Kill-Devil and Water by Andrew Pepper Page A

civilians from the public purse to do the work of the police is wrong.’
     
    ‘It’s your job to see things in terms of right and wrong. For the rest of us, fault isn’t so easy to apportion.’
     
    ‘Listen, Pyke, I don’t have time to debate the ethics of journalism. Either you agree to my condition or we shake hands and go our separate ways. Which is it to be?’
     
    Pyke stole another glance at Saggers and briefly weighed up his debt to Tilling against his desire to find Mary Edgar’s murderer and vindicate himself in his son’s eyes. ‘His name’s Fitzroy Tilling.’ Pyke hesitated, still contemplating his betrayal. ‘He’s the deputy commissioner.’
     
    Outside Spratt’s office, Saggers turned to him and whispered, ‘For a moment I thought you were going to piss our deal up against the wall for the sake of, what, a friendship?’
     
    Pyke had to fight the urge to grab the fat man by his neck and squeeze it until he choked.
     
     
Pyke sat at the counter in the smoky confines of Samuel’s taproom drinking rum and water. As the man had predicted, the atmosphere of the place was different. Perhaps it was the babble of different languages which made it so: Scandinavians drunkenly toasting each other and dark-skinned Italians smoking their pipes and cheroots. The rest of the faces belonged to Negro and Lascar sailors, each keeping to their own, the different nationalities and races in the cramped room rubbing shoulders with one another, but never mixing.
     
    A part-time dock labourer called Johnny - a man in his forties with blue-black skin and forearms as thick as sapling trees corded with veins - recognised Mary Edgar from the charcoal drawing. He told Pyke he’d seen her in the window of a gentleman’s carriage on Commercial Road about two or three weeks earlier, coming from the direction of the West India Docks. He didn’t recognise anyone resembling Arthur Sobers’ description but told Pyke that a ship from Jamaica called the Island Queen had docked there around the same time.
     
    But that wasn’t the end of Pyke’s good fortune. Samuel directed him towards a woman in her sixties with dark, wrinkled skin who was sitting on her own at a table in the corner of the room. He showed her the drawing and told her the woman had been killed. That provoked very little reaction, but when he suggested that her body might have been embalmed with rum, a glimmer passed across her hooded eyes.
     
    She picked up a glass and swallowed the drink he’d bought her in a single gulp. ‘We call it kill-devil. These days I like it with a little water.’
     
    ‘Is it a practice you’re familiar with?’
     
    ‘Not since I been living in this country.’
     
    ‘But you have heard of it?’
     
    Her glance drifted over his shoulder and her eyes glazed over. ‘Folk reckoned it could ward off the duppies.’
     
    ‘Duppies?’
     
    ‘Ghosts. Evil spirits.’
     
    ‘As in witchcraft?’ Pyke waited to catch the old woman’s eyes and thought about Mary Edgar’s mutilated face.
     
    ‘Obeah.’
     
    ‘What’s that?’
     
    ‘Some black folk reckon Obeah men and women can commune with the dead; they have the power to curse and cause harm, as well as cure and uplift.’
     
    ‘And rum is part of what they do?’
     
    ‘Where I grew up, rum’s a part of what everyone does. It’s what kept us going, made the hard times feel better.’ For the first time, she scrutinised Pyke’s expression carefully and added, ‘You sure this girl was embalmed with rum?’
     
    ‘I think so. A bottle of rum had been left by the body and even though it was muddy, the body was spotless, as though it had been washed.’
     
    ‘With rum?’
     
    Pyke nodded.
     
    ‘And this would have been after she was killed?’
     
    ‘Does it make a difference?’
     
    As the woman looked away, the light left her eyes, as if someone had blown out a candle. ‘You kill someone, maybe you want to find a way of appeasing their spirit