Read Kill-Devil and Water Online
Authors: Andrew Pepper
Tags: #Jamaica, #Murder, #England, #Sugar Plantations, #London (England), #Mystery & Detective, #Prostitutes, #Crimes Against, #Fiction, #General, #Investigation, #Historical, #London, #Crime
Kill-Devil and Water (28 page)
‘Pemberton might have made the arrangements but Charles Malvern would have been there to see her off.’
Pyke tried not to show too much interest but felt his skin prickle with excitement. ‘So Charles Malvern and Mary Edgar are attached?’
‘Engaged to be married, as far as I know,’ Harper said.
‘And Charles is Silas’s son?’
‘That’s right.’
Briefly he assimilated this new piece of information. He wondered whether it explained why Elizabeth Malvern had sent Crane and his men to try to frighten Sobers and Mary Edgar into fleeing the city. He certainly couldn’t see Silas Malvern welcoming Mary into his family with open arms. But it raised other questions, too. If Mary had been engaged to Charles Malvern, why had she taken a room in a lodging house on the Ratcliff Highway? And why had she been dallying with Alefounder?
‘I was told Silas’s daughter, Elizabeth Malvern, had sailed for this part of the world.’ By Pyke’s calculations, she would have left two or possibly three weeks before him, and if she’d come by steamer, she should have been there for a number of weeks already.
‘Not as far as I’m aware.’ Harper’s elbows were resting on the desk. He was trying to appear relaxed but Pyke could see the tension in his shoulders.
‘Are you certain about that?’
‘You want her, ask for her up at Ginger Hill.’
‘I’ll do that,’ Pyke said, still trying to work out whether he liked the big newspaperman. ‘It can’t have been easy for people to take, a mulatto girl being engaged to a rich white planter.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘I’m guessing his family have objections, too. The father, for example. You knew him when he was here?’
‘Not personally.’ Harper’s eyes narrowed.
‘I wouldn’t think you’d be one of their supporters.’
‘Who said I was?’
‘Then what’s to stop us from having a private chat?’
But Harper was rubbing his chin and looking at Pyke with ill-concealed suspicion. ‘You know something? This conversation is beginning to make me feel uncomfortable. So either you tell me what you want and why you’re here or I ask you to leave.’
Pyke nodded. ‘All right.’
From his desk, the newspaperman produced a bottle of rum and two glasses. He filled them with the murky spirit and pushed one of them across the desk. Pyke took it, closed his eyes and swallowed the rum in a single gulp. The fiery liquid burned the sides of his throat. Harper laughed when he saw Pyke shudder. ‘Most white folk take it with water,’ he said, still grinning.
‘Kill-devil and water.’
The words hung in the air. Pyke thought about McQuillan’s claim that ‘kill-devil’ had been some kind of code word used by Mary Edgar and Arthur Sobers.
‘That’s right,’ Harper said, eventually. ‘So what were you about to tell me?’
Pyke started with news of Mary Edgar’s murder and proceeded with a summary of his investigation to date. He left nothing out, apart from Alefounder’s involvement with the dead woman and the fact that the sugar trader would shortly be arriving in Falmouth. He also didn’t say anything about his suspicions regarding Elizabeth Malvern or indeed about the manner of Mary Edgar’s death; for now, this was something he wanted to keep to himself. When he’d said all there was to say, Pyke took a sip of the fresh glass of rum Harper had poured him then swore the newspaperman to silence.
‘I didn’t know Mary Edgar personally but I’m sorry she’s dead. Like you said, she was a beauty.’ Harper hesitated, not quite meeting Pyke’s gaze. ‘Do you know who killed her?’
This time it was Pyke’s turn to be reticent. He tried to swat a fly that had landed on his arm.
‘What I meant to ask was why, given she was killed in London, have you made the trip all the way out here?’
This was also a question Pyke wasn’t prepared to answer. Instead, he waited for a moment and said, ‘I wonder whether Charles Malvern knows his fiancée has been murdered.’
Harper poured himself another rum. ‘I publish a daily newspaper and
I
hadn’t heard about it. But someone might have written him a letter, his father or sister ...’
I
hadn’t heard about it. But someone might have written him a letter, his father or sister ...’
Or someone might have travelled from England to break the news to him in person ...
‘Tell me about the father.’
‘At one time Silas Malvern was the largest slave-owner in the county. About four or five years ago, just after the first emancipation act, he decided to move to England. Perhaps he saw the writing on the wall. In any case, he sold everything but Ginger Hill and moved to England with his daughter Elizabeth.’
‘And Charles stayed here?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What kind of man is he?’
‘Silas or Charles?’
‘Silas.’
Harper looked at him and shrugged. ‘Well, he wasn’t the worst of them, not by a long way.’ Then he rose to his feet and told Pyke he wanted to show him something, if Pyke had a few moments to spare.
It had already fallen dark in the short space of time they had been talking, although the air was still warm and filled with the trilling of cicadas. They walked in silence along Market Street. It was noticeably quieter, eerily so, and when Pyke mentioned this to Harper, and asked why all the shutters and windows of the houses had been boarded up, Harper assured him that all would soon become clear.
Pyke heard them before he saw them; a mob of men, white men, gathered in a semicircle around a fight or some kind of spectacle in front of the courthouse. It turned out not to be a fight, though. Harper, who for obvious reasons kept his distance, said, ‘This is Jamaican justice.’ A black man, stripped naked to his trousers, was lying on the ground chained to a rock. Next to him, a burly white man holding a whip was catching his breath, as were the crowd who had assembled to witness the spectacle. ‘The Custos found him guilty of theft, so this is his punishment.’ The next lash of the whip, when it finally came, made Pyke look away. The following made him wince; twenty-five lashes later, he wanted to be sick. The mob roared their approval at every one of them and by the end there was almost nothing left of the man’s back.
‘There’ll be retribution later,’ Harper said, as they made their way to a place that he’d euphemistically called ‘the hole’. ‘That’s why all the shutters have been closed. Once the white folk have all gone home, they’ll move in from the edge of town and untie the man you saw being whipped. You can smell the anger in the air. I wouldn’t go for a walk later, if I were you.’ Pyke noticed Harper had referred to the town’s black population as ‘they’.
In fact, the ‘hole’ was not as euphemistically named as Pyke had imagined. The space had been dug into the ground and was covered by a roof made of corrugated iron and bamboo. It was the only place in the town, as Harper later explained, where whites and blacks could mix without causing upset. Harper also said it served the cheapest and best rum. Pyke sat on an overturned crate while Harper bought the drinks at the counter. In spite of the late hour, the room was like a furnace and Pyke’s new cotton shirt was already damp with perspiration.
‘The fellow with the whip,’ Harper explained, after he’d put two glasses of rum filled to the brim down on the crate between them. ‘That was the Custos.’ When he saw Pyke didn’t understand the term, he clarified, ‘The chief magistrate.’
‘And the man being whipped - were the charges against him fair?’
This made the big man laugh. ‘They reckon he stole two goats from a landowner near Martha Brae.’ Harper sat forward, his gigantic forearms resting on the crate, so that Pyke could smell the rum on his breath. ‘Actually, you know him, or know of him. Your friend Michael Pemberton made the accusation.’
They sipped their rum. It was certainly more palatable than the drink Pyke had imbibed at Samuel’s place in the East End. ‘What had this man
really
done?’
really
done?’
The newspaper proprietor considered Pyke’s question. ‘How much do you know about this island?’
‘I know the apprenticeship system was abolished two years ago.’ As Pyke understood it, this was a system introduced after slavery had been outlawed three or four years previously, mostly to appease the planters. Former slaves were ‘apprenticed’ to their masters for a period of time which, in effect, meant they had to work in conditions similar to slavery in order to ‘earn’ their freedom. Pyke had read that abuses were commonplace and the system had been almost as unpopular as slavery itself, or perhaps more so; under slavery those working on the estates had at least received medical care from trained doctors.
‘And how have your newspapers reported this emancipation?’ The irony was difficult to miss.
‘Are you saying nothing much has changed?’
‘Everything and nothing.’ Harper swallowed what remained of his rum and shuddered slightly. ‘You can’t put a price on a man’s freedom. I still remember the first day I bought my freedom; the air tasted cleaner, the sun shone more brightly, the sky was that much bluer. But the landlords still have all the power and they expect us to work on their estates for next to nothing.’ His eyes were shining. ‘Under slavery, they were obliged to provide housing and provision grounds so that we could grow our own food. These are places where folk have lived their entire lives, where their relatives and their ancestors are buried. Now, under this new system, the landlords are charging rents almost as high as the wages they’re prepared to pay. So it’s true, folk ain’t happy, and rightly so. The man you saw being whipped, Isaac Webb, was trying to do something about it. He’s organised a strike up at Ginger Hill - they’re refusing to bring in the harvest until their wage demands have been met - and now the dispute’s threatening to spread across the island.’
Harper paused to wipe his face with a handkerchief. ‘You see, the cane’s ripe and ready to be harvested. If it ain’t cut down and pressed in the next week or so, the whole crop will be lost. Malvern’s workers know this and they’re holding out against going to the fields, hoping he’ll buckle and agree to pay them a fair wage.’ From nowhere, two more rums appeared on the table. Harper grinned.
Pyke hadn’t finished the one in his hand and already felt a little drunk. ‘So Malvern, Pemberton, the Custos, there’s no difference between them?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Harper picked up the full glass of rum and drank it in a single gulp. ‘The dispute started at Ginger Hill because they reckon he’s a soft touch.’ His eyes were a little bloodshot and his accent was stronger now, too. ‘Like I said, Silas wasn’t the worst of them and neither is his son.’
Pyke took a sip of the next rum. Harper watched him, smiling. ‘But I heard Charles is looking to leave, sell up and join his fiancée in London, or at least that’s what his plans were before ...’ Harper hesitated, suddenly not sure what to say. But there was a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. ‘In fact that’s who I thought you were, when you first walked through my door, asking questions about Pemberton and Mary Edgar.’
‘Who?’ Pyke asked, confused.
‘A potential buyer.’
‘A potential or a particular buyer?’
‘Malvern’s had lots of potential buyers over the past year and a half; all have pulled out. I’m told a gentleman from Antigua is expected here soon. I’m also told Malvern has high hopes for this one. He’s desperate to sell the estate. I have no idea how your news will affect his plans.’
Pyke turned this information over in his mind, while Harper ordered another round of drinks. ‘You know this buyer’s name?’ he asked when Harper returned, this time carrying four glasses of rum between his calloused fingers.
‘Not off the top of my head but I can find out. Why you ask?’
‘This buyer is expected here soon. And if he’s coming all the way from Antigua, it isn’t likely anyone’s actually met him, is it?’
‘Exactly what I was thinking.’
Later Pyke would wonder why the newspaperman had been so keen for him to do what they eventually agreed upon, but at the time they were both swept up on a giddy tide of rum.
‘What I still don’t understand is why, if Mary was killed in London, you came all this way to Jamaica.’
Pyke noticed Harper had just called her ‘Mary’ but didn’t comment. ‘I came for the sunshine.’ He upended the glass into his mouth and shuddered involuntarily. ‘And the rum.’
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