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poor and getting exploited by white men like yourself.’
     
    Pyke absorbed her insult. ‘But if I did want to speak to people who might have known Mary Edgar and Arthur Sobers ...’
     
    She studied his face for a few moments, deciding whether she wanted to help or not. ‘There’s a beer shop at the bottom of Commercial Road, near the docks. Ask for Samuel.’
     
    Pyke thanked her and stretched his legs, but when he reached down to gather up the drawing, she touched his hand. ‘You want to know something? That’s the first time I touched another human being in a month.’ She looked away suddenly, perhaps because she didn’t want him to see the tears in her eyes.
     
    Pyke went to kiss her on the cheek but at the last moment she turned her head towards him and he had no choice but to embrace her mouth. Her lips were softer and saltier than he had imagined. Momentarily Pyke closed his eyes and put the smell of faeces out of his mind. When he pulled away, he expected that she might say something, but whatever had happened in that moment passed and she was staring up at the ceiling, as though nothing had happened.
     
    ‘I lie here trying to remember happier times but when I shut my eyes all I can see are the faces of the men who fucked me.’
     
    Pyke left her without saying goodbye. He guessed that she would be dead before the end of the year.
     

THREE
     
    William Maginn’s face glistened like a ham that been soaked in briny water and boiled vigorously until it had turned a burnished shade of pink. He was pontificating about the merits of Shakespeare’s tragedies while imbibing from a hip-flask. Around him, a coterie of admirers hung on his every word. At one time, he had been the most respected and feared journalist in the city, though this had been before he had burned his bridges at Fraser’s magazine and spent time in prison, like Pyke, for failing to pay his debts. Godfrey told Pyke all this while fretting nervously at the edges of the circle, trying to find a way of interrupting Maginn and maybe limiting his consumption of gin, at least until after the speeches.
     
    Hatchard’s bookshop on Piccadilly was full and Pyke was momentarily surprised by the number of people Godfrey had persuaded to attend the event, until he remembered that the book they’d all come to toast had attracted more than its fair share of notoriety in the months following its publication. Figures as worthy as Dickens and Bulwer had described Godfrey’s book as a ‘brutally honest account of wrongdoing’. Godfrey had framed those reviews. But other critics had torn it to shreds. Thackeray, for example, had compared it unfavourably to the ‘already lamentable’ Eugene Aram and had lambasted it as a ‘foul, sordid piece of writing’ that should be ‘consigned to the nearest cesspool’ for fear that ‘it might irrevocably contaminate those whose misfortune it was to turn its pages’. Godfrey had framed that review as well, claiming that a book capable of provoking such hostility had to be doing something right. Pyke suspected that beneath his bluster, his uncle cared very deeply what a man like Thackeray thought and that the review had wounded him more than he cared to admit. It had been something of a surprise, then, when Maginn had written to Godfrey to offer a cautiously favourable verdict, because Maginn and Thackeray had once been good friends, and perhaps still were.
     
    Pyke hadn’t read The True and Candid Confession of an ex-Bow Street Runner , nor did he have any desire to do so. He had talked at length with Godfrey, while his uncle scribbled notes, and he had been as truthful and as candid as he thought appropriate. But Pyke had known from the start that what appeared in print would bear only the slightest resemblance to his own experiences. Godfrey wasn’t interested in virtue and goodness; rather his writing and publishing reflected a preference for the tasteless, sordid, low and morally repugnant. Pyke knew