Kill-Devil and Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

up. They chatted to one another as though what they were doing was the most commonplace thing in the world. When the hole had been dug, the three of them lowered the coffin into it using a length of rope. After that, the gravediggers withdrew for a few moments, perhaps thinking that Pyke had known Mary Edgar and wanted time at her graveside to remember her. As he stared down into the hole, he thought about Emily and how it had rained on the day he had buried her. Pyke didn’t know whether he was still grieving for her or not; on good days, he could shut his eyes and summon an image of her that seemed so vivid it was as if she was there in the room with him, but at others he could barely remember the colour of her eyes.
     
    He helped the diggers shovel earth back into the grave and once they had gone, he stood there for a while listening to the crows cawing and watching the masts of ships glide past on the nearby river. His thoughts, now turned back to Mary Edgar. Her good looks and dress indicated that she moved in genteel circles and that he should perhaps concentrate his search on the West End, places such as Bloomsbury, Marylebone or St John’s Wood. But her body had been found on the Ratcliff Highway and, in that sense, Tilling had been quite right. There weren’t too many jobs a woman could hope to get in this part of the city, and if one ruled out domestic service and factory work, that left prostitution as the most likely option. Though not convinced by this hypothesis - if she had worked as a prostitute, surely it would have been at one of the respectable bordellos in St James’s - Pyke decided to put off calling on Crane until the next day and spent the rest of the afternoon traipsing from one sleazy brothel to the next, showing the dead woman’s likeness to the pimps and madams.
     
    As he moved along the Ratcliff Highway from east to west, tramping between brothels, slop-shops, taverns, pawnbrokers, gin palaces and beer shops, past vendors selling pies, chestnuts, gingerbread and baked potatoes, he didn’t exactly feel unsafe but he did make a point of not catching anyone’s eye unnecessarily. He also kept the purse he’d been given by Tilling close to his body. It was a warm, early spring afternoon but the weather did nothing to improve the Ratcliff Highway: it had always felt like the kind of place where someone might slit your belly as easily as shake your hand.
     
    The pavements were full, but many of the faces were alien to Pyke. Lascar and Malay sailors with their dark skin and tear-shaped eyes; bearded Jews hawking piles of old clothes; German and Scandinavian stevedores, recognisable by their uniform, biding their time before their ships sailed for home; and black dockers who could carry a hogshead of sugar on their shoulders. There were the children, too: bow-legged, malnourished, running alongside the wagons and drays barefoot. Everyone was going about their business but Pyke couldn’t help feeling that people had noticed him, noticed that he was different, that he didn’t belong there. Even as a Bow Street Runner, he’d rarely ventured to this part of the city: a Runner who had tried to serve a warrant on a tavern landlord here had been dragged out on to the street and kicked to death. Pyke couldn’t say with any conviction that it was either the poorest or indeed the most dangerous part of the city - St Giles and parts of Shadwell and Rotherhithe came close - but it was undoubtedly the street whose reputation cast the greatest terror into the hearts of most Londoners.
     
    He had also heard a lot about Craddock’s brothel but had never had a reason to visit it. Not that he had missed much. Its ill repute was based on the promise of its madam, Eliza, that no reasonable offer would be turned down: that a ‘reasonable’ offer could sometimes be as little as a shilling was indicative of the kind of customer it hoped to attract. Pyke had once been told by a woman who’d worked there that a