The Poisoned Island (14 page)

“What is your name?” asked Horton.

The man looked momentarily confused, as if he couldn’t remember.

“Nott . . . Peter Nott.”

The name was as plain as the man’s clerical clothes but somehow in contrast to his face, with its deep tan and smooth, fat cheeks.

“Nott, do you know me?”

“You . . . you’re a constable. You came onto the ship yesterday.”

“That’s right. And as a constable I need to ask you what happened here.”

The eyes widened and the young man looked left and right, seeking out something. Somebody, perhaps.

“Nott, you must tell me.”

The eyes continued to search the hallway, looking at the surrounding faces as he answered.

“The door was open. I knocked on it, but there was no answer. So I went in. I found them asleep on their beds, but the room . . . The room was in a mess.”

“The first time you came in here, on your own?”

“Yes. The first time.”

“What made you run out?”

“That. Only that. The fact that the room had been . . .
pawed over
. And they were asleep.”

“You saw no blood, Nott? The men were alive?”

“They were
asleep
. The room had been
searched
. But I have no doubt they were alive.”

“You were agitated when you ran out.”

“Yes, yes. I was. I had hoped to find them awake and undisturbed. When I found them asleep, both of them at the same time, while all around them their belongings in a mess . . . I panicked, Constable. It did not seem usual. I even shouted to awake them, but they did not respond.”

“There was no blood, Nott? That first time you went in?”

“No blood, Constable.”

The eyes flicked around again, as if an army of assassins were lurking in the shadows.

“Do you know these men?”

“Yes.”

“Their names?”

“Bob Attlee. Tommy Arnott. They are men from the
Solander
.”

The names settled the matter. Horton ordered the landlord
of the place to lock Nott in an empty room, and, wonder of wonders, the man did it, although there was no legal reason he should do so. Indeed, it occurred to Horton that if there were a parish constable or headborough in this crowd of people, the omnipresent question of jurisdiction would already have presented itself, and he’d have been arguing the finer points of it right now, rather than preparing to investigate the room behind him.

So he went back in. Here he is now, sniffing the air, watching the scene, turning it over and over in his mind.

It is perhaps a half hour since he first entered the boardinghouse with Abigail. He wonders where she might be now, then forces himself to stop. He is overwhelmed by a growling sense of time rushing past, of trails going cold. If Nott is telling the truth, then the killer was in this place only minutes ago. Indeed, he might be in the house still. Might be in the
room
still, so little attention has Horton given it.

His first glimpse, with Abigail, had given a solid impression, but again the
frenzy
with which the room has been ransacked strikes him. The two dead men are lying in their beds, their throats in tatters, the sheets beneath and around them dyed a deep purplish red, the walls behind them splattered in an awful fashion. The scene in the room is of a mighty struggle, and yet the men lie serenely in their beds, as if dreaming of country meadows and apple-cheeked girls. Despite the dreadful purple that surrounds their necks like a ruff, they do seem to be smiling in their sleep. It would indeed have looked disturbingly unreal to Nott when he’d first come in: two men sleeping the sleep of exhausted children, while all around them is chaos. The echoes from Sam Ransome’s chamber are resounding.

Horton tries to picture the scene as it developed. Did the
men fight, and then calm themselves before retiring? Or did they struggle with their assailant, or more probably assailants, before he killed them and then laid them out in bed? But why the need for that final laying-down? And then there is Nott’s claim that the men were only asleep when he first came in, that the slaughter happened between Nott leaving the room and returning with Horton.

How had the killer managed to make his escape, if the wounds were so fresh, without Nott having seen him? Horton tries to imagine the scene. The killer slays the men in their sleep, the blood fresh. But then he searches the room, perhaps for something essential to the case. That must have taken some time—judging by the mess, it was something that was hard to find. And then he left.

But that would mean Nott was lying about there being no blood when he first went into the room. And the blood was still fresh by the time Horton had arrived. How long would it have taken for blood to thicken? Minutes? Hours? Horton rather suspected the former.

And what happened between Nott first coming into the room, and then coming back with Horton? Had the killer really left, and then come back in that small sliver of time, and taken these men’s lives with such haste?

Horton goes deep inside himself as he thinks. Abigail would have recognized the expression: slightly narrowed eyes, thinned lips, a few deep furrows in the brow, the occasional fingers through the hair, the slow walk, the bent head. Horton is
imagining
himself into the murder scene. John Harriott too has seen him do this, and it always makes the older man profoundly uncomfortable to see it.

He begins prowling around the room, taking some notes and (in a new departure) making some sketches. He has taken
to carrying paper with him to write on wherever he goes. He is by no means aware of using any kind of technique. He takes simple steps. He assumes that some kind of answer to the question “Who did this?” is available in this room. Therefore, it follows that whatever kind of signs there may be in the room need to be protected from any potential disturbance, even though the room itself is disordered beyond all apparent pattern.

Another half hour passes while he watches the room and takes it in. He stands in the center of the floor. He does not know why. He sniffs. Again, he does not know why. He tries to concentrate on a meaningless mark in a corner of the room, up above him, where the ceiling meets the wall. He forces himself to look at that and not at the room itself.

He has managed, as far as is possible, to maintain the integrity of the room. And now he is standing in its center, trying as far as he can not to see something, so that he might see something. He catalogues the things he sees.

The cups: two of them, almost identical, next to each of the beds, lying on their sides.

An open bag at the foot of one of the beds which reminds him of something. The sea chest in Ransome’s room.

A swatch of red cloth hanging from the underside of the frame of one of the beds.

The view from the little window. It looks across the river to a windmill on the Millwall bank.

There is no money in the room. Whoever did this took it, or Attlee and Arnott had already spent it.

All these things and dozens more swirl around his thoughts. He picks up one of the cups and notes the dark sediment at the bottom. He picks up the other cup, and it is just the same. He checks the open bag, and sees that its contents are in a
mess, as if they’d been stuffed back. He pulls the red cloth off the little splinter of wood it’s attached itself to. He looks out of the window to the windmill.

He sniffs the air again. Something is missing. No smell of alcohol, and no smell of tobacco. Perhaps the only seamen’s room in London without those smells.

He takes the cups and the cloth and puts them into the open bag, ready to take them back to the police office. He finds the key to the door on the inside, removes it, and steps out into the hall, pulling the door shut and locking it. Ideas and connections are beginning to swirl in his mind.

From somewhere, he hears the sound of a violin.

Robert Brown arrives at Kew after a long day in the Soho Square library. Banks is insistent that he spend as much time with the Otaheite plants as possible, but administrative matters need his attention too. He had rather lost himself in his work, and had been alarmed to receive a message from Sir Joseph that his presence was required at Kew, and immediately. He is to attend Banks at the Great Stove, with all speed. Characteristically, there is no explanation for the summons.

It is another twilit evening of no little beauty. The river has the same dusty golden quality, the sunlight refracted through air thick with pollen and insects and edging the wavelets on the water’s surface with gold. The herons sit along the riverbank like bishops in the House of Lords, monitoring the growing slumber of the stream.

Brown’s carriage drops him at the gate into the Gardens, just at the edge of Kew Green. It is an odd thing, this little gate, hardly keeping with the splendors within. One expects
to find a compact cottage garden, attended by two eccentric spinster sisters, rather than what is actually there. Brown walks through the gate into the Gardens, planted by Princess Augusta in the midst of the last century, now almost entirely the preserve of Sir Joseph. He walks through the Gardens to the Great Stove. Behind the Stove rises the solid boxy elegance of the Orangery and behind that the neat, unobtrusive Dutch House. In front and around those two buildings Kew opens out and sets the stage for the more eccentric construction projects of the King: an expanse of open ground, once containing the White House, knocked down as a precursor to George’s building of the crazy, mercilessly mocked Castellated Palace on the riverbank.

The King, prior to the return of his illness and the installation of his son as Regent, had spent much time developing Kew, both through construction and through acquisition. In this he followed the careful footsteps of his brilliant mother Augusta, for whom Kew had been both a mission and a hobby. Neighboring estates had been gobbled up and replanted throughout the previous century, and even now Kew still has a fluid identity. Is it a pleasure garden? A working farm? A horticultural laboratory? For a while it was even a madhouse, the resting place for a King with a departed mind who has now himself departed for Windsor.

Madhouse, greenhouse, farmhouse, funhouse. Kew is all these things. As if in recognition of that fact Brown sees a small flock of sheep shuffling across the expanse of lawn where the White House had once stood, remnants of the merino flock which Sir Joseph Banks had smuggled in via Portugal twenty years before and which was, even now, transforming Britain’s wool trade. Nature, Commerce, and Empire were all stakeholders in this place, and Banks himself was, as it were,
the Company Secretary, trading one off against the other in the name of Britannia.

For almost thirty years, Daniel Solander had been Joseph Banks’s amanuensis and philosophic inspiration, the quiet and popular thinker beside Sir Joseph’s gregarious, ambitious and ruthless politician. Solander, no doubt, had advised both Banks and his friend the King on the botanical basis for these Gardens. He had also, again with no doubt, walked through these very meadows and copses, watching the great collections from around the world take root in this sandy soil beside the Thames. Here, all the world’s flora came together, a botanical treasure trove of hoarded delights among which were those plants Banks and Solander had brought back with them on the
Endeavour
forty years before, the great Prime Movers of every botanical endeavor since.

Brown has now almost reached the Great Stove, the largest plant house in the Gardens. The wisteria which runs all along the eastern side of the Stove and which was exploding in magnificence only weeks before has now given way to a lush green cloud, and it quivers as if in excitement at what is happening inside. The Stove, erected by William Chambers fifty years ago, is heated by dry stoves at either end via flues in the wall, and by a great bark stove in the middle, based on a Dutch design, in which oak bark ground to a powder is mixed with the sawdust from elms and left to ferment, causing a natural heated mulch into which potted exotics can be placed. Two men are waiting outside the Stove even now, poor-looking fellows whom Brown takes to be the undergardeners charged with maintaining its temperature. They nod towards Brown with the minimum accepted level of respect. He is, after all, only a librarian. He does not speak to them—Brown’s sense of himself and his position in society is as carefully calibrated
as any other intelligent Scot in London—and walks straight into the hothouse.

The change in temperature never fails to shock him, the great thick brick walls and expanses of glass storing the Stove’s heat within. There has been a recent watering, and the air is heavy with the moisture and that sense of oppressive closeness which Brown can still remember from the tropical forests of New Holland. He is not in England anymore; he is deep within some strange green composite of a tropical world, where growth is rapid and change constant. Not for the first time, Brown finds himself wondering about how plants
grow
and what can be said about it more intelligently than the careful euphemisms of today’s botanical texts. The thickness in the air and the quivering in the leaves could make one think that the forest itself had a soul, a watching mind as old as Time and just as pitiless.