The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [52]
Moving his body for the first time, something squelched beneath him. He lifted his head from the pillow, felt something damp against the back of his neck and had to fight off a wave of revulsion. His initial reaction was that he had pissed himself. His self-disgust was visceral. More awake now, though not yet clear-headed, it took him a moment to work out that his back, his arms, his legs and his head were all covered in something wet and sticky.
With a sudden movement, he sat upright, driven by a mixture of curiosity and unease. He was still fully clothed and his clothes were covered in the same moist liquid; the smell was sweet and yet overpowering.
Sitting upright and fighting off the dizziness, Pyke ignored the icy temperature, pulled back the blanket and almost fainted. The bed was awash with blood, as though someone had slaughtered a cow. At first, Pyke supposed that he must be cut; that he was delirious from the loss of blood. But he did not feel any pain, at least not apart from the pounding headache which was quickly ebbing away under the onslaught of panic. Rousing himself from the bed, he began to check himself, his back, his clothes, all of them dripping with fresh blood. And it was everywhere: on the bed, the sheets, the blanket, the floor, his clothes, his hands, his fingers, his toes, his genitals, and in his eyes, ears, nose, lips, hair and teeth.
Lizzie, though, was not moving, and it finally struck him what had happened, or at least that the blood was not his own.
Pyke stripped the blanket from her motionless body.
Wearing the dress he had bought her, she was lying half on her back, half on her side. There were two red-ringed stab wounds in the middle of her abdomen. Beneath her was a pool of her own blood. Quickly, he checked for a pulse but didn’t find one. Her body was cold, indicating that she had been dead for a number of hours.
Lizzie had also taken a blow to her head. Pyke fought back the urge to gag.
He stripped naked, pulled down the muslin curtain and wiped off the blood. The cream material quickly turned crimson. Leaving his soiled clothes in a heap, he ignored the freezing temperature and went downstairs to the bar and opened a fresh bottle of gin.
Pyke put the bottle to his lips and did not stop imbibing the fiery liquid until he had to pause for breath.
Outside in the yard, he poured two buckets of icy water into a metal bath tub. As he submerged himself in the water, it felt as though his chest might collapse but, gasping for air, he took a bar of soap in one hand and, splashing icy water over himself with the other, he started to scrub himself: his face, his neck, his armpits, his torso, his hands, his groin, his legs, between his toes. He took another bucket of water and tipped it over himself, rinsing off the suds. He rubbed himself dry with a cloth and, picking up the bottle and putting it again to his lips, took another gulp of gin.
Upstairs he dressed in a dark jacket, plain shirt, trousers and boots and returned to the bedroom. He found the knife, a large hunting knife with a jagged blade, on the floor next to the bed. Having wiped it with the same muslin curtain he’d used to clean himself, he placed it carefully in his pocket.
Later, it struck Pyke that if it had not been market day and the street outside had been empty of livestock, they might have caught him. As it was, one of the constables dispatched to arrest him screamed at someone to clear a path through the street, and Pyke looked out of the upstairs window and saw them through the fog: ten or more men wearing tall hats, forcing their way through a stationary herd of cattle.
Even with these men bearing down on him, Pyke knew that he could not leave George to either perish in his bed or suffer some as yet unknown fate; perhaps a slow, painful death in a lunatic asylum. Ascending the stairs to the old man’s garret three at a time, he could feel some of the horror of what had happened begin to hit home. Lizzie was dead.