‘I don’t know.’ Closer inspection had revealed bruises on his hands, neck and chest, but Pyke still had no idea how Felix had sustained his injuries.
‘Where did you find him?’
‘The old courthouse.’ Pyke paused, let the implications of this information sink in. ‘In one of the upstairs rooms. Someone had laid him out on the bed.’
‘The old courthouse?’ Jones shook his head. ‘Sir Clancy hasn’t been seen for two or three weeks.’
Making the obvious connection between the courthouse and Smyth, just as Pyke had done.
‘I went to his house, Blenheim, down in the valley. His butler told me Smyth has left for Ireland.’
‘He never told me he was going.’ Jones gestured towards the soldiers huddled outside their tent. ‘Sir Clancy abandoned the town to the soldiers. Now a captain called Kent is in charge. We weren’t able to keep a lid on things. Kent’s taking orders directly from Sir Josiah Webb.’
Pyke didn’t know for sure whether Smyth knew about, or had been responsible for, his son’s death, but he had fled the town suddenly without revealing his plans to anyone; and that, to Pyke at least, indicated a troubled state of mind.
‘I need to know what happened to my son.’ It was why he’d travelled back to Merthyr and was the only thing that got him out of bed in the morning.
Jones nodded, the suspicion returning to his eyes. ‘I bet Jonah Hancock feels the same way.’
‘What happened to his son, to mine, it’s part of the same thing.’
‘And you think John Wylde has the answers you need?’
‘There’s only one way to find out.’
Wylde was sitting on the floor of his cell, back against the wall, arms curled around his knees. His wounded hand was swaddled in a bandage.
After the door had swung open, Pyke entered the cell, closely followed by Jones. The bully glanced up, saw who it was, and his upper body stiffened, although there was nowhere for him to go.
‘Who gave the order to assassinate me?’ Pyke could feel the anger building inside him, a knotted ball in the pit of his stomach which was hard to distinguish from his grief.
He listened while Jones translated but the superintendent’s words made no impression on the bully. When he didn’t answer, Pyke said, ‘Who told you to go to the Southgate Hotel?’ Again Jones translated but received no response.
This time Pyke went across and knelt down next to Wylde, almost gagging from the smell of him. Before Wylde could react, Pyke grabbed his bandaged hand and squeezed it hard. A sickening yell echoed around the tiny room.
‘I want to know how you knew that I was going to turn up at the Southgate Hotel.’
Pyke didn’t expect Wylde to answer but almost immediately the bully looked at Jones and rattled off a few sentences.
‘He says he received an anonymous letter telling him you would be there,’ Jones said.
Pyke regarded Wylde, trying to anticipate what the man would say next. ‘And you just decided to go there and kill me?’
Wylde looked at him, sullen, and barked a few words at Jones, then held up his bandaged hand.
‘He says he knows it was you who shot off his hand and then robbed him.’
‘Who told him that?’ Pyke knelt down again and this time hit Wylde around the face. ‘Who?’
This time the bully didn’t need a translation.
‘The same letter.’
Standing up, Pyke turned to Jones. ‘He’s lying. He knows who gave the orders.’
Jones glanced down at the prisoner, suddenly uneasy. ‘Is he telling the truth? Was it you who shot him?’
Ignoring Jones, Pyke reached down and grabbed Wylde’s throat, pressed him against the wall. ‘ Who? ’ But he hadn’t counted on the bully’s strength, his speed, and didn’t react quickly enough. Wylde lunged, his mouth open like a rabid dog, and bit Pyke on the hand. Pyke gouged his thumb into the bully’s eye. Wylde’s jaw went slack and as Pyke pulled out his thumb, wet with blood, the bully began to convulse. But Pyke hadn’t finished. Instead he felt his fingers around Wylde’s throat and he kept on squeezing, shouting at Wylde to tell him about his son, anger and grief pouring out of him until he was hardly aware of what he was doing.
‘Christ Almighty. What kind of monster are you?’ Jones threw himself on top of Pyke and managed to pull him off Wylde. He was panting, shocked.
But Pyke wasn’t concerned by Jones’ moral righteousness. All he could think of was his dead son and the guilt that was growing inside him like a tumour.
It took him an hour to walk from Market Square to Morlais House, a mostly uphill trudge along the Pennydarren Road. When he presented himself at the front door, the butler led him through to the drawing room. Pyke had told the man his name and even though he’d not met Sir Josiah Webb, the ironmaster seemed to know who he was and shook his hand, as if Pyke had come there at Webb’s invitation.
Webb was a robust, rosy-cheeked man in his fifties, with snow-white hair and a full, almost portly figure. In other circumstances, he might have struck Pyke as an almost grandfatherly character but he had heard that Webb was every bit as ruthless as Zephaniah Hancock.
There was an oil painting of two young boys on one of the walls, perhaps Webb’s sons. It made Pyke think about his own situation; that he would never see Felix marry, never know what it was like to have grandchildren. Briefly Pyke’s thoughts returned to the burial ceremony, not one reference to God or Jesus, a decision borne of his own guilt and rage and one that didn’t reflect the decisions Felix had made during his brief life. Pyke had put a notice in The Times and had made a point of writing to the people who’d known his son. He hadn’t wanted to be secretive about the ceremony because Felix had done nothing wrong. If Pyke was ashamed of anything, it was the world that he had chosen to inhabit, a base world where a young man’s life could be sacrificed for no reason. But now Pyke saw Jakes had been right; the service should have been a Christian one. It was what Felix would have wanted. Maybe he would rectify his mistake when all of this was finished.
‘I’ve been hoping we might have this conversation, Detective-inspector,’ Webb said.
Pyke tried to clear his mind, focus on the task at hand. Somehow it was jarring, to be addressed by his title. He no longer thought of himself as a policeman. The title, the sanction, the law itself: all of it was irrelevant. He knew he would never go back to his old position. He had said as much to Jack Whicher, one of his detective-sergeants, who’d seen the notice in the newspaper and attended the ceremony.
‘You may feel differently later,’ Whicher had said.
‘That’s just it. I don’t feel anything.’ He had been about to say something else when he remembered that Whicher too had lost a son.
‘Pierce also saw the notice. I’m surprised he’s not here. He’s demanded that you return to Scotland Yard at once.’
‘Pierce knows he wouldn’t be welcome here.’ Pyke had paused, looked up at the winter sky. ‘He’s read about the rioting?’
‘And the death of the industrialist’s son.’
Pyke had known his superiors would find out about the carnage sooner or later but now no longer cared. ‘I’m going back to Wales.’
‘Look, Pyke, Pierce knows that I’m close to you and he told me to tell you there will be no immunity from prosecution.’
Pyke hadn’t expected to be treated any differently but the barely concealed threat hardly registered.
Webb’s throaty cough brought him back to the present. ‘I heard this wild rumour, that you had absconded with the ransom money.’
‘Not true. If I had taken the money, why would I bother coming back to this godforsaken town?’
Webb considered this, his lips pursed together.
‘I was shot by John Wylde. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He calls himself the emperor of China.’
‘Wylde? The name’s familiar. If I’m not mistaken, I believe my friends up at the Castle formed an acquaintance with him a few years ago, used him to break a strike.’
Pyke nodded. He wasn’t surprised that a man like Webb knew such things. ‘I think someone paid him to assassinate me.’