As the sun peeked over the roofs of the buildings, Pyke checked to make sure the charcoal etching was still in his pocket. He closed his eyes and felt the stiff breeze against his face. In his mind, a shadowy figure was hunched over Mary Edgar’s body with a cloth, liberally splashing it with rum. He worked quietly and methodically, cleaning every speck of dirt from her dark skin. When he was done, he took a scalpel and knelt down next to her face, drops of perspiration dripping on to the purple welt on her neck. The first incision sliced into the skin around her eye, the blade lodging deep into the bone. Calm nerves and a steady hand were needed. After a few minutes, he had cut out one of the eyeballs and wrapped it up in a clean handkerchief. Ten minutes later, the other eyeball had been extracted…
Pyke felt something brush past his leg. He looked down to see the same dog he’d noticed earlier, padding towards a gas-lamp. Perhaps he was wrong that no one else cared about Mary Edgar. Maybe Pierce was just as committed to apprehending and punishing her murderer as he was. But as the sun cast its pale light over the field, it was hard not to think he was as alone in his task as Mary Edgar had been in her death. In that sense, it felt as if the two of them were joined.
Pyke was waiting on the pavement in front of Godfrey’s apartment when Jo and Felix appeared, a little after nine o’clock. Felix was dressed for school and Jo wore a woollen shawl over her cotton print dress. This time Felix’s greeting was a little less diffident than it had been either at Hatchard’s or the first time Pyke had shown up after his release from prison. And when he suggested that his son might miss school just this once, and proposed spending the morning together, the three of them, the lad sparked into life. By the time they’d walked to the zoological gardens in Regent’s Park, less than ten minutes from Godfrey’s apartment, Felix had listed the numerous ways in which the malefactors from the Newgate Calendar had been punished by the state.
‘William Gregg, traitor, hanged at Tyburn, 1708; Jonathan Wild, hanged at Tyburn, 1725; Catherine Hayes, burned alive at Tyburn, 1726; Captain John Porteous, convicted of murder but killed by the mob in
1736; William Stroud, whipped through the streets of Westminster, 1752.’
Even when they had paid their admission fee, and were moving between the various exhibits, Felix appeared less interested in the animals than in regaling Pyke with the exploits of the characters he’d read about.
‘Did you know that after Sawney Beane killed his victims, he quartered them, and then salted and pickled their flesh and ate it?’
They were standing in front of the giraffe enclosure. Pyke glanced over at Jo, who gave him an exasperated shrug.
‘Come on, Felix, let’s walk over to the monkeys.’ He indicated to Jo that they would be back presently. She smiled and went to sit on a bench in front of the giraffes.
‘So why are you so interested in the stories from the Newgate Calendar?’ he asked, when they were alone. He put a gentle hand on the lad’s shoulder.
‘It was Uncle Godfrey’s idea. He told me that’s how you’d learned to read, when you were a boy.’ There was a mixture of defiance and admiration in his voice.
‘He did, did he?’ Pyke kept walking. ‘So tell me what you like about the stories, then.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you like the descriptions of the crimes or the fact that the bad men are always punished in the end?’
‘I suppose they did bad things and they deserve to be punished.’
‘But?’ Pyke waited.
‘I don’t know. Some of them I felt sorry for. Some of them I even liked. I wanted them to get away with it. But none of them ever did. They were all hanged in the end.’
Pyke looked down at Felix whose face was rigid with concentration. He was surprised at how nuanced the boy’s understanding of the stories was.
‘They were all put to death to prove a point.’
‘What point?’
‘That crime doesn’t pay; that the laws of the land need to be obeyed and that the state is all-powerful.’
‘What’s the state?’
‘The government.’
Felix considered this and then looked up at him. ‘You know what you said about the things in Uncle Godfrey’s book not being true? Were you lying to me?’
‘Why would I lie to you?’ Pyke bent over slightly, so he could see Felix’s face.
‘In the book, you did some very bad things.’
‘That character isn’t based on me. He isn’t based on anyone. He’s someone your Uncle Godfrey made up.’
‘Oh.’ Felix dug his hands into his pockets. Ahead of them, two monkeys were climbing up the side of the cage, but Felix didn’t seem to be too interested in them. ‘Why did you take Copper to live with you and not me?’
For a moment, Pyke tried to think how Emily might have answered this question, but nothing came to him. The truth was actually simpler than this: she would have taken Felix with her. Briefly Pyke thought about the long, rickety staircase up to his garret, and the unsavoury figures who lived in the building, and the roughness of the general area. Clearly it was no place to bring up a child but it was also true that with the purse he’d won at the card table he could have rented a house or apartment in a better area. He tried to think of some way of explaining to Felix that he still didn’t feel quite ready to take on this responsibility again; that he didn’t yet trust himself to be the father he knew that Felix needed and yearned for.
‘The place I’m living in at the moment is too small for all of us. But soon we’ll be together again. I promise.’
Felix stared at the monkeys for a while. Neither of them spoke.
‘The man I fought the other night was a coward and a drunkard. He tried to harm me, and he was hurting a woman.’
‘I saw the blood on your fists,’ Felix said.
Pyke couldn’t tell whether he thought this was a good thing or not. He changed tack. ‘A woman has been killed and I’m trying to find the man or men who killed her. That’s what I do. Or what I used to do.’
‘And if you find the murderer, can I watch him hang at Tyburn tree?’ Felix’s eyes were gleaming.
‘They don’t hold executions at Tyburn any more.’
‘Newgate, then,’ Felix added, quickly.
Pyke had wanted Felix to know what he was doing but now he felt uneasy about the direction in which the conversation was heading. He suggested that they go and find Jo, and Felix seemed to think this was a good idea.
Back at the giraffe enclosure, Pyke sat down next to Jo while Felix went to inspect the animals in the cage. ‘He seems happier,’ she said, giving Felix a wave.
‘I know I’ve neglected my responsibilities…’ He stopped, not sure what else to say. He didn’t want to make promises he couldn’t keep but, equally, he was beginning to see how his absence had affected the lad.
‘You don’t have to justify yourself to me.’ Jo turned around to face him. Her skin glowed in the morning sunlight.
‘It’s funny,’ he said, as though the connection between his fatherly responsibilities and Confessions was self-evident, ‘but I never wanted Godfrey to write that damned book in the first place.’
It took her a few moments to realise what he was talking about. ‘Then why did you agree to help him?’