‘She and I were acquainted at one time.’ Alefounder brushed his hand against his chin, as he did when he was lying.
‘ Acquainted? Is that what they’re calling it these days?’ When Alefounder didn’t seem to have understood Pyke’s remark, he added, ‘Your wife told me that Elizabeth Malvern was your mistress for about two years.’
That almost finished him. ‘You’ve talked to my wife?’ The sense of betrayal in his voice was hard to miss.
‘She was very forthcoming about the affair.’
Alefounder shook his head as though he couldn’t quite fathom what was happening to him.
‘Your wife also told me about your charitable work for the Vice Society. Elizabeth’s, too.’ Pyke hesitated. ‘Of course, given this, it seems a little obtuse that Elizabeth should be involved with a man like Jemmy Crane.’
This time the sugar trader’s expression was more circumspect. ‘What she does with her life is up to her.’
‘I take it you don’t approve of her choice of lover?’
‘When we were still together, she expressed an interest in the work the society performs and I encouraged her to join.’
‘And what precisely do you do for the society?’
‘I sit on the board and help raise money for the society’s work. As for Elizabeth, you’d have to ask her. We haven’t had much contact in the past two years.’
‘But you must hear of what she does?’
The trader sighed, clearly agitated, and shook his head. ‘Field work, as far as I’m aware. She latched on to a man called Samuel Ticknor, I believe. I’m told he encourages fallen women to find more respectable occupations.’
‘Does the name Lucy Luckins mean anything to you?’
‘Luckins?’ He appeared to give it some thought. ‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘Her corpse was found in the Thames.’
‘I hope you’re not suggesting that I had something to do with it,’ Alefounder said, rediscovering some of the pomposity he’d displayed in London.
Pyke shrugged. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, that you and Elizabeth should play any kind of role in the Vice Society when your own sexual predilections are so…’
This was almost too much for Alefounder to bear. His neck swelled with colour and his fists clenched into tight, white balls. ‘I’ll not be slandered in such a vile manner. I might have done wrong by not coming forward with information about Mary…’
But Pyke was not interested in Alefounder’s outrage, whether it was heartfelt or not. He left the trader slumped in a chair and went to find Charles Malvern.
After an hour or so of fruitless searching, Pyke found the young planter wandering on the front lawn. He was muttering to himself, staring up into the dark void, seemingly oblivious to the torrential rain and fierce winds. Pyke tried to put his arm around him and guide him back into the house but Malvern pushed him away and continued to mutter to himself. He stumbled and fell, laughing drunkenly as he did so. Just at the last moment Pyke turned around and saw the plank of wood a fraction of a second before it cracked him around the head, so that in the end he wasn’t sure whether someone had swung it at him or whether he’d become another victim of the storm. He fell to the ground and passed into unconsciousness.
NINETEEN
Pyke came around just after dawn the following morning, face down in a drainage ditch, his head throbbing with pain. The air around him was cool and clear and filled with birdsong. The clouds had passed too, and the sky was a mass of intense blue, dazzling to the naked eye. There was a soft breeze, laced with the scent of lily, ginger, jasmine and honeysuckle, and all across the lawn, and on the track leading down the hill towards the stables, pools of water created by the rains shimmered in the early morning light.
On another day it might have been the perfect morning, but the devastation wrought by the storm was apparent wherever you looked. The great house lay in ruins; part of the roof had been torn off and dumped across the surrounding land and the wall at one end of the building had buckled and collapsed. Much of the furniture lay scattered across the lawn, splintered and upended; bookcases were overturned like shipwrecks, their contents distributed to every corner of the gardens; tables and chairs were marooned in flower beds, torn pictures lying face down in pools of rainwater. The surrounding bush had been flattened and pulped by the wind and trees lay strewn across pathways, their roots having pulled up massive clumps of red earth. It was a strange, desolate scene, made even more eerie by the near-total silence. Nothing moved and no one answered Pyke’s calls. He looked for Malvern, Alefounder, Pemberton, Josephine and any of the house servants, but the whole place was deserted.
Pyke eventually found Malvern and Pemberton under a pile of brick rubble at the end of the house that had collapsed. He checked their pulses but didn’t need to. Both were dead and had been for a while. Pemberton’s face was still bruised from where Pyke had struck him with the shovel, but there was nothing to indicate how he’d died. Charles Malvern, on the other hand, had died from a heavy blow to his skull. In both cases there were drag marks in the brick dust. Pyke rummaged through Malvern’s pockets and found a purse full of silver dollars, which he kept for himself. Someone had wanted it to look like an accident; nothing had been stolen and nothing would be. He retrieved Pemberton’s pistol and went looking for Alefounder.
The house itself would have to be knocked down and rebuilt from scratch. Entire walls had collapsed, many of the ceilings had fallen in and large sections of the roof were gone; as Pyke wandered from room to room, he kept his sleeve up to his mouth to shield it from the choking residue of plaster and brick dust. He didn’t find Alefounder anywhere on the ground floor and the upper floor had been marooned by the partial collapse of the main staircase. Outside, Pyke continued his search of the grounds, including the counting house and, underneath it, the old slave dungeon, but the sugar trader was nowhere to be found.
Back up at the great house, he found Josephine hunched over Charles Malvern’s body. When she finally looked at him, her eyes were watery and bloodshot and her face was streaked with tears.
‘I knew ’im when he was a babe; I held ’im in my arms and sung to ’im.’ She reached out and brushed some brick dust off his forehead.
‘This wasn’t an accident, was it?’
She wouldn’t answer him and looked away.
‘They told you they’d spare him, didn’t they? No one’s going to mourn for Pemberton, are they? Not even his wife, I suspect. But in a strange kind of way, Charles was an innocent.’
Josephine sat there staring down at Malvern’s face for a while, and when she did finally look up, her expression was as hard as dried wax. ‘If you want answers, ask her. Go to Accompong and ask her.’ She spat out this last word with particular venom.
‘Who?’ Pyke tapped her shoulder.
‘If you touch me again, you’ll regret it.’
Pyke’s throat tightened and his jaw clenched. ‘Who do I ask for when I get to this place Accompong?’
‘You threaten me?’ This seemed to amuse her. ‘You think I scared of you ’cos you big and white?’
Pyke looked down at her hunched, frail figure and sighed. ‘I just want a name and then I’ll leave you in peace.’
But Josephine had started to sing a haunting melody whose words Pyke couldn’t quite grasp and whose meaning lay beyond him.
He waited until she had finished. ‘Who put the eyeball in my bed?’ She gave him a proud, defiant stare. ‘I don’t know. I’d say one of the servants paid by Busha.’
‘Why?’
‘To scare you.’
‘Why would he want to scare me, if he’d already decided to kill me?’
Josephine just shrugged. ‘Maybe they don’t know that. It’s how Busha frighten off all them other buyers.’
Pyke waited for a moment. ‘Who should I ask for in Accompong?’
Josephine closed her eyes and shook her head. When she opened her eyes again they were hard and black like pebbles. ‘Ask for Bertha. She Mary’s mother.’