The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [31]
Over lunch purchased from a street vendor, a hot meat pie dripping with warm gravy, he had watched as two men, one dressed as a Protestant minister, staged a ‘conversion’ play for the unwary crowd. The minister said a few prayers and sang a hymn and the other man rose up and started to spit on some rosary beads and an effigy of the Pope. Apart from Pyke, everyone in the crowd applauded wildly. The minister passed round a collection plate. Once the crowd had dispersed, the two men tipped the coins into one of their hats and disappeared into a nearby tavern.
During the day, Pyke visited countless taverns and brothels, asking for Mary Johnson and spreading the news about the reward money. He had narrowly avoided being attacked with a broken glass in the Black Horse on Tottenham Court Road and had come close to breaking the neck of a young thief who had tried to pick his pocket outside a brothel on the corner of Church Street and Lawrence Street in the heart of the rookery.
He had also suffered the stares of ordinary men and women in most of the taverns that he had visited. These were his people and yet they were as strange to him as a South Sea islander or an African pygmy.
The Rose tavern on Rose Street in Covent Garden had, during the last years of the previous century, hosted posture molls who stripped naked while standing on overturned crates. These activities still happened, though on a more informal basis, but the tavern’s main business was straight-down-the-line prostitution. Upstairs, the madam, Polly Masters, an ugly woman with no front teeth and thick black hair sprouting from her bulbous nose, greeted Pyke with measured enthusiasm.
‘The word’s already got out that you’re willing to pay twenty pounds to anyone who can deliver this Paddy lass, Mary Johnson.’
‘Do you know her?’
As she shrugged, she afforded Pyke a glimpse of her cleavage. ‘Maybe.’
Pyke paid no attention to it. ‘Did she work here?’ ‘Might have done, I couldn’t rightly say.’
‘Twenty pounds is a lot of money, Polly.’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’ She adjusted her dress to conceal her bosoms. ‘A few of my gals could earn as much in, say, a month.’
‘Was Mary Johnson one of them?’
She met his stare. ‘Could’ve been but she was a flighty one, that one. Her ’eart was never in it. Sweet lass, pretty, popular with the gen’lemen.’
Pyke asked Polly to describe Mary and she gave him a description that fitted with the one they had been given by Mary’s neighbour. Polly shrugged. ‘Haven’t seen her for a while, I’m afraid.’
‘Do you know where I might find her?’
‘What’s in it for you, Pyke? I mean, from what I can see, there’re plenty of tarts in the city, more ’n enough to go round.’
‘If you have anything worth telling me, you can leave a message at Lizzie’s place, next to Smithfield.’
She gave him an amused look. ‘Is it true love, then? You and Lizzie Morgan?’
He turned to leave.
‘That lass, Mary, she came and went as she pleased. Not the kind of girl I much care for. Two days ago, when I weren’t ’round, Mary crept in ’ere and cleared what little she had out of her room and scarpered. Vanished into thin air.’
This made Pyke turn around. ‘You say this happened two days ago?’
‘One of the gals might know where she went. And if I manage to dig it out of ’em, you’ll be ’earing from me, Pyke. Keep that money for me. I’ll want it paid in legal notes, too.’
Because it seemed to be a solid lead, Pyke said that if he managed to locate Mary Johnson as a result of her information, he would pay her fifty pounds.
Downstairs in the taproom, a man that Pyke recognised but whose face he could not place lunged towards him through a crowd of drunken bodies. Pyke stepped to one side with ease and the knife that the man had been carrying sank deep