upstairs in the tavern.
He tossed the remains of the mole into the cage and watched as the long-tailed rats fought one another for the fleshy morsel. Blood poured from the wound and dripped into the cage, sending the rats into an even more heightened state of anticipation.
Pyke rested the candle on top of the cage, next to Swift’s head, and unbound his gag. Swift’s mouth sagged open; his stare was uncomprehending, as though he had not yet adjusted to his new fate.
‘Jimmy Swift. Or should I call you James Sloan?’ Pyke spoke in a soft whisper.
Swift stared at Pyke for a while.
‘Well?’
‘Sloan was my mother’s name. I adopted it when I left Ireland and came to London. Funny, I didn’t want my past catching up with me. The very last thing I did as Jimmy Swift was lead you to St Giles.’ He spoke in a gentle, nasal tone. ‘You walked straight into that one.’
Pyke nodded, ‘I visited your old house in Hamilton’s Bawn. It’s comfortable but a little run down perhaps. Nothing compared to your Russell Square residence. Or Hambledon Hall.’
Pyke’s taunt registered in Swift’s eyes but he said nothing.
‘A seat in Parliament. The daughter’s hand in marriage. And the prospect of one day inheriting a country estate. That’s quite a reward, particularly from someone as ungenerous as Lord Edmonton.’
For a moment, Swift was distracted by the sound of the rats. He was tied to the cage in such a way that he couldn’t see them, but he could hear them.
‘You’re going to kill me anyway, so why should I tell you what you want to know?’ His face betrayed some of the dread that he was, doubtless, feeling.
Pyke took out his pistol and fired a shot into the sea of rats. He must have wounded or most probably killed one of them because the others began to swarm around its twitching form and feed on its carcass.
‘You hear that sound?’ he said to Swift. ‘There are three hundred rats in the cage, three hundred sets of pincer-like teeth. Can you even imagine what short work that many teeth would make of your flesh? You would be dead in a matter of seconds, of course, but imagine those final moments of your life, rats crawling on your face, chewing out your eyes.’ He aimed the barrel of his pistol at Swift’s head. ‘But if I felt you were telling the truth, I might consider simply shooting you.’
Swift watched him carefully but said nothing. He was listening to the rats beneath him.
‘Perhaps I might outline what I think took place,’ Pyke said. ‘You can interrupt me if I have made a mistake or if I require your assistance.’ Again Swift did not respond.
Pyke began by indicating how he believed Swift’s relationship with Edmonton had started. He said they had probably met through the Orange Order and the Brunswick Club and corresponded regularly over issues of mutual concern. The unappealing prospect of Catholic emancipation had certainly been one such issue, and Edmonton had asked Swift to be vigilant for anything they might use to thwart or disrupt the smooth passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill through Parliament. This had taken place some time in October or even November of the previous year. Six months earlier, Swift had employed the services of Davy Magennis to tend his small plot of land. Magennis had been dismissed from the Irish Constabulary for violent misconduct but had been recommended to Swift by someone in the order. Swift had never particularly liked Magennis but his interest in the big man was piqued by a story he told about his brother, Stephen, who had fallen in love with a Catholic girl and had absconded to London. Magennis had spoken about his brother’s betrayal with an anger that bordered on mania. When Magennis had also revealed that he had once been personally recruited into the constabulary by Tilling, Peel’s emissary in Ulster, Swift had seen an opportunity that was too good to pass up, especially as Peel was openly talking about changing his position on the Catholic question and throwing his support behind the push for emancipation.
But Swift had had to move quickly. He had contacted Edmonton in London and explained what he had discovered and how this information might be used in such a way as to further their cause. Edmonton had been delighted by the idea: that Swift would accompany Davy Magennis to London and talk him into, if any talk were required, killing his brother. For their plan to work, any subsequent investigation would have to establish a connection between Peel and Magennis. They could then claim that Peel had staged the murder in order to bolster support for the police bill that he was attempting to push through Parliament at the same time as Catholic emancipation. In any case, if it could be leaked to the newspapers that a Protestant man from Ulster had been murdered, seemingly by a Catholic, then such news would, no doubt, spark a wave of anti-Catholic protests that might end up blowing Peel’s plans out of the water. Edmonton had assumed responsibility for planning events in the capital. He had paid someone to track down Stephen Magennis and his mistress and given some consideration to how he might ensure that the subsequent investigation into the murders would unearth the connection between Davy Magennis and Peel.
This was the moment when Edmonton had struck upon the notion of using Pyke. He had known, for a fact, that Pyke was a formidable investigator. If it could somehow be arranged that Pyke discovered the dead bodies, he would have to be a part of any investigation, and given his tenacity and contrariness, he might begin to suspect some kind of conspiracy. If not, he could always be pushed in such a direction once the investigation had commenced. In any case, Pyke could be used and then discarded once his purpose had been served.
Pyke paused for a moment. Swift seemed to be more preoccupied by the sound of rats. Pyke continued with his narrative.
Swift was, by no means, a papist sympathiser. After all, he had grown up in the Orange Order and had been initiated into a way of thinking that saw Catholics as both a threat and a menace. Nonetheless, he was not a rabid Catholic-hating extremist like Edmonton. For him, there had to be prospect of significant personal and material advancement to compensate him for the dangers he would have to face in actually executing the plan. Hence Edmonton’s generous offer of a parliamentary seat, his own daughter’s hand in marriage and the prospect of one day inheriting the family estate. The unpredictable element had been Davy Magennis. For the plan to work, Swift would have to prime his anger and transform the big man’s violent threats into something tangible.
‘But you weren’t aware that Clare, Stephen’s mistress, had just given birth, were you?’ Pyke said.
Swift looked at him with growing contempt.
‘And when Davy saw the baby, the whole plan fell apart.’ Pyke ran his knife across the open wound on Swift’s chin and saw him wince. ‘Suddenly, he couldn’t go through with it. Davy didn’t kill them. Did he?’
Swift shrugged, as though the issue were a trifling one.
‘So it was down to you. Either go through with the murders yourself or risk losing everything you’d been promised by Edmonton.’ Pyke watched his sullen reaction. ‘You made Magennis stay, initially at least. You made him help you tie up Stephen and Clare, and then you slit their throats with a razor.’ Pyke did not need to close his eyes to recall the sight of their severed throats. ‘But what I don’t know, what I still can’t work out, is why you had to kill the baby as well.’
Swift licked his blood-caked lips. ‘It wouldn’t stop crying.’
Pyke stared at him. He felt his innards tighten. ‘Is that it?’
‘The other two were dead. Magennis was blubbering. He wanted to leave. Then we heard a sound at the door. I’d forgotten to lock it behind us. It was the cousin, Mary. She saw Davy, who she obviously knew, and saw the blood on the floor and screamed. Magennis ran after her. I told him to. I thought he would know what to do. Later, I realised that he wasn’t coming back and that, perhaps, he hadn’t taken care of the girl as I’d hoped. At the time, I was left in that God-forsaken room with the crying baby. I picked it up. I hadn’t thought about killing it until it started to bawl even louder, and I couldn’t bear it. I shook it a few times but it wouldn’t stop. So I shook it again, much harder this time, but the screams still wouldn’t stop. That was when I decided I’d had enough. I throttled it and dumped it in the pail.’ He looked up at Pyke and shrugged. ‘That’s it. That’s everything.’
It was as though he had described throwing away a pot of boiled meat bones.
There it was. Pyke could not help but feel a little deflated by Swift’s revelations, as though they made all his own efforts to conceive of Swift’s crimes as degenerate and monstrous seem wholly misplaced. His moment of vindication had somehow floundered on the banality of Swift’s evil. In particular, Pyke felt foolish for having imagined a gruesome scenario in which the killer had deliberately tortured the parents by forcing them to watch their baby’s murder. Through such acts of imagination and fantasies of revenge, Pyke had given the murders a status that far exceeded their squalid reality. Swift had killed the baby simply because it would not stop crying. Pyke did not know whether the mundanity of this explanation was less upsetting than the macabre constructions of his own imagination, but, in the end, it didn’t really matter. For six months, he had pursued phantoms inside and
