‘I don’t guess you read about too much news from Ulster in your London newspapers, do you, Mr Pyke? This all happened last autumn. There’s a fellow, Jack Lawless, a journalist in Belfast, one of O’Connell’s lieutenants in Ulster. You heard of O’Connell?’ Pyke nodded. Mary continued, ‘And you probably know, us Catholics, we’re in the minority in Ulster. Well, last autumn, Lawless announces he’s going to raise a force in the south and enter Ulster, march from town to town holdin’ meetings and the like, raisin’ support for Catholic emancipation and collectin’ Catholic funds. So Lawless gathers up maybe eighty thousand men and crosses from County Monaghan into Ballybay, which is nearly all Presbyterian and full of about ten thousand Orangemen with pitchforks and scythes ready to defend their town. All of the army and police in the whole area rush to the town. At first, they manage to get Lawless to avoid Ballybay and travel via another route. But then the two sides come face to face on the Rockcorry road and all hell breaks loose. There’s a pitched battle and the police wade in, too. According to Stephen, in front of a thousand witnesses, Davy beats this Catholic fellow to within an inch of his life. Normally that kind of behaviour would go unpunished but there were witnesses. After that, there wasn’t nothing that anyone could do for him, even if his da was a well-respected preacher. Stephen just said his brother had dropped out of sight. No one knew what happened to him.’
‘He didn’t go home?’
‘Not as far as Stephen reckoned.’ Mary sat up a little and stretched her arms. ‘Though his family hold on to much hate, they still think of themselves as respectable folk, friends in the right places. Those friends like their violence to be carried out under the cover of darkness, not in full sight of a thousand other men.’
Pyke liked her analysis. ‘And that’s how you think Davy got the police job in the first place? Because his father had friends in high places?’
‘That’s what Stephen reckoned. Reckoned the da was friends with this fella, John Arnold, owns the biggest mill in Belfast, both of ’em up to their necks in Orange business.’
‘I take it you can’t remember any other names. Did Stephen ever mention specific names?’
Mary frowned. ‘What kind of names?’
‘For a start, the man who came calling to the home, recruited Davy into the police in the first place.’
‘Not that I can remember.’ She winced a little. ‘I’m sorry . . .’
‘I have to ask, Mary. Did you see any of what happened?’
‘You mean to Stephen and Clare and the wee baby?’ She was shaking, perhaps not just from the cold.
Pyke nodded.
A tear escaped from Mary’s eye and rolled down her cheek. ‘It was a small room. I didn’t always stay there. I didn’t like to get in their way and in the last month I had a room elsewhere . . .’
She did not want to elaborate and he decided not to push her. ‘You didn’t see anything, then?’
‘No,’ she whispered, staring down at the ground. ‘I just heard about it later. I heard about it and panicked. I collected up a few things and hid out with Gerry in his room but even there I didn’t feel too safe. I knew someone would want to talk to me but I didn’t want him to find out. Davy. Gerry knows a man who works on this farm in the spring and summer. We’ve been here a few days now. It’s brutal cold, too.’ She wiped her eyes. ‘In the name of Jesus, it was just a baby. Would you think it was even possible?’ She was crying now. Gerry sat down next to her, trying to offer comfort.
Pyke wondered whether Mary was telling him the truth. There was no doubt she was terrified. But was she keeping something from him?
‘Are you certain there’s nothing else you can tell me?’
This time she looked away. Gerry put a protective arm around her shoulder and glared at him.
He waited for a while before saying, ‘Do you think Davy killed them? Was he capable of doing something like that?’
‘Do I think he was capable of it?’ Mary said, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of Pyke’s coat. ‘I wouldn’t imagine anyone was capable of doing something like that.’
‘But you do believe he killed them?’
Mary shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Honestly I don’t.’
‘But it’s possible that he did it?’
Her stare was devoid of emotion. ‘I fancy it is. The longer you live, the more you realise that anything’s possible. Even something as terrible as what happened.’
Once Pyke had deposited a bedraggled Mary Johnson and a grateful Gerry in a guest house in Isleworth, paid for a week’s accommodation and warned them not to go anywhere or talk to anyone without his consent, he told Gaines to return him to Bow Street. As he sat in the carriage on the journey back to the city, Pyke considered what Mary had told him and thought about the implications for his own investigation.
He was close, now, to finding the real killer, not the unfortunate lunatic who was currently being held by Hume. For a lot of reasons, Davy Magennis seemed to be the likely candidate. From the start, Pyke had believed that whoever had murdered Stephen, Clare and the baby had known his victims. Nothing about the scene suggested a random attack. It had been premeditated and, Pyke had felt all along, motivated by hate. And now, according to Mary, Davy Magennis had been sighted in London: Davy Magennis, who was uneducated, physically strong and driven by hate; a man who had perhaps lost sight of familial links to his brother.
Mary Johnson was intelligent and credible. Pyke believed everything she had told him.
Pyke was now certain that Charles Hume and his investigative team had arrested and charged the wrong man. But he didn’t necessarily believe that Hume was corrupt. Pressure for a quick arrest had, no doubt, been forthcoming from Peel and charging an escaped Bedlamite was politically expedient. So how might Hume, or for that matter Peel, react to Pyke’s news? It was hard to judge. Or rather Peel was hard to judge. Hume would reject his claim outright and would threaten Pyke, should he continue with his own investigation. Peel, though, would have to be sensitive to the political implications associated with convicting and, doubtless, killing the wrong man. For Peel knew about Pyke’s relationship with Fox and would be only too aware that Fox continued to wield enough political clout to cause him considerable embarrassment.
Peel could not afford to ignore his claims.
Pyke thought about taking his discoveries directly to Fox but he was concerned that Sir Richard simply wanted to use the investigation as a stick to beat the government with. Fox didn’t care about the dead. Nor did Peel or Hume. But out of all of them, Peel was the one who could assist or damage Pyke’s cause and, for this reason, Pyke made up his mind to present his findings, in the first instance, to the Home Secretary, and give him the chance to pull Hume into line.
Pyke leaned out of the window of the carriage and shouted at Gaines, the driver, to take him directly to Whitehall. Outside, the branches of the trees were just beginning to thaw and the first signs of green were starting to show themselves. As he blew into his cupped hands to keep them warm, Pyke thought about the dead baby, more than anything irritated that it continued to unsettle him in a way he did not understand.
Pyke knew it would be hard to secure an audience with Peel himself, at least in the first instance. Peel, after all, had instructed him to deal either with Hume or Fitzroy Tilling.
Still, he did not imagine it would be quite so difficult to convince the guards outside the Home Office to even ask inside the building for Tilling. None of them seemed to know who Tilling was. Pyke explained that he was Peel’s private secretary and offered them a brief description. He introduced himself as a Bow Street Runner working at the behest of the Home Secretary himself. He said he had urgent business to share with Peel. He said they would have to shoulder the responsibility, should his news fail to reach Peel, via Tilling. It was only when he made it clear that it was a matter of the utmost importance to the security of the state that they were provoked into action.
One of the guards said he would go and make some enquiries. The other, meanwhile, led Pyke into a dingy antechamber, set off the building’s main entrance hall.
Pyke waited for almost two hours for Tilling to rescue him from the stares of the two guards. The burly man greeted Pyke without warmth and led him in silence through the main hall, past the same cantilevered staircase he had seen previously on his visit to Peel’s offices and down a flight of stairs, to a room in the basement of the building. It was furnished with two chairs and a wooden table. A gas lamp hissed quietly in the corner of the room.
Tilling told Pyke he could spare him ten minutes. He wore a well-cut jacket over a silk neck stocking and styled dark trousers. Though he possessed neither beard nor moustache, his sideburns were thick and as dark as
