As he moved along the Ratcliff Highway from east to west, tramping between brothels, slop-shops, taverns, pawnbrokers, gin palaces and beer shops, past vendors selling pies, chestnuts, gingerbread and baked potatoes, he didn’t exactly feel unsafe but he did make a point of not catching anyone’s eye unnecessarily. He also kept the purse he’d been given by Tilling close to his body. It was a warm, early spring afternoon but the weather did nothing to improve the Ratcliff Highway: it had always felt like the kind of place where someone might slit your belly as easily as shake your hand.
The pavements were full, but many of the faces were alien to Pyke. Lascar and Malay sailors with their dark skin and tear-shaped eyes; bearded Jews hawking piles of old clothes; German and Scandinavian stevedores, recognisable by their uniform, biding their time before their ships sailed for home; and black dockers who could carry a hogshead of sugar on their shoulders. There were the children, too: bow-legged, malnourished, running alongside the wagons and drays barefoot. Everyone was going about their business but Pyke couldn’t help feeling that people had noticed him, noticed that he was different, that he didn’t belong there. Even as a Bow Street Runner, he’d rarely ventured to this part of the city: a Runner who had tried to serve a warrant on a tavern landlord here had been dragged out on to the street and kicked to death. Pyke couldn’t say with any conviction that it was either the poorest or indeed the most dangerous part of the city — St Giles and parts of Shadwell and Rotherhithe came close — but it was undoubtedly the street whose reputation cast the greatest terror into the hearts of most Londoners.
He had also heard a lot about Craddock’s brothel but had never had a reason to visit it. Not that he had missed much. Its ill repute was based on the promise of its madam, Eliza, that no reasonable offer would be turned down: that a ‘reasonable’ offer could sometimes be as little as a shilling was indicative of the kind of customer it hoped to attract. Pyke had once been told by a woman who’d worked there that a mattress might see five or six different bodies in the space of an hour. The same woman had had her face slashed by a broken bottle wielded by a drunken sailor, but Eliza hadn’t even contacted the authorities, saying it would be bad for business. Instead, the woman had been dismissed. She’d been told no one would want to fuck a girl with a scarred face. There were few businesses Pyke knew of where the laws of the market were practised with the same cold efficiency.
‘So who is she?’ Eliza Craddock asked, when Pyke showed her the drawing of the dead woman. She sat behind her desk like an enormous beached whale, folds of blubber hanging off her arms and face.
‘I take it she’s not one of yours?’
Craddock grinned, revealing an enormous gap in her front teeth. ‘Most of the bucks come in here would just as well poke a hole in the wall. But a gal like that would cause a riot.’
Pyke nodded. Her thoughts confirmed his own suspicions that the dead woman probably wasn’t a prostitute, at least not one who plied her trade on the Ratcliff Highway.
Craddock had another look at the charcoal sketch. ‘You reckon she might be a blue-skin, then?’
Pyke had already mentioned this. He then described Arthur Sobers and asked whether she had seen him.
‘I don’t know him but we see all sorts in here. I ain’t prejudiced against the darkies. Even employed one for a while.’ She crossed her arms and shrugged. ‘You could talk to her, if you like. Popular with the Lascars and the blackbirds, she was. But I had to let her go.’
‘You know where I can find her?’ It was unlikely that this woman had known Mary Edgar or Arthur Sobers but it was worth a try.
Craddock held out her chubby hand and Pyke tossed a shilling coin on to the table. She scooped it into her apron and rested her arms, two mounds of flesh, on the table. ‘Jane Shaw. Last I heard she’d taken a room in the old lepers’ hospital on Cannon Street, near New Road.’
‘Is that how it works?’ Pyke felt the skin tighten around his temples. ‘You use them up and when they’re beyond repair you toss them away?’
But the criticism was lost on Eliza Craddock. She stared at Pyke, as if he’d spoken to her in a foreign language, and asked, ‘The girl you’re looking for. Is she dead or just missing?’
‘Would it make any difference?’
Craddock shrugged. ‘I don’t like it when a girl gets killed. Makes folk jittery and it’s bad for business.’
‘It’s bad for the girls, too.’
She regarded him with cynical good humour. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’ll always be more girls.’
The old lepers’ hospital on Cannon Street had long since been overrun by rogues and vagabonds of every hue: broken-down coiners, their skin eroded by the liquids used to oxidise base metal; footpads waiting to beat up their next marks; ageing prostitutes prowling the corridors; distillers inhaling fumes that would kill them; pickpockets as young as ten emptying stolen pocket handkerchiefs into the hands of their receivers; rampsmen polishing their brass cudgels; and mudlarks picking caked mud and faeces from their old boots.
Pyke found Jane Shaw in one of the rooms right at the top of the building. There was no heat or light and he’d had to pay for a lantern to guide his way through the mass of bodies, either sleeping or staring vacantly into space. A few of them begged for money, but he kept moving, only stopping to ask where he could find the ‘blackbird’ and only giving a farthing or two to those who helped him. Most were drunk or, as he discovered later, pacified by laudanum.
Jane Shaw could have been thirty or sixty, for all Pyke could tell. Her hair and all of her teeth had fallen out, and when he brought the lantern up to her face and saw her ravaged nose, it confirmed what he had suspected from the first moment he had stepped into the room. She was dying of untreated syphilis.
‘You the first visitor I had in t’ree months,’ she said, the whites of her eyes accentuated by the inky blackness of her skin.
Pyke knelt down and showed her the charcoal etching of Mary Edgar. Wincing, she sat up so that she could get a better look at it, and as she did so, she sniffed his skin. ‘You smell good, like soap.’
The room, on the other hand, reeked of human faeces and for a moment he wondered how and where she defecated.
‘Her name is Mary Edgar.’ He put the lantern down next to the drawing so she could see it properly.
‘So?’
‘I wondered if you might know her.’ As soon as it had left his mouth it struck Pyke as an absurd proposition, but he needed to find a way of getting her to talk.
She peered at the etching and laughed without warmth. ‘That why you come here? ’Cos I’m black and she’s mulatto so we must know each other?’
Pyke acknowledged the truth of her observation with a rueful smile. ‘I don’t know a thing about her apart from her name and that she recently arrived from Jamaica. I thought she might have fallen into the game.’
That drew a more serious nod. ‘So how did you find me?’
‘Craddock.’
Jane bit her lip, or what was left of it. ‘That bitch had me there to serve them Lascars and Africans but it was the whites who ask for me because I was cheap and they reckoned they could do what they liked with me.’
‘And as soon as you contracted syphilis she tossed you out.’ Pyke tried to keep any sympathy from his voice; he guessed it would only anger her.
‘She gave me a bottle of mercury, told me that would cover it.’ She touched her bald head self-consciously.
Pyke brought her attention back to the drawing. ‘Have you got any idea where I might start looking for her?’ He paused and then told her that Mary Edgar had been sharing a room at the Bluefield lodging house with a black man called Arthur Sobers.