No one even looked at him.
Pyke picked up the drawing, and as he did so, he leaned across the trader and whispered, ‘If I find out you’re part of this, in any way, I’ll make it my business to ruin your life.’
For a moment, Alefounder didn’t know where to look or what to do.
Pyke stepped out on to the pavement in St Michael’s Alley just as two breathless police constables appeared at the far end of the passage.
Half an hour later, and twenty shillings lighter, Pyke emerged from the Jamaica Coffee House with a much fuller picture of William Alefounder. He was forty-five, married, with no children, and he lived in a large, detached property on Richmond Green. He was generally well respected and had inherited his sugar trading company from his father. Each morning, regardless of the weather, he travelled into the city in an open-topped phaeton. The company, Pyke was told, had gone through a bad patch a few years earlier but was moderately prosperous and dealt primarily with sugar plantations in Jamaica, where Alefounder went once a year to conduct his business. There were a few grumbles about his high-handed manner and the dismal rates he paid his clerks, but most of the men Pyke had approached preferred to chat about his physical vigour — he liked to ride horses and play polo — and his charitable work for the Suppression of Vice Society, of which he was a board member. But a few of the men Pyke talked to had other, less favourable stories to tell; stories that stood in sharp relief to accounts of the charity work he did. Apparently Alefounder was also a notorious philanderer and had cheated on his wife countless times during their marriage. No one had been able to give Pyke exact details but at least two clerks had said the same thing, which was sufficient corroboration in his mind. The idea that Alefounder might pontificate about the ills of lewd behaviour in public and carry on in private attested, in Pyke’s view, to his gross hypocrisy. But was he capable of murder? That was the question Pyke needed to answer.
Copper was waiting for Pyke on the steps of the ancient, dilapidated tenement that housed his garret. So, too, was Benedict Pierce. A former Bow Street Runner and now part of the Metropolitan Police’s Whitehall Division, Inspector Benedict Pierce, was the man who’d been appointed to lead the investigation into Mary Edgar’s death. Pierce wore his dark blue uniform as Pyke had imagined he would: nothing was out of place; the belt was neatly buckled around his waist, the coat was buttoned right the way up to his collar, and every one of the brass buttons had been polished to such a sheen you could see your reflection in it. His pencil moustache had been neatly trimmed, as had his sideburns, and his sandy-coloured hair had been slicked back off his forehead with some unguent.
Pierce looked as if he had made the transition from Bow Street Runner to New Police without too many difficulties. In fact, Pyke thought, he was probably far more at home in the New Police, with its rules and procedures, than he had been at Bow Street.
It was a damp afternoon, with dark clouds threatening to dump their rain on the city’s streets. Pierce was standing under a butcher’s awning; in the window, a heap of meat sat slowly blackening under the flare of a gas-lamp. Pyke ignored him and went to pat Copper on the head.
‘Come on, let’s walk,’ Pierce said, impatient now that Pyke had returned home.
‘What brings you down here?’
‘You know as well as I do I’ve come to talk about the dead girl.’ Pierce strode forward in the direction of Smithfield. Just ahead of them, a collie was barking at a stationary cow but keeping far enough back from the animal’s hind legs to avoid being kicked.
‘Yes, I heard you’d been given the investigation.’ It was clear he didn’t yet know about Mary Edgar’s connection to Alefounder, but if the sugar trader was as good as his word, Pierce and his team would soon be paid a visit.
Pierce took a couple more steps, then stopped. ‘I want to know everything you’ve found out about the murder so far.’
‘Then I suggest you read the newspapers. I’m told the Examiner has taken an interest in this case.’ Pyke allowed himself a quiet smirk.
‘We already know you’re responsible for that, Pyke, and believe me, it’s left you dangerously short of friends.’ Pierce was, of course, referring to Tilling, and Pyke found himself wondering again how Tilling had reacted to the story in the Examiner and whether he had been punished for employing Pyke’s services. ‘You know it’s a crime to withhold information about a criminal act from a police officer.’
‘You do your job, I’ll do mine. And if you stay out of my way, I’ll stay out of yours. How does that sound?’ Pyke looked down at a mountain of rotting animal flesh quivering in the gutter.
‘The old way of doing things, your way, is over. Finished. Just crawl back to the stone Tilling found you under and stay there.’
‘Do your job, Pierce. Be a detective. Go and find things out. It’s what you’re paid to do.’
‘This is now a police matter. If I find out you’ve been withholding information or using your limited skills to inappropriate ends, I’ll make sure you go back to prison for good.’
‘You’ve never liked me, have you, Pierce?’
‘Liked you? I’ve always thought you were corrupt. I despised you and everything you stood for. I still do.’
‘For all your moral righteousness, I know you cut corners, Pierce. Too busy trying to impress your seniors. In this instance, I’m guessing you won’t look any farther than Arthur Sobers. Find him and you’ve found Mary Edgar’s murderer.’
Pierce tried to hide his surprise but didn’t quite manage it. ‘Do you know where he is?’
Pyke stepped over the rotting meat, avoiding the swarm of flies that was hovering over it. He left Pierce standing with a vacant expression on his face and joined Copper at the door of his building.
Later that evening, just as it was getting dark, and after Pyke had washed himself with a sliver of soap and a bucket full of water in the yard and changed his clothes, he set off along Cock Lane in the direction of Giltspur Street and Smithfield, where he would hail a hackney coach to take him to Camden Town. He would see Felix before he went to bed and then perhaps stay for dinner with his uncle and Jo. Whistling, he didn’t notice the men appear from a side alley and creep up behind him until they were almost upon him. Spinning around, he held up his hand and tried to parry the blow, but was pushed from behind, and struck over the head with a cudgel. The last thing he remembered was falling to his knees, and worrying about dirtying his clothes.
When he regained consciousness, he discovered he’d been hooded and his hands had been tied to the back of the chair he was sitting on. Disoriented, dry-mouthed and with a headache so intense his whole skull seemed to be throbbing, he tried to work out how long he had been unconscious and where his attackers had taken him. It took him a few moments to realise how quiet the place was and a few more to sense how cold and empty it felt. Then the smell hit him; the ripeness of putrefying flesh and the metallic scent of fresh blood. At a guess, he decided, he was being held in the back room of a butcher’s shop or one of the underground slaughterhouses in the vicinity of the market.
At the same time, when Pyke heard the clip-clop of footsteps and felt someone tug off his hood, he was still surprised to find himself looking up into the grinning face of one of the city’s most feared criminals.
Up close, the first thing he noticed was the careful manner in which Field had groomed his facial hair; his elaborate handlebar moustache was oiled and coiled, his broad, mutton-chop sideburns had been freshly trimmed and the thick tufts of red hair on top of his head smelled vaguely of perfume. Indeed, with his unnaturally red lips and long, wispy eyelashes, there was something almost feminine about Field’s appearance, and it was only when you looked into his eyes, like two dark holes drilled into his skull, that you realised something was missing in him, something that you recognised in others that made them human.