavern where the autopsy will take place in half an hour.’
A moment’s silence passed between them. ‘You know that even if you hadn’t gone to all this effort, I would have been let out of prison next month.’
Tilling’s glance drifted over Pyke’s shoulder. ‘This way, you get to see your son a month earlier than you expected.’
The corpse was that of a young woman. At a guess, Pyke supposed she had once, or as recently as a week ago, been beautiful. Her black hair was wet and matted but her legs were long and her body, shapely and well proportioned. What was left of her face reinforced this impression. Still, none of this really registered, at least not the first time Pyke saw her. Instead, all he could look at was her skin, already eaten away by a coating of quicklime, and her eyes, or the two holes bored into her lifeless face where her eyes had once been. All that remained was a few torn vessels in the empty sockets.
‘Who is she?’ Pyke asked, drawing his shirtsleeve across his mouth. They were waiting for the coroner in a room above the Green Dragon public house on the Ratcliff Highway, a few hundred yards from where the corpse had first been discovered.
Tilling pulled at his collar, seemingly uncomfortable in his dark blue coat. ‘That’s what I want you to find out.’
Pyke allowed his gaze to fall back to the woman’s face. ‘Has anyone reported a daughter or wife or friend as missing?’
Tilling shook his head.
‘And no one, as yet, has come forward to claim the body?’ Pyke went on.
‘We’ve done our best to keep a lid on the matter. I don’t want folk traipsing out here on a macabre pilgrimage to see where she was mutilated.’
Pyke looked again at the remains of the woman’s face and her long black hair and wondered who had done this to her.
A few minutes later, the coroner arrived, put his bag on the table next to the dead body and began to prepare for the autopsy. John Joseph Hart was young, clean shaven, with a cherub-like face, and a grumpy, condescending manner that belied his years. He had a high opinion of himself and conducted himself in a prissy manner that rankled with Pyke. After shaking Pyke’s hand, Hart produced a large, white handkerchief and wiped his palm clean.
They watched as he made a few incisions above her breast-bone. The sight of the scalpel slicing easily through the woman’s flesh made Pyke wince inwardly.
‘I can say for a fact that she didn’t drown. No trace of any water in her lungs, you see,’ Hart said. The coroner looked at them, as if waiting for a round of applause.
Pyke pointed at the contusions on her neck. ‘At a wild guess, I’d say she was strangled.’
Irritated by Pyke’s intervention, Hart sighed. ‘But would you have known that for sure, if I hadn’t conducted my examination of her lungs?’
‘So we can put down the cause of death as strangulation, then?’ Tilling asked.
‘I’d say so,’ Hart muttered, casting a scalding look in Pyke’s direction.
‘And that’s it? That’s all you can tell us?’
‘I’m a coroner, not a mind-reader,’ Hart retorted, continuing to inspect the bruises around her throat.
‘Well, let’s hope her landlord will be a little more illuminating.’
In the pocket of a dress which had been discovered in marshy ground a few yards from the corpse, along with a half-empty bottle of Jamaica rum, was a scrap of paper giving the address of the Bluefield, a lodging house on the Ratcliff Highway. The landlord had already been summoned.
‘If you look at the bruises here and here,’ Pyke said, pushing the coroner to one side and pointing at the marks on either side of her slender neck, ‘those would have been his thumbs.’ He removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and turned to Hart. ‘Just stand still for a moment,’ he said to the bemused coroner. Before the man could answer, Pyke had wrapped his hands around Hart’s throat and dug his thumbs into the area just below the glands, keeping them there for a little longer than was strictly necessary to illustrate the point. ‘That’s how he killed her.’ He held up his hands. ‘But you can see from the size of those marks that whoever did this had bigger hands than mine.’ What he’d said was purely conjectural, something to irritate Hart rather than impress Tilling, and as he said it, Pyke wondered whether he still really had what it took to undertake such an investigation.
Somehow he doubted it. After all, it had been a long time — more than ten years — since he’d regularly done this kind of work; since he’d resigned from his position as a Bow Street Runner.
Having been released from Pyke’s grip, Hart made exaggerated choking sounds to indicate his discomfort. ‘Really, this is the most unacceptable behaviour I have ever witnessed…’
‘You can see,’ Pyke said, pointing to the woman’s face and chest, ‘that the quicklime has eaten away the skin… here and here.’ She was lying face up on the table. ‘But if we roll her over on to her front…’ He paused while performing this manoeuvre. ‘You’ll see how clean and unblemished her back is.’ Her biscuit-coloured skin felt cold and hard to the touch.
Tilling rubbed his chin. ‘So what are you suggesting?’
Rolling her on to her back again, Pyke held up one of her hands. ‘In spite of the quicklime, there’s hardly a blemish or a callus. Not the hands of a servant or a seamstress, I’d wager.’ He looked over at Tilling, surprised at how good it felt to be using his mind. ‘My question is: how did she earn a living?’
Pyke could see that Tilling was thinking what he was thinking.
‘Perhaps,’ he added, though Tilling hadn’t said anything, ‘but I don’t think she was a street-walker.’ Pyke glanced down at her fleshy curves and felt his stomach tighten
. ‘She’s too exotic, too refined. And that dress would have cost a few pounds, too.’
Tilling nodded, conceding the point. ‘You’re suggesting she had money?’
‘I don’t know.’ Pyke picked up one of the woman’s hands and had another look. ‘Of course, if she had money, why would she be staying at a lodging house on the Ratcliff Highway?’
‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Tilling said. ‘At least not until young Jenks returns with the landlord.’
‘Then we should start with what we do know. Tell me what you found out from the dram-shop owner.’
Tilling explained that the old man had come across the corpse the previous morning while emptying night soil and had reported it to the police at once. According to his testimony, the dram-shop owner had found the body lying on the bank of a stream that trickled under the Ratcliff Highway. He hadn’t touched it and therefore, if he was to be believed, hadn’t seen the woman’s facial mutilations. The bottle of rum and the dress had been found next to the body. The man’s wife hadn’t slept well that night and claimed to have heard voices, and a horse and cart stopping somewhere under their bedroom window, although she hadn’t climbed out of bed to have a look.
Pyke considered what he had just been told and weighed up the likely cause of death — strangulation — against the removal of her eyeballs. He was unable to find a way of reconciling the two acts. In some ways, the murder struck him as cold and clinical. The woman had been strangled and her body tossed away like a piece of rubbish. There was no indication that she’d been beaten and there was no sign of sexual congress. But her eyeballs had been gouged out with a knife; she’d been defaced in the most gruesome manner imaginable, as if the man who’d done it hadn’t merely wanted to kill her but to annihilate her.
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