The Ghost of Waterloo (16 page)

The banker nodded. ‘Indeed it is. So, what difficulty could there be in melting down plate, even if you can’t, or for some reason won’t, sell it? And what’s hard in passing, discreetly, perfectly legal coin of the realm?’

The Patterer had no satisfactory answer. All he could venture was that perhaps the thieves had, in the half-light of the vault, mistaken the gold coins for coppers.

Mr Potts shrugged at that idea. ‘Perhaps. But although much, much less valuable than the gold and plate, I am also intrigued by those 1000 Spanish dollar coins.’

‘But that’s only 310 or so pounds,’ Dunne protested. ‘Is it because of their foreignness? I mean, I know they’re the legendary pirates’ hoard – pieces of eight – but what’s so unusual about the bank having Spanish dollars? They’re valued anywhere in the world, aren’t they? And from the earliest days here we’ve had all sorts of coins floating around.’

‘Indeed,’ the banker replied. ‘Trade brings in all sorts – and they leave as payments for importations, since we do not yet have manufacturing to sustain all our needs. There recently have been, for instance, Portuguese johannas, gold napoleons, double-napoleons (and I believe there are even supposed to be rare mis-struck double-napoleons, with his head on both obverse and reverse), Dutch guilders, Indian gold mohurs and their rupees. In earlier days there even surfaced the odd gold angel, or angel-noble to give it the full name, that wonderful English gold coin, hundreds of years old, that bore the Archangel Michael slaying a dragon.’

‘Anyway,’ persisted the Patterer, ‘we’re still talking about only 310 odd pounds.’

‘ “Odd” is the key word,’ Mr Potts chided gently. ‘The precise value given is 312 pounds and ten shillings. And that’s what interests me.

‘At a value of five shillings each, these Spanish dollars could have been counted as being worth 250 pounds. Why the extra sixty-two pounds and ten shillings?

‘There is a hole in the figures,’ Dunne conceded.

‘Exactly! Because there
is
a hole in these dollars. They’re obviously holey dollars – the ones the Governor used from 1813 to ease a shortage in currency.’

Of course. Governor Macquarie had the Spanish coins’ centres punched out, and each five-shilling ring provided a new small coin called a ‘dump’ and valued at one shilling and threepence, or fifteen pence. So the stolen coins must have been holey dollars, stored with their bonus dumps.

The Patterer’s mind raced. ‘But surely —’ he began.

‘Just so,’ Mr Potts clapped his hands. ‘Those dollars and dumps are virtually worthless. They are being withdrawn from circulation and someone redeeming them in small batches would have a thankless task; exchanging them in bulk would surely attract attention – and arrest.

‘Why steal them now, and why take them at all and leave 2000 easily negotiable sovs and all that very easily disposed-of silver plate?’

Good questions. Dunne wondered why the writer of that
Gazette
story had couched it in such odd terms. Perhaps the scribbler knew something that he had not thought, or cared, to reveal fully. There was only one way to find out: that gentleman of the press could expect a visit.

First, however, he must not forget the French connection; he needed to consult some literature, then some people, to gain more background on the Emperor, who, impossibly, may have escaped both his exile and his extinction.

Chapter Twenty-two

Nicodemus Dunne’s desire for a conversation with the enigmatic
Gazette
journalist had to wait. Six pressing matters would delay him – seven, if one counted congress with his landlady as important (and he did).

The first impediment arose when he was forced to return to his room at the Bag o’ Nails for an overlooked item. He had neglected to return to Mr McGarvie, at his stationery warehouse and bookshop, a borrowed volume. This was a translation of an immensely popular memoir of Bonaparte’s stay on St Helena, written by a naval officer who had attended the General there. The author, who had been considerably enriched by the book, was the Comte de Las Cases.

His revelations were limited by the fact that he had left before his master’s last illness. But the great interest now for the Patterer was the Frenchman’s detailed and intimate insights into the apparent character and attitudes of Bonaparte’s foe there, his gaoler, General Sir Hudson Lowe.

After retrieving the book, he was waylaid in the taproom of the inn by his landlady, Mrs Norah Robinson. Her red-gold long hair blazed even in the bar’s poor light, and her green eyes were always alive, in either anger or good humour. She was a handsome Irishwoman who ran the hostelry during the frequent absences of her husband on business – funny business in skirts, she chose to make clear. She had an iron hand for hard men or hooligans and a velvet glove for favourites. Dunne was decidedly one of the latter.

‘I’d like you to meet some new guests,’ she said, motioning towards a table in a corner. The man sitting there looked vaguely familiar, but the Patterer identified the dog at his side instantly. It was Munito, the performing dog from the theatre.

‘Nicodemus Dunne,’ said Mrs Robinson, ‘this is Mr Dominic Keynes’ – she gave the surname two syllables – ‘and of course you recognise his partner.’ The men shook hands and the large dog, one of long ginger hair and uncertain parentage, gave a nod of acknowledgement.

‘Mr Keynes and Munito will be staying here for a spell,’ explained Norah Robinson. ‘I have put them in a chamber near yours.’ A chamber for a canine? Oh, well, he
was
a star.

The Patterer inclined his head to his new neighbours. ‘Delighted to make your acquaintance.’

Mr Keynes said that he was equally delighted and Munito raised a big paw in salute.

Dunne studied the newcomer closely and turned the man’s names over in his mind. ‘
Pax vobiscum
,’ he said suddenly.

Mr Keynes started, then relaxed and smiled. ‘Very clever, Mr Dunne, “peace be unto you” also. Although, strictly speaking, it is the form of words used by a bishop. But how did you know?’

Mrs Robinson was puzzled. ‘Know what?’

‘That I was,’ explained her new guest, ‘once in holy orders. Again, what gave me away?’

‘Ah,’ said the Patterer, ‘I observe that you are still more comfortable with a tonsure and you still prefer to wear sandals. More important, however, is the fact that your name is a clever clerical pun. Your connection with a dog is a clue, too. You were a Black Friar?’ The man nodded.

‘You see,’ Dunne turned to the landlady, ‘such friars are members of the religious order called Dominicans.’ She nodded and he went on. ‘A fervently observant order, they have also been called the “hounds of the Lord” – in Latin
Domini canes
. Not far removed from Dominic Keynes?’

Mr Keynes laughed delightedly. ‘Bravo!’ Then he was serious. ‘I am a fallen friar, Mr Dunne. Nothing evil – I simply lost my vocation and much of my love of man. Munito and I are happy touring fairs and theatres. In truth, my credo is “the more I see of men, the more I love dogs”.’

‘Surely St Dominic never said such a thing!’ cried Mrs Robinson, shocked to her Celtic core.

‘No, dear lady,’ soothed the former friar gently, ‘but another leader of men, one less benevolent: Frederick the Great said it.’

The Patterer privately wondered if the Dominicans, who had fiercely prosecuted the Inquisition of the Holy Office, were any more loving of man than the Prussian warlord.

As Dunne left his new-found friends, Norah Robinson followed him to the street door.

‘Will you be in this evening?’ she asked.

He knew her meaning. There was no love, but they had both been lonely people. Ah, thought Dunne guiltily, here I have Norah, also in the biblical sense, and now I’m mooning (in truth, lusting, he conceded) after Miss Susannah Hathaway. He sighed. That Mr John Gay had the right of it when he versified:

That was in
The Beggar’s Opera
; he would be a foolish beggar indeed if he did not take all things as they came. ‘I will be
in
tonight,’ he said warmly, ‘if you will, of course, permit me?’

The lady of the house nodded and smiled as they brushed past each other.

Even the return of the borrowed volume was to be delayed; the second distraction of the day was bumping into Dr Thomas Owens in the street. ‘Well met,’ said the surgeon. ‘I will kill two birds with, if you’ll pardon a medical jest, one gallstone.’ He bared his yellowed, horse-like teeth in a distorted smile.

‘It will save me a trip to the Police Office,’ he continued. ‘You can pass on to Captain Rossi the results of my expedition into the dark interior, and elsewhere, of the cancelled castrato, Signor Bello. I can tell you exactly how he died and, as I told you at the scene in the Angel Inn, the time he died. But how it happened – in a locked room – is beyond me.

‘Nonetheless, accept that he was stabbed, once, which proved to be sufficient. Vital organs and arteries were crucially compromised and he bled internally, massively.

‘He did not die instantly, in a sense that he literally dropped dead. He may have staggered and fallen backward. He did not have any wounds on his hands to suggest he may have tried to defend himself. Perhaps he knew his killer.

‘Now, the shape of the wound’s entry to the belly is rather interesting. A wound such as that, through the skin and subcutaneous matter – flesh and so on – tends to retain the shape of the weapon involved. At the extreme end of this scale, a hack by a Heavy Brigade cavalryman’s broadsword makes a different wound from that of, say, a light dragoon’s sabre or a lancer’s pig-sticking spearhead.

‘I have seen a Heavy’s sword remove limbs, smash ribcages, even completely sever heads. Sabres make slashes. Now, our man has a smallish puncture near the umbilicus.’

The Patterer shivered. ‘So, as he wasn’t slashed or shot, he wasn’t killed by a soldier.’

Owens shook his head. ‘I can’t say that. You see, I have witnessed similar wounds, countless times, on the battlefield. I deduce he was almost certainly killed by a soldier’s stabbing weapon – a bayonet.’

‘Why not a butcher’s knife?’ challenged Dunne.

‘Because the wound does not match such a blade. That wide blade – and forget a cleaver – would leave behind an open wound in the skin like inch-long “lips”. An officer’s sword would do much the same damage. Also, this was no sailor’s or watchman’s cutlass.

‘Back to bayonets: the sword bayonet on a Baker rifle carried by British skirmishers would leave the wider, longish “lipped” wound we’ve just discussed. But consider the socket bayonet on the Brown Bess musket issued to most infantrymen. It has a
triangular
blade, starting at a needle point and ending at the socket on the muzzle mouth. It is about half an inch at that finishing stage – our shape exactly. For that matter, the French carbine found at Cockle Bay would also have such a bayonet.’

The Patterer frowned. ‘But a musket measures four feet and ten inches long and its bayonet is another seventeen inches. Put together, they make three inches over six feet – few soldiers themselves tip that! It would surely be hard to conceal all that in a public place.’

‘Perhaps the killer carried only the bayonet,’ said Owens. ‘But, anyway, why conceal such weaponry? This is a garrison town; we all live in an armed camp. We hear
diane
– pardon, reveille – and the retreat beaten, bugles for “lights out” and mess, drums and fifes for musters, parades and punishments, exercises. When is seeing an armed soldier out of the ordinary?’

‘And there was a redcoat in the vicinity,’ cried Dunne excitedly, recalling the evidence at the scene of the death.

The doctor patted him on the shoulder. ‘Find that soldier; but this still leaves that damned locked room to be explained. For that, you must talk to the living. I talk to the dead. And they talk to me.’ He shook his head sadly as he walked off.

Chapter Twenty-three

When the Patterer, still clutching the book, strode into the Hope and Anchor – where he knew he was likely to find Captain Rossi, or at least have word of his whereabouts – yet another distraction, though a welcome one, awaited him.

Rossi was absent but some other friends and acquaintances were there – and so too was a stranger, who recognised Dunne and introduced himself as one who had served on St Helena when Napoleon Bonaparte was there.

It was no accident that this man, who called himself Josiah Bagley, was now prepared to regale the Patterer (and those of his circle within earshot) with a most interesting tale. For he was responding to a move that Dunne had initially regarded as a gamble; now, like a wager on a burst of athleticism from the Flying Pieman, it was one that paid off.