The Devil's Mask (4 page)

Father's mood lifted as the evening progressed. I hoped this had to do with the wine, and not the arrival of Sebastian and John, yet undoubtedly he relaxed in their presence. John, in particular, has a knack of putting him at ease. He has always had a slow-moving complicity around Father that both I and Sebastian lack; it hangs in the heavier set of his bones and fuller figure; you can hear it in the near-ponderous manner of his speech. Wherever a conversation begins with John, it always seems to move towards a joke, with him the willing butt.

‘The bear was on a long chain,' he was saying now. ‘We stopped to watch it down by St Nicholas Market. Every time its owner jerked its collar the thing would stand up on its hind legs and clap. Two jerks and it would attempt to keep upright on just the one leg. Hilarious. The man had a tin whistle the bear would dance to. The funniest apparition you ever saw, the great thing lumbering in time to the music on the cobbles! I had to join in, of course, just for a turn, but I got a bit carried away.'

‘I'll wager,' nodded Father. ‘Two left feet.'

‘Not at all. Inigo himself must admit I'm the better dancer. It was just the damned chain.'

‘What happened?' I asked.

‘I became entangled. Briefly. Just long enough to lose my
footing. In short, I fell headlong into the bear. We ended up in the street.'

‘Fool!' Father laughed silently.

‘Marvellously strong smell on the thing,' John said slowly. ‘And long teeth. Not to worry, though. The owner pulled it back promptly, well out of reach.'

‘And you informed Jonas Adams of our proposal,' said Father. ‘After this … interlude?'

‘Of course.' John leaned back in his chair and crossed his fleshy calves. ‘He'll accept.'

Both Sebastian and Father nodded sagely at this. I had no idea what they were talking about. As if to underline the point, Father now asked whether I'd had as entertaining a morning as John. Had it involved dancing with a bear?

‘I'm afraid not,' I admitted. Then I said, ‘No, my day was altogether more boring. Port fees and import duties. I'm working on a job for the Dock Company. It's a clerk's work, really. Mundane stuff.'

John uncrossed his legs. Speaking yet more deliberately than normal, and looking to my father rather than me, he said, ‘Come, now. No need to play down your more
intellectualised
existence.'

A smile passed between my father and brother and the familiar, competitive heat spread across my chest. John's supremacy in the battle for Father's affections has always maddened me, deep down.

Sebastian rose and poured himself a refill from the decanter on the mantelpiece, then bent to stab at the fire with a poker. He abhors confrontation. I quelled my annoyance and stared at my glass. Blood-red wine swam briefly with flame. John
repressed a fake yawn. Father twisted his signet ring round his little finger, then muttered, ‘Wasps' nest, that Dock Company. Be careful not to prod it unduly hard.'

Still irked, I replied evenly, ‘Oh, it's all routine clerking, as I say. Dotting ‘i's and crossing ‘t's. That's why Mr Carthy has delegated the legwork to me. He has only expressed an interest in the records of one particular ship himself.' I looked at Father, found he was still scrutinising his signet ring, and went on slowly. ‘A ship that docked just yesterday. The
Belstaff
I think she's called. No. The
Belsize
.'

Father nodded absently. At length he said, ‘Did you fear the bear would bite you, John? Was there any intent in its eye when it bared its teeth?'

‘Not really,' said John. ‘I think it was more scared of me than I was of it.'

I opened my mouth to repeat the word
Belsize
, but refrained. Bright & Co. has investments in concerns beyond the Western Trading Company, which itself takes stakes in many ventures, ships included. Perhaps Father really hadn't heard of the
Belsize
. And even if he had, I knew nothing more of the ship than that its recent arrival in port had raised Carthy's eyebrows. Lord knew it wasn't alone in managing that.

We crossed the hall to the dining room for a dinner of pork chops, cabbage, potatoes and gravy. All of it was overcooked, even the gravy, which swam with caramelised onions. Father, Sebastian and John have always shared a dislike of rare meat. In the Carthy household food has more flavour and meals take time; Mr Carthy himself regards eating as an excuse for conversation about subjects unrelated to work, and his wife's
ample figure is testament her commitment to the household's meals. Here we four men sat squarely opposite one another across a table unadorned with cloth or silverware and wolfed our meal in silence. Fuel, untempered by a female touch. Still, there was nothing dishonest about the meal. I took a second helping of potatoes and asked Sebastian to pass the salt.

Two days later my understanding of the Western Trading Company's records had deepened to a point which required me to talk to Carthy again. Yet he spent his morning taking a witness statement on behalf of a client, and the entire afternoon making an application in court. From there he headed directly to a dinner at the Hot Well. The delay worked upon me with the persistence of rust, blurring my conviction, dulling its edge. Father would be sure to find out I was at the root of the Western Trading Company's misfortune sooner or later, and I knew that ‘misfortune' really meant ‘fine'. The records showed irregularities above and beyond the sum that Bright & Co. had paid in respect of the Company's debts; put bluntly, the books were impossible to reconcile. In particular, there was insufficient detail about the numbers of slaves the Company had bought and sold before the trade was declared illegal. The Company must have shipped more from the Guinea coast to the Indies than it had declared, or it must have lost fewer in transit, to account for the sums invested in goods subsequently shipped to Bristol. There was outstanding duty on swathes of those goods, too. My father's payment was a sop at best; at worst, it now looked like an attempt to cover up some deeper problem.

The mess could only harm the Western Trading Company as and when it came to light.

If the Company suffered, Father would suffer too.

He'd not keep that suffering to himself. Upon discovering I had been instrumental in bringing it about, he'd be liberal in sharing the harm.

So I waited up to tell Carthy what I'd found, fearful that a night spent sleeping on the matter might fatally weaken my resolve. I spent the time making a sketch. Or at least
endeavouring
to make one. As so often happened, the blank page had about it something of the quality of a reversed magnet. My attention simply skated away from it. Perhaps I was more
preoccupied
than I'd realised. That's the trouble with doing the right thing. A man can talk himself out of it so easily. What was the right thing to do about Lilly, for example? I pushed my sketchbook away, dragged my chair over to the window casement and stood upon it to inspect the flap of wallpaper which, Anne no doubt having suffered another bath night, had unpeeled further, a longitudinal slit, revealing a slice of naked plaster wall. Perhaps I could stick it back together with some sealing wax. I rummaged in my desk drawer for a block of the stuff and, candle in hand, was back up on my chair, flame and wax held aloft, dripping red drops down behind the slack wall covering, when Carthy appeared in my doorway.

‘You can walk away from the job at any time, Inigo. No need to burn the place down.'

‘I was just –' I began.

‘– but if you're intent on making a statement, there has to be something easier to set fire to than that.' Carthy swept his hand in the general direction of my desk. ‘That lot. I'd set fire to a box of it and throw it into the coal hole. Puff! All our troubles would be over!'

I had climbed down from my chair. I set it before Carthy
now, and steered him to sit down. His movements were drink-blunted; he slumped heavily on to the seat and threw an arm over its back. I had seen him the worse for wear before now – often enough through eyes dimmed by the contents of the same bottle – but the warm abandonment Carthy usually exhibited seemed tinged with something more reckless that evening. ‘You're right, though,' he was saying now. ‘The furnishings aren't up to scratch.' He dug at the threadbare rug with the toe of his shoe. ‘I'll have the matter attended to. Appearances count, after all.'

At that moment there was a shout in the street outside. Carthy flinched even before the riposte came, a drunken oath followed by laughter, common enough at such an hour in town. Wondering at his jumpiness, I poured my master a glass of water from the jug on my desk. Then I told him my further misgivings about the accounts.

He appeared to listen. He nodded and sipped and stared at the cloudy water in his glass. Then his toe started tracing the pattern on the rug again. By the time I finished speaking, it was all but tapping.

‘Hmm. Yes. Interesting,' Carthy said absently.

‘I thought so at least.'

‘And you've been through all their import accounts – anchovies to yams and back again – to spot where duties have and haven't been paid?'

‘I have,' I smiled. ‘Anchovies to yams.'

‘Well, I suppose we must pass all this on to Orton at the Dock Company.'

At this I repressed an urge to state my family's interest in the case.

‘But it's all a bit …' Carthy tossed back the last of his water and upended the empty glass. ‘… a bit dry, don't you think?'

‘Dry?'

He kneaded his temples, then rubbed his palm across his furrowed eyebrows, making them bristle all the more. He yawned. I felt impatience prickle across my scalp. I hadn't waited up half the night, struggling with my conscience, to have my findings brushed aside like this. ‘Perhaps we should continue the conversation in the morning,' I said.

Carthy rubbed his eyes and muttered, ‘No need.' Then he yawned again. Something wasn't right with the gesture. Yawns satisfy; this one was perfunctory, over too quickly. It was fake. The drink-blur seemed to have faded fast, too.

‘No need?' I repeated.

‘I think we need to look somewhere a bit wetter. Juicier detail, that's what we need.'

‘Wetter?'

‘The docks. That ship, the
Belsize
. Have you been on board her yet? Kicked the timbers, sniffed about in the hold?'

‘No, I –'

‘Well, that's the thing.' Another mock-yawn. ‘The thing to do next. I'll set up a paperwork meeting with Orton for later in the week. In the meantime …' Carthy climbed heavily from the chair, stretched out his back, rubbed his forehead again, and waved expansively from the desk to the window. ‘In the meantime you see if you can't come up with something … I don't know … something to set fire to the show.'

As a boy I had a recurring daydream in which every physical thing before me appeared as a prop I'd seen used in a previous scene; likewise, everybody around me was an actor I'd watched before playing a different part. How could they think I would not notice that the man selling mussels on the quay was in fact my Latin master in a poor disguise? Even my own brothers cropped up as market-place extras, my father as the visiting preacher glimpsed from the back of the cathedral. The daydream created the illusion that I was at the centre of things, influencing the deployment of these actors and props, that some inner process of my mind was in fact shaping events, so that the word marigold, say, overheard on my way to the cobbler's, would turn up just minutes later as Mary's gold, a fortune inherited by the cobbler's cousin upon the death of her aged father. Who but me were these echoes orchestrated for, who else could wring meaning from the connections?

Too much coffee. I ordered a refill all the same. Up early, I'd been Thunderbolts' first customer, which in itself had heightened my sense that the story in Felix Farley's newspaper had been written with me in mind. Now the place was filling up, diminishing my significance, and underlining the foolishness of my delusion. It was a coincidence, nothing more. Nevertheless, I opened the newspaper and read the
story again. Until a few days ago I'd never heard of the Western Trading Company. Now it turned out that the Clifton Killer had been discovered attempting to bury his victim's body in the footings of a mansion to be built on the Company's land.

So what?

It was hardly the most interesting detail in the report, most of which seemed to me to undermine its own assertion, in support of Justice of the Peace Jim Wheeler, that the culprit was safely in hand.

The suspect had been named as one Ivan Brook, a local man born and bred. The allegation against this fine Bristolian was that having received his week's wages he'd begun drinking at six in the evening and continued into the small hours, moving from pub to pub and shedding his workmates as he went. The last reliable sighting of the man was at gone midnight, when an aggrieved barmaid he'd just given up pestering had seen him stumbling about outside the Old King. He'd made it across the Welsh Back, from which vantage point he'd relieved himself into the floating dock. Thereupon it was said that he'd staggered off in the direction of Redcliffe, the inference being that he was headed for the alleys beyond that salubrious neighbourhood, in search of a member of the small population of the city's workforce which sees fit to labour at such an hour. His victim, the coroner had reported, was a young woman of no more than eighteen. Nobody had reported such a person as missing, which pointed firmly towards her not having been a Clifton lady, as some were whispering, but instead an unfortunate who dwelt beyond the law. The report ascribed Mr Brook with no motive. It seemed content to surmise that inebriation of the
kind he'd already demonstrated that evening was evidence enough of bad character. Perhaps he'd killed out of frustration, too drunk to perform. Or maybe, if he could be given the benefit of the doubt – for it had to be admitted that Mr Brook was of previously sound character – he'd committed his crime out of guilt brought on by a post-coital flash of sobriety. Either way, he'd done his drunken best to vanish the evidence. First, he'd burned the body beyond recognition. The report dwelt upon the detail, telling how the corpse was so badly charred that, never mind its melted face, the coroner had not even been able to deduce the colour of the woman's hair. Conjecture had it that the man might have made use of the brazier at his worksite to carry out the burning. His workmates were evidently now unprepared to light the thing again, preferring to take their break around the flame of rumours instead. Upon extracting the burnt remains, Ivan Brook was said to have made a half-hearted attempt to bury the body in the very trench he'd been cutting before embarking upon his night of evil abandonment. He'd been discovered, still drunk, halfway through the task.

The story did not add up. I took a mouthful of coffee and let it roll burningly across my tongue. For a start, unless they were suggesting the involvement of a horse, it was nonsensical to think that a man, even a labouring man as strong as Ivan Brook, would transport a corpse from beyond the centre of town right up Clifton Hill, simply for the pleasure of burning and burying it on familiar turf. The place was an active building site. Why not just slide the body into the river? It would likely have been discovered sooner or later, bobbing about in the floating harbour, or given up at low tide, but not
before the rats, gulls and turbid water had disfigured it, and who was to point then to Mr Brook's involvement in any case? Brook was apparently maintaining that he'd been disturbed in the act of uncovering the body, not burying it. That seemed plausible; all inferences to the contrary appeared to hang on his having been drunk. The man wasn't popular with his workmates, it was alleged. He kept himself to himself. The absurdity of it! A leap of logic that would condemn a man for murder because he'd been observed pissing into the harbour at midnight. By that reckoning half the men in Bristol stood eligible for transportation.

Innocent or guilty, the best Ivan Brook could hope for now would be the remainder of a life lived under a boiling sun, machete in one hand, razor stalks of sugar grass shredding the other, his broad shoulders withering beneath the weight of the work, and the heat, and the disease. Since the abolition of the trade, plantation owners are more desperate than ever for indentured labourers with which to replace those slaves who break daily in the cane fields. Any able body will do. It didn't matter that Ivan Brook's landlady had come forward to state that at an hour she could not be sure of she believed she'd heard her lodger bang his way up the wooden stairs and thump into bed. No, because even if Justice Wheeler failed to cook up sufficient evidence with which to ensure that Ivan Brook swung at home for the crime, he'd nevertheless force a settlement upon the man condemning him to die more slowly on a distant shore.

I pushed the paper away in disgust. Mary, the morning shift waitress, was sidestepping between the nearby tables, tray held high. As she squeezed between two seatbacks her
skirts were compressed so that for an instant I saw the real silhouette of her arse, rounded and full. The sleeve of her blouse, rolled above the elbow, revealed a strong smooth forearm, tense with the weight of the tray. Her chest strained against the cotton apron as she set the order down, and a fierce lust overran me, as complete and obliterating a sensation as that of climbing into a warm tub. A long brown indecent stain ran down one side of the girl's apron across her hip and into the material of her skirt. It drifted closer to me.

‘Are you all done?'

‘Pardon?' I shifted in my seat as the girl stretched across me to take my empty cup.

‘Because if there's anything else …'

‘No, that's fine.'

She put the cup on the tray and changed her grip on it, holding the tray flat across her forearm, elbow pressed into the crook of her outthrust hip. I looked up at her face. A tangle of thick brown hair had escaped from the side of her bonnet. She pushed it back with her free hand, exposing the padded pinkness of her cheek, her jaw, throat.

‘You'd be sure to ask, if there was, I'm sure,' she said, and turned, stepping past me with her backside inches from my face.

More unsettling world, connecting up. Had I noticed Mary before? Not in that way, not that I could remember, though she'd served me on and off for two years. Yet as soon as I'd seen her in that light, or transformed her with my mind's eye, she'd apparently noticed. I turned back to the window. The view through the nearest panes, not three feet away, was of a black frock coat, whose wearer was pulling a
chain from its breast pocket, a silver chain attached to a watch. The terseness of the gesture was immediately evocative. I was up and out of my seat before I'd even checked the man's face, but I saw it and was proven right outside. Two shards of grey either side of a dark beard. The officer from the
Belsize
, who turned to walk away, stomping across the flagstones as though he distrusted the very ground he trod upon.