The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [59]
But Pyke’s righteous sense of injustice did not colour his every thought. Nor did he permit himself to indulge in fantasies of revenge. Nor even was he angered by the fact that he had been abandoned by his old acquaintances; he had heard nothing from Sir Richard Fox or indeed from Peel. Rather, his enforced solitude gave him the chance to sift through what had happened.
He knew he had not murdered Lizzie, which, in turn, meant someone else had killed her. The evidence also suggested that she had not been the victim of a random attack. Rather, her death had been planned in such a way as to implicate him; this much was clear from the arrival of the police constables, who, doubtless, had expected to find Lizzie’s corpse and had been told to arrest him. The complicity of others was also indicated by the likelihood that Pyke had been drugged. Although he had taken a few drops of laudanum in his gin, the dose was nothing like what would have been needed to knock him out.
This suggested to Pyke that Brownlow Vines had been mixed up in the business of administering the laudanum or, at least, in distracting Pyke so he did not notice its aftertaste. But Vines had not acted alone. That night he had acknowledged someone behind the bar. At the time, Pyke had thought only of his pathetic attempts to flirt with Lizzie, but what if he had also signalled to one of the other servers? To Maggie perhaps, who had been called as a witness for the prosecution and who had perhaps administered the dose because she had been paid to do so?
But neither Vines nor Maggie had been acting on their own impulses. Neither had ever much cared for Pyke, but the idea they might seek to damage him and kill Lizzie for their own advancement seemed preposterous. Vines’s involvement, in particular, implicated other parties. Sir Richard’s long-time assistant was no killer. He did not have the stomach for it, and Pyke doubted it had been Vines who had delivered the fatal blows to Lizzie. Nonetheless, Vines was not the kind of man to offer his assistance unless there was some gain to be made. This meant Vines had cut some kind of deal with a figure who, in turn, had the power to mobilise a significant number of constables and watchmen. Only Peel himself seemed capable of such a task. And Peel could certainly offer Vines what he seemed to want.
This line of thought was bolstered by his instinctive belief that the decision to murder Lizzie and frame him had been taken as a result of his meeting with Tilling and his casual reference to the name Davy Magennis and his stated theory that Magennis, who until recently had served in the very Royal Irish Constabulary Peel had established, was the St Giles murderer. It was of course possible that he had misinterpreted Tilling’s discomfort and that someone entirely different had been responsible for Lizzie’s death but, instinctively, he felt this not to be the case. All of which posed a larger and much more serious question: if Fitzroy Tilling was somehow implicated in Lizzie’s death, did it mean he had been acting on the orders of the Home Secretary?
Pyke had no answer to such a question, but still believed that Peel was his only chance of winning freedom.
Above all, Lizzie’s brutal murder filled him with a sense of sadness, outrage and guilt. Pyke had known her for eight years, and she had lived with him in the gin palace for three. His ardour might have cooled in recent years but he had not stopped admiring her: her toughness, her honesty, her blunt manner. In his own time, he would try to come to terms with her murder, and when the shock had abated, and he had avenged her death, he would face up to his grief, but in the immediate moment he knew such sentiments were beyond him.
‘Well, this isn’t too bad. Not too bad at all. In fact, it’s rather comfortable.’ Godfrey’s cheeks were the colour of ripe beetroots, perhaps because