The Revenge of Captain Paine (22 page)

On the same afternoon he had learnt about Nash’s death and the stolen documents, Pyke gathered together the watchmen who had been guarding the bank the previous night. But to his consternation and irritation, it transpired that no one had seen or heard a thing. Pyke believed them, too. The watchmen he’d employed didn’t have the wit or the courage to lie to him.

‘I want to know who’s stolen from me and I want you to help me,’ he’d told them at the meeting. ‘And if I find out that one of you was involved or knows something and is covering up for someone else, I’ll make you wish that you’d never taken a job at this bank.’

If Nash’s murder was linked to the corpses discovered in Huntingdon it suggested that the suppression of the navvies and the rape of the old woman were in turn connected to the internal politics of his bank. But in spite of his investigative prowess Pyke couldn’t determine what the connection might be. In his eyes, the only way Nash’s murder and the riots in Huntingdon
were
linked was by the slavering interest shown in both events by journalists and news editors. It was perhaps inevitable that a gruesome murder would find favour with hacks who could exploit its sensationalist appeal to promote their names and sell newspapers, but Pyke was surprised by the extent of the coverage on the riots and the obvious bias shown towards the townsmen. Even the apparently liberal
Chronicle
and
The Times
, though regretting the still-unconfirmed loss of life suffered by the navvies, placed all blame for the disturbances on the navvies and the radicals who’d infiltrated their ranks and incited them to violence.

To counter this view, the unstamped newspapers like Godfrey’s the
Scourge
had started to circulate an alternative account of the events in Huntingdon among the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, producing a groundswell of sympathy for the navvies and anger at the perceived vigilante behaviour of the special constables who’d been appointed without due process and who’d taken the law into their own hands. Many of the trade unions had already convened impromptu meetings to plan their response, something that in turn had prompted the government to fill up the barracks on Birdcage Walk with detachments of cavalry from Hounslow and Croydon and regiments of infantry from Woolwich and Chatham. There were also two thousand uniformed police officers making their presence felt on the city’s streets.

Unlike Nash’s murder, Morris’s apparent suicide merited only a very brief mention in
The Times
’ City Intelligence column and was deemed to be significant only insofar as it affected the already flagging fortunes of the Grand Northern Railway. The
Chronicle
ran a slightly longer account of his ‘unfortunate demise’ and speculated that the difficulties facing the railway and boardroom tussles regarding the future direction of the venture had driven him to ‘tragically’ take his own life. Unsurprisingly, since no corpses had yet been unearthed, no mention had been made of the two Spitalfields weavers, Freddie Sutton and his wife, whose deaths Pyke had stumbled across. Nor, in spite of his personal intervention, had anyone at Scotland Yard treated his claims seriously; Pyke had been shooed from the assistant commissioner’s office and warned not to waste police time with his ‘groundless scaremongering’.

 
As Gore had intimated, Bellows was the kind of man whose apparent commitment to public service concealed a burning private ambition to succeed the Right Honourable Charles Lord Tenterden on the bench of the Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. As such, his liberal contributions to the royal commission on capital crimes and his proximity to the Home Office were not principled stances but rather appropriate ways of currying favour with those who might be able to influence the appointment of the next Lord Chief Justice. As the chief magistrate at Bow Street he had sought to foster a reputation as a thoughtful, fair-minded figure, liberal in his dealings with the poor but hard on all forms of political radicalism. In public, he liked to believe that his efforts were part of a larger project to reform the entire judicial system according to Benthamite principles; in private he was a cruel, vindictive man who beat his servants and used his office to punish those who had personally crossed him.

Pyke had heard a rumour that Bellows had once set up a man who had cuckolded him on a false theft charge and sentenced him to hang.

On the morning of the coroner’s inquest, Pyke met the chief magistrate outside the King’s Head tavern, the first time he had encountered the man since walking out of his courtroom with Godfrey on his arm. It was an awkward moment but Bellows made no mention of that incident and pushed past him without uttering a word, indicating to Pyke that he had no desire to discuss the fact that all the charges against Godfrey had now been dropped. His bristling, self-righteous air suggested that he hadn’t adjusted to his humiliation very well.

The stink from the filth-blackened north bank of the Thames at low tide had filled the upstairs room of the King’s Head. Filthy remains washed up from the tanneries and glue factories on the Surrey side of the river mixed with slaughterhouse offal and human excrement to produce dark pools of slime whose eye-watering smell easily penetrated the closed windows and overpowered the rosemary and lavender that had been sprinkled over the floor.

It was the only room that the coroner, Daniel Day, had been able to requisition at such short notice that was large enough to accommodate the twelve jurors and the various witnesses he intended to call upon. Still, his timid apologies regarding the foulness of the air and the grubbiness of their surroundings did little to appease Bellows, who bewailed having to run the gauntlet of the rambunctious mob gathered downstairs in the taproom, where, Pyke knew, ratting contests sometimes took place.

It was highly unusual that such an important legal figure should attend or present evidence at a coroner’s inquest, even more so because the chief magistrate had no connection with the deceased. This didn’t stop him complaining bitterly about the vile stink and the drunken behaviour he had witnessed downstairs. Briefly Pyke thought about explaining to him that public houses always did brisk business on the day of inquests but decided that he would be wasting his time. How could Bellows ever be made to see that the working men and women weren’t drinking to celebrate someone else’s death but rather to affirm the fact they were still alive? He would never imagine that survival was a sufficient cause for revelry.

Including the twelve men of the jury, there were twenty or so people squeezed around the two adjoining tables. Bellows sat at one end and a space had been reserved for Day at the other end. A few others rested on spittoons and window ledges and perched on top of the old piano. But pride of place had been reserved for Morris’s corpse, laid out in the middle of the two tables and covered with a dirty sheet. Pyke could just about make out Morris’s features under the sheet and felt a mixture of sadness and anguish wash over him.

‘Thankee kindly for helping a crippled man.’ Jake Bolter hobbled into the room with the grace of a man wearing leg-irons and collapsed into the Windsor chair reserved for the coroner. Behind him, his mastiff stood panting, a wet string of saliva hanging from its powerful jaws.

When Bolter sat down, he let rip with a fart that seemed to go on for minutes and which produced a stink much worse than the odours emanating from the river. ‘That’s what they call letting a brewer’s fart, grains and all.’ Bolter grinned as he looked around at the others. ‘Must be the meat pie I ate playing with my digestion.’

Those who were sitting nearest to him edged away, perhaps because of the smell but also on account of his mastiff, which had taken its place at Bolter’s feet and growled at anyone who looked at it.

Day, who had helped Bolter up the staircase, looked around for a chair, now that his had been taken.

‘Can anyone fetch me a pot of ale?’ Bolter said, trying to get comfortable in his chair. ‘I’ve a powerful terrible thirst and I need a drop to meller the throat.’

‘I’ll go,’ Pyke offered, having given up his chair for the coroner. ‘Would a pot of Barclay’s ale suffice?’

Bolter looked up at him, unable to hide his surprise. Bellows seemed confounded, too. ‘That would hit the spot perfect, sir. Much obliged to you.’ Bolter doffed his cap and smiled awkwardly, doubtless still trying to make sense of Pyke’s generous offer.

Downstairs in the taproom, Pyke pushed past a gang of coal-whippers to the zinc-topped counter and waited until he’d caught the landlord’s eyes. He took out a sovereign and pushed it across the counter. ‘There’ll be another one for you, if you bring me one of your ugliest sewer rats, in a box, within the next few minutes.’ When the landlord didn’t move, he added, ‘Oh, and I’ll have a Barclay’s ale, too.’

When Pyke returned to the upstairs room, he placed the pot of ale on the table in front of Bolter, who thanked him profusely, and kept the small wooden box on the floor. No one paid it any attention.

Bellows’ jurisdiction as chief magistrate at Bow Street extended only as far north as St Martin’s Lane, and the Colosseum in Regent’s Park, where Morris had died, fell under the auspices of the Marylebone police office. Nonetheless it was Bellows, rather than Day, who began the proceedings and as soon as he’d done so, Pyke asked on what or under whose authority he was there. Bellows smiled thinly and told the jury he’d been asked by his ‘good friend’ and the ‘barrister-at-law’ at Marylebone to attend the meeting. Attend but not take charge of? Pyke asked. This drew another frosty stare, by which time the coroner had developed enough of a backbone to impose himself on the meeting. ‘It’s stuffy in here,’ he said, looking at Bolter and his dog. ‘Perhaps we could allow a little air into the room? At present it resembles a garden of earthy delights.’ He looked around him to see whether anyone had picked up on his reference.

‘Or a ship of fools,’ Pyke said, looking at Bellows.

Bellows was up on his feet. ‘I object to this man’s impertinence.’

Day waved his hand in a fey manner. ‘Good Lord, man, pipe down. We were just sharing a private joke. He meant no offence and I’d hope none was taken.’ He looked at Pyke and smiled, revealing a set of perfectly straight teeth. ‘The air will have to do. After all, this is the Thames and not Lake Windermere.’

Bellows glared but said nothing. Pyke found himself warming to the coroner.

‘Well?’ Day folded his arms and looked at the chief magistrate. ‘Don’t you have some evidence to present, sir?’

Bolter took a few sips of ale and put the pot down on the floor for his dog. Copper slurped from the pot and nuzzled against Bolter’s leg.

Bellows stood up and addressed the room. His chest puffed out, he said it was his belief that Edward James Morris had tragically taken his own life on the second night of November, 1835, and that he had done so by jumping off the viewing promenade, a raised platform some two hundred feet above the ground floor of the Colosseum, at the end of a charity function held there to celebrate the birthday of his wife Marguerite.

Pyke interrupted and asked how he knew that Morris jumped and wasn’t pushed. ‘That’s what we’re here to determine, isn’t it? I’d hate to think the chief magistrate was trying to sway the minds of the jurors even before any evidence has been heard.’

Pyke didn’t know for a fact that Morris
hadn’t
killed himself, but he was intrigued that Bellows seemed so keen to rule out foul play.

‘Whether Morris jumped of his own volition or was pushed,’ Bellows muttered, ‘you surely don’t deny he fell two hundred feet from the viewing platform to the ground beneath him and that this fall caused his death?’ Everyone looked at the corpse that lay in front of them on the tables.

Day cleared his throat and told the inquest that Morris had almost certainly died from injuries sustained from the fall. But from his examination of the body there was one anomaly that he couldn’t fully explain. Morris’s backbone and pelvis had been shattered in many places, indicating that this part of the body had borne the brunt of the initial impact, but there was also a contusion and a partial fracturing of the skull. These injuries were most likely sustained as a result of the fall, Day explained, but he hadn’t yet determined how they were consistent with those sustained in his lower back area.

What if he’d been hit over the head with a blunt object first and
then
thrown over the railings? Pyke asked.

This drew a howl of derision from Bellows. There was no physical evidence to suggest foul play, he said, and all the circumstantial evidence pointed towards suicide. With some skill, Pyke had to admit, Bellows laid out the various pieces of information at his disposal and called upon the assembled witnesses to corroborate them. In doing so, he gradually built up a picture of what had happened prior to Morris’s death. At a quarter to midnight, Jake Bolter had come across Morris up on the viewing platform. According to Bolter, Morris had been incoherently drunk, and when Bolter had tried to help him, he had pushed him away, repeatedly referring to himself as a ‘dirty monster’.

‘I like the grog as much as the next man but Mr Morris, God rest his soul, was in the gun and obstropulous. That’s the truth. I’ll take an Alfred David if I have to.’ Bolter then coughed up a lump of black phlegm in his handkerchief and gave it to the dog. The mastiff greedily licked it off the handkerchief and those jurors who had seen this winced with horror.

Jake Bolter, Pyke had already concluded, was there to corroborate Bellows’ ironclad belief that Morris had taken his own life. It was time to disbar him as a witness. Pyke nudged the wooden box towards the mastiff and waited until the animal noticed him and growled. At this point, he kicked the box over and watched as the long-tailed rat scurried from beneath it directly in front of the mastiff’s giant paws. The effect was instantaneous. Letting out an excited yelp, the creature went for the fast-moving rat, a sudden movement that wrenched the lead from Bolter’s grip. So focused was the dog on the scuttling vermin that it didn’t look to see where it was going: the result of which was chaos on a level that even Pyke couldn’t have imagined. The lumbering beast tore through, rather than past, the chief magistrate, upending him from his chair and sending him sprawling gracelessly on to the floor. The dog also ploughed through the entire row of jurors sitting along one side of the table, and in its efforts to catch up with the escaping rat, it banged against one of the table legs, which had the effect of destabilising the table to such an extent that Morris’s corpse rolled from its precarious resting place on to the floor. The jurors’ screams fell on deaf ears, as far as the mastiff was concerned, for the snarling animal, realising the rat was darting back across the floor in the direction it had just come from, suddenly doubled back on itself and collided head-on with Bellows, who had just picked himself up off the floor. At first it was difficult to tell who had come off in a worse state, Bellows or the dog, but when Pyke next looked, the resourceful beast had somehow managed to ensnare the wriggling vermin in its mouth and was shaking its head and gnashing its jaws to kill it. By this point Bolter had recovered sufficiently to try to bring the situation back under control, but his clumsy efforts to restrain the dog had the opposite effect, and as the animal tried to shake off his attentions the half-dead rat flew from its mouth and struck one of the jurors squarely in the face. His screams, Pyke guessed, could be heard on the Surrey side of the Thames.