The Revenge of Captain Paine Read Online Free

his face. For a moment, Pyke didn’t think the duke would recognise him - he had once humiliated the man in a courtroom before hundreds of spectators - but as their stares met, the duke’s expression darkened and he pushed Pyke away, muttering, ‘God, what are you doing here?’
    But the duke had brushed past him before Pyke had time to answer and strode into the yard shaking his head.
    It was a cold, wet afternoon and the wind was gusting off the choppy waters of the Thames. ‘I have my carriage,’ Morris said, choosing not to remark on Pyke’s exchange with the King’s brother. ‘Perhaps I could offer you a ride back to Hambledon? As you might know, we’re practically neighbours. My wife fell in love with Cranborne Park and insisted we snap it up. It came on to the market and she was suddenly desperate to move to the countryside.’
    Pyke smiled non-committally but the idea that Morris should have moved to within a few miles of Hambledon at the same time as wanting Pyke’s help in an unrelated matter seemed too coincidental.
    They sat in silence as the carriage clattered out of the Palace yard and up Whitehall, finally crossing over on to St Martin’s Lane after waiting for a collision between a wagon transporting barrels of Truman’s ale and a costermonger’s barrow to be cleared away. The air was laced with the scent of hops and a few scavengers were on their hands and knees, lapping up the beer from the gutters.
    ‘Peel wouldn’t tell me how the two of you became acquainted,’ Morris said after a few moments.
    ‘Before I married, I was a Bow Street Runner.’ Pyke waited. ‘An incident that I’d rather not talk about brought me into contact with Peel, who was then the Home Secretary under the Duke of Wellington. Peel came to my rescue when his hand was forced, but he never warmed to me.’
    Morris nodded awkwardly. ‘He can be a cold fish on occasions, I’ll grant you that. But when he’s among those he knows well, he’s a changed chap. He loves a bawdy tale as much as the next man.’
    Pyke nodded blankly. They sat in silence for a while as they crawled their way up Charing Cross Road. In the past two years he had noticed an increase in the number of vehicles using the roads. Not just the drays, wagons and carts used to transport goods around the capital but also the brightly painted private carriages carrying well-fed men and women to and from their homes. There used to be a time when broughams and open-topped phaetons were the preserve of the very rich, but now it seemed that parvenus like him had decided en masse they couldn’t get by without owning their own carriage.
    ‘Do you miss it?’ Morris wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. ‘Being a Bow Street Runner?’
    ‘Since the new police were set up, the job isn’t what it used to be,’ Pyke answered, still bridling from his encounter with Peel.
    ‘But do you miss the work ?’
    ‘Sitting behind a desk hasn’t been kind to my waistline but four years at the bank have made me a lot richer than ten years as a Bow Street Runner.’
    It was as close as he’d come to admitting that he did sometimes miss it. Exploiting people’s weaknesses and tilting events to suit his own circumstances were elements that applied just as well to banking as to policing, but it was hard not to remember the business of piecing together different scraps of information, pursuing suspects, questioning witnesses and forcing confessions out of people without some residual affection.
    ‘Good answer,’ Morris said, toying with his silk cravat. ‘But perhaps I could ask you another question?’
    Pyke shrugged, wondering what kind of inducement Morris might offer him and whether it would offset the bitter aftertaste his encounter with Peel had left.
    ‘Don’t look so worried, old chap. I’m not about to beg for money.’ Smiling, Morris put on his spectacles and pulled out a watch from the fob pocket of his purple waistcoat. ‘As I mentioned earlier,