By the time Pyke left, some of the crowd were shouting for vengeance.
That night, still with no word from Felix, Pyke lay in the downstairs room, imagining the worst. Perhaps it had been seeing William Hancock’s corpse, seeing a father carry his dead son.
John and the neighbour had paid one of the police constables a considerable sum of money. The man had told them, reassured them, promised them, that Felix wasn’t being held in the station-house, and had never been there. Pyke had given them a physical description of the clerk who’d directed him to the Southgate Hotel. They were told that the man hadn’t shown up for work. Asked for his home address, the constable had given it to them, but when they had gone there to look for him, they found that the room had been vacated.
Later in the night, Pyke heard the rioting and thought about Felix, possibly out there, alone in a strange country. Pyke could almost feel the hatred, the resentment, the ugliness vibrating in the air. Dosed up on laudanum, he drifted in and out of consciousness, asleep when awake and awake when asleep; shapes, faces, memories moving in and out of focus, their meaning just beyond his reach.
In the morning, the family was told that a mob of more than two hundred, mostly from the Caedraw ironworks, had marched on Quarry Row and Bathesda Gardens. Taken by surprise, the police had been unable to stop them from setting light to the houses. No one seemed to know how widespread the rioting had been but people had died.
Soldiers from the barracks were now patrolling the streets and reinforcements had been summoned from Brecon.
The disturbances had spread to the works themselves, Caedraw and Morlais. Someone reported that all of the blast furnaces had gone quiet, the first time this had happened since the strike.
Shops had been attacked and ransacked; rubble and broken glass littered the streets. The town centre was deserted. Two had died. Five had died. Ten had died. More. No one knew. Even in the house, the air smelled of charred wood.
The husband had procured a horse and cart and Pyke had driven to the Castle, each bump, each rut, causing him to wince. The entrance was blocked and Jenkins, one of the agents, was giving orders to two men armed with rifles. Pyke waited for Jenkins to leave and then hobbled up to one of the guards. Thrusting an envelope into the man’s hand, he instructed the man to deliver it at once to Catherine Hancock. The guard asked who he was but Pyke turned without answering, and limped back to the horse and cart.
‘All kinds of rumours, place is wild with ’em,’ the neighbour said, grim-faced.
The husband was sullen and wouldn’t look at Pyke. They were standing across from each other in the downstairs room.
‘Such as?’
‘A man who worked for the Hancocks made off with twenty thousand, meant to be for the kidnappers.’
Pyke assimilated this news without reacting. So the kidnappers hadn’t received the money; and the Hancocks blamed him. Understandable in light of his ‘disappearance’. He thought again about Cathy, whether she’d got his letter, what she must be going through.
‘Apparently the man in question is a policeman from London.’
John tugged the neighbour’s sleeve, said something in Welsh.
‘He wants to know where your money’s from,’ the neighbour said, by way of translation.
Pyke understood now that they thought he was the one who’d stolen from the Hancocks. They were frightened, feeling let down. He looked at the neighbour. ‘Tell him, on the life of my own son, I did not steal any money, nor have I broken the law in any way, shape or form.’
The neighbour stared at him, trying to work out whether or not to believe him. ‘You didn’t answer the question.’
‘Hancock paid me what he’d originally promised.’
‘To negotiate the safe return of his son?’
Pyke nodded. He could see how bad it looked.
The neighbour and John exchanged a few words in Welsh. The former was about to translate, for Pyke’s benefit, when the noise of horses’ hoofs interrupted their conversation. A carriage pulled up outside one of the houses farther up the street, a place Pyke knew to be empty. It was the address given on the note he’d left at the Castle for Cathy. At the window, they watched as four men leapt out of the carriage, smashed through the door with crowbars and stormed into the tiny house. About a minute later, they emerged, clearly agitated, not sure what to do next.
‘Those men were sent by Jonah Hancock.’ Pyke turned to the neighbour. ‘They’re looking for me. If you really think I had something to do with the Hancock boy’s death, or I stole the ransom money, I won’t stop you from going out there and telling them where I am.’
The neighbour translated and the two men discussed what to do, their eyes darting between Pyke and the activity outside. As they talked Pyke thought about the presence of Hancock’s men and what it indicated — either that Cathy had read his note and passed it on to her husband or that his letter had been delivered directly to Jonah Hancock.
It also told him that the Hancocks were baying for his blood. The police would be looking for him, too.
John spoke. The neighbour waited for him to finish then turned to Pyke. ‘He says you can stay — for the time being.’
Pyke felt another bolt of pain streak up one side of his body. He took a breath and had to steady himself against the wall. In other circumstances, he would have been relieved by this offer, but all he could think about now was his son.
TWENTY
MONDAY, 1 FEBRUARY 1847
Cashel, Co. Tipperary
In the police wagon, the journey to Cashel took a little under two hours. It was a bumpy, uncomfortable ride made worse by the silence, the two constables not wanting to acknowledge Knox or too afraid to say anything in Hastings’ presence. For his part, the sub-inspector was in a foul mood and refused to tell Knox why he’d been summoned back to the barracks. Knox was too worried about his son to care about his own predicament. Cornwallis had taken his post and his home. What else could they do to him now? Lock him up? Knox tried to think what they might be able to use against him. In his pocket, he felt the two copperplates rattling around and realised his mistake. If they threw him in a cell, they would search him and find the plates. It was difficult not to be overwhelmed by the injustice of it all.
At the barracks, he was led into the front of the building by O’Hanlon and Morgan, but they hadn’t handcuffed him and they didn’t take him to the cells. Instead, they led him upstairs and waited with him in the corridor while the sub-inspector went into his office. Knox heard voices. Then the door opened and he was beckoned inside.
To his surprise, and despite the lateness of the hour, the County Inspector was there, together with a man Knox didn’t recognise.
‘You know the County Inspector, of course,’ Hastings said, once he’d settled into his chair behind the desk. He turned to the stranger. ‘This is Benedict Pierce, the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.’
Pierce nodded at him and even tried to smile. He was a neat, well-groomed man in his late forties, with short dark hair, a cleanly shaven chin and small, quick eyes.
‘The Assistant Commissioner has made the arduous journey from London to look into your unsubstantiated claim that the man found on the estate in Dundrum was one of his men, Detective-inspector Pyke.’
Knox felt his chest tighten. ‘I was given the task of investigating this murder, sir,’ he said to Pierce. ‘I’m a lowly constable with no experience of such matters. I was told I could have four days and it was made clear that I was not to do much. Get rid of the body and let the whole thing drop…’