Dark Waters (35 page)

‘She's granddaughter of a self-proclaimed Whig. That's bad for her. He was an exterminator of vermin and handled poisons. That's doubly bad. And she put the poisoned dish in Allcroft's room. That's—'

‘I know, trebly bad. Yet with the chamber door unlocked, anyone could have gone in there after her and mixed the poison into the stew. There's no proof it was Maggie, though in certain people's eyes you don't need proof, you just have to hate the girl enough and she becomes guilty. It would have been much better had she never bested Grimshaw's own niece in the May Queen contest, but she did. So there's more than enough of circumstance and prejudice to convict her, I fear.'

‘The election will be well over by the time of the assize.'

‘Yes, but in the meantime she'll be the focus for all sorts of discontent. Some will be for her and some against. The killing of her grandfather, on his way to vote, cannot fail to be seen by your Whigs as the same. Once the facts are out they will say it is some kind of retaliation for Allcroft.'

‘So what do you propose to do?'

‘Delay the inquest until after polling has finished. Biggs and Grimshaw will be delighted. They're afraid the election will be overturned and they'll have the trouble and expense of another contest. It's a pity to please them but it can't be helped.'

*   *   *

We found the apothecary shop closed, with the door locked and the window shuttered on the inside. I hammered at the door while Furzey peered in, trying to see through a gap in the shutters. At length Mrs Wilson came to the door.

‘I must see your husband,' I told her. ‘He failed to answer my summons to give evidence yesterday. It is a serious matter, I'm afraid.'

Even before I had got through half of this short speech Mrs Wilson was shaking her head.

‘Wilson has never come home, Mr Cragg. I've not seen him, from when he walked out of that door on the night before last to go to the tavern, to this minute now. I begged him not to go out. I said there'd been more than enough drinking, but he wouldn't listen.'

‘Have you enquired after him?'

‘I went myself to the White Hart, sir. They said yes, he'd been in but he left at ten on Tuesday or soon after. Nobody's seen a whisker of him since and I don't know where to put myself for worrying.'

I exchanged glances with Furzey who gave an almost imperceptible shrug. He was right. There was nothing much we could do until the apothecary turned up. I told his wife I would let her know if there was any news, and we left.

There was news soon enough. We had been back at the office no more than five minutes when Dick Middleton the eel fisher walked in.

‘I've got Wilson the apothecary for you, coroner, at my place.'

‘You have? That's very good news. I need to speak to him. But how did you hear about that?'

‘I didn't, and it isn't good news.'

‘Well, it should be, Dick. Mr Wilson was lost, and now he is found, like the prodigal son, you know.'

‘He's found all right. I pulled him from river this morning.'

This brought me up short.

‘He was in the
river?
'

‘Aye. I was early bringing in my traps, see, because tide had yet to turn and rightly I should do it at top of tide.'

‘Come to the point, Dick. You pulled Thomas Wilson from the river, you say. You mean he's dead?'

‘Oh, aye, dead as can be.'

‘Ye gods, not another drowning!'

I collected my thoughts. I had just felt a kind of landslip around me, a sense that events might pass out of my control. It was necessary to act with decision.

‘All right, let's go directly to your place. Furzey! Will you please get a message to Dr Fidelis and ask him to meet me at Dick's garden as soon as he can get there?'

On the way, Dick told me his story. He'd gone down to the riverbank and started to bring in his traps, when what he thought was a sack became snagged on his lines. He pulled until it came within reach and he groped underwater for it. Presently he found he had hold of a man's hand.

‘I can tell you, I were properly frighted, Mr Cragg. I'm used to pulling in live eels, not dead people.'

When we came to his garden there was a small knot of curious people standing by the gate, standing on tiptoe to look into the garden and exchanging whispered remarks. For some reason people do speak in whispers in the presence of death, though I don't know why. Do they imagine they might wake the corpse with too much noise?

I told them to disperse, unless they could tell me anything about the death, which none of them could, and they shuffled off. Middleton crossed to one of his sheds, whose door was fastened with a padlock. He unlocked and opened up, to reveal Wilson's body sprawling in the wheelbarrow that he had used to transport it from the riverbank. The legs and arms dangled over the edges, and the head was canted at an unnatural angle. If I had not known he was dead, he might have just seemed dead drunk, and ready to be barrowed home.

‘Let's get him into the light and out of that.'

I seized the barrow handles and wheeled him outside. Then, together, we lifted up the corpse, still sodden with Ribble water, and humped it onto a rough table just outside the shed, which Middleton used to gut his eels. Wilson was still fully clothed, except for his shoes. His mouth was open and his eyes stared, as if shocked at the sudden death that had come upon them. I tried closing the eyelids, but they kept springing open again until Dick offered me two flat stones the size of crown pieces, and I used these to weigh them down. Then we stood, one on each side of him, while I thought about death, its suddenness and its finality.

I knew Dick was following the same line of thought when he said, ‘It's the same with eels when they're dead, Mr Cragg. Eyes stare at you, mouth gapes open. Makes you think.'

Luke Fidelis arrived ten minutes later, carrying, as ever, his medical bag. First he examined Wilson's head, peering close.

‘He's taken a blow to the head. It would have knocked him out for certain, if it didn't kill him.'

He bent again to inspect the open mouth.

‘What's this?'

He rifled in his bag until he came out with a case of small instruments, which he opened. He selected a pair of tweezers and applied them to Wilson's teeth. Wilson had had good teeth, browned but holding together. Fidelis's tweezers seized something from between the two front ones, and plucked it out. He held it up to the light.

‘What would you say this was?'

‘It looks like a piece of silver thread.'

‘I think that is exactly what it is. But I wonder how it got between his two front teeth. Who do we know who wears silver-threaded clothing?'

‘Burgess Grimshaw, on most days,' I suggested.

Fidelis laughed.

‘Beware of prejudice, Titus. Who else?'

Suddenly I saw again the unexpected opulence of Hamilton Peters's waistcoat, when we met in the hall of the Gamecock Inn.

‘Peters!' I said.

‘Quite so,' confirmed Fidelis.

Carefully he preserved the piece of thread in his pocketbook and went back to work, extending his examination of the corpse from the head to the trunk, arms and legs. Stripping off the man's coat and shirt he turned the body onto its front and produced his listening trumpet, which he pressed to various parts of the back, applying his ear to it while thumping the flesh with his fist. Finally he stepped away from the table.

‘Of one thing I am certain, Titus: that Wilson was murdered. Quite probably with a bludgeon. His body was then thrown into the river. The killer may have had in mind what happened to Antony Egan, and the outcome of your inquest at the Ferry Inn. He wanted people to assume the same of Wilson – that his death was a drunken mischance.'

‘Perhaps it was, Luke. He might have struck his head on something while being swept along by the current.'

‘He might well have – but if he did, it wasn't what killed him. There's no water in his lungs. Unlike the last corpse we recovered from the river, this one was dead when he went into it.'

*   *   *

‘I am beginning to be alarmed,' said Fidelis, ‘about the safety of the other two.'

We had left Middleton reluctantly in charge of the late Wilson, and were climbing up the lane in the direction of town.

‘Which other two?'

‘Reynolds and Drake. The only two left from the Sunday night cribbage game which, it seems to me, someone wants to exterminate.'

‘I don't think we have enough facts to warrant the conclusion. You are suggesting a conspiracy.'

‘Of course I am, Titus. Why not? Looked at in a certain way, all life is a conspiracy. One group against another. Politics. Religion.'

‘Good Lord, could it be someone objecting to their playing a godless game on the Sabbath?'

‘It's a possibility, I suppose. But the fact that all were of the same party, and one of them a candidate in the election, is more suggestive of politics.'

Fidelis had a point.

‘Very well. First I must go to Mrs Wilson and tell her of her sadly changed station in life. But let's meet at your lodging in thirty minutes and we'll pay a visit to Mr Reynolds. He may still by then not have heard of this latest death, and it will be interesting to see if it frightens him at all.'

So I left him and hurried away to the apothecary's shop.

*   *   *

It has often been my task to bring news of death, and I have observed certain patterns in the behaviour of the suddenly bereaved. Some collapse like a tent whose ropes are cut. Others jut out their chins and put a brave face on it. And there is a third group that finds release in histrionic mourning, as seen in old Greek tragedies. Mrs Wilson had never heard of Sophocles, I am sure. But she played the news of her widowhood with extraordinary vigour and passion. She threw her apron over her head. She wailed in long, swooping vowels. She went around the room thumping and kicking the furniture, cursing fate and cursing too her husband Wilson for his inability to stay alive.

I made sure that a neighbour woman was at hand to provide her with a suitably condoling audience and, as soon as I decently could, slipped away.

*   *   *

Fidelis and I had to push through a small knot of troublemakers that had gathered in the street outside Mrs Bryce's house. Wearing oak leaves pinned to their lapels they jibed about murderous Whigs and Walpoleans, and called John Allcroft a sainted martyr, to which neither Fidelis nor myself made reply. Mrs Bryce made a face at them as she came to the door, at which they jeered.

‘Those ruffians have been at my door all morning,' she said as she ushered us inside. ‘They seem to think dear Mr Reynolds is in some way responsible for this poisoning at the Gamecock. Such nonsense.'

I asked after Mr Reynolds.

‘He is in the music room, drinking coffee with Mr Destercore. So you and the doctor must come up and take a cup with us.'

Mrs Bryce's house was of four storeys, with two parlours. The one on the ground floor was for everyday callers, while the first-floor front room, equipped with a harpsichord, was reserved, in normal times, for evening entertainments.

At the door Mrs Bryce whispered, ‘Poor Mr Reynolds is feeling fretfully hard pressed, you know, very hard pressed indeed. But he finds coffee steadies his nerves.'

Music had been temporarily abandoned and the room had become a staff headquarters for the election battle, with its harpsichord, side table and more than one of its chairs covered with papers containing lists of names, with incoming letters, memoranda and drafts of speeches. I recognized several notebooks like the one Destercore had been copying into at the Moot Hall on the previous Saturday morning.

Fidelis and I had agreed in advance to behave, at first, as if this were a polite call. Two or three chairs were cleared of paper and we sat in a semicircle at the fireplace while Mrs Bryce brought fresh coffee and buttered teacakes. Reynolds looked as his landlady described – fatigued and rather bewildered – though he seemed amenable to a little distraction. Destercore, on the other hand, was hardly able to conceal his impatience at our interruption; he sat studying papers while swiping up his coffee cup at intervals to take hurried sips. I asked how Mr Reynolds and his party were faring in the vote.

‘We struggle against heavy odds,' he said. ‘The death of Isaac Satterthwaite is a blow and it cost me a dozen votes. Even worse, Hoghton will not campaign. He skulks at Hoghton Tower afraid of the jokes they will shout at him. Imagine that, will you? The sitting MP and afraid of jokes! He ought to think about policy not scurrility.'

‘The view does you credit,' I said. ‘But I wonder if, in politics, jokes are not a mightier force than arguments.'

‘Oh, no! We cannot have that,' broke in Mrs Bryce. ‘For then Mr Reynolds will never succeed, having not a – what shall I say? – not a
funny
bone in his body. Have another teacake, dear Mr Reynolds, it will build you up.'

Reynolds fetched a deep and gloomy sigh as he helped himself.

‘My late mother used to say,' he declared, taking a half-moon out of the slice, ‘that I never laughed after I was five years old.'

A moment of silence followed this curious statement, during which I wondered if it was time to broach the real reason for our visit. Then Reynolds himself, swallowing his mouthful, leaned forward and opened the way to me.

‘Cragg, have you come nearer to establishing what happened to Satterthwaite? There are shocking rumours that he was shot. Can these be true?'

I thought it best to evade the question.

‘That will come out at the inquest. But I'm afraid we now have equally sad news about another of your friends in town.'

Reynolds was nodding lugubriously as he listened. I went on.

‘I am sorry to tell you that Mr Thomas Wilson the apothecary has been pulled out of the river this morning. He, too, is dead. Dr Fidelis and I have just returned from examining the body.'