Read Kill-Devil and Water for Free Online Page A

She was dying of untreated syphilis.
     
    ‘You the first visitor I had in t’ree months,’ she said, the whites of her eyes accentuated by the inky blackness of her skin.
     
    Pyke knelt down and showed her the charcoal etching of Mary Edgar. Wincing, she sat up so that she could get a better look at it, and as she did so, she sniffed his skin. ‘You smell good, like soap.’
     
    The room, on the other hand, reeked of human faeces and for a moment he wondered how and where she defecated.
     
    ‘Her name is Mary Edgar.’ He put the lantern down next to the drawing so she could see it properly.
     
    ‘So?’
     
    ‘I wondered if you might know her.’ As soon as it had left his mouth it struck Pyke as an absurd proposition, but he needed to find a way of getting her to talk.
     
    She peered at the etching and laughed without warmth. ‘That why you come here? ’Cos I’m black and she’s mulatto so we must know each other?’
     
    Pyke acknowledged the truth of her observation with a rueful smile. ‘I don’t know a thing about her apart from her name and that she recently arrived from Jamaica. I thought she might have fallen into the game.’
     
    That drew a more serious nod. ‘So how did you find me?’
     
    ‘Craddock.’
     
    Jane bit her lip, or what was left of it. ‘That bitch had me there to serve them Lascars and Africans but it was the whites who ask for me because I was cheap and they reckoned they could do what they liked with me.’
     
    ‘And as soon as you contracted syphilis she tossed you out.’ Pyke tried to keep any sympathy from his voice; he guessed it would only anger her.
     
    ‘She gave me a bottle of mercury, told me that would cover it.’ She touched her bald head self-consciously.
     
    Pyke brought her attention back to the drawing. ‘Have you got any idea where I might start looking for her?’ He paused and then told her that Mary Edgar had been sharing a room at the Bluefield lodging house with a black man called Arthur Sobers.
     
    Jane shook her head. ‘Why are you looking for her? What she done?’
     
    Pyke shrugged. He didn’t want to tell her that Mary Edgar was dead. Nor, for obvious reasons, did he want to reveal that the woman’s eyes had been gouged out. But if the murder had a ritualistic element to it, as he now suspected, he wanted to find out as much as possible about such things.
     
    ‘Whether she black or white, it look like she got money. So why you looking for her in a black hole like Craddock’s?’ Jane snorted through her disintegrating nose. ‘And why you think she want to be friends with a nigger like me?’
     
    He felt the anger of her stare. ‘To be honest, I hardly know a thing about the black community in the city.’
     
    This much was true. Whereas forty or fifty years earlier, London had had a thriving black population, buoyed by émigrés from the United States who’d fought on the side of the Crown during the revolutionary wars and former slaves who’d earned their freedom and decided to stay and work in the capital, the effects of grinding poverty and falling numbers of immigrants meant there were now probably just a few hundred - or maybe as many as a thousand - black men and women left in the city, in a population of more than a million. Pyke was used to seeing coloured faces around the docks but these men were often sailors and merchant seamen who would spend their shore leave in and around the Ratcliff Highway before leaving for the next port.
     
    ‘And you think I do?’ Jane looked at him. ‘I was born in Gravesend. I can point it out on a map if you don’t know where it is.’
     
    ‘If you were a black man or woman recently arrived in the city, where would you go to eat and drink?’
     
    ‘Anywhere I could afford that would take my money.’ She hesitated. ‘You seem to think there’s one place all black folk go to spend time with each other. That’s not how it is. The only thing black people got in common is being