The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [97]
It’s been boarded up. No one’s living there.’
‘Wha’s that got to do wi’ me?’
‘I asked in the town. No one wanted to talk to me about him.’
‘Folk in this part of the world don’t much care for loose talk with strangers.’
‘I’m not a stranger to you.’
Andrew Magennis shrugged.
Pyke nodded. He had expected to be stonewalled. ‘Davy’s dead. He cut his own throat. They buried him in an unmarked grave outside a church in Mullabrack.’
This was sufficient to break the old man’s resolve. ‘The big lad’s dead?’ His lip quivered. ‘My Davy?’ Tears welled up behind his glassy stare.
‘The man who Davy went to work for . . .’
A solitary tear rolled down the old man’s face.
‘Let me assure you of one thing,’ Pyke continued. ‘He was no friend to Davy.’
Beaten now, the old man just nodded. His eyes were dark with exhaustion, his hair matted with sweat.
‘You met him, didn’t you?’
‘Once, about two years back,’ Magennis said, slowly. ‘I paid Davy a visit, when he was still workin’ there.’
Pyke took his time. ‘I just need you to answer one question for me.’
‘Then you’ll leave us to grieve?’ The old man stared at him through bloodshot eyes.
‘Did this man have a brown mole on his chin?’
Magennis seemed momentarily nonplussed.
‘Did he have a large brown mole on his chin?’
‘Jimmy Swift,’ Magennis said, nodding his head. ‘How did ye know?’
Pyke closed his eyes. It was as though an anvil had fallen on his skull from a great height. He felt sickened. How did he know? God, the real question was: how could he have been so blind?
PART III
London, England SEPTEMBER 1829
EIGHTEEN
It started when a curmudgeonly black bear, with fur shaved from its head to make it appear more human, broke free from its shackles outside the Old Cock tavern in Holborn. Perhaps wanting retribution for years of humiliation and ill-treatment, the bear lumbered up the creaking staircase at the back of the building and forced its way into the crowded upper room where red-faced market vendors were screaming their support for a seven-foot man wearing full military uniform to resemble the duke of Wellington. The outfit would have been too small on a man half his size. The giant had placed a dwarf, dressed as Napoleon, in a headlock, and was squeezing his neck with such intensity that the little man’s eyeballs seemed as though they might pop out of their sockets.
Pyke could not hear the dwarf’s chokes over the delighted cheers of the crowd, at least eight deep around every side of the gas-lit ring. That was until the bewildered bear paused briefly in the doorway to the upper room and surveyed the surroundings. It would have been a familiar sight: the tavern owner, Ned Villums, put the beast to work twice a week in that same ring, performing a version of Little Red Riding Hood, taking the part of the wolf. The crowd did not pay half a shilling each to watch the bear growl his few lines, though. They came for the ratting, bare-knuckle fights or a bout of wrestling. The bear sniffed the fetid air, saturated with the combined stench of cheap gin and unwashed clothes. The crowd gathered on the bear’s side of the room visibly parted and shrank into the room’s darker recesses, affording the bear a clear view of the ring.
Without giving it a second thought, the bear shuffled on all fours, ignoring the silent and evidently petrified crowd, and hauled itself over the ring’s waist-high wooden wall, with more aplomb than might have been expected from a beast that weighed fifty stone. By that time, the giant’s grip around the dwarf’s neck had slackened enough for some of the dwarf’s colour to return to his cheeks. For a few seconds, the bear and the giant wrestler stood rooted to their positions, no more than ten feet apart, each silently contemplating the other. Later, Pyke was not sure how it had started: whether the bear had attacked without provocation, or someone from the audience had thrown an object at the animal, but the result was the same. Ignoring the dwarf, who was slumped on the ground gulping for air, the bear launched itself