The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [139]
‘But you weren’t aware that Clare, Stephen’s mistress, had just given birth, were you?’ Pyke said.
Swift looked at him with growing contempt.
‘And when Davy saw the baby, the whole plan fell apart.’ Pyke ran his knife across the open wound on Swift’s chin and saw him wince. ‘Suddenly, he couldn’t go through with it. Davy didn’t kill them. Did he?’
Swift shrugged, as though the issue were a trifling one.
‘So it was down to you. Either go through with the murders yourself or risk losing everything you’d been promised by Edmonton.’ Pyke watched his sullen reaction. ‘You made Magennis stay, initially at least. You made him help you tie up Stephen and Clare, and then you slit their throats with a razor.’ Pyke did not need to close his eyes to recall the sight of their severed throats. ‘But what I don’t know, what I still can’t work out, is why you had to kill the baby as well.’
Swift licked his blood-caked lips. ‘It wouldn’t stop crying.’
Pyke stared at him. He felt his innards tighten. ‘Is that it?’
‘The other two were dead. Magennis was blubbering. He wanted to leave. Then we heard a sound at the door. I’d forgotten to lock it behind us. It was the cousin, Mary. She saw Davy, who she obviously knew, and saw the blood on the floor and screamed. Magennis ran after her. I told him to. I thought he would know what to do. Later, I realised that he wasn’t coming back and that, perhaps, he hadn’t taken care of the girl as I’d hoped. At the time, I was left in that God-forsaken room with the crying baby. I picked it up. I hadn’t thought about killing it until it started to bawl even louder, and I couldn’t bear it. I shook it a few times but it wouldn’t stop. So I shook it again, much harder this time, but the screams still wouldn’t stop. That was when I decided I’d had enough. I throttled it and dumped it in the pail.’ He looked up at Pyke and shrugged. ‘That’s it. That’s everything.’
It was as though he had described throwing away a pot of boiled meat bones.
There it was. Pyke could not help but feel a little deflated by Swift’s revelations, as though they made all his own efforts to conceive of Swift’s crimes as degenerate and monstrous seem wholly misplaced. His moment of vindication had somehow floundered on the banality of Swift’s evil. In particular, Pyke felt foolish for having imagined a gruesome scenario in which the killer had deliberately tortured the parents by forcing them to watch their baby’s murder. Through such acts of imagination and fantasies of revenge, Pyke had given the murders a status that far exceeded their squalid reality. Swift had killed the baby simply because it would not stop crying. Pyke did not know whether the mundanity of this explanation was less upsetting than the macabre constructions of his own imagination, but, in the end, it didn’t really matter. For six months, he had pursued phantoms inside and outside his head, and now that those phantoms had been rendered visible, given recognisable shape and form, in the figure of Swift, he felt only drained and soiled as a consequence. Somehow, too, this made his revenge seem less legitimate than it had been, at least in his own mind. More than anything else, Pyke just wanted Swift to be dead. Swift saw this, too, and any lingering hope evaporated in his eyes.
‘Just one more question,’ Pyke said, lifting the hatch next to Swift’s bound form. ‘How did you know where to find the cousin, Mary Johnson? I mean, I presume it was you who strangled her and her boyfriend?’
Swift tugged at the bindings around his