The Last Days (41 page)

‘You still don’t understand, do you? Peel is not your enemy here.’ Tilling started to shake his head.

‘Can I ask you a question?’ Pyke said, buttoning up his jacket.

‘Of course.’

‘The last time we met, you said something about Vines and Sir Richard Fox, the two of them being closer than I thought.’

‘So, ask them about it. Not me.’

‘I can’t ask Vines. Apparently he’s in Scotland at a family wedding.’

The interest in Tilling’s face faded. ‘Scotland? I saw him the other day walking down the street.’

They shook hands and Pyke wandered down the steps towards the heath. It was only then that the implication of Vines being in London finally struck him.

 

It was after midnight when Pyke made it back to the Old Cock tavern in Holborn. He entered the building through the back door and went straight down to the cellar. He lit a candle, jammed it into a tin sconce and carried the flickering light carefully through to the room where Villums had built a cage for the creatures used in the ratting contests. Villums paid sewer hunters sixpence per rat; the hunters themselves worked in pairs, for if they worked alone they ran the risk of being overwhelmed by their venomous prey. Villums preferred sewer to water-ditch rats because he reckoned they were meaner and hence posed more of a challenge to the dogs. They were certainly ravenous; the three hundred or so creatures that currently occupied the wooden cage had stripped the fifty-stone carcass of the dead bear in less than five minutes.

Earlier, Pyke had bound Swift’s wrists and ankles to the outside of the cage with rope; below Swift’s tethered form was a seething carpet of sinew, wet black fur, whiskers, beady eyes, pincer teeth and ribbed tails the size of horsewhips.

In the end, it had simply been a matter of who had responded quickest. Since Pyke’s reactions had been sharper than Swift’s and Pyke had reached for his knife before Swift could decide what course of action to take, it was Pyke who had triumphed in their skirmish. Pyke had forced the blade of his knife deep into the flesh of Swift’s thigh and immobilised him. He had then transported Swift from Russell Square to the tavern in Swift’s carriage.

Lifting the candle up in order to throw some light on Swift’s unmoving body, Pyke inspected his adversary for a while. He was nearer forty-five than thirty-five, Pyke decided, with bushy, sandy-coloured hair and a gaunt, almost oblong face. He was by no means an attractive man, but there was something arresting about his features; his taut, weathered skin, his slate-grey eyes, his pursed lips and his almost translucent eyebrows gave the impression of someone who had been mummified. But it was his mole that attracted one’s attention; it was an ugly purple mark, almost as large as a half-shilling coin, located in the middle of his chin.

Swift seemed barely alive so Pyke opened a bottle of gin and sloshed it liberally into his eyes. When that did not rouse the man, Pyke took out his knife, heated the metal blade over the flame of the candle for a few moments, steadied himself, sliced the mole from Swift’s chin and then daubed the open wound with gin.

For an instant, Pyke was worried the man’s agonised screams might have attracted the attention of those upstairs in the tavern.

He tossed the remains of the mole into the cage and watched as the long-tailed rats fought one another for the fleshy morsel. Blood poured from the wound and dripped into the cage, sending the rats into an even more heightened state of anticipation.

Pyke rested the candle on top of the cage, next to Swift’s head, and unbound his gag. Swift’s mouth sagged open; his stare was uncomprehending, as though he had not yet adjusted to his new fate.

‘Jimmy Swift. Or should I call you James Sloan?’ Pyke spoke in a soft whisper.

Swift stared at Pyke for a while.

‘Well?’

‘Sloan was my mother’s name. I adopted it when I left Ireland and came to London. Funny, I didn’t want my past catching up with me. The very last thing I did as Jimmy Swift was lead you to St Giles.’ He spoke in a gentle, nasal tone. ‘You walked straight into that one.’

Pyke nodded, ‘I visited your old house in Hamilton’s Bawn. It’s comfortable but a little run down perhaps. Nothing compared to your Russell Square residence. Or Hambledon Hall.’

Pyke’s taunt registered in Swift’s eyes but he said nothing.

‘A seat in Parliament. The daughter’s hand in marriage. And the prospect of one day inheriting a country estate. That’s quite a reward, particularly from someone as ungenerous as Lord Edmonton.’

For a moment, Swift was distracted by the sound of the rats. He was tied to the cage in such a way that he couldn’t see them, but he could hear them.

‘You’re going to kill me anyway, so why should I tell you what you want to know?’ His face betrayed some of the dread that he was, doubtless, feeling.

Pyke took out his pistol and fired a shot into the sea of rats. He must have wounded or most probably killed one of them because the others began to swarm around its twitching form and feed on its carcass.

‘You hear that sound?’ he said to Swift. ‘There are three hundred rats in the cage, three hundred sets of pincer-like teeth. Can you even imagine what short work that many teeth would make of your flesh? You would be dead in a matter of seconds, of course, but imagine those final moments of your life, rats crawling on your face, chewing out your eyes.’ He aimed the barrel of his pistol at Swift’s head. ‘But if I felt you were telling the truth, I might consider simply shooting you.’

Swift watched him carefully but said nothing. He was listening to the rats beneath him.

‘Perhaps I might outline what I think took place,’ Pyke said. ‘You can interrupt me if I have made a mistake or if I require your assistance.’ Again Swift did not respond.

Pyke began by indicating how he believed Swift’s relationship with Edmonton had started. He said they had probably met through the Orange Order and the Brunswick Club and corresponded regularly over issues of mutual concern. The unappealing prospect of Catholic emancipation had certainly been one such issue, and Edmonton had asked Swift to be vigilant for anything they might use to thwart or disrupt the smooth passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill through Parliament. This had taken place some time in October or even November of the previous year. Six months earlier, Swift had employed the services of Davy Magennis to tend his small plot of land. Magennis had been dismissed from the Irish Constabulary for violent misconduct but had been recommended to Swift by someone in the order. Swift had never particularly liked Magennis but his interest in the big man was piqued by a story he told about his brother, Stephen, who had fallen in love with a Catholic girl and had absconded to London. Magennis had spoken about his brother’s betrayal with an anger that bordered on mania. When Magennis had also revealed that he had once been personally recruited into the constabulary by Tilling, Peel’s emissary in Ulster, Swift had seen an opportunity that was too good to pass up, especially as Peel was openly talking about changing his position on the Catholic question and throwing his support behind the push for emancipation.

But Swift had had to move quickly. He had contacted Edmonton in London and explained what he had discovered and how this information might be used in such a way as to further their cause. Edmonton had been delighted by the idea: that Swift would accompany Davy Magennis to London and talk him into, if any talk were required, killing his brother. For their plan to work, any subsequent investigation would have to establish a connection between Peel and Magennis. They could then claim that Peel had staged the murder in order to bolster support for the police bill that he was attempting to push through Parliament at the same time as Catholic emancipation. In any case, if it could be leaked to the newspapers that a Protestant man from Ulster had been murdered, seemingly by a Catholic, then such news would, no doubt, spark a wave of anti-Catholic protests that might end up blowing Peel’s plans out of the water. Edmonton had assumed responsibility for planning events in the capital. He had paid someone to track down Stephen Magennis and his mistress and given some consideration to how he might ensure that the subsequent investigation into the murders would unearth the connection between Davy Magennis and Peel.

This was the moment when Edmonton had struck upon the notion of using Pyke. He had known, for a fact, that Pyke was a formidable investigator. If it could somehow be arranged that Pyke discovered the dead bodies, he would have to be a part of any investigation, and given his tenacity and contrariness, he might begin to suspect some kind of conspiracy. If not, he could always be pushed in such a direction once the investigation had commenced. In any case, Pyke could be used and then discarded once his purpose had been served.

Pyke paused for a moment. Swift seemed to be more preoccupied by the sound of rats. Pyke continued with his narrative.

Swift was, by no means, a papist sympathiser. After all, he had grown up in the Orange Order and had been initiated into a way of thinking that saw Catholics as both a threat and a menace. Nonetheless, he was not a rabid Catholic-hating extremist like Edmonton. For him, there had to be prospect of significant personal and material advancement to compensate him for the dangers he would have to face in actually executing the plan. Hence Edmonton’s generous offer of a parliamentary seat, his own daughter’s hand in marriage and the prospect of one day inheriting the family estate. The unpredictable element had been Davy Magennis. For the plan to work, Swift would have to prime his anger and transform the big man’s violent threats into something tangible.

‘But you weren’t aware that Clare, Stephen’s mistress, had just given birth, were you?’ Pyke said.

Swift looked at him with growing contempt.

‘And when Davy saw the baby, the whole plan fell apart.’ Pyke ran his knife across the open wound on Swift’s chin and saw him wince. ‘Suddenly, he couldn’t go through with it. Davy didn’t kill them. Did he?’

Swift shrugged, as though the issue were a trifling one.

‘So it was down to you. Either go through with the murders yourself or risk losing everything you’d been promised by Edmonton.’ Pyke watched his sullen reaction. ‘You made Magennis stay, initially at least. You made him help you tie up Stephen and Clare, and then you slit their throats with a razor.’ Pyke did not need to close his eyes to recall the sight of their severed throats. ‘But what I don’t know, what I still can’t work out, is why you had to kill the baby as well.’

Swift licked his blood-caked lips. ‘It wouldn’t stop crying.’

Pyke stared at him. He felt his innards tighten. ‘Is that it?’

‘The other two were dead. Magennis was blubbering. He wanted to leave. Then we heard a sound at the door. I’d forgotten to lock it behind us. It was the cousin, Mary. She saw Davy, who she obviously knew, and saw the blood on the floor and screamed. Magennis ran after her. I told him to. I thought he would know what to do. Later, I realised that he wasn’t coming back and that, perhaps, he hadn’t taken care of the girl as I’d hoped. At the time, I was left in that God-forsaken room with the crying baby. I picked it up. I hadn’t thought about killing it until it started to bawl even louder, and I couldn’t bear it. I shook it a few times but it wouldn’t stop. So I shook it again, much harder this time, but the screams still wouldn’t stop. That was when I decided I’d had enough. I throttled it and dumped it in the pail.’ He looked up at Pyke and shrugged. ‘That’s it. That’s everything.’

It was as though he had described throwing away a pot of boiled meat bones.

There it was. Pyke could not help but feel a little deflated by Swift’s revelations, as though they made all his own efforts to conceive of Swift’s crimes as degenerate and monstrous seem wholly misplaced. His moment of vindication had somehow floundered on the banality of Swift’s evil. In particular, Pyke felt foolish for having imagined a gruesome scenario in which the killer had deliberately tortured the parents by forcing them to watch their baby’s murder. Through such acts of imagination and fantasies of revenge, Pyke had given the murders a status that far exceeded their squalid reality. Swift had killed the baby simply because it would not stop crying. Pyke did not know whether the mundanity of this explanation was less upsetting than the macabre constructions of his own imagination, but, in the end, it didn’t really matter. For six months, he had pursued phantoms inside and outside his head, and now that those phantoms had been rendered visible, given recognisable shape and form, in the figure of Swift, he felt only drained and soiled as a consequence. Somehow, too, this made his revenge seem less legitimate than it had been, at least in his own mind. More than anything else, Pyke just wanted Swift to be dead. Swift saw this, too, and any lingering hope evaporated in his eyes.

‘Just one more question,’ Pyke said, lifting the hatch next to Swift’s bound form. ‘How did you know where to find the cousin, Mary Johnson? I mean, I presume it was you who strangled her and her boyfriend?’

Swift tugged at the bindings around his wrists and ankles and strained to look beneath him at the rats that covered every inch of floor and wall space at the bottom of the cage.

‘How did you find her?’

‘I can’t remember,’ Swift said, sounding panicky. ‘I don’t know. Edmonton must have told me.’

Pyke took his knife and cut through Swift’s hand bonds. He gouged his thumb into the wound on Swift’s chin. Swift gurgled and momentarily passed out. Pyke cut the bonds around his ankles and shunted Swift’s prostrate body across towards the open hatch. Beneath him, the carpet of rats seemed to move as one.

He waited until Swift came round. His hands were gripping Swift’s ankles. The rest of his body was dangling upside down inside the cage. The rats could almost touch his scalp. He was screaming now, screaming and pleading with Pyke for pity and for mercy. Pyke held him there for as long as he was able to. Finally, however, his grip weakened; he let go of Swift’s ankles and watched as he fell into the mass of rats, at least six or seven deep, watched as Swift’s body - first his legs and then his arms, torso and, finally, his neck and mouth - seemed to disappear as the rats swarmed over him. He watched - fascinated and sickened - as a body of wet, black fur and long, twitching tails engulfed Swift’s disintegrating form, and he listened as the almost unbearable carnivorous screeches finally drowned out the stomach-churning gurgles emerging from Swift’s body. Eventually, the only sound in the cellar was the unmistakable noise of ten thousand teeth tearing into bloodied flesh. Pyke would remember that terrible sound for as long as he lived.