A Burial at Sea (6 page)

“Very true,” Lenox said. “But since it’s already been dug … at any rate, it’s crucial that we catch up with the French. I’m an emissary of the prime minister, officially, sent to affirm our rather weak alliance with Egypt. Fortunately the governor there, a chap called Ismail, is open to our use of the channel. I’ll take him presents, flatter him, attend an audience with him, impress his friends…”

“All this over a canal,” Billings said. It wasn’t a disrespectful statement, exactly, but it seemed to reflect the mood of the room.

“It could be worth ten million pounds one day, this meeting. A hundred million.”

To men who would have felt themselves quite rich on eight hundred pounds a year this number was nearly unfathomable, but it effectively undercut whatever unvoiced dissatisfaction they had collectively felt with Lenox’s mission. Worth sailing to Egypt a hundred times for
that
sort of meeting, they would say to each other confidentially, out of his hearing.

To his explanation there was in fact some truth. His trip to Suez would help British interests there. But of course it was secondary to his true purpose in making this voyage.

“And you? Why were you sailing for Egypt?”

“In part to take you,” said Billings. “The navy has orders to prove itself useful.”

“A friend in Parliament wouldn’t go amiss.” Halifax chuckled as he said this but Lenox felt stares of evaluation directed at him.

Billings went on. “We also like to patrol the trade waters. The prevention of piracy is still essential, though it’s not the old swashbuckling sort of the last century.”

Then Quirke spoke, the redheaded engineer. “They also like to give a ship like the
Lucy
a short mission after they give her a long one. Bless the Lord, for we’ve been afloat a very long time.”

“That’s sensible.”

“Mr. Lenox, by traveling with us won’t you miss your time in Parliament?” asked Carrow, the third lieutenant. “Votes—meetings—that sort of thing?”

“Yes, although we’re close to recess. I suppose this is more important.”

“Parliament,” said one of the anonymous young lieutenants with some wonderment, almost as if he were speaking a magic word. “What is it like?”

“It took some getting used to,” Lenox said. “But now I wouldn’t trade it for anything. There’s a great deal of shouting, there are many long, tedious meetings, but with that said there’s more camaraderie and excitement than I expected.”

“You know the lads—the midshipmen—are eager to ask you about murders and all that,” said Halifax, smiling. “They say you were a detective.”

“Once. A long while ago, it seems now. I don’t do anything in that direction nowadays.”

In his cabin later (after he had finished his ablutions and McEwan had finished scrubbing) he stretched out in bed feeling some queer emotion that was neither sadness nor quite melancholy. For the longest time he couldn’t think what it was, until it hit him: homesickness. It had been so many years, thirty perhaps, since he had felt it.

But almost as if by magic the diagnosis cleared the sensation itself away, and immediately after promising himself that he would write Lady Jane a long letter in the morning, he fell into a heavy and dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER EIGHT

An urgent hand shook him from it.

“Mr. Lenox!” a man’s voice said. “Mr. Lenox! Come, wake up!”

It wasn’t McEwan, Lenox knew even in that bewildered state of half wakefulness that follows a startle from rest. But who then?

A yellow light that had seemed to be emanating dimly from the floor of the cabin rose, and as he came into self-possession Lenox saw that it was a lantern. It illuminated the face of the ship’s captain.

“Mr. Martin?” said Lenox in surprise.

Martin spoke in his usual dry, imperturbable voice, but there was a tremor beneath it that Lenox hadn’t yet heard. “I would ask you to come to my mess, Mr. Lenox. Please, be quick about it if you will.”

“What time is it?”

“Running on four in the morning. It’s through the last door in the wardroom and along a corridor. Hurry, if you please. I’ll leave you this lantern.”

“Is it Teddy? My nephew, rather, Edmund?”

“No, no, he’s well. He’ll be asleep in the gun room now.”

There had been enough middle-of-the-night visitors in Lenox’s past life that he was quick to get ready. He threw on a shirt and braced himself with a splash of water to the face, taken from the small pool left in his washstand. McEwan, in his hammock, slumbered on apace—or seemed to at any rate—and Lenox just managed to squeeze past his bulk and through to the darkened wardroom.

By contrast the captain’s spacious and well-appointed mess was a blaze of light, with lanterns on their chains swinging from the beam over the dining table. There were two men besides Martin seated at the far end of the table. One was Tradescant, the surgeon, who had a vinegary look on his face. The other was the slender Billings, Martin’s first lieutenant.

“There you are,” said Martin. “Please, come sit. Take a glass of brandy.”

“I thank you, no,” said Lenox.

“You had better,” said Billings, and Lenox saw that his face looked haunted.

“If you prefer it, then.”

“There you are.” Billings, who seemed relieved to have some duty, poured Lenox a crystal tumbler full of brandy and slid it down the table to where he was sitting.

“Plainly something has occurred, gentlemen,” Lenox said, his drink untouched, hands folded before him. “What is it?”

“You were a detective once?” said Martin.

“Once.”

“I mean to say that you retain the … the faculties of an amateur detective.”

“An intermittently professional one, in fact. But they are corroded by disuse, I assure you. Why do you ask? Mr. Tradescant, I can see the various spots of blood on your cuff—they are fresh, not darkened by washing—I presume you do not wear your nightshirt to see your patients. You have roused me from sleep—from all this I conclude that somebody has been wounded unexpectedly. It only remains to ask whether the person is dead or not.”

There was a long pause.

“They are,” said Martin at last. “He is.”

“Who?”

“Lieutenant Halifax.”

After his short speech the onetime detective had felt in control of this tense congregation, but this name knocked the wind out of him. His only friend aboard the
Lucy
, really. And a good man—kindly hearted—gentle. A gentleman in the old sense of the word. A thought strayed across Lenox’s mind: he hadn’t had time to fish, Halifax, on this last voyage of his life. What a pity. Now he took a sip of that brandy before speaking.

“When did it happen?”

Billings answered. “His body was discovered on the quarterdeck fifteen minutes ago.”

“Discovered!” said Lenox. “Surely it would be impossible to shift a body around—to kill someone—without others knowing about it, on a ship this small? Why, there are two hundred and twenty men aboard the
Lucy
!”

Martin gave him a dry glance, as if to indicate that this piece of information was already in his possession, but said nothing.

It was Billings who spoke again. “It’s the dead of night. Very few men are on deck, and those that are would have been on the poop or about the main deck. He could have been brought from below, I suppose.”

“Leave the conclusions out,” said Martin. “Mr. Lenox, I’m afraid we must call upon your skills.”

Rather than acknowledging this request, Lenox said, “Mr. Tradescant, you attempted to resuscitate him, I take it?”

“I did, after a fashion. That is to say I checked his pulse, though a dunce in medical college could have spotted from fifty yards off there wouldn’t be one, and then checked his breath.”

Impatiently, Martin said, “Mr. Lenox, we have agreed that you should look into this. I feel certain that whoever did it will come forward—before morning, I would lay odds—but on the off chance that they don’t…”

“Did Mr. Halifax have any disagreements with the sailors?”

“Mr. Billings, perhaps you can answer that.”

“On the contrary, though he had only been here for several months he seemed quite popular. Occasionally they’ll take advantage of someone—someone—well, Faxxie wasn’t soft, exactly, but he wasn’t the martinet that some lieutenants might be. He had a reputation as a very capable gentleman at sea, though, which the men seemed to understand and value. I would have called him beloved, in fact. Certainly more than Carrow or I.”

“That squares with what I observed,” said Martin.

“Then there’s nobody likely to have borne him ill will?”

“Not for more than a passing moment. No.”

Lenox pondered this. “And of course,” he said, half to himself, “if someone bore a grudge why not kill him in Plymouth?”

“What can that mean?” asked Martin sharply

“On shore they would have had six weeks to do the job. The ship is in effect a closed room. Impossible to flee, should you be discovered. It’s peculiar, I’ll say that. Did you take many new men on board for this voyage? Someone who might be violent?”

“Only two.”

“Two! Is that all? Out of two hundred odd?”

“Yes. A new lieutenant, our fifth, Lee, and a new forecastleman, Hardy. Both, I can assure you, came with unimpeachable references.”

“I thought there was tremendous turnover on a ship of this sort.”

“In others, perhaps, but there is no war on at the moment,” said Martin, “which means there are more men than places, and the
Lucy
is a remarkably steady sailor. And then, I have something of a reputation for taking prizes.”

This made sense: to take a prize, an enemy ship, meant that everyone on board got in various proportions some reward of the prize money. It was an incentive to courage, and indeed an incentive to sail with the navy. A good prize for a common sailor might have meant enough money to buy a small cottage or open a public house, while for a captain it would be enough money to buy a splendid estate on a hundred acres in the countryside.

Lenox forced himself to focus.

“Who found the body?”

“Carrow. He was on duty.”

With a lurch in his stomach Lenox remembered that Teddy would have been, too. “Were there any witnesses?”

“From what Carrow says, no. There was a loud thump on the quarterdeck, which might have been the murder itself, and he went to look at what had caused it after several moments. The quarterdeck would have been hidden from his view, you see. When he went to look he found the body.”

“And so it was Carrow who came to fetch you, Captain?”

“He came to me first,” said Tradescant. “I ran up on deck. The captain followed shortly thereafter.”

Martin nodded his confirmation of this sequence of events. “I called for Billings, then. We agreed to find you.”

“Mr. Tradescant, how long had Halifax been dead when you saw him? You said a dunce in medical college could have spotted that he was?”

“Five minutes, I would say, just to hazard a guess. Not more than ten or twelve. His skin was still as warm as yours or mine. And his heart was still hot to the touch.”

There was a moment of quiet at this news.

“But how on earth could you know that, about his heart?” said Lenox. “Did you perform an autopsy so soon?”

The three men—Martin, Billings, and Tradescant—exchanged looks.

“No,” said the captain at last. “We found him on his back, cut open straight down the middle from his throat to his stomach, and the skin pulled back so that you could see his entrails.”

CHAPTER NINE

To have a preference among types of murder was absurd, of course—grotesque even—but Lenox had always had a particular distaste for death by the knife. Gunshot, strangulation, poisoning: for reasons hidden even to him, none of these seemed quite as grim as a stabbing or a cutting. Somehow the image of Halifax meeting such an end made everything worse.

He stood. “Good Christ. Let me see him then. Is his body alone? We must go at once if it is, before anyone can interfere with it.”

“No, no, Carrow is standing over him,” said Billings. “Nobody else has been permitted close to the body—Halifax’s body—or indeed the quarterdeck, besides the three of us and Carrow. Though I’m afraid several seamen saw the body.”

Martin stood. “You’ll do it then, Mr. Lenox? If nobody comes forward, you’ll find the man who did this?”

“I could scarcely do anything else.”

They climbed up to the main deck. A cool breeze there just ruffled the otherwise slack sails.

“Why aren’t we sailing?” he asked.

“We need to beat to windward,” said Martin, “but that takes men, and I wanted to keep the deck as clear of people as possible. We’re simply drifting at the moment.”

“I see. Out of curiosity, what’s the nearest port?”

“London, I would imagine, perhaps Whistable. Why?”

“In case we need to seek help on land.”

The captain shook his head. “No. We have our own ways in the navy, sir, and we may try and convict a man of a crime as legitimately here as they might in the assizes.”

“Hm.”

“We’re not putting into port, with all due respect. I won’t go back there tail-tucked, a man who can’t control his own ship.”

“Very well. Let’s see poor Halifax, then.”

The quarterdeck of the
Lucy
(domain solely of officers) was one level up from the main deck and the poop deck was one level up from that, but each had a separate set of stairs leading to it from the main deck. This left the quarterdeck invisible in parts from the others, just as Martin had said, particularly where the poop deck’s rail blocked off from sight the back half of the quarterdeck. It would be just possible, then, to do something out of sight of both the main deck and the poop deck at once. Still, it seemed improbable somehow that a man could be murdered within ten feet of a half-dozen other men without attracting attention.

“When was Halifax’s watch?” said Lenox as they walked single file up the quarterdeck.

“First watch,” said Billings.