The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [37]
‘Including who is defined as sane and insane?’
Emily’s expression hardened. ‘Don’t presume to speculate about my family, Mr Pyke.’
‘I was referring only to your father.’
‘Your point is made,’ she said, trying to appear unaffected. ‘And I commend you on your skills as an investigator, though I was not in any doubt as to your . . . abilities.’ She smiled coldly.
Outside the prison, on Old Bailey, Pyke said, ‘If I said that’s just the way of the world, the fact that some prosper, yes, because of their inheritance but also because they’re ruthless or committed or just plain lucky, while others wither and die because they aren’t, would you think me hard-hearted?’
She touched his forearm and pulled him into her stare. ‘Is that you, Pyke? Are you ruthless and committed?’
‘I would hope so.’ He shrugged. ‘But I also believe we live or die ultimately according to the whims of chance.’
‘But what about those who aren’t ruthless or lucky? What happens to them?’ Her face was flushed with energy. ‘When you see pain and injustice, can you really just walk away?’
What she said caught him by surprise and he pulled away because he didn’t want her to see that he was capable of being moved.
Waiting for her footman to pull down the steps up to the carriage, Pyke asked her what she had been arguing about with her father during his visit to Hambledon. At first, she did not seem to know what he was talking about. Her eyes dulled a little and she seemed to withdraw into herself.
Emily shook his hand and while doing so pulled herself towards him and whispered, ‘People aren’t always who you imagine them to be.’ Her breath felt hot and sticky against his ear. ‘That applies to you and me as well.’
As she climbed up into her carriage, Emily was assisted by her servant, a young woman with a plump figure and a full, round face. Briefly, Pyke and the servant exchanged a glance, and in that moment Pyke was left with an uncomfortable sense they had met somewhere before, though he could not remember where or when this might have been.
Renovation work on number four Whitehall Place had already started, a sign perhaps that Peel was more than confident about his chances of forcing the police bill through Parliament. It was a sturdy, imposing three-storey red-brick building with ornately carved arched windows on the ground floor.
Pyke had perused the morning papers and all the editorials seemed to agree: the St Giles murders made the case for a centralised, uniformed police force even stronger. But the same editorials had not been so kind to the proposed Catholic Emancipation Bill. Only the Chronicle called for caution and circumspection and urged its readers to wait and see what the police investigation revealed. Others failed to denounce the wave of anti-Catholic violence that was sweeping the city and demanded, in varying tones of outrage, that the Catholic relief bill either be abandoned or put on hold until people had had the time to reflect on the situation. One had even called for Catholics to be forcibly converted to Protestantism or thrown out of the country. Pyke had read a letter in The Times written by Edmonton in which the old man had called upon his ‘fellow countrymen’ and ‘brother Protestants’ to ‘stand forward and defend our Protestant religion and constitution’ from ‘disgraceful attacks’ by ‘Tory turncoats, papal agents and lovers of Rome’.
Pyke found himself wondering how such sentiments would affect his investigation.
Finding the main entrance boarded up, he wandered around the side of the building, along a narrow passage leading into Great Scotland Yard, and tried the door that led into the old watch house.
Almost at once, he found himself confronted by the same surly man whom he had encountered at the lodging house. Pyke said that he wanted to see Charles Hume and was told, curtly, that he would have to wait a long time. The man explained there had been an important development in the St Giles murder investigation but he did not reveal what it was and Pyke did not ask.
Pyke asked to see the possessions of the