The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [11]
But of all the rookeries Pyke knew and feared - feared because in his world you were only ever one step away from poverty - the bleakest was the Holy Land, an area that housed most of the city’s transplanted Irish population. It was there, in ‘Little Dublin’ as some liked to call it, that Swift ended up. Antiquated hovels backed on to narrow streets. In windows filled only with tattered paper, grim stares met his wary gaze. Livestock roamed freely in and out of open doors and the smell of burned animal fat wafted from rooms that housed as many as could lie top to toe on bare floors. These people didn’t care about political emancipation, he thought grimly, only about where their next meal was coming from.
Halfway along a typically windy street, Pyke was close enough behind to see Swift disappear, without warning, into a run-down building. A small sign on the door indicated it was a lodging house for dock workers and their families.
Pyke waited for as much as a minute and followed Swift into the building. Without natural light, the candle-blackened entrance hall was gloomy and the room smelt of wax and cooked food. The walls and ceilings seemed to press in on him. Hearing a noise from somewhere above, he started to ascend the rickety, corkscrewed staircase; on the next floor, he inspected the various closed doors but, on hearing the sound above him once more, he opted to continue his ascent of the staircase and found himself on the upper-floor landing. Everything was quiet. In all probability he had lost Swift downstairs or out of the back of the building. Looking around him, he counted five doors, all of which were closed.
Pyke tried one of the doors and found it was locked. Turning to the adjacent room, he eased the handle and applied pressure to the door. As it swung open, the rusted hinges groaned audibly.
The stench hit Pyke with an explosive force. It seemed to invade his nostrils and peel off the skin from the inside. Pyke did not think of himself as delicate and, in his work as a Runner, he had been confronted by rotting animal carcasses and the occasional dead body, perhaps even of his own doing. Still, he had to check himself as he entered that room, and take his time to adjust to a smell that was so visceral it made him want to be sick.
It was a bleaker room than many prison cells and it had neither heating nor natural light. A torn mattress filled almost a quarter of the floor space. The rest of the room was occupied by two motionless figures pressed against the wall farthest from the door. Taking a candle lantern from the landing, Pyke set it down on the wooden floor in the middle of the room. He called out but did not get an answer. Nor did the occupants move or even flinch. At first he fancied they might have been high on laudanum, but almost at once a squelchy feeling underfoot put paid to such a notion. Pyke had known even before he’d stepped into the room that the smell was that of putrid flesh and fresh blood, and it took less than a few seconds of rational thought for the two figures to become corpses. Still, it wasn’t until others arrived with gas lamps and replacement candles that the full horror of the scene would reveal itself. Then he would see for himself what had happened. He would see that a man and a woman no older than twenty had been bound and gagged. He would see that their throats had been cut from ear to bloody ear, and that the cuts themselves went so deep their heads had almost been severed from their bodies.
If that had been the extent of the horror, then, gruesome as it was, Pyke might have been able to walk away from what he had witnessed there, with his fortitude and resolution intact, for he had