The Last Days (23 page)

Outside, the skies were beginning to lighten. He was due to hang in less than two hours.

‘If I am honest, I am also curious about your motives for sharing this information with me, since there is nothing I can offer you in return.’

Pyke nodded, as though he had been expecting this response. ‘But you are no supporter of the Home Secretary, either.’

Hunt licked his lips. ‘And you feel this information might be damaging to his prospects, eh?’

‘Perhaps even more than damaging,’ Pyke said, nodding.

‘Is that so?’ Hunt seemed both pained and excited by such an idea. ‘You think it might even force Peel’s resignation?’

‘It might.’

‘That’s a grave assertion.’ He seemed to be weighing up what he might gain from such a situation. ‘But how can I attest to the information’s authenticity?’

‘Its authenticity would be legitimised by the reaction of the Home Secretary.’ Pyke freed his handcuffs.

‘I see,’ the governor said, nodding carefully. ‘Perhaps you might share this information with me now?’

Pyke looked around at the closed door and whispered, ‘Are you certain that no one will be listening?’

‘The turnkeys won’t be interested in our conversation.’

‘But the information is only valuable if it is wielded carefully and by the right people,’ Pyke said carefully.

‘So what do you suggest?’

‘Since I cannot write while shackled,’ Pyke said, holding up his handcuffs, ‘perhaps I might venture a little closer, so that I can be sure we’re not overheard.’

The governor considered his proposal. ‘Your hands will remain shackled. But I can see no reason why you might not come closer, so long as you maintain a respectful distance.’

Pyke heaved himself up off the chair and shuffled around Hunt’s desk in his leg-irons and advanced a few paces towards the governor, until the man held up his hand and said, ‘That’s far enough.’ It was near enough too. Pyke let the metal handcuffs slip from his wrists and managed to catch them before they struck the floor by clutching the chain. In the same motion, he swung the chain upwards and directed the shackles at the governor’s uncomprehending face. The iron cuffs struck Hunt squarely on the head and he slumped forward on to the desk. Preparing himself for an invasion of turnkeys alerted by the noise, Pyke turned to face the door. Silently he counted to ten. No one appeared. He exhaled slightly and used the key to release his leg-irons.

The governor’s quarters occupied a separate building at the rear of the prison, set back from the main wards. The governor’s office, located on the second floor, looked down over the enclosed press yard which separated the prison from the condemned block. Pyke tried to open the window behind the governor’s desk; to his surprise, it was unlocked. Somehow, Emily had come through for him. He pulled up the sash and looked out into the misty dawn. Below was a sheer drop of fifty feet down to the yard. If he jumped, Pyke knew he would break both his legs, and would still have to scale a high wall protected by two rows of iron spikes in order to make it out of the prison. Better to climb upwards, on to the roof, if that were possible, and from there try to drop down on to the brick wall that ran the entire length of the press yard. The problem was that the wall was clearly visible from the governor’s office. Even if he made it that far, Pyke would certainly be seen by one of the turnkeys.

He needed an alternative plan.

On the governor’s desk he found a letter opener in the shape of a dagger. Taking the implement in his hand, and without giving it another thought, he thrust the sharp end into Hunt’s neck and felt the metal slice through sinew and muscle. He had to step back so the blood that spilled from the wound did not cover his hands and feet.

 

Moments later, the turnkeys burst into the room. Before them they saw the governor’s motionless body, slumped on his desk, surrounded by a thick pool of his own blood. The man’s head, as usual, was hidden under his black hat. Behind him, the window was open. Pyke was nowhere to be seen. When one of the turnkeys raced to the window and looked down into the yard beneath him, he saw what he thought to be Pyke’s unmoving body, splattered against the hard ground.

One of the turnkeys shouted, ‘Prisoner escaped.’

The other, by the window, yelled, ‘Prisoner fallen. Get someone down there. He looks to be dead.’

Another said, ‘How in God’s name did he do it? We searched him, didn’t we?’

Still another said, ‘I take it the governor’s dead.’

‘I ain’t touching him.’

‘Fetch a doctor.’

Another voice. ‘Get the Ordinary, not a doctor. Too late for that.’

‘Come on. Let’s see whether Pyke’s dead.’

Moments later, alone in the governor’s office, Pyke removed the hat from his head and used it to wipe the governor’s blood from his face and neck. He climbed out on to the narrow window ledge. Holding on to the stone arch that framed the window, he pulled himself up on to the building’s roof and lay there for a moment, staring up into the dawn skies. In the distance, he could hear the mass of people beginning to gather outside the prison to witness a hanging that would not now take place. Then he was up on his feet and scurrying across the sloping roof. Then he lowered himself on to the wall and traversed the press yard.

Far below, he could see the outline of the governor’s body, and he moved as quickly along the wall as its narrow width would allow. At the end of the wall, he dropped down into the garden of the Royal College of Physicians, as the first of the turnkeys reached the governor’s body.

The last thing Pyke heard the man say was, ‘It’s not him. It isn’t bleedin’ him.’ Then he shouted, ‘Prisoner escaped.’

Belfast, Ireland
JULY 1829

FOURTEEN

P
yke had no idea what type of dog it was, except that it was not a pure-bred. It possessed an unkempt coat and a deformed ear, and hauled itself along on three stubby legs, the fourth being entirely lame. It was no larger than a moderate-sized ferret, and was about as lovable, but for a reason Pyke could not explain the animal had developed a fierce loyalty to him in the short time since he had disembarked from the steamship. So much so that even when he retired to his room for the night, the dog would still be waiting for him the following morning. Finding this attachment irritating rather than endearing, Pyke had tried to shoo the dog away, to no avail. It did not seem to want his affection in any explicit manner, and Pyke was far too sensible to try to pet it. Rather, it simply followed him wherever he went in the town, happily trotting behind him on its three good legs. After a day or so of this, and when a firm kick to the dog’s groin had not managed to drive it away, Pyke had relented a little and deigned to address the animal merely as ‘dog’. It seemed content with the name.

The inn, if it could be called that, jostled for attention alongside the taverns, music halls and spirit shops of North Queen Street. The area also housed the town’s main infantry barracks, which perhaps explained the large number of brothels located in the immediate vicinity. In fact, it had taken Pyke a few hours to work out that his own place of residence offered more than simply room and board. It was the kind of place in which you could die and not be discovered for days. For one thing, there was the odour: the corridors were not just damp and musty but smelt of something riper and more obscene, as though human flesh in an adjacent room had turned gangrenous. For another thing, he never actually saw any guests. He heard them, though; heard them beg for sexual relief through the paper-thin walls of his room, which was no bigger than a coffin and much less hospitable. If he’d had the money, he would have stayed in one of the hotels overlooking the Linen Hall, but his funds - effectively what he had retrieved from Godfrey’s apartment in London - were running perilously low. Such a dilemma, unfortunately, necessitated prudence.

Pyke’s search for Davy Magennis had led him to Ireland - he had been reliably informed that Magennis had long since fled London - but in Belfast he felt both anonymous and hopelessly visible. He sensed acutely the fact of being a stranger in a town where people seemed to be warily accustomed to each others’ faces. The previous day, Pyke had gone out with the intention of asking for Davy Magennis in the public houses and terraces of Brown’s Square, but had soon realised the futility and, indeed, the danger of such a mission. It was not that the pubs were any more menacing than those in St Giles in London, or that the district was any poorer, though it probably was. It was simply that, in Belfast, his reputation counted for nothing, and when he had walked into one particular pub, the Boot and Crown on the north side of Smithfield Square, the hostile silence he had provoked and the collection of brickbats, swords and knives hanging up on the wall behind the counter had convinced him of the need for a subtler approach.

On his first morning in the town, Pyke was approached by a scruffy adolescent. ‘How’ye,’ the lad said, nervously pushing past the dog. ‘You here for the celebrations, mister?’

The dog growled and bared its teeth. The lad retreated a little.

‘The celebrations?’ Pyke said, uncomprehendingly, even though he had been asked the same question by others.

‘You know, the parades.’

Pyke stared at him blankly. ‘What parades?’

‘To celebrate King Billy’s victory.’ The lad sounded breathless with excitement. ‘You know, over the papists at the Boyne.’

‘Oh, you mean the Dutchman’s victory over the French king a hundred and fifty years ago?’

‘Eh?’ the lad said, stepping warily round the dog this time. ‘There’s gonna be a show of strength this year, so there is, whatever the lodge masters reckon. Ordinary Orange folk want to show nothing’s changed, despite the Catholics gettin’ emaciated.’

Pyke smiled, pushing the dog gently towards the lad. ‘Aren’t they eating enough, then?’

‘Eh?’ The lad seemed both confused by Pyke and intimidated by the small dog.

To its credit, the dog seemed to know what was expected of it and nipped at the boy’s leg. The boy swore and said, ‘Would ye away,’ to the dog. The dog bit him harder, causing him to yowl with pain and fall to the ground clutching his ankle. Pyke heard himself say inadvertently, ‘Good dog.’ It wagged its runty tail even harder.

Pyke had been told that Belfast was a tidy, orderly town comprising stout, red-bricked edifices and broad, straight streets: a clean-living, industrious place, someone had said to him on the steamship, an Ulster-Liverpool, eminently preferable to Dublin’s effete grandeur. Another man had commented on its enviable setting: a pleasant location at the mouth of a beautiful bay ringed by soaring gorse-clad mountains. What Pyke had discovered, however, was a squalid, industrial town spoiled by unedifying warehouses and monstrous cotton and linen mills - gargantuan structures that policed the town’s skyline and belched plumes of black smoke through giant chimneys into overcast skies.

As in most industrial towns eager to show off their new-found wealth, there were a few buildings, such as the White Linen Hall on Donegall Square, which were palatable enough. There was also a smattering of attractively attired people going about their daily business. But on the whole, Pyke quickly concluded, Belfast was a drab town, inhabited by unattractive creatures, made even worse by the fact that it had been built on a bog. Accordingly, sanitation was non-existent, and at high tide the seawater rose up into the town’s sewers and overflowed into the streets, turning them into noxious rivers of waste.

London faced similar problems, of course. But London had other attractions that tempered the bleakness. Here, everything seemed different, more depressing. For one thing, it was a fervently religious town; there were more meeting houses and churches than there were public houses. For another, the guttural accents, as much Scottish as Irish, reminded Pyke that, despite the Act of Union, he was in a foreign country. The green-clad mountains that ringed the town compounded this sense of difference, and while some may have regarded them with approval, Pyke found them oppressive.

From his less than desirable lodgings, it took him only five minutes to walk to the newly constructed mill on York Street. Pyke did not have to ask for directions. All he had to do was look upwards: it was possible to see the giant, six-floor edifice from most parts of the town. From the end of the street, the mill towered above the neighbouring houses, a sheer wall of red brick soaring vertically into the gloomy sky. There was something forbidding, even monstrous, about the building. Its giant chimney stack, its depressingly uniform symmetry and its long, angular windows reminded him of a prison. This impression was augmented both by the number of cripples in the immediate vicinity of the building - mostly women whose hands and feet had been deformed by operating the new machinery - and by his first impressions of the cavernous interior. Pyke wandered through the vast chamber and inspected the hundreds of thousands of whirring wheels, all connected to a giant steam engine, and feeding an army of individual machines. Slumped over each of these was a legion of women and children, some as young as ten, red-faced and blotchy from the stifling humidity. Their dull stares told of the deadening nature of the work.