Kill-Devil and Water

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘Better you than someone else.’

  Pyke crouched down and pulled Field’s head up out of the soil. ‘It wasn’t personal. If I didn’t do it you’d have killed me.’ He now saw that his shot had struck Field in the middle of his back. Blood was leaking into the black ooze.

  ‘Tell Paxton ...’ Field hesitated and coughed up some blood.

  ‘Tell him what?’

  But Field died before he could finish his sentence. His eyelids fluttered and his body went limp. A long-tailed rat scurried past them, heading deeper into the tunnel.

  On the riverbank, Pyke found Paxton and told him that Field was dead. Paxton took this news in his stride.

  ‘And the woman?’

  Paxton was still holding his pistol and, just for a moment, Pyke thought he was going to use it. Instead he put it into his pocket and started climbing up the ladder. ‘If you give me what you promised me, I’ll take you to her.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  She was sitting at the dressing table, staring at her reflection in the looking glass. Field may have been holding her captive, but the room was comfortable and well appointed, with a proper bed and a place to read and write. She looked up as Pyke entered the room, then turned around, her lips parting and her eyes widening with surprise. He had to admit she looked fantastic. She had just combed her hair and it fell around her face and down her back. For a few moments they stared at one another, Pyke at her flawless complexion, long, slender neck and, above all, her eyes: brown with yellow flecks around the irises and rimmed with circles of black.

  ‘I was hoping you’d come for me,’ she said, a half-smile forming on her lips.

  ‘Hello, Mary.’ Pyke spoke the words boldly; even so, they sounded strange.

  For a moment she stared at him, amazed. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Elizabeth Malvern had green eyes.’

  Mary Edgar remained perfectly still, perhaps trying to work out in her head what to say and how to say it. ‘I always knew you’d be the one who would find me out.’

  Pyke felt dizzy just looking at her. He tried to suck down some air. ‘You should have killed me when you had the chance.’

  ‘You think I could do that?’ She seemed genuinely appalled.

  ‘You’ve done it before.’

  Mary waited for a moment before she spoke. ‘Do you know what kind of a person she really was?’

  Pyke’s expression remained implacable.

  ‘Elizabeth Malvern passed herself off as a virtuous woman - an upstanding member of society who volunteered her time to help others. But it was all a lie. She would find women, prostitutes mostly, for this man, Crane. When he was finished with them, he had someone kill them and throw them away.’

  ‘I know that, Mary. And I also know that you didn’t kill her because she offended your morals.’

  Mary stared at him, as though caught in a lie.

  ‘I know why you and Sobers came here from Jamaica - to kill Elizabeth and take her place. Silas isn’t going to last much longer and, with him and Charles dead, the estate passes to Elizabeth.’ Pyke waited and added, ‘I never met Elizabeth, but Alefounder’s wife saw you with her husband and remarked on your resemblance to her. You would have seen it, too, growing up in her shadow. Once you’d killed Elizabeth, all you had to do was sit tight, make a point of not seeing anyone who knew her, and wait for Silas to die and the estate to be settled.’ Pyke whispered, ‘Did you really think it would work?’

  ‘No one thinks Elizabeth is dead. Soon Silas will receive a letter, posted from Jamaica, apparently written by Elizabeth. It will inform him of her decision to remain there.’

  ‘Then why are you still here?’

  She looked up at him and held his gaze. ‘I wanted to see how everything turned out.’

  ‘And how, Mary, is it supposed to turn out?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I?’ Mary put the comb down and turned around to face the looking glass. ‘That’s up to you.’

  They ended up talking for over two hours, and gradually Pyke, with Mary’s help, fitted all the pieces together. What Mary knew, she had discovered from Phillip: indeed, the two of them had evidently formed a close bond in a short time.

  Whatever way one looked at the circumstances, it had started with Elizabeth Malvern. About the time she introduced Crane to the practice of daguerreotyping, Phillip Malvern had turned up on her doorstep. While he had initially presented himself as her uncle, he later tried to convince her that he was, in fact, her father. Elizabeth didn’t believe him at first, but he was persistent and his story was persuasive: he told her about his long-standing affair with Bonella, Elizabeth’s mother, about her mother’s death and about Silas’s vengeful act of blinding him. Elizabeth had always been close to her father, and Pyke wondered how she had dealt with this revelation.

  Phillip had lived in London for up to a year before he’d summoned the courage to face his daughter. To earn a living, he had scavenged the riverbanks and sewers for rats, and, in doing so, had stumbled on the underground room that eventually became his home. An unassuming and quietly rational man, Phillip had also brought with him some of the darker beliefs he’d inherited from his Jamaican Creole ancestry. As such, he was, from time to time, disturbed by visions and believed his blindness to be a punishment that could be cured by making sacrifices to the dark spirits that plagued him. He’d shown Elizabeth his underground ‘kingdom’, as he’d called it, and let her see his collection of animals’ eyeballs. He also told her that if he could offer the ‘duppies’ a human eyeball as a sacrifice, they might be appeased and restore his sight. Elizabeth didn’t take Phillip’s hopes for a cure seriously, but she certainly pitied him, and when, a little later, Crane’s experimentation with daguerreotyping meant that a few unfortunate women had to be sacrificed, she came up with a plan to suit everyone’s interests. Instead of burying the corpses, she and Crane would allow Phillip to dispose of them, thereby indulging his ‘fanciful’ belief that his blindness could be cured with the help of human eyeballs. He could do whatever he liked with the corpses as long as he made them disappear.

  When Phillip had first arrived in London - to try to initiate a reconciliation with Silas and Elizabeth - he’d written to Bertha, his former lover, in Accompong. It was at this point that Bertha had confessed to Mary, her daughter, what Mary had always suspected; that she was related to the Malvern family by blood. Until that conversation, she had always believed that Silas, and not Phillip, was her father, because of her close physical resemblance to Elizabeth. Therefore her mother’s revelation that Phillip was, in fact, her father, also threw into doubt Elizabeth’s parentage - at least in Mary’s mind. And when Bertha found out that Mary was going to London, she passed on the address Phillip had given her - the Bluefield lodging house - and told her to try to persuade Phillip to come back to Jamaica.

  According to Mary, the fact that she and Elizabeth were half-sisters, by the same father, was an open secret amongst the estate’s black population. Unsurprisingly, this had never been acknowledged by the Malverns, who saw her merely as a negro slave. Similarly, Elizabeth’s incestuous affair with her brother, Charles, was never brought up, even though most of the household knew about it. Mary didn’t know whether Silas ever found out but many of the black servants at Ginger Hill suspected he knew. According to some, it was the main reason he had brought forward his plans to retire to London and why he’d insisted that Elizabeth accompany him, forcing Charles to remain at Ginger Hill against his will to run the estate. It was after their departure that Charles’s attention had turned, quite naturally, to Mary, who, though a little darker skinned, looked eerily like his sister.

  At the time Mary had been sleeping with Isaac Webb, but it was Webb, and particularly Harper, who had pushed Mary into an affair with Charles: both men saw it as a good opportunity to exploit the Malvern family. And when, a year or so later, a besotted Charles proposed marriage to her, they had insisted that she accept.

  When Charles had discovered that
Mary was still sleeping with Isaac Webb, rather than confront her directly, he had decided to send her to London, where she would live with his godfather until he could arrange the sale of Ginger Hill. For Harper and Webb, the idea that Mary would be in the same city as Elizabeth Malvern - without Charles to interfere - was too good a chance to pass up. Ideas were discussed; plans were formulated. Arthur Sobers volunteered to accompany her to London - without, of course, Charles Malvern learning about their plan. Meanwhile, wanting Mary to be safe in London but away from the disapproving stares of his family, Charles had arranged for her to stay in an apartment annexed to his godfather’s home in Mayfair.

  The first obstacle that Mary had faced upon her arrival at the West India Docks in London was William Alefounder. He was a friend of Charles’s who had visited Ginger Hill the previous year. He, too, had noticed the physical resemblance between Mary and his former lover, Elizabeth Malvern. He’d followed her around the great house and had tried to flirt with her. According to Mary, they had slept together once in Jamaica. From her point of view, it had been a mistake; she had been flattered by his attention and had succumbed one night when a little drunk. But Alefounder had fallen for her, and when Charles Malvern sent him a letter explaining that Mary was to travel ahead of him to London, the besotted trader insisted on meeting her at the quayside and escorting her to her final destination. At first Mary didn’t want anything to do with him - the last thing she needed was an additional complication. But a few days later, when it became clear to her that Lord Bedford didn’t intend to let her have the freedom of the city without a chaperone, she sent Alefounder a message asking him to show her the sights. By Mary’s own account, this was a cruel thing to do, because it gave the trader some encouragement. He set up an apartment on The Strand and took her there one evening. (Later Pyke would surmise that Alefounder’s wife must have followed him there and seen him and Mary together.) According to her, nothing had happened between them; she didn’t particularly like Alefounder or find him attractive and had merely used him as a foil in order to escape the attentions of Bedford.

  Under the guise of spending the day with Alefounder, Mary had, in fact, travelled to the Bluefield lodging house on the Ratcliff Highway, where Sobers had taken a room, and had managed to find Phillip Malvern. Initially Phillip was shocked to discover that he had another daughter; Bertha had never told him that Mary was his, and since he’d disappeared into self-imposed exile after he’d been blinded by Silas, he hadn’t seen her grow up. Old and fragile, it had taken him a few hours to adjust to the news, and it was only when she told him that Bertha wanted him to go back to Jamaica that he finally seemed to believe her. He admitted that Bertha had been the true love of his life. They spent the afternoon and some of the next day together. Phillip was intrigued by Sobers’s claims that Mary was a myalist and begged for her assistance in summoning spirits and ‘vanquishing the demons’ who’d stolen his eyesight. Eventually, he took them down to his underground chamber and showed them his collection of eyeballs. By her own admission, Mary was appalled by what she’d seen and tried to force Phillip to tell her where the eyeballs had come from, and whether he had harmed any of the women. Shaken, he confessed that Elizabeth had procured the bodies for him - he said he didn’t know where they’d come from and only later, when Mary confronted Elizabeth, did she find out the truth.

  Mary insisted that Phillip had not been involved in the plot to kill Elizabeth Malvern. From her descriptions of him, Phillip came across as a kind, lonely, deluded old man who was grateful to Elizabeth and didn’t seem to understand the full horrors of what she and Jemmy Crane were doing. Pyke surmised that, out of gratitude, Phillip had told Elizabeth about the sewer access to the bullion vault at the Bank of England. He obeyed, of course, when she swore him to absolute secrecy. Elizabeth, for her part, had no intention of keeping it a secret, and when she told Crane about it, she set in motion a chain of events that inadvertently culminated in Crane’s capture and arrest. Mary swore that she didn’t know what had happened to Phillip and seemed genuinely upset when Pyke told her that he believed Phillip was being held captive by Crane’s accomplices somewhere in the city, and might even be dead.

  ‘I promised my mother I’d bring him back to her,’ Mary said, facing the prospect that, despite her best efforts, she might fail to make good on this pledge.

  Elizabeth Malvern’s fate had effectively been sealed before Mary had even left Jamaica, but the plan - hatched by Harper and Webb - was put into action when Mary went to the Malvern residence to announce that she was going to marry Charles. This drew a predictable response from Silas and she was escorted from the house. Before Mary left, she told Silas that she was not going to change her mind - such were her feelings for Charles - and that she was willing to discuss the matter only with Elizabeth. Mary had left her address at the Bluefield lodging house, with instructions that Elizabeth should meet her there. Like her father, Elizabeth had wanted Mary out of their lives and certainly didn’t want her former servant marrying her beloved brother. For this reason, Elizabeth had asked Crane and his friends to go to the lodging house to try to scare Mary into abandoning her wedding plans, but they had come up against Arthur Sobers. Later, Elizabeth sent word that she would be willing to talk to Mary at her house. Mary had agreed to go because it suited her own ambitions, but only on the condition that no one else was present, not even servants. Together with Arthur Sobers, she crossed the city on a horse and cart that Sobers had acquired the previous day. Convinced that Elizabeth was alone, Mary had excused herself and slipped downstairs to let Sobers into the house via the back entrance. According to Mary, Sobers was the one who’d actually strangled Elizabeth, but she didn’t deny that she’d been a willing participant, pinning her half-sister to the floor.

  When Mary described the murder, Pyke tried to gauge whether she felt any guilt or remorse, but her face remained blank.

  Afterwards, Mary and Sobers took off Elizabeth’s clothes, removed her jewellery and laid her out on a tarpaulin. They had already decided to cover the body with quicklime - it would dissolve some of the flesh and make a positive identification difficult. The more pressing dilemma had been what to do about Elizabeth’s eyes. They were emerald green and anyone who’d seen Mary and who might be required to identify the body might notice the discrepancy. They’d already decided to try to make Elizabeth’s death - Mary’s death - resemble the murders they’d heard about from Phillip. If these murders were already known to the police, they would likely assume that Mary - or rather Elizabeth - had been killed by the same man. According to Mary, she had been the one who’d cut out her half-sister’s eyes with a scalpel borrowed from Phillip. Once this procedure had been completed, they carried Elizabeth’s corpse to the cart, hid it under a tarpaulin and returned to the Ratcliff Highway. There, at a spot they’d found earlier, they rolled the corpse down a grassy slope and left one of Mary’s dresses - the one she’d been wearing that morning at the Bluefield - nearby, together with a bottle of rum. That, and washing the body with the rum, had been her idea. The scribbled note bearing the name of the Bluefield, which was left in the dress pocket, would lead the police to the landlord, Thrale, who would, in turn, identify the corpse as Mary. The rum and the apparently ritualistic nature of the killing would underline the fact that a black or mulatto woman had been killed. No one would think the corpse belonged to a white woman. The policemen wouldn’t look at the skin colour; all they would see was a body decomposing with quicklime, the missing eyeballs, the rum.

  Their hope, Mary explained, was that the corpse would be identified as Mary Edgar’s and any investigation - if there was an investigation - wouldn’t amount to much. They also knew that Silas Malvern, if he ever learned about Mary’s death, wouldn’t want it investigated too much either, because he wouldn’t want his family’s connection to a dead mulatto to become a matter of public record.

  The only problem, of course, was Lord William Bedford. A kindly old man who was devoted to his godson, he ha
d been true to his word and, at Mary’s insistence, he’d told no one about her engagement, except for his most trusted servant, the butler. If Mary’s murder was publicised and Bedford, or the butler, read about it, either man might go to the police and tell them what he knew: that Mary had been a guest in his house and that she was engaged to his godson, Charles Malvern. Moreover, if she went to see him after the death, the old man would know that the victim wasn’t, in fact, Mary or the woman the police believed to be Mary.

  ‘So you had to do something about him, didn’t you? You didn’t have a choice in the matter.’ Pyke tried to push this point.

  For her part, Mary tried to convince Pyke that she’d gone back to Bedford’s mansion after discarding Elizabeth Malvern’s body merely to talk to him; to explain that she’d decided to return to Jamaica. This way, and assuming her death wasn’t widely reported in the press, Bedford wouldn’t think anything of her vanishing act.