‘Aren’t you going to say hello to them?’ Tilling hesitated. ‘I thought it was the purpose of this detour.’
‘I’ll come back tomorrow or the day after.’ Pyke tried to swallow but there was hardly any moisture in his throat.
‘Are you sure?’
Pyke frowned but didn’t want Tilling to know what he was thinking. ‘I’m quite sure. We can go now.’
Tilling tapped on the roof and a few moments later the carriage jerked forward. Pyke stared out through the glass and thought about the shame that had stopped him from greeting his son.
‘All right, now you can tell me what it is you want, Fitzroy. Why have you gone to all this effort to arrange my release from prison?’
‘A body was found yesterday morning by a stream running alongside the Ratcliff Highway.’
Pyke digested this news without visible reaction. It still didn’t explain why Tilling had freed him from prison. ‘And that’s where we’re going now?’ He looked at the passing buildings, trying to get his bearings after nine months in confinement. He knew the Ratcliff Highway. It was an ancient thoroughfare running through the East End, skirting the northern perimeter of the London Dock, and was lined with taverns, gin shops, brothels and cheap lodging houses that catered to the needs of sailors on shore leave.
Tilling checked his watch. ‘We’re meeting the coroner at the tavern where the autopsy will take place in half an hour.’
A moment’s silence passed between them. ‘You know that even if you hadn’t gone to all this effort, I would have been let out of prison next month.’
Tilling’s glance drifted over Pyke’s shoulder. ‘This way, you get to see your son a month earlier than you expected.’
The corpse was that of a young woman. At a guess, Pyke supposed she had once, or as recently as a week ago, been beautiful. Her black hair was wet and matted but her legs were long and her body, shapely and well proportioned. What was left of her face reinforced this impression. Still, none of this really registered, at least not the first time Pyke saw her. Instead, all he could look at was her skin, already eaten away by a coating of quicklime, and her eyes, or the two holes bored into her lifeless face where her eyes had once been. All that remained was a few torn vessels in the empty sockets.
‘Who is she?’ Pyke asked, drawing his shirtsleeve across his mouth. They were waiting for the coroner in a room above the Green Dragon public house on the Ratcliff Highway, a few hundred yards from where the corpse had first been discovered.
Tilling pulled at his collar, seemingly uncomfortable in his dark blue coat. ‘That’s what I want you to find out.’
Pyke allowed his gaze to fall back to the woman’s face. ‘Has anyone reported a daughter or wife or friend as missing?’
Tilling shook his head.
‘And no one, as yet, has come forward to claim the body?’ Pyke went on.
‘We’ve done our best to keep a lid on the matter. I don’t want folk traipsing out here on a macabre pilgrimage to see where she was mutilated.’
Pyke looked again at the remains of the woman’s face and her long black hair and wondered who had done this to her.
A few minutes later, the coroner arrived, put his bag on the table next to the dead body and began to prepare for the autopsy. John Joseph Hart was young, clean shaven, with a cherub-like face, and a grumpy, condescending manner that belied his years. He had a high opinion of himself and conducted himself in a prissy manner that rankled with Pyke. After shaking Pyke’s hand, Hart produced a large, white handkerchief and wiped his palm clean.
They watched as he made a few incisions above her breast-bone. The sight of the scalpel slicing easily through the woman’s flesh made Pyke wince inwardly.
‘I can say for a fact that she didn’t drown. No trace of any water in her lungs, you see,’ Hart said. The coroner looked at them, as if waiting for a round of applause.
Pyke pointed at the contusions on her neck. ‘At a wild guess, I’d say she was strangled.’
Irritated by Pyke’s intervention, Hart sighed. ‘But would you have known that for sure, if I hadn’t conducted my examination of her lungs?’
‘So we can put down the cause of death as strangulation, then?’ Tilling asked.
‘I’d say so,’ Hart muttered, casting a scalding look in Pyke’s direction.
‘And that’s it? That’s all you can tell us?’
‘I’m a coroner, not a mind-reader,’ Hart retorted, continuing to inspect the bruises around her throat.
‘Well, let’s hope her landlord will be a little more illuminating.’
In the pocket of a dress which had been discovered in marshy ground a few yards from the corpse, along with a half-empty bottle of Jamaica rum, was a scrap of paper giving the address of the Bluefield, a lodging house on the Ratcliff Highway. The landlord had already been summoned.
‘If you look at the bruises here and here,’ Pyke said, pushing the coroner to one side and pointing at the marks on either side of her slender neck, ‘those would have been his thumbs.’ He removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and turned to Hart. ‘Just stand still for a moment,’ he said to the bemused coroner. Before the man could answer, Pyke had wrapped his hands around Hart’s throat and dug his thumbs into the area just below the glands, keeping them there for a little longer than was strictly necessary to illustrate the point. ‘That’s how he killed her.’ He held up his hands. ‘But you can see from the size of those marks that whoever did this had bigger hands than mine.’ What he’d said was purely conjectural, something to irritate Hart rather than impress Tilling, and as he said it, Pyke wondered whether he still really had what it took to undertake such an investigation.
Somehow he doubted it. After all, it had been a long time - more than ten years - since he’d regularly done this kind of work; since he’d resigned from his position as a Bow Street Runner.
Having been released from Pyke’s grip, Hart made exaggerated choking sounds to indicate his discomfort. ‘Really, this is the most unacceptable behaviour I have ever witnessed ...’
‘You can see,’ Pyke said, pointing to the woman’s face and chest, ‘that the quicklime has eaten away the skin ... here and here.’ She was lying face up on the table. ‘But if we roll her over on to her front ...’ He paused while performing this manoeuvre. ‘You’ll see how clean and unblemished her back is.’ Her biscuit-coloured skin felt cold and hard to the touch.
Tilling rubbed his chin. ‘So what are you suggesting?’
Rolling her on to her back again, Pyke held up one of her hands. ‘In spite of the quicklime, there’s hardly a blemish or a callus. Not the hands of a servant or a seamstress, I’d wager.’ He looked over at Tilling, surprised at how good it felt to be using his mind. ‘My question is: how did she earn a living?’
Pyke could see that Tilling was thinking what he was thinking.
‘Perhaps,’ he added, though Tilling hadn’t said anything, ‘but I don’t think she was a street-walker.’ Pyke glanced down at her fleshy curves and felt his stomach tighten. ‘She’s too exotic, too refined. And that dress would have cost a few pounds, too.’
Tilling nodded, conceding the point. ‘You’re suggesting she had money?’
‘I don’t know.’ Pyke picked up one of the woman’s hands and had another look. ‘Of course, if she had money, why would she be staying at a lodging house on the Ratcliff Highway?’
‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Tilling said. ‘At least not until young Jenks returns with the landlord.’
‘Then we should start with what we do know. Tell me what you found out from the dram-shop owner.’
Tilling explained that the old man had come across the corpse the previous morning while emptying night soil and had reported it to the police at once. According to his testimony, the dram-shop owner had found the body lying on the bank of a stream that trickled under the Ratcliff Highway. He hadn’t touched it and therefore, if he was to be believed, hadn’t seen the woman’s facial mutilations. The bottle of rum and the dress had been found next to the body. The man’s wife hadn’t slept well that night and claimed to have heard voices, and a horse and cart stopping somewhere under their bedroom window, although she hadn’t climbed out of bed to have a look.
Pyke considered what he had just been told and weighed up the likely cause of death - strangulation - against the removal of her eyeballs. He was unable to find a way of reconciling the two acts. In some ways, the murder struck him as cold and clinical. The woman had been strangled and her body tossed away like a piece of rubbish. There was no indication that she’d been beaten and there was no sign of sexual congress. But her eyeballs had been gouged out with a knife; she’d been defaced in the most gruesome manner imaginable, as if the man who’d done it hadn’t merely wanted to kill her but to annihilate her.
‘Why cut out her eyes?’ Tilling said, reading his mind.
‘And why sprinkle her face and body with quicklime but leave a scrap of paper in her dress with the name and address of a lodging house?’
Pyke bent forward and sniffed the body. He’d smelled the odour as soon as he’d stepped into the room but hadn’t been able to place it. Not simply the ripeness of putrefying flesh, but something sweeter, tangier.
‘You said a half-empty bottle of rum was found next to the corpse?’ he said, ignoring Hart.
‘That’s right,’ Tilling replied.
‘Here.’ Pyke stepped aside to let Tilling do what he’d just done. ‘Can you smell it on her?’
‘The rum?’
‘On her body. All over it, in fact.’
Tilling offered Pyke a puzzled stare. ‘What are you suggesting? That she was embalmed with rum?’
‘Perhaps.’ Pyke took another look at the body, particularly the colour of her skin. ‘I wouldn’t describe her as Negro but could we say she was mulatto?’
‘For what it’s worth,’ Hart interrupted, ‘that would be my opinion on the matter.’
‘That she was mulatto?’ Tilling asked.
The coroner shrugged. ‘Well, look at the swarthiness of her skin here and here,’ he said, pointing to her hands and wrists.
‘Yes, I suppose.’
‘Together with the rum,’ Hart said, looking warily at Pyke, ‘it could mean she had some kind of connection to the West Indies.’ He waited for a moment. ‘After all, those people are a law unto themselves, aren’t they?’
Tilling and Pyke looked at one another, frowning.
‘Well, do you honestly believe a godly white man would have done that to her?’ Hart added defensively.
‘Are you saying that someone with darker skin than you or I is naturally predisposed to gouge people’s eyes out?’ Pyke asked.
‘I didn’t say that ... I simply meant that the negro race is more predisposed towards savagery. Science has proved this to be so.’
Pyke looked again at the dead woman and tried to work out whether her features were Caucasian or not.
‘I’ve been in touch with the magistrate at Shadwell. The inquest will take place here, in this room, tomorrow at ten. After that, if no one has claimed her, someone will have to make arrangements for her burial.’ Hart put his scalpel back into his bag and snapped the fastener shut. ‘Otherwise the stink will become unbearable.’
Tilling thanked Hart for his work and ushered him to the staircase. ‘You’ll recommend that the jury deliver a verdict of wilful murder, won’t you?’ Pyke overheard Tilling say to the coroner.
Pyke went to cover the body with a sheet. A few moments later Tilling joined him.
‘So you want me to find the man who did this to her?’ Pyke asked eventually.
Tilling nodded. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not interested. I can see it in your eyes.’
Pyke walked across to the window and stared down into the yard below. It felt strange, disconcerting even, to be free all of a sudden. ‘What I am interested to know is why a man in your elevated position, and with your newfound responsibilities, would consider employing the services of a lowly convict.’ He paused. ‘The last time I checked, there were something like three thousand men working for the New Police.’