Free The Last Days by Wye8th

wrote a book called The Prince.’
    ‘Oh.’ The duke turned back to face Peel and shrugged. ‘Why is this man relevant here?’
    ‘Machiavelli lived in the early sixteenth century . . .’
    ‘I’m not stupid, Robert. I meant this chap here,’ the duke said, motioning without enthusiasm at Pyke.
    ‘Mr Pyke was the man who discovered the bodies in St Giles.’
    ‘What bodies?’ The duke seemed both confused and annoyed. ‘I’m the Prime Minister and no one tells me a bloody thing.’
    Peel looked at Pyke and said, ‘I think the Prime Minister and I need to have a talk . . .’
    Pyke stood up and left.

FIVE
    L izzie’s gin palace did not, as the name might suggest, belong to Lizzie Morgan, the woman who occasionally shared Pyke’s bed. Nor did it belong to her father, George Morgan, who had once been a Bow Street Runner and had first initiated Pyke into the ways of earning additional income from the job. The establishment, which occupied a position at the north end of Duke Street, at the back of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and adjoining the livestock market at Smithfield, was owned by Pyke himself - the happy byproduct of a business arrangement that had also led to the capture and imprisonment of a notorious criminal. For a while, after this man’s conviction, his base of operations had remained vacant. Pyke had bought the lease with reward money paid to him by the grateful owner of valuables Pyke had recovered. He had then transformed it into a drinking establishment replete with plate-glass windows and gilt cornices, ornamental parapets, spittoons, gas lights and illuminated advertisements announcing the ‘medicinal’ properties of the gin on sale. Initially George, who had just retired from the Runners, had assumed the day-to-day running of the bar, but a stroke had subsequently confined him to his bed and propelled Lizzie into the limelight.
    Pyke had christened it the Smithfield gin palace, but ever since Lizzie had put on her apron and taken over the running of the bar, most folk simply referred to it as ‘Lizzie’s place’.
    It was after three in the morning by the time Peel’s carriage dropped Pyke outside the entrance. The main bar was deserted - the gas lamps had been switched off - and Pyke went straight up to his room, ignoring the powerful scent of human sweat, sawdust and alcohol. To his dismay, Lizzie was curled up in his bed, gently snoring. He envied her peace. Without waking her, he closed the door behind him and went back downstairs to the bar.
    Pyke knew that sleep was beyond him, just as he also knew that he did not want to wake Lizzie and have to field well-meaning questions about where he had been and what he had been doing. But he could not settle in the empty bar and found himself yearning for someone to distract him from the unpleasantness of his own thoughts.
    Even the laudanum, which he kept hidden away in a bottle behind the counter, did little to alleviate his anxiety.
    A while later, still numb from the drug, he found himself walking, unaware of his surroundings or the biting wind, not knowing where he was going until he had reached the cobbled streets surrounding St Paul’s. The giant cathedral stretched so far above him that he could hardly see the starless sky.
    When he couldn’t help himself, Pyke tended to prowl the streets around Wellington Barracks on Birdcage Walk, looking for ‘dollymops’: maids, shop girls and milliners who moonlighted as prostitutes to earn additional money and perhaps find someone to support them in a flat of their own. But given that he was half an hour’s walk from the barracks, he didn’t expect to find anyone except a street-hardened prostitute. Usually Pyke did not much care for their crude ways, preferring the faux innocence of girls who still believed in the possibilities of true love. This time he had no intention of being selective.
    To his surprise, in a grubby all-night coffee house, he found a nervous red-headed girl, no more