But Fox was not about to relinquish his responsibility without a struggle and had already questioned Goddard and Townsend about what they had learned of the victims from any of the residents who lodged with Miss Clamp.
Pyke asked about the missing cousin.
Fox returned to his chair and sat down. ‘A neighbour, Mrs Jackman, who shared one of the upper-floor rooms, was on speaking terms with the deceased. She informed Goddard that she didn’t know whether the young girl who shared their room was Clare’s cousin or not, but she provided him with a name and a description. Mary Johnson. No more than twenty years old, attractive but frail, with brown hair, a thin face and freckles. The neighbour chatted to her once. The girl had an Irish brogue. She told Mrs Jackman that she worked in a nearby factory as a seamstress, but Mrs Jackman said to Goddard that she often saw her dressed in expensive clothes, dresses made of satin and silk, and that she doubted Johnson would have been able to afford such items on what she earned as a seamstress.’ He looked up at Pyke, pleased with himself.
‘You’re saying that she was not a seamstress at all,’ Pyke said.
‘Perhaps.’
‘A pretty young girl with expensive clothes.’
‘It means one of two things, doesn’t it?’
Pyke nodded without much enthusiasm. ‘That she had a suitor with money or she worked as a prostitute.’
‘It’s a start, isn’t it?’ Fox said, seeing his reaction. ‘We have a name, a description and perhaps also know how she earned her money.’
Pyke gave him a hard stare. ‘Even if that was the case, do you have any idea how many prostitutes there are in this city?’
The task of locating a young Irish girl who may have been whoring for money was not quite as daunting as it sounded, but it was not too far from finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. Pyke could rule out having to look too far from St Giles and the community in which she lived. Prostitution was rife across the entire city - from the taverns of the Ratcliffe highway to the fashionable assembly rooms of Haymarket - and theoretically Mary Johnson could have travelled to any part of it to ply her trade. But Pyke believed it was more likely she would have done so somewhere in or close to St Giles. This only helped slightly, for St Giles, since it bordered on the theatres of Drury Lane and taverns, hotels and private clubs of Covent Garden, contained the largest number of brothels and the highest concentration of prostitutes anywhere in the city.
Pyke knew that the image of a prostitute in respectable circles - a foul-mouthed tart with painted lips and false hair who called herself Sal the Siren or Anytime Annie - applied to just a fraction of them. Women from a variety of social backgrounds came to prostitution for a myriad of different reasons: to avoid destitution, to supplement a low income, to escape the shame of pregnancy or a broken engagement, to find a husband, to pay off a debt, or to run away from family.
Pyke was not looking for a type of woman. He was looking for a particular woman and it paid to know the difference.
As with all professions, there was an established hierarchy. At the top were the courtesans, who worked in the most fashionable areas and who solicited only wealthy gentlemen, and women who were kept in their own apartment by a single suitor. Below them were the board lodgers who worked and lived in brothels and paid a proportion of what they earned to a madam. Below them were those who hung about the lodging houses and taverns of the rookeries, and the dollymops who had other jobs as maids or cleaners and worked only to supplement their meagre income. At the bottom of the pile were the streetwalkers. Pyke doubted that Mary Johnson was anywhere near the top of that hierarchy. Nor did it seem likely that she worked full-time in a brothel or lodging house since she appeared to board with her cousin. This meant that either she worked on a casual basis, picking up men in taverns and coffee shops, or she walked the streets. And Pyke did not see her as a streetwalker; according to the neighbour, her clothes were too refined.
Though he had a full description and a name, his task remained a prodigious one: there were hundreds of young, pretty, dark-haired girls who picked up men in the taverns of the area.
But Pyke had two things going for him: first and most obviously it stood to reason that somebody knew Mary Johnson or knew of her and might know where he could hope to find her. More importantly, however, there was also the fact that Pyke had money and was prepared to pay generously for any information that might lead him to the girl.
Even though Pyke was aware of how badly he wanted to find and talk to Mary Johnson, it struck him as odd that he was willing to fund the exercise from his own pocket and had no chance of turning a profit on it. As he walked along Bow Street towards Long Acre and stared upwards at the vast canopy of frozen blue sky that stretched far beyond the limits of the city, he felt light-headed, as though the recklessness of his decision meant that he no longer understood himself as well as he once had.
After noon the temperature started to plummet, so that by the time dusk arrived the usually bustling streets of the capital were practically deserted. The conditions had driven even the hardy porters, cabmen and dung collectors indoors. It was so inhospitable that the river itself was in danger of freezing. Though it was only early afternoon, it also meant that the taverns and coffee houses were bursting with custom. In these establishments, Pyke found a cavorting mass of stinking bodies.
Even Pyke, who was used to the harshness of the city, was weary from his exertions, from walking its unforgiving streets and smelling its noxious smells: the grim odours of its wet pavements, the stench of the river at low tide, the tanneries where human excrement was used as an astringent, and the ubiquitous smells of horse dung, animal sweat, fried meat, rotten fruit and discarded herring bones.
Over lunch purchased from a street vendor, a hot meat pie dripping with warm gravy, he had watched as two men, one dressed as a Protestant minister, staged a ‘conversion’ play for the unwary crowd. The minister said a few prayers and sang a hymn and the other man rose up and started to spit on some rosary beads and an effigy of the Pope. Apart from Pyke, everyone in the crowd applauded wildly. The minister passed round a collection plate. Once the crowd had dispersed, the two men tipped the coins into one of their hats and disappeared into a nearby tavern.
During the day, Pyke visited countless taverns and brothels, asking for Mary Johnson and spreading the news about the reward money. He had narrowly avoided being attacked with a broken glass in the Black Horse on Tottenham Court Road and had come close to breaking the neck of a young thief who had tried to pick his pocket outside a brothel on the corner of Church Street and Lawrence Street in the heart of the rookery.
He had also suffered the stares of ordinary men and women in most of the taverns that he had visited. These were his people and yet they were as strange to him as a South Sea islander or an African pygmy.
The Rose tavern on Rose Street in Covent Garden had, during the last years of the previous century, hosted posture molls who stripped naked while standing on overturned crates. These activities still happened, though on a more informal basis, but the tavern’s main business was straight-down-the-line prostitution. Upstairs, the madam, Polly Masters, an ugly woman with no front teeth and thick black hair sprouting from her bulbous nose, greeted Pyke with measured enthusiasm.
‘The word’s already got out that you’re willing to pay twenty pounds to anyone who can deliver this Paddy lass, Mary Johnson.’
‘Do you know her?’
As she shrugged, she afforded Pyke a glimpse of her cleavage. ‘Maybe.’
Pyke paid no attention to it. ‘Did she work here?’ ‘Might have done, I couldn’t rightly say.’
‘Twenty pounds is a lot of money, Polly.’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’ She adjusted her dress to conceal her bosoms. ‘A few of my gals could earn as much in, say, a month.’
‘Was Mary Johnson one of them?’
She met his stare. ‘Could’ve been but she was a flighty one, that one. Her ’eart was never in it. Sweet lass, pretty, popular with the gen’lemen.’
Pyke asked Polly to describe Mary and she gave him a description that fitted with the one they had been given by Mary’s neighbour. Polly shrugged. ‘Haven’t seen her for a while, I’m afraid.’
‘Do you know where I might find her?’
