The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [55]
He blinked and rubbed his eyes, hoping they weren’t deceiving him. Again, he wondered who she was and what she wanted from him.
At ten or fifteen minutes past the hour, Pyke was considering his options, wondering whether the boy had simply pocketed the half-crown and discarded the note, whether Godfrey had received the message at all, when out of the fog ahead of him appeared the portly frame of his uncle. Pyke recognised Godfrey by his shambling gait and the mane of white hair on top of his head.
He called out to him but Godfrey had stopped moving. He was doubled up and looked to be in discomfort.
‘Godfrey,’ Pyke shouted, louder this time. Still, though, the figure ahead of him did not look up.
Pyke moved quickly towards him, both concerned and irritated. As he did so, he did not think to look behind him. That was his second mistake. His first was to imagine that his uncle had not been followed. Still wheezing, Godfrey dismissed Pyke’s attempts to help him but managed to utter, ‘I’m sorry, I really am sorry.’ Godfrey could have been sorry for a gamut of reasons but instinctively Pyke knew what he was referring to. Godfrey thrust a pile of banknotes into Pyke’s outstretched hand but Pyke did not need his uncle to explain that ‘they’ had made him do it, in order to work out for himself what was happening. By this point, Pyke had already turned around and broken into a run, ignoring the shouts of the battalion of constables who had gathered to block his escape to the north side of the river. For ten or twenty yards, Pyke sprinted as a hunted fox would run, motivated only by fear and an instinct for self-preservation. But while he had expected, and even planned for, his route across the bridge to the north bank to be blocked, he had not for a moment imagined there might be constables amassed at its southern end.
Trying not to panic, he took a deep breath, while he considered his options. He looked at the massed ranks of constables, two or three thick across the bridge and gingerly closing in on him. Could he force his way through this human barricade? It did not appear likely. Nor did he think he would survive jumping from the bridge; if he did not drown, the icy waters of the Thames would kill him. Briefly, he cursed himself for not bringing some sort of weapon, a knife or a cudgel. Ahead and behind him, the two lines of constables edged warily towards him, as though they had cornered a wounded but dangerous animal. One of them yelled, ‘Give yourself up, Pyke. There’s no way through us.’ The man sounded as nervous as Pyke felt. Dizziness swept over him. There was only one option left. Closing his eyes, he launched himself at one of the advancing lines; as he did so, he unleashed a blood-curdling scream. Pyke did not know what he screamed but it emanated from the bottom of his stomach and propelled him forwards into the startled constables at such a speed that, for an instant, he thought he might just break through their ranks and earn his freedom.
Then he took a heavy blow to his head, and another to his upper body, and felt his legs buckle, and the next thing he remembered was a bearded man with cheese-and-onion breath hunched over him, shouting that he was being arrested for the murder of Lizzie Morgan, while two other men applied leg-irons and handcuffs.
As he lay there on the bridge, panting, he didn’t feel a thing: neither regret nor sadness nor loss, just a gaping emptiness that was one heartbeat away from death.
ELEVEN
The office at Great Marlborough Street magistrates’ court, once the parlour of a private house, was too small for its current function: hosting an examination into the evidence against Pyke in order to determine whether there was a case to be answered in a higher court. Because he had been accused