Later, after she had led him up to her bedroom and they had made love again, this time more slowly and somehow even more pleasurably, they lay there in silence. She was still wearing her dress and had just hitched up it while they made love, repelling all of his attempts to remove it.
‘Will you stay with me tonight?’
Pyke closed his eyes, the guilt now beginning to wash over him. ‘I can’t.’
Next to him her body hardly moved.
‘Are you angry with me, that I have to go?’
To his surprise, she laughed. ‘You have your life, I have mine.’
Her face looked so beautiful and guileless. ‘Elizabeth?’
‘Yes, my darling?’
Pyke wanted to say something about the evening, the sex, but he couldn’t find the right words. ‘Nothing.’
But she squeezed his hand anyway and whispered, ‘I know.’
He washed himself with soap and water at the basin in the kitchen and dressed quickly. When he returned to the bedroom, she hadn’t moved. He went over to the bed and kissed her on the mouth.
‘Will I see you again?’ Elizabeth asked, as he prepared to leave. When he didn’t answer, she waited for a moment and added, ‘Whatever happens, don’t think badly of me. I don’t think I could bear it if you thought badly of me.’
It was late, after eleven, by the time the hackney carriage dropped him outside his house and he found Jo waiting up for him in the front room.
‘Some policemen were here earlier.’ She was wearing a white nightdress and a matching gown tied at the waist.
‘They say what they wanted?’ He was wondering whether she could sense the guilt he was feeling.
‘Your friend, or he claimed to be your friend, told you to meet him tomorrow noon at Trafalgar Square, in front of the National Gallery.’
‘Fitzroy Tilling?’
‘That’s the name he gave.’
They stood there for a while contemplating one another without speaking. Pyke could feel his perspiration.
‘Is this how it’s going to be?’ Her arms were folded tight to her body and her face was hot with anger.
‘Is this how what’s going to be?’
‘Us, you.’ She took a step towards him and seemed to sense or smell something. ‘Where have you been, Pyke?’
Pyke hesitated just a little too long. ‘I’ve been looking for a missing prostitute.’
She stood there for a moment, not knowing whether to challenge him or not. Then she moved away and shook her head. ‘This isn’t going to work.’
‘Look, it’s late and we’re both tired. Maybe we should talk in the morning.’ Pyke tried to give her a hug but she saw it coming and backed away.
‘I’ve been thinking about this for a while, Pyke. In fact, I haven’t thought about much else since you returned from Jamaica.’ She held up her hand to stop him from interrupting. ‘Let me finish, please. If you don’t, I might never say what I need to say.’ For a moment, he thought she might cry. ‘I’ll continue here until the end of this month, while I look for another position. But I can’t go on like this, not knowing what you feel for me, if it’s anything more than gratitude; wondering what my place is in this house, and worrying about my future and whether I have one.’
Pyke felt a sharp stab of shame and thought about all his declarations of intent to her — and how by making them, by articulating what he thought they both wanted, he’d actually believed he could will a life for them both into existence.
‘I don’t know what to say, Jo. Is there any way you could be persuaded to change your mind?’ He tried to imagine life without her but couldn’t.
‘That’s just the problem, Pyke. You don’t know what to say because you don’t know what you want.’
‘Tell me what to say and I’ll say it. For my sake and for Felix’s sake. Please, Jo, I’m begging you. I’ll get down on my hands and knees if I have to. Stay until the New Year and make a decision then. If we can make it until January, maybe we do have a future.’
‘As nursemaid to your child or mistress in your bed?’
The bluntness of her question took him by surprise and Pyke didn’t have an immediate answer.
‘For me, it’s simple,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately, I’m in love with you. I probably have been for a long, long time, but I’ve never dared to acknowledge it even to myself. But what happened between us before you left for Jamaica unleashed those feelings in a way I couldn’t have expected.’ She paused and her eyes filled with tears. ‘These past few months have been the most unhappy, the most miserable, of my life, and I just can’t do it any more. I can’t just put my feelings back into a box and pretend they don’t exist.’
Guilt, shame, affection, respect. Pyke felt all those things. He wanted to take Jo in his arms and tell her that he loved her; wipe away her tears and convince her that they had a future together. He wanted to do it for Felix’s sake, of course, but also for his own. For he knew that a part of him wanted the things that she could give him: a happy, stable domestic life. But he could still feel the taste of Elizabeth Malvern’s tongue in his mouth and recall the way it had made him feel, and he knew that in time he would hurt Jo more than he already had, and that he would keep on hurting her.
‘I’m sorry, I really am sorry.’
That riled her. ‘What exactly are you sorry about?’
He thought about Emily; how he’d been more or less faithful to her throughout their time together. ‘That I don’t love you in the same way.’
Perhaps Jo had been expecting it; perhaps she’d even been trying to provoke him into admitting it. But the baldness of his confession still made her gasp. She stared at him, her eyes wide open, trying to make sense of what he’d just said, before wiping her nose on the sleeve of her dress and smiling. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.
‘For what?’ It would have been hard for Pyke to hate himself any more than he did at that moment.
‘For finally being honest with me.’ As her eyes started to fill up again, she managed to say, ‘Could you leave me alone now, please?’
TWENTY-SIX
As part of an attempt by planners to tear down the ancient city and construct a modern metropolis of wide avenues and open public spaces, Trafalgar Square had been envisaged as the embodiment of Britain’s imperial might and as its centrepiece a column built of Portland stone upon which a statue of Nelson would one day sit was beginning to take shape. Pyke could see that, when completed, the square might be a pleasant place to pass the time, but in the middle of summer and with plumes of dust whipped up by the building work and the slow procession of omnibuses, drays, cabs, barrows and carriages moving between The Strand and the West End, it was about as disagreeable a spot as he could imagine.
While he waited, Pyke tried to think about his investigation; what he had found out and more importantly what he had missed. It pained him to realise he still didn’t know who had killed Mary Edgar or even why she had been killed. Different pieces of information were still pulling him in different directions. The fact that she had been staying in Bedford’s home at the behest of Charles Malvern and that Bedford, too, had been murdered suggested that the same man — or woman — had been responsible for both deaths. But there was also the question of Mary’s facial mutilation and how this replicated an incident that had taken place in Jamaica many years earlier involving Silas Malvern and his brother, Phillip. That had to be significant — the coincidence was too stark — but while a familial connection between Mary and Phillip Malvern seemed to offer a partial explanation, it still didn’t begin to explain why Lucy Luckins had been mutilated in a similar fashion.