It was a nauseating spectacle, Vines’s attempt to flirt with Lizzie while one of the other barmaids poured two mugs of stout and placed them on the counter before him. Vines seemed pleased with himself, as though his efforts revealed his common touch. Lizzie had acted along, laughing at Vines’s efforts at humour. She had even appeared to be flattered.
‘Cheers,’ Vines said, lifting up his mug.
‘You’re not from this world, are you, Vines?’
‘Maybe not, but I can see its earthy appeals,’ Vines said, making a point of winking at Pyke.
‘In a place like this, you so much as look at someone else’s woman, you’re a dead man.’
The colour drained from Vines’s face. He glanced across at Lizzie and then around the room, to see whether anyone had noticed.
‘Lizzie,’ Pyke called out.
After serving another customer, she came to join them. Pyke reached over the counter and kissed her on the mouth. It was an ugly, sloppy gesture, made worse by the fact that Lizzie bridled at his feigned attempt at intimacy, doubtless realising she was being used. Still, it elicited the reaction Pyke had wanted. Vines stared at them aghast, though Pyke didn’t know whether he was appalled by the show of affection or by what it suggested about Pyke’s choice of woman.
‘Don’t pretend this is a social visit, Vines,’ Pyke said, once Lizzie had left them. ‘What do you want?’
Vines was ambitious but stupid. Usually he had nothing but contempt for Pyke, but now he was pretending to be his friend. Pyke wondered whether Vines really believed he was taken in by his false show of bonhomie.
‘Straight to the point, eh?’ Vines looked at him with apprehension. ‘I wanted to talk to you, away from the eyes and ears of Bow Street, about Sir Richard.’
‘What about Sir Richard?’
They both took a long drink.
This time Vines whispered, ‘I’m worried about him, Pyke. I think he’s losing his mind.’ He wiped froth from his mouth with his sleeve. ‘Have you noticed the way he’s been acting of late?’
‘Acting?’ Pyke raised his eyebrows. He’d noticed Fox’s erratic behaviour but didn’t say anything.
‘The mood swings, the ecstatic highs, the lows.’
‘It must be a hard business, watching everything that you’ve worked to build threatened by the people you most trust.’
Vines refused to meet his stare. ‘Quite so, but he’s blind to the realities of the situation, Pyke. This new police force is going to happen, whether he likes it or not. I know it. You know it. Why can’t he see it? Sometimes progress is inevitable.’
‘Depends what you mean by progress.’
‘Many people would call a new, uniformed, city-wide police force progress.’
‘And you?’
Vines smiled unconvincingly. ‘My admittedly humble task is to serve, and not to make difficult decisions.’
Pyke rubbed his eyes and tried to focus. He felt light-headed, drunker than he should, even though he had imbibed only three gins and a mug of stout. Usually he could consume a bottle of gin and still shoot a man between the eyes at twenty paces.
Through blurry eyes, he stared at Vines and tried to work out what the man wanted. Vines had not, as yet, mentioned the murders, and did not seem to want to know about the investigation. All of which suggested that he had not been dispatched to Pyke’s gin palace by Peel or Tilling.
Vines ordered another round of drinks and insisted on paying for them himself.
Emboldened by the alcohol, Pyke asked Vines whether he’d struck a deal with Peel or whether Peel had offered him a role in the new police force. They both took a drink.
‘Is that what you think?’ Vines looked at him, shaking his head.
Pyke didn’t like being this drunk. He didn’t feel particularly in control of the situation.
‘Sir Richard thinks you’re the magistrate that Peel is employing to preside over Hume’s investigation.’
‘Really?’ Vines said, sounding more amused than perturbed. ‘And that’s why you think he’s been acting strangely around me?’
Pyke felt his vision blur and closed his eyes, trying to revive himself. The room started to spin around him. He tried to respond but words failed him. Vines placed his hand on Pyke’s shoulder and asked whether he was all right.
‘I’m fine.’ Pyke opened his eyes and smiled.
But Pyke was not fine. He was drunk: drunker than he had been in as long as he could remember. So drunk, all of a sudden, that he could barely sit up straight, let alone speak. The room became a jumble of noise and motion. He felt his mouth dry up, his head spin. He felt himself fall, and the next moment he was on the floor, lying in the sawdust, not knowing and caring how he had got there. It was a peculiar feeling, mellow and soothing in its own way, as though he had been deposited in his own soft cocoon. Hearing someone call Lizzie’s name, he recognised her voice. ‘Pyke, Pyke? ’ He wanted to smile, and suddenly it felt as though he were afloat. Above all, he wanted to be left alone, but the voices persisted. Someone lifted him up, two people perhaps. He heard other voices. Vines, proposing, ‘Take him to the bedroom.’ They dragged him upstairs. His whole body felt limp. He did not put up a struggle but rather felt himself falling. Everything went black.
The first thing Pyke heard when he finally awoke from his feverish dreams was the squeals and grunts of petrified livestock being driven through the narrow streets outside the gin palace. Trying to open his eyes, he realised that the effort required to do so was beyond him. His mouth tasted stale and arid. He made another attempt to move but a sharp pain in his head wouldn’t allow it. Remaining still, he took a deep breath and opened his eyes. Weak shafts of morning light pierced the thin muslin curtains. He stared up at the unfamiliar ceiling and soon realised he was not in his own bed. His eyes opened a little more and he fought the sudden pain that streaked across his forehead. Moving his head a fraction to the left, he recognised Lizzie’s wallpaper, her dressing table.
Gently, Pyke turned a little farther to his side and saw Lizzie’s sleeping form. Though Lizzie’s back was turned to him, from where he was positioned her hair looked oddly dishevelled.
Pyke reached out and touched the back of her neck. As he did so, he tried to remember the last time they had woken up in the same bed.
Moving his body for the first time, something squelched beneath him. He lifted his head from the pillow, felt something damp against the back of his neck and had to fight off a wave of revulsion. His initial reaction was that he had pissed himself. His self-disgust was visceral. More awake now, though not yet clear-headed, it took him a moment to work out that his back, his arms, his legs and his head were all covered in something wet and sticky.
With a sudden movement, he sat upright, driven by a mixture of curiosity and unease. He was still fully clothed and his clothes were covered in the same moist liquid; the smell was sweet and yet overpowering.
Sitting upright and fighting off the dizziness, Pyke ignored the icy temperature, pulled back the blanket and almost fainted. The bed was awash with blood, as though someone had slaughtered a cow. At first, Pyke supposed that he must be cut; that he was delirious from the loss of blood. But he did not feel any pain, at least not apart from the pounding headache which was quickly ebbing away under the onslaught of panic. Rousing himself from the bed, he began to check himself, his back, his clothes, all of them dripping with fresh blood. And it was everywhere: on the bed, the sheets, the blanket, the floor, his clothes, his hands, his fingers, his toes, his genitals, and in his eyes, ears, nose, lips, hair and teeth.
Lizzie, though, was not moving, and it finally struck him what had happened, or at least that the blood was not his own.
Pyke stripped the blanket from her motionless body.
Wearing the dress he had bought her, she was lying half on her back, half on her side. There were two red- ringed stab wounds in the middle of her abdomen. Beneath her was a pool of her own blood. Quickly, he checked for a pulse but didn’t find one. Her body was cold, indicating that she had been dead for a number of hours.
Lizzie had also taken a blow to her head. Pyke fought back the urge to gag.
He stripped naked, pulled down the muslin curtain and wiped off the blood. The cream material quickly turned crimson. Leaving his soiled clothes in a heap, he ignored the freezing temperature and went downstairs to the bar and opened a fresh bottle of gin.
