Kill-Devil and Water by Andrew Pepper Page B

recognise him at the time but later it came to me. I used to watch him fight, back in the old days, a real bruiser, but I can’t for the life of me remember his name.’
     
    ‘Thrale.’
     
    ‘That’s it.’ Crane’s face lit up for a moment. ‘These days my tastes are more refined. I have a box at the Theatre Royal and I attend concerts at Somerset House.’ His smile was without the faintest hint of warmth.
     
    ‘You haven’t answered my question.’
     
    ‘And I’m not going to.’
     
    Pyke could see the coldness in his eyes. He removed the drawing of Mary Edgar from his pocket and handed it to Crane. ‘You know her?’
     
    Crane glanced down at the drawing and just for a moment his mask slipped and a look of curiosity, even puzzlement, crossed his face. ‘No.’
     
    ‘That’s Mary Edgar, the woman you visited.’ Pyke paused. ‘She was strangled and her body dumped a few hundred yards away on the Ratcliff Highway.’
     
    Crane assimilated this news. ‘And what is your interest in this affair, sir?’
     
    ‘I’m investigating her murder.’
     
    ‘Out of a sense of civic duty?’ His tone was vaguely mocking.
     
    ‘What took you to Thrale’s lodging house that day?’
     
    ‘A private matter. In other words, none of your business.’
     
    ‘You don’t deny you were there, then?’
     
    ‘How could I? Thrale saw me. And now you’re here.’
     
    ‘And I’m not leaving until you’ve answered my question.’
     
    ‘I’ve told you all I’m going to tell you. I suggest you leave before the situation becomes unpleasant.’
     
    ‘Unpleasant for me or for you?’ Pyke’s stare didn’t once leave Crane’s face.
     
    ‘I might appreciate a Beethoven symphony more than a bare-knuckle fight these days but if I give the word, Sykes here will do to you what Benbow did to Thrale. And I’ll watch, as I did then.’
     
    Pyke looked up at the muscular figure at the top of the stairs. ‘Does he speak as well as glare?’
     
    That drew the thinnest of smiles. ‘I admire courage up to a certain point, but after that it becomes stupidity.’
     
    ‘If you know who I am - if you know me from the old days and what I’m capable of - you’ll know I’m not likely to give up until I’ve found what I’m looking for.’ Pyke waited and sighed. ‘She had just arrived from Jamaica. They both had. How would a piece of dirt like you know them?’
     
    The skin tightened around Crane’s eyes. ‘My patience has run out. You can find your own way out.’ He turned and started back up the stairs.
     
    ‘One way or another you’ll tell me what I need to know,’ Pyke shouted up the stairs but Crane, blocked by his burly assistant, had disappeared from view.
     
    At the front of the shop, Pyke passed the elderly assistant who looked at him as though he’d heard at least some or all of their conversation.
     
     
For the rest of the afternoon, once he’d ascertained that Arthur Sobers hadn’t returned to the Bluefield lodging house, Pyke patrolled the sunless court outside the building asking anyone who entered or emerged from the front door whether they knew or had seen Arthur Sobers. He had no luck for the first hour or so and was just about to give up - it had started to drizzle and he needed to eat - when a fat man with whiskers shuffled out of the door.
     
    ‘Yeah, I ’member the cull,’ he said, once Pyke had explained who he was looking for. ‘Saw him a few times with a mudlark goes by the name Filthy on account of his stink.’
     
    ‘You know where I can find this man?’ Pyke looked down at his bruised knuckles and thought about the scene his son had witnessed the previous night.
     
    ‘Filthy? A cull like that don’t have no home, just sleeps rough, wherever he can lay his head.’
     
    ‘Then how can I get in touch with him?’
     
    ‘How should I know? You often see him on the Highway, hanging round the docks or the river at low tide.’
     
    Pyke tried to rein in his