The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [12]
In those first moments, he did not see the bloodied sheets tossed on to the floor nor the metal pail beside them until his eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness. While both corpses had been propped against the wall like rag dolls, the metal pail was right in the centre of the room. Pyke kicked it and felt something move inside. Gingerly, he edged the lantern into the middle of the room with his foot and bent over, peering into the pail.
Pyke spotted a tuft of hair. It looked like a small animal.
He brought the lantern closer.
What he saw, then, was a collapsed jumble of tiny, delicate limbs and soft, pinky flesh. He saw a head, then two legs, two arms, a body, some feet and fingers. He strained for a better look, not able to trust his eyesight, and saw that the head, tiny as it was, had been squeezed out of shape, as though someone had taken it between their thumbs and pressed as hard as they could until it split apart like a piece of overripe fruit.
There was a faint whiff of urine but no liquid in the pail, just a dead baby. Pyke prodded it with his finger and instinctively pulled back. It did not move. The bruised flesh resembled melted wax. Pyke looked into its staring eyes, like small chunks of freshly mined coal, and felt unsteady on his legs. Supporting himself against the wall, he tasted bile in the back of his throat and barely had the chance to open his lips before a hot spike of vomit exploded from his mouth.
THREE
Once reinforcements from Bow Street arrived, it took them a further two hours to clear the upper floors of the lodging house and herd the curious residents downstairs into the apartment and back yard of the landlady, a plump spinster called Dulcibella Clamp. She, of course, objected vociferously to her home being overrun, as she put it, by foreign hordes, but only, Pyke fancied, because it gave her lodgers the chance to see how comfortably she lived, in comparison with the squalor of their own quarters. Pyke, whose task it had been to take her statement, dismissed her objections and went to rejoin Sir Richard Fox and Brownlow Vines, who were waiting for him on the second-floor landing. Having summoned as many gas lamps as they could solicit in such a short space of time, Fox and Vines were surveying the upper floors of the lodging house, now flooded in brilliant light.
Pyke was not surprised by the enthusiasm with which they had responded to his discovery, for they had dispatched all available men under their authority to the scene. He knew they were not necessarily moved by the incomprehensible horror of the murders. Rather, as politically minded bureaucrats, they intended to use this opportunity to stake their claim on the events of the day.
Fox and Vines had come from separate dinner appointments and looked utterly out of place, dressed in formal attire and standing in a dismal building in one of the worst slums of the city.
‘There will have to be a proper investigation, of course,’ Fox said, as though the matter had already been agreed upon. ‘The sooner whoever did this is behind bars the better it will be for everyone.’
‘I can’t imagine Peel would want it otherwise.’ Vines nodded.
‘Perhaps, but then again, I wouldn’t want to speculate on what our venerable Home Secretary might have in mind.’
‘Given Peel’s propensity for changing his mind, who would?’ Vines glanced disparagingly at Pyke. ‘But he’ll use this as an opportunity to limit your authority.’ He disliked Pyke’s closeness to Fox and as a result took every opportunity to make his life as uncomfortable as possible.
‘Peel might want to,’ Fox said, absent-mindedly rubbing his chin, ‘but does he yet have the power? I am still the most senior police officer in the city.’
‘For the time being anyway,’ Vines muttered, with dejection.
As all runners were, Pyke was aware that Peel was shortly going to introduce the Metropolitan Police Bill to the Commons with the expectation of winning the House’s approval.
‘Peel can