The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [87]
‘I’ve never met the man.’
‘But you know where he might be hiding.’
‘I know he’s got family in the town. That’s all.’ Arnold seemed irritated enough to be telling the truth.
‘Family? Where.’
‘A house on Sandy Row.’ Arnold let out a heavy sigh.
‘You know, if you shoot me, they’ll send the whole garrison after you.’
‘Except they won’t know where I’ve gone.’ Pyke thought about it for a moment. ‘And if I let you live, you’ll send a warning to Andrew Magennis in Loughgall. Perhaps arrange for an ambush along the way.’
Pyke heard footsteps and saw the gate open. He felt something brush against his boot, heard a yap. The little dog brushed against his leg and wagged its tail.
‘No one else knows who I am, do they?’
Arnold didn’t speak but, for the first time, Pyke sensed his discomfort. He was a canny man and understood the precarious nature of his own situation: the garrison would be looking for a man called Hawkes, not Pyke.
‘That was a mistake, telling me you knew who I was.’ Arnold seemed to shrink before him. His eyes darkened with fear.
That settled it: Pyke knew what he had to do.
Megan appeared, silhouetted against the frame of the gate. The dog was licking his boot. Pyke told her to wait for him at the far end of the alleyway. She said they had to move; that all the streets were crawling with armed vigilantes. Pyke heard a shout at the other end of the alleyway. He decided he could not wait any longer, so he raised the pistol and shot Arnold in the middle of his forehead. The blast was drowned by Megan’s scream.
SIXTEEN
The first time it had happened, Pyke was not even certain whether he had killed the man or not. He had spotted him, a forger who had returned illegally from transportation, in a crowded pub in Clerkenwell and pursued him through labyrinthine back alleys and courtyards, across traffic-choked streets, through bustling warehouses and eventually up on to the roof of an abandoned lunatic asylum. Cornering the fugitive, Pyke had advanced slowly, hands in the air, to show that he was not carrying a weapon, and backed the terrified man towards the edge of the roof until he could go no farther. Afterwards, when it was finished and the man was dead, Pyke had not been able to tell, with any conviction, whether he had pushed the man or whether he had jumped, but in the end it did not seem to matter: the man was still dead. Later, he would become accomplished at constructing whatever moral justification his actions seemed to require, but in that moment, as he stared down from the roof of the building at that unmoving figure sprawled on the stone floor, Pyke had been struck both by the pointlessness of the man’s death and by his own culpability in it.
Pyke had no time to explain his actions to Megan, who was looking at him, her hands covering her mouth. Taking her hand, he pulled her into the yard and, from there, into the derelict house. Others had heard the blast, of course, and were converging on where they thought it had come from. Safely inside the house, he took Megan in his hands and shook her, to stop her from wailing. ‘I didn’t plan to kill him, but in the end I didn’t have a choice. I need you to understand. I also need your help. Do you live with your family?’
At his feet, the little dog was panting and wagging its runty tail. He reached down and patted the dog on its head.
‘Megan?’ He shook her shoulders harder this time.
‘I got my own room,’ she said, finally.
‘Whereabouts.’
‘The Pound.’
‘Is it far?’
‘Eh?’ She seemed distant, still in shock.
‘Megan. Is it far?’
He heard more voices, outside in the back alleyway. Pyke knew it was only a matter of time before they were discovered. They had to find a better place to hide. Through the broken windows at the front of the house, he looked out on to the main square. In the darkness, it made for a miserable view. There were four or five taverns, in addition to the Royal, which overlooked the square, and