The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [128]
Pyke darted into a side street and broke into a run. Doing so may have been a mistake: it unnecessarily drew attention to him. But he could not help it. He needed to put as much distance between himself and his pursuers as possible. That was his ambition, but alerted to his presence by shouts from behind, others were spilling out of dilapidated buildings almost at the same moment as he was passing them. Turning into an even smaller alleyway, he pushed his way past a newsboy. From behind, someone tried to grab his shoulder; he pulled himself free and ducked into a dingy entrance. Shouts followed. It was a pawnshop: there were racks of shawls, petticoats, skirts, stays, gowns, shirt-fronts, handkerchiefs and trousers. Ignoring the owner, he barged his way through the shop, knocking over piles of clothes as he did so. He kicked down the back door, and found himself in a small courtyard, surrounded by buildings. A fighting dog, chained to its kennel, sprang to its feet and growled at him through bared teeth. Pyke took no notice of it and forced his way into another building on the other side of the court. He could still hear voices behind him. This time he found himself in the kitchen of a lodging house: a fire was blazing in the grate, rashers of bacon suspended before it. Around a table sat seven or eight men dressed in working clothes. No one made any effort to block his path. As he left the lodging house, this time by the front entrance, he could not see any sign of his pursuers. Across the alleyway, he entered another lodging house, this one more run down, and pushed his way through to the back of the building, where he found himself in an identical courtyard. This time, however, he hesitated for a moment and looked behind him.
No one seemed to have followed him.
It was dark and quiet in the yard. Above him rain fell lightly out of a desolate sky. Pyke kept moving deeper and deeper into the rookery. If he had stopped to think about it, he might have likened himself to a hunted animal, but such was his fear, and his desire to evade capture, that he did not once pause to consider his predicament. Perhaps his nerves were dulled by the laudanum. In any case, he felt oddly calm by the time he finally came to a halt, in an empty skittle yard attached to a beer shop. At first he just chuckled, but very soon this had mutated into a deep belly-laugh and finally into uncontrolled hysteria. He laughed because he was not yet dead.
From the bay window in Fitzroy Tilling’s front room, the view took in Hampstead Heath and extended far beyond to the sprawling metropolis, which spilled out in every direction. A blanket of fog clung to the city’s smoke-blackened buildings, and the sun was barely visible through the murkiness.
From a cursory inspection, Pyke concluded that it was a masculine environment and, as such, was appropriately anonymous. There were no personal effects in the rooms and few decorative features. The ground floor comprised a front and a back room, in addition to the small - and from what Pyke could tell unused - kitchen in the basement. The rooms were furnished with dingy Turkey carpets and an assortment of old-fashioned tables and chairs. Above the fireplace in the front room