The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [145]
It made some kind of perverted sense. ‘So you dispatched Vines to Lizzie’s place? To drug me?’
‘You mustn’t hold it against Brownlow. He had no idea what I was planning to do. He didn’t know about any of this.’
Pyke was sickened by all of it. He was sickened by Fox, Edmonton, Peel, Swift and even by himself.
Fox crawled off his desk and sat down on the chair, smoothing his moustache with the palms of his hands. ‘I knew you preferred to sleep alone. You had mentioned it to me once or twice before. But Vines, or whoever it was that carried you up the stairs, put you in Lizzie’s room. Later, after everyone had gone, I crept up the stairs. I had one of your knives in my hand. I went to your room, initially, and found it was empty. So I tiptoed across the landing to Lizzie’s room. It was dark. I stood next to your motionless body for what seemed like hours. I had the knife in my hand but I could not bring myself to do it. In the end, my nerve failed me. I’m not going to give a dramatic speech about the closeness of our relationship but, in the end, I could not kill you. I was about to leave when Lizzie woke up. Of course, she recognised me. I tried to placate her, but I had no way of explaining my presence in her bedroom. I suppose she must have seen the knife and then screamed for help, because the next thing I remember, I was trying to grab her, to stop the screaming. That’s when it must have happened. I didn’t mean to, I swear to God. I just remember standing there, staring horrified at the blood oozing from her stomach.’
For a while, neither of them spoke. Pyke thought about the last time he had seen Lizzie alive; the time they had kissed in front of Vines. On that and other occasions he had used her, but he still mourned her death. And he would grieve for her when this was done.
‘But you didn’t just flee the scene, did you?’
Fox looked up at him and sniffed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You watched Lizzie die. You waited until she was dead and you laid her next to me and you planted the knife that you’d used on the floor by my bed.’ His throat felt arid. ‘It was how the constables you dispatched the next morning were supposed to find me.’
Fox didn’t disagree. He sat there, unmoving, staring blankly at the wall behind Pyke.
Pyke took his pistol and placed it carefully on the desk. Fox looked at it and then up at Pyke. ‘I was good to you once, wasn’t I?’ But there was no pleading or desperation in his tone.
‘You tolerated me because I was a good investigator.’
‘And you looked up to me,’ Fox said, almost dreamily.
‘I was young and naive.’ Pyke pushed the pistol across the desk towards him. ‘Take it. It’s loaded.’ It did not matter what the old man said; it still felt like a betrayal.
Fox stared at the pistol as though it were a poisonous snake. ‘It’s too late for apologies, Pyke, but for what it’s worth, I am sorry.’
As he closed the office door behind him, Pyke heard the deafening blast of the pistol, and felt nothing at all; not anger, nor regret, nor even some kind of perverse satisfaction. More than anything else, he wanted it to be over. He wanted the killing to be over.
Townsend was as good as his word. When Pyke rode up to the entrance of Hambledon Hall, he was greeted by the sight of a hundred or more men, carrying torches and pitchforks. Saville and Canning were among the gathered mob, though neither appeared to recognise him. The mood of the crowd was ugly. Townsend had already told him of continuing reprisals being carried out by Edmonton’s militia against certain villages. Three inns had been ransacked and set on fire. As a response, more threshing machines had been destroyed. Earlier, in a nearby inn, Townsend had paid for as much ale as the men could imbibe and many in the assembled crowd were drunk, and talking openly of violent retribution.
Ahead of them, on the other side of the main gates, Edmonton’s militia were lined up seven or eight deep down the tree-lined avenue that led