‘My name’s Pyke…’
‘I know who you are.’ Crane paused. ‘You once owned a ginnery on Giltspur Street. I used to be an acquaintance of your uncle, Godfrey Bond.’
Pyke studied Crane’s expression, wondering what Godfrey would have to say about this man. ‘A week ago, you accompanied three men to a guest house on the Ratcliff Highway. Your men were heard arguing with one of the guests. I need to know why you went there and what the argument was about.’
Crane’s expression betrayed nothing. ‘You like to get straight to the point, don’t you? I admire a man who knows his own mind.’ He seemed to be the kind of man who enjoyed the sound of his own voice.
‘What business did you have with Arthur Sobers and Mary Edgar?’
‘It was the old man who saw me, wasn’t it? I didn’t recognise him at the time but later it came to me. I used to watch him fight, back in the old days, a real bruiser, but I can’t for the life of me remember his name.’
‘Thrale.’
‘That’s it.’ Crane’s face lit up for a moment. ‘These days my tastes are more refined. I have a box at the Theatre Royal and I attend concerts at Somerset House.’ His smile was without the faintest hint of warmth.
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘And I’m not going to.’
Pyke could see the coldness in his eyes. He removed the drawing of Mary Edgar from his pocket and handed it to Crane. ‘You know her?’
Crane glanced down at the drawing and just for a moment his mask slipped and a look of curiosity, even puzzlement, crossed his face. ‘No.’
‘That’s Mary Edgar, the woman you visited.’ Pyke paused. ‘She was strangled and her body dumped a few hundred yards away on the Ratcliff Highway.’
Crane assimilated this news. ‘And what is your interest in this affair, sir?’
‘I’m investigating her murder.’
‘Out of a sense of civic duty?’ His tone was vaguely mocking.
‘What took you to Thrale’s lodging house that day?’
‘A private matter. In other words, none of your business.’
‘You don’t deny you were there, then?’
‘How could I? Thrale saw me. And now you’re here.’
‘And I’m not leaving until you’ve answered my question.’
‘I’ve told you all I’m going to tell you. I suggest you leave before the situation becomes unpleasant.’
‘Unpleasant for me or for you?’ Pyke’s stare didn’t once leave Crane’s face.
‘I might appreciate a Beethoven symphony more than a bare-knuckle fight these days but if I give the word, Sykes here will do to you what Benbow did to Thrale. And I’ll watch, as I did then.’
Pyke looked up at the muscular figure at the top of the stairs. ‘Does he speak as well as glare?’
That drew the thinnest of smiles. ‘I admire courage up to a certain point, but after that it becomes stupidity.’
‘If you know who I am — if you know me from the old days and what I’m capable of — you’ll know I’m not likely to give up until I’ve found what I’m looking for.’ Pyke waited and sighed. ‘She had just arrived from Jamaica. They both had. How would a piece of dirt like you know them?’
The skin tightened around Crane’s eyes. ‘My patience has run out. You can find your own way out.’ He turned and started back up the stairs.
‘One way or another you’ll tell me what I need to know,’ Pyke shouted up the stairs but Crane, blocked by his burly assistant, had disappeared from view.
At the front of the shop, Pyke passed the elderly assistant who looked at him as though he’d heard at least some or all of their conversation.
For the rest of the afternoon, once he’d ascertained that Arthur Sobers hadn’t returned to the Bluefield lodging house, Pyke patrolled the sunless court outside the building asking anyone who entered or emerged from the front door whether they knew or had seen Arthur Sobers. He had no luck for the first hour or so and was just about to give up — it had started to drizzle and he needed to eat — when a fat man with whiskers shuffled out of the door.
‘Yeah, I ’member the cull,’ he said, once Pyke had explained who he was looking for. ‘Saw him a few times with a mudlark goes by the name Filthy on account of his stink.’
‘You know where I can find this man?’ Pyke looked down at his bruised knuckles and thought about the scene his son had witnessed the previous night.
‘Filthy? A cull like that don’t have no home, just sleeps rough, wherever he can lay his head.’
‘Then how can I get in touch with him?’
‘How should I know? You often see him on the Highway, hanging round the docks or the river at low tide.’
Pyke tried to rein in his frustration. ‘Could you give me a description, then?’
The fat man rubbed his whiskers. ‘Older ’n me, wizened little fellow. Grey hair. But you’d know him on account of the patches he wears over his eyes, like a pirate, and the long bamboo cane he carries.’
‘This man is blind?’
‘Didn’t I say that? He’s blind. That’s right. Why else would he be wearing patches an’ carrying a cane?’
Pyke walked back up the hill to the Ratcliff Highway thinking about what he had just been told and whether this mudlark’s condition was, in any way, linked to the manner of Mary Edgar’s death.
FOUR
Even for a country teetering on the brink of full-scale economic depression, the scene outside the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs was a remarkable one. There must have been a thousand people clamouring for the attention of the foreman and his crew; in addition to the regular porters, stevedores, coopers, riggers, warehousemen, pilers and baulkers who had already been admitted into the docks. The explanation for the crowd, if not its size, could be seen over the top of the high brick wall that circumnavigated the docks: a three-mast ship had docked overnight and word had quickly spread that the company intended to employ around fifty casual dockers to unload crates of sugar, rum and coffee on to the quayside. The mood of the would-be dockers was anxious, and even from the fringes of the crowd, Pyke could scent their desperation. Jobs were scarcer than smog-free days and the deluge into the city of farm labourers, identifiable by their dirty smocks and kerseymere coats, and navvies, unemployed since the railway boom had faltered, had made the situation even worse. The merest whiff of a job would attract tens, sometimes even hundreds, of dead-eyed men; workhouses across the city were turning people away; petty theft and begging were on the rise; and men and women were sleeping rough in numbers Pyke had never seen before.
A horn sounded and the men surged towards the arched entrance to the docks, crushing those at the front. Hands were raised to attract the foreman’s attention and coins were offered, by way of a bribe. But rather than select men by pointing at them, the foreman threw a bucket of brass tickets into the mob and stood back to admire his handiwork. Scuffles broke out as men fought each other, desperate to catch or pick up the tickets, or indeed prise them from those who’d been fortunate enough to scoop them up. Some of the tussles turned violent; one man was stabbed in the eye; another had part of his ear bitten off. It was a difficult thing to watch: men fighting for a job that would earn them just a few pence an hour and that would be paid not in coins but tokens that could be redeemed only at taverns owned by the dock company, where prices were kept artificially high.
As the crowd began to disperse, Pyke contemplated what Emily would have said about such a spectacle and how little he had done since her death to honour her legacy.
Pyke passed through the stone archway and paused to survey the scene. Directly ahead of him, bobbing gently up and down in the water, was the tall ship with three masts and a thick forest of rigging. The stevedores, who were the most experienced and therefore the best paid of the workers, brought the crates and sacks up from the ship’s hold as far as the deck, where the ordinary dockers would carry them down gangplanks to the quayside. There the sacks and crates were taken by warehousemen and porters to the various storage buildings that surrounded the dock.