The Halifax Connection (64 page)

“A
decoy?” Matt suggested.

“Possibly.”

Erryn found the right key for the next trunk and tossed the remaining one to Matt. “Here, constable, make yourself useful.”

“In a minute,” Matt said. “Let’s see what that one looks like first.”

It was the largest of the three. Erryn unlocked it easily, but for a long moment he could not bring himself to lift the cover. He was, he realized, quite absurdly afraid, and part of what he feared was that this one would look exactly like the other.

It did. So did Matt’s.

Nobody said a word. Carefully he and Matt picked their way through the contents, trying not to gag at the smell, trying not to think very hard about how idiotic they looked, and felt, poking about in the bedclothes and underwear of strangers, holding long fluttery nightgowns up against the light to see if bombs or pistols or dispatch cases would fall out of them. When they were done, three shabby piles of used clothing lay on the floor, and nothing else. No weapons, no contraband, no papers, no money.

“I don’t bloody believe this,” Matt said. “Where did you find this Janes arsehole, anyway? In a circus?”

“They must have suspected you, Calverley,” the colonel said. “They gave you the wrong cargo. I’ll wager there’s a few tons of weapons still sitting in the
Dover’s
hold.”

“No, sir, there isn’t. I thought it was a mistake too, but we checked everything. We examined the hold, the warehouse, the cargo manifests, everything. It all matches. That ship was full of
cookstoves and hammers and cheap brandy and such, nothing else. Besides, Janes’s letter says ‘trunks.’ We’ve got the right cargo.”

“Well then, gentlemen, you’ve been had. The man is obviously a lunatic. Give him back his trash and let him go.” He took out a fine linen handkerchief and wiped his face. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go home and find out how much Madeira it will take to get this stink out of my throat.”

“No,” Erryn said sharply.

“What did you say, Shaw?”

“I said … Damn it to hell, sir, we can’t just quit. Not until we know for sure there’s nothing here.”

“There
is
nothing here.”

“We don’t know that, sir. All we know is there aren’t any of the things we were expecting. There might be something else. Janes never told me what was in the trunks. We just guessed. Obviously we guessed wrong—”

“Obviously.”

“We have to search everything, piece by piece—”

“Looking for what, Erryn?” Matt asked. His voice was quiet, almost gentle. He wasn’t challenging, just asking.

“I don’t know. Messages. Stuff that’s valuable but small—medicines, maybe. An ounce of morphine’s worth a fortune in the Confederacy.”

“These aren’t going to the Confederacy, remember?”

“Bloody damned hell, let’s just look, all right?”

“All right,” Matt said. “One pile apiece, mates.” He took off his jacket, hung it over a chair, and carefully rolled up his sleeves. “When I get home, I’m going to take a
bath
in Madeira.”

“Calverley, there’s no point in this—”

“We don’t know that yet. What I mean is, sir, I think Mr. Shaw is right. We haven’t really looked at this …
stuff.
We just tossed it aside looking for weapons. God knows what might be inside linings and hems, or slipped in the pages of that bible there.”

The colonel glared at him.

“If I might say something, sir,” Erryn put in. “I spent a lot of time with Maury Janes. He’s been working on this project for months. He sent a man to the States to find just the right spots for his bloody trunks. He waited here for weeks for the ship to arrive. Janes isn’t crazy, colonel. Or God knows, maybe he is crazy, but he isn’t stupid. He didn’t do all that for a pile of blankets and underwear.”

“Maybe he did it for a ruse,” Matt suggested.

“What?”

“Maybe it’s a sham. A ruse for the Yankee agents … and for us. Maybe what he’s really doing, and really waiting for, is something else.”

Oh,
shit …
! Erryn rubbed his forehead with his palm. “I never thought of that,” he admitted.

“So what do we do?”

“We search.”

What followed was barely endurable. He picked up one dreary item after another, studied them inch by inch until his eyes burned; noticed a small rent in one, a stain in the other; ran each hem carefully between his thumb and forefinger; laid the bed jackets carefully over his lap and patted every inch of lining. Several times he thought he had found something: a lump in a pocket that became a shilling wrapped in a handkerchief; a piece of paper carefully tucked away that, when unfolded, said only
Saturday. Buy fish.
He sliced open the rag doll, but there was only cotton inside. He turned every page of the bible. He read the five brief pages written in the diary, a young girl’s chatter about friends, about a boy who walked her home from the market. The last entry read:
Susan came to visit me this afternoon. Mother is sick today so we couldn’t play the piano or sing. Tomorrow is Susan’s birthday and she will have a big party.

That was all. Just bits and pieces of other people’s lives, small and passing and innocent. Just things they sold or gave away or left behind. No things of war at all.

His head hurt. He leaned it against his hands for a bit, trying to think, and trying not to think—trying most especially not to think about his growing certainty that he would find nothing, either because there was nothing to find and he had made an idiot of himself or, worse, that he would not find it because it was so small, so cunning, so hidden he would never notice it, and they would pack it all up again and give it back to Maury Janes, and he would do … what? Oh, God damn bloody hell,
what?

“Have you finished, Mr. Shaw?”

“What?” He looked up. The others had gone through everything they had. The colonel was pulling on his jacket again. “Yes, I’ve finished.”

“Well, that’s it, then,” Matt said.

Erryn spoke without thinking, the idea already in words before it took proper shape in his brain. “No, it isn’t. We switch piles.”

They stared at him as though he were completely insane. Quite possibly they were right.

“Maybe one of us will notice something the other didn’t. We switch piles.”

“Erryn—”

“Another hour, that’s all I’m asking. I’ve been following this son of a bitch around for months. Just give me another bloody hour, all right?”

“You were taken in, Mr. Shaw. Admit it, and call it a day. That’s an order.”

“Don’t do that, sir,” Matt murmured.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t do it. Shaw’s good at this work. If he wants us to stand on our heads here, we owe it to him. Once, anyway.”

Thanks, Matt.

“I’m not going to argue about it. This operation is over.”

“Well, there’s the rub, sir,” Matt said calmly. “It may be over for your department; I respect that. But then there’s the Halifax constabulary, which at the moment is me, and that’s another matter. Until I’m satisfied there’s no crime intended here, this investigation damn well stays open. We’ll do one more search, just the two of us. But I’m asking you to stick around, sir. If Erryn’s right, and we find something, it would be best if you were here. And if he’s wrong, well, he’s buying us the best dinner in town, and all the good liquor we can drink.”

There was a long silence. The colonel pulled out his watch, examined it, and replaced it wearily. “Very well. One hour. I’ll wait for you outside.”

It was, if possible, worse than before. Erryn shoved the colonel’s pile and Matt’s together with a few kicks of his boot, folded one of the heavier blankets into a small cushion, and sat down. Began again.

You never know when to quit.

He could hear his father’s voice as though the man were right here, sitting just across this pile of discarded belongings. A man who’d fought in imperialist scraps over half the known world, his hard body marked up like a chopping block, his bony face tired and cold. A father of the old school, a lord of the lordliest manor, an earl to the marrow of his bones.
You never know when to quit.

Of course, it was what they taught him, all of them, right from the nursery. He was English, and the English were the lords of the earth, the builders of its greatest empire, God’s finest handiwork of man. He was privileged, and in return for privilege it was his duty never to quit—to be stronger, smarter, braver than anyone else.

To win every time.

Nobody ever explained how one could win every time and still know when to quit, except by being omniscient, no longer God’s finest handiwork but God almighty himself. When he walked
away from contests he considered stupid, he was reminded of his rank, his place, his duty. When he remained in others—always the wrong ones, of course, always for the wrong reasons—he was a fool, a romantic, a man who never knew when to quit. Thus he ended in the colonies, living on a borrowed name and seventy pounds a year …

Well, he thought, nothing so drastic could happen to him now. At worst, the colonel would write to Governor Monck and suggest he be dismissed as a hare-brained idiot … and God knew the colonel might very well be right.

Slowly, more carefully even than before, he went through the items piece by piece. Different things, and yet maddeningly the same. He had no idea how much time was passing, but he did not hurry. He picked each item up gently, searched it, put it aside. A fine linen shirt with a monogram,
JLR.
A soiled, empty bag. A nightgown, ragged and worn, with a dark stain near the top and down the sleeve, as though someone had taken coffee lying in bed and spilt it. Sweat ran into his eyes. He wiped it away, aware that he was growing numb with frustration, with the mindless sameness of it; aware also of something else, of a growing sense of monstrous incongruity, something absurd, something that made no sense because the rules of ordinary rationality no longer held. The goods themselves made no sense—some items of the finest quality, almost new; others worn to shreds; all of them jumbled together, all half spoiled, as though they had been left in a mouldering warehouse for weeks. To what end?

A ruse. More and more he began to think Matt was right. It was a ruse. And somewhere the Confederates sat drinking mint juleps and laughing their heads off at this pack of dumb colonials hunkered down for hours over a pile of dirty underwear.

There was, however, nothing to be done about it except continue, item by dreary item, all the time thinking that perhaps it was a ruse, and thinking it was a damned expensive ruse, and thinking also of Maury Janes, Janes like an incubus beside him,
grinning and brazen and yet always so vague around the edges, talking of the coming victory, of his early fortune—almost bursting with it sometimes—holding it secret only because he had to, because otherwise he would lose it. But sure of it. Always so sure.

Everything about this smelled of a ruse. Nothing about Maury Janes smelled of a ruse maker. Janes believed in it; this Erryn would have sworn to. He believed in it, and he wasn’t crazy; therefore there was something here.

Eton logic, Erryn. Marvellous stuff on paper, but the world isn’t logical. You learned that years ago; the world is quite insane.

It was all mechanical now; he would finish because he had begun; he was a man who did not know when to quit. He looked at everything, because everything was equally perilous or equally trifling. He picked up yet another bible, opened it where the satin marker was placed:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil …
He read the family history, the marriage of Albert James Connors and Mary Ann Bedard by Reverend Tobias Damler, May 17, 1834, the children, Albert James Jr., David, Robert, Edwin. He thought,
More cannon fodder for the empire
, and then he felt ashamed; those were someone’s beloved children, after all. He picked up a book of Mrs. Browning’s sonnets, battered and sorry-looking, as though it had passed through innumerable hands. He leafed through the pages, glanced at the inside cover:
To my dear aunt Frances, with all my love, Sylvie.