The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [120]
Pyke did not meet his stare. ‘Did I ask you to find out whatever you could about a man called Jimmy Swift?’
‘Three times. You described him for me, too.’ Godfrey shook his head and waited for a moment. ‘I don’t know what to say . . . I just . . .’ He stared at Pyke awkwardly. ‘I’m just worried about you, that’s all.’
Pyke reached down and picked up the bottle of gin. He opened it and took a swig. ‘Thank you for bringing this and the blankets.’
The serrated edge of the blade cut into Polly Masters’ leathery throat and drew a few droplets of blood. Standing behind her, Pyke locked his left arm around her neck.
It was a dank, windowless room. The walls had been stained black with coal dust and on the ceiling there were large circular smudges from where candles had been left to burn. Close-up, Polly Masters’ skin smelled of camphor and rancid mutton. Barely twitching, she muttered, ‘That you, Pyke?’
‘Who else did you tell about Mary Johnson?’ He repeated the question he had just asked.
‘I don’t ever show my feelings, Pyke, but when I heard they was gonna kill you, I did a little jig,’ she whispered hoarsely.
‘Someone tracked Mary and her boyfriend Gerald down to an inn in Isleworth. This person strangled them and dumped the bodies on Hounslow Heath.’
‘I din’t tell no one ’bout Mary.’
Pyke pressed the blade deeper into her neck. More blood bubbled up from the wound. ‘No one else, apart from you, knew where they were hiding.’
‘I swear, I din’t tell a soul.’ Her tone remained defiant.
‘Mary Johnson was a nice girl who didn’t deserve to die. I don’t care whether you liked or hated her. I know you’re a greedy woman and you would have sold her out in the blink of an eye. But I want to hear it from you. I want to know who you told about Mary’s whereabouts. I want a name or I want a description.’
Polly Masters tried to wriggle free from his armlock but couldn’t manage it. Eventually she exhaled loudly and croaked, ‘You’re a marked man, Pyke. Downstairs, there must be close to a hundred men who’d kill each other for the chance to pummel you with their bare knuckles and collect the reward what’s been offered. There’s men givin’ out handbills with your likeness across the whole city. All I have to do is scream . . .’
‘And I’d slit your throat and leave you to bleed to death on the floor like a slaughtered pig,’ Pyke said, jabbing the knife even deeper into her flesh. ‘Like you said, I’m a marked man. I don’t have anything left to lose.’
Her bruised lip quivered with anticipation.
‘Tell me the truth this time,’ he said, slowly. ‘Did someone come here asking about Mary Johnson?’
‘No.’
‘Polly, I want the truth. Did a man with a brown mole on his chin come here asking for Mary?’
‘No.’
‘One last time. Did you tell anyone where Mary Johnson was hiding?’
‘Fuck you, Pyke.’ Polly Masters was crying now. ‘You’re a monster. Fuck you, fuck you and fuck you again.’
Later, as Pyke wandered through the mud-crusted alleyways and cobbled streets around Covent Garden, comfortable in his disguise, he thought about Polly’s defiance and decided she had probably been telling him the truth. But just because Swift had not found out about Mary Johnson from Polly Masters did not mean he hadn’t strangled her. No one else apart from Pyke had known which guest house she had been staying at.
So how had they found her? How had Swift found her? Pyke sensed that the answer was staring him in the face but he still couldn’t work it out.
It was raining and mud clung to his boots, weighing them down as he walked. Ignoring the outstretched hands of a sooty-faced beggar and walking past an old man who was chewing on a bar of soap in order to simulate having a fit, he tried to arrange his thoughts.
Pyke liked the grimy anonymity the city afforded him but knew he belonged neither to the world that Polly Masters inhabited - that grubby, hand-to-mouth existence he’d known for much of his early life - nor to Emily’s comfortable world, where propriety and social mores determined what was and wasn’t permissible. Pyke wasn’t naive or rich enough to romanticise