‘But you didn’t just flee the scene, did you?’
Fox looked up at him and sniffed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You watched Lizzie die. You waited until she was dead and you laid her next to me and you planted the knife that you’d used on the floor by my bed.’ His throat felt arid. ‘It was how the constables you dispatched the next morning were supposed to find me.’
Fox didn’t disagree. He sat there, unmoving, staring blankly at the wall behind Pyke.
Pyke took his pistol and placed it carefully on the desk. Fox looked at it and then up at Pyke. ‘I was good to you once, wasn’t I?’ But there was no pleading or desperation in his tone.
‘You tolerated me because I was a good investigator.’
‘And you looked up to me,’ Fox said, almost dreamily.
‘I was young and naive.’ Pyke pushed the pistol across the desk towards him. ‘Take it. It’s loaded.’ It did not matter what the old man said; it still felt like a betrayal.
Fox stared at the pistol as though it were a poisonous snake. ‘It’s too late for apologies, Pyke, but for what it’s worth, I am sorry.’
As he closed the office door behind him, Pyke heard the deafening blast of the pistol, and felt nothing at all; not anger, nor regret, nor even some kind of perverse satisfaction. More than anything else, he wanted it to be over. He wanted the killing to be over.
Townsend was as good as his word. When Pyke rode up to the entrance of Hambledon Hall, he was greeted by the sight of a hundred or more men, carrying torches and pitchforks. Saville and Canning were among the gathered mob, though neither appeared to recognise him. The mood of the crowd was ugly. Townsend had already told him of continuing reprisals being carried out by Edmonton’s militia against certain villages. Three inns had been ransacked and set on fire. As a response, more threshing machines had been destroyed. Earlier, in a nearby inn, Townsend had paid for as much ale as the men could imbibe and many in the assembled crowd were drunk, and talking openly of violent retribution.
Ahead of them, on the other side of the main gates, Edmonton’s militia were lined up seven or eight deep down the tree-lined avenue that led up to the hall; they would be armed with muskets and rifles, Pyke realised, and would not be afraid to use them. Pyke was not concerned whether the irate mob stormed the front gates and attacked the hall, whether there was a pitched battle or simply a tense standoff. That was their business. He just required them as a distraction, in order that he might slip unnoticed into the grounds.
He had warned Townsend that Edmonton’s militia would be armed. The rest was up to them.
Pyke was not an impetuous man but when he finally laid eyes on Edmonton, sprawled out on his four-poster Queen Anne bed, he had to resist an urge to attack him without further ceremony. Edmonton seemed both unsettled and gratified by Pyke’s intrusion, fumbling to retrieve something he had hidden under the many pillows and bolsters that were propping him up. The bedroom itself was a plush, elaborately decorated affair. Lit up by candles that sat on top of the marble mantelpiece and the mahogany dresser, the gilt-striped wallpaper seemed to glisten in the light.
Edmonton finally produced a flintlock pistol, and waved it triumphantly at Pyke, nearly knocking over a decanter filled with port that adorned his bedside table.
‘I see that you have availed yourself of the view,’ Pyke said, not bothered by the pistol, as he walked across the room to the window that overlooked the main gate. ‘Maybe the mob will storm the defences, ransack the hall and cut off your head.’
‘This is England, not the Continent.’ Edmonton laughed. ‘And the mob will never get in here. I’ve offered the men outside a bonus of ten guineas for every peasant they shoot dead.’ He was holding the pistol as though his life depended on it.
‘I had no problem getting in here.’
That elicited a fatuous smile. ‘The past few months have demonstrated that I am more than capable of taking care of you.’
‘I’ll admit I had no proper understanding of the extent of your depravity.’
‘Ah, excellent. A lesson in ethics from a common thief and convicted murderer. I bow to your superior wisdom.’
‘Better a common thief than a moral simpleton with innocent blood smeared over his fat hands.’
‘In what way am I a moral simpleton?’ Edmonton seemed amused rather than annoyed. ‘Tell me this. Do you really want a country full of papist spies running amok in every department of state, passing our secrets to the foul Roman Church? Conspiring to replace our goodly Anglican brethren with depraved, child-molesting Catholic priests? In God’s name, don’t you understand what’s been happening? One day soon, papist traitors like O’Connell will be able to stand up in the House and vote on matters concerning the true Church. What if I was to stand back and do nothing? We would soon have rosary beads adorning every mantelpiece, incense burning in every home, and lust- driven monks roaming the streets preying on our innocent Protestant children.’
Pyke had come to Hambledon in the expectation that he might find something that explained the terrible scene that he had witnessed in that lodging room. Now, though, as he stared into Edmonton’s reptilian eyes, it was hard not to conceive of his pathetic ranting as a form of madness, and as such he felt less outrage than he had expected to; less outrage but no pity.
Pyke supposed it was relatively easy for Edmonton to despise Catholics: to see them somehow as subhuman and not deserving of life. For him, it was simply a matter of personal preference, an opinion that could be strongly held precisely because it did not impinge on his life in any way, except in abstract terms. Catholics were akin to demons; monstrous figures that existed only in his imagination. For Andrew Magennis, or his son Davy, or even for Jimmy Swift, it was different. At least their hatred, malignant and debilitating as it was, had a history; it made some kind of perverse sense in the context of two hundred years of religious animosity and upheaval. It made sense because they had lived among and fought with people who, in the process, had become their bitterest enemies. For Edmonton, though, Catholics were faceless and anonymous - barbarians amassing at the gate to sack Protestant civilisation - and therefore could be subjected to any degree of inhumanity in the name of a nobler cause. Closeted in his English home, and buoyed by a formless hatred, Edmonton had overseen a chain of events that had led to many deaths. But it was pointless to expect him to feel guilt for what he had done.
‘But you failed, Edmonton. Catholic emancipation passed through both Houses. Peel remains in office. Swift is dead. And I’m still here.’ Pyke walked across the room towards the four-poster bed. ‘And it will be my very great pleasure to take away everything you have left.’
‘How delightfully naive,’ Edmonton said, still waving the pistol. But he was perspiring like a hog.
‘I’m here to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage.’
‘You’re here to ask me?’ Edmonton started to laugh. ‘That’s rich. Rather wonderful, actually. You’re quite the brigand, aren’t you?’ His feigned laughter subsided. ‘But did you actually imagine I would give you my blessing?’
‘Is that a yes or a no?’
‘By God, you’re certainly a man to admire, that’s for certain. A cad and a brigand. Obstinate. Quite obstinate.’ Edmonton’s rosy cheeks glowed in the candlelight.
Pyke nodded, as though Edmonton had given him the answer he had been expecting. ‘By the way, that pistol is quite useless. While you were preparing for bed, I found it under one of the pillows and disarmed it.’
Edmonton looked down at the pistol, then up at Pyke, cocked the trigger and fired it. Nothing happened.
‘Let me rephrase the question. I’m going to marry your daughter. There. No longer a question, was it?’ He smiled easily.
‘The two of you can do whatever you damn well like, but you won’t ever see a penny of my money.’ His eyes narrowed.
‘Not even when you’re dead?’
This drew a leering grin. ‘Especially when I’m dead.’
‘Oh?’ Pyke said, happy to play along with him for the moment.
‘If she should marry unwisely, she loses everything. The estate would pass to a distant cousin in America.’
‘Really? And how is this business of an “unwise marriage” characterised in your will?’
