The Poisoned Island (17 page)

“Most beautiful place in the world. Green mountains with waterfalls coming down. Warm, soft sand. Rain which kisses you and then dries in minutes. Fish and veggies and drink like nectar. And the
women
, Horton. Ah, the women. You’ve never seen the like. They come to you each night, wearing nothing but a smile, and they stroke and play and . . . Well, we’re men of the world, Horton. But the women of England, even the women of Scotland herself—they’d poison every bitch on that island if they knew.”

Red Angus smiles in blissful remembrance.

“And Ransome? He enjoyed the fruits of Otaheite?”

“Hard to say. Hardly saw him once we were there. He was probably enjoying himself somewhere about.”

“You were left to yourselves on the island? What of Captain Hopkins?”

“Oh, he dinnae mind. We were there best part of five
weeks, and we were given every third day off. The only ones who worked all the time were the plant collectors, the—what’s the word—
botanists
. They were scrabblin’ all over that place, digging up all sorts. We only went back to the normal watch when we left the island.”

“So men were left to their own devices much of the time.”

“Oh, aye.”

“Did you know Ransome before you left on the voyage?”

“No. Didn’t know anyone, though. Was my first time in London, though I think I’ll stay now.”

“Why?”

“Wait for another trip south. I’m thirsty to get back there, Horton. You would be, too.”

Carrick does indeed look hungry for the place. Talking about it has made him so. Horton recognizes the lust for voyaging in the eyes. He too used to feel the tug of warmer, distant climes. Still does, when the wind is in the right direction and Abigail is not nearby.

“You did not answer my question. Did Ransome have any particular friends on the ship?”

“Friends? It’s not a bloody schoolroom, man.”

“Did he know Attlee and Arnott?”

Carrick looks at him for a moment. “Attlee and Arnott?”

“Yes, Carrick. Did Ransome know them? Were they his friends?”

The cook thinks for a moment.

“Yes. Yes, I suppose they were Sam’s friends. If Sam could be said to have any.”

“And were you friendly with Attlee and Arnott?”

“Bloody hell, man, why are you asking about them?”

“Because they were killed. Yesterday. Just down the street from here.”

It’s a petty little thing, this sense of victory which sweeps through Horton at the revelation, but there is something to cherish in the way the cockiness sweeps out of Carrick’s cheeks, and for the first time he looks both impressed and afraid.

After that, the interrogation goes more smoothly. Carrick is compliant now, almost humble, but claims to have had no friendship with Attlee or Arnott, nor to have known where they were living once they left the ship, nor to have any idea as to why someone should kill them. Horton asks whether Ransome, Attlee, or Arnott were particularly attached to drink or tobacco or any other intoxicant, but at this Carrick looks bemused and Horton does not pursue it.

“Well then, Carrick. That will be all. If you could just write down your name, age, and place of residence while you’re ashore on the paper next to you, I would appreciate it. And say nothing of Attlee and Arnott on your way out.”

The Scot looks at him through narrowed eyes, and then forms his mouth in a tight little knowing smile. He turns, dips the quill in the ink, and does as Horton asks.

*  *  *

All of them have similar stories to tell. Didn’t know Ransome. Didn’t see him on the island. Want to get back there. All of them talk of the women of Otaheite. All of them go misty-eyed with the memory. Some of them are crude. Some of them almost poetic. But it is clear to Horton that Otaheite and, more particularly, its women have exerted a powerful hold on these men of the northern hemisphere. More than half of them are already making plans to return. Some of them can write their own names. Many of them cannot.

The first few men look shocked and frightened by the news
of Attlee and Arnott, the grinning insolence swept away like a broken mast. Carrick, it seems, did as he was asked, but soon the news sweeps out of the room and down the stairs, so Horton’s revelation loses the capacity to shock. Even so one of the sailors before him, a man called Craven, looks like he may actually cry when Horton brings up the killings, and when Horton asks why he is so upset Craven alludes to a secret shared between Ransome, Attlee, and Arnott. For the first time in the day Horton seizes on something. What nature of secret? But Craven shakes his head and cowers even further into his chair, as if he would roll himself into a ball like a guilty hedgehog, and claims to know nothing at all of this secret, only that Ransome, Attlee, and Arnott spent a good deal of time doing things together on the island, and they’d never let Craven join them or even tell him what they were doing. Horton ponders this. Does Craven know something, or is he simply a weak, jealous man without friends in the crew? He decides he will pay Craven a visit at his lodgings to enquire further.

The final member of the group is the blond Viking, Jeremiah Critchley the carpenter’s mate. He enters the upstairs room like a once powerful prince going into a shithouse, his head lowered as he passes through the doorway, and sits in the armchair. He folds his arms and looks at the constable. His hands are enormous, and up one thick arm is a massive tattoo of a sea serpent, its tongue billowing fire. It looks fresh but amateurish. Once again Horton is struck by how exhausted the man looks.

“Like it?” asks Critchley, and Horton almost jumps, as if caught out staring. “You’ll not find it easy to get one of your own. Done on the island, it was.”

“Otaheite?”

“Aye, Otaheite, if you like. That’s not what they call it, though.”

“They?”

“The islanders. To them it’s just Tahiti. The ‘O’ just means ‘it is.’ ”

Horton leans back against the windowsill.

“You made some study of them, then? Learned their language?”

“Aye, I got some words.”

“In five weeks.”

Critchley smiles, a weak, watery thing on such an impressive face.

“No officers, here, Constable? Only us pig-thick idlers and seamen? No chance of us ever understanding a thing, eh?”

“Captain Hopkins organized the men into groups for me. It seems sensible not to mix the officers and the ordinary men.”

“Well, Hopkins was always careful about things like that.”

“Ransome was a seaman.”

“That he was. Hardly saw him at sea.”

“And what of on land?”

“You mean on the island?”

“Yes. Did you fraternize with Ransome much on the island?”

Critchley looks away to the window.

“No, Constable. I didn’t.”

The man is lying. Horton is sure of it.

“And what of Attlee and Arnott?”

“Aye, I knew them. ’Tis a tragic thing, that.”

“You know of their deaths?”

“Mr. Horton, you’ve sent a dozen or more of my shipmates back down the stairs with fear in their eyes. They bloody told me, didn’t they?”

The man’s intelligence and confidence are clear. A natural leader, is Jeremiah Critchley. But something else too, dancing around behind the exhaustion. A suppressed nervousness, anxiety, even fear.

“How well did you know them?”

“Pretty well. They were good mates, both.”

“The circumstances of their deaths are . . . odd.”

“Odd how?”

“They appear to have been sleeping when they were dispatched. The killer did not even wake them.”

Critchley shakes his head.

“No doubt they were drunk, Mr. Horton. They both liked a good drink.”

The man may be a leader, but he is a terrible liar. Horton’s conviction that there is more to this than he can see immediately is growing.

“Were they close to anyone else on the crew?”

“No, sir. They kept themselves to themselves, pretty much.”

“Your shipmate Craven seems to think they shared a secret with Ransome.”

“Craven? You don’t want to believe a word from that rat’s mouth, Constable. He’d sell your liver for dog food if he could get a hold of it.”

“Indeed. Well, if you could just write your name, position, and place of residence while ashore, Critchley, I’d appreciate it.”

Critchley looks at him, an appraising glance. He seems to be pondering saying something else, and Horton is conscious of being weighed, though for what he cannot say. For a moment, the Viking is about to speak, but then he gives a little sad shake of the head and turns to the task of writing on the paper. He stands to leave when he is finished, saying nothing else, lowering his head again as he goes through the door.

Horton snatches up the piece of paper, half expecting some revelation or confession to be scribbled there. But all he sees is:
jeremiah critchley carpenter’s mate the pear tree wapping
.

Robert Brown, it seems to Harriott, is a man who interests and then disappoints. When Graham had mentioned his name over lunch it had been familiar, but Harriott had not been immediately able to place it. Some cursory research on his return to Wapping had clarified the matter. Brown is of course rather more than Sir Joseph Banks’s librarian. He is Scottish for a start, which is for Harriott never a cause for recommendation. His background is Scottish Episcopalian, a Jacobite taint and another black mark. But he is without doubt a brave man. He had been the botanist on the
Investigator
, which had followed the track of the lamented Cook and mapped the coast of New Holland, botanizing all the way, before coming to grief. Harriott, like many ex-seamen still fired by the maritime exploits of new discoverers, had been an appalled follower of the fortunes of that ship, whose captain Matthew Flinders had only returned to England two years ago, a decade after having left England,
prematurely aged by long imprisonment by the French on Mauritius.

Brown, then, trails a good deal of reputation, so it is something of a disappointment to find, when the Scot enters the drawing room of Sir Joseph’s Soho Square residence suddenly and unannounced, that he is an unprepossessing, thin, tall, and somber-looking fellow, dressed (as all these damned natural philosophers seem to dress) in a dark frock coat and trousers and no wig. They shake hands and then sit opposite each other, as if in an encounter across generations.

Harriott is not alone. Attending him is Aaron Graham. A meeting which Graham had been reluctant to countenance over luncheon has become sharp and urgent since the latest deaths. Horton is even now interrogating the ship’s seamen, permission for which has not been sought from Brown or Banks. Peter Nott, the strange young man from the
Solander
, is under lock and key in Coldbath Fields prison. Events are suddenly running ahead of polite requests for meetings.

Harriott finds himself both disappointed and relieved that Brown is not accompanied by his employer. He wonders what he would do if Banks were now to appear at the door of this drawing room. He has rehearsed dozens of imaginary conversations with Sir Joseph in the months since the Ratcliffe Highway murders. This is the closest he has come to having a real one.

“We apologize for disturbing you, Mr. Brown,” Graham begins, to Harriott’s irritation. He is by no means sorry for disturbing Mr. Brown. There are unexplained deaths to account for, and the transactions of natural philosophy may have to wait.

“My thanks for that,” says Brown. “We are indeed rather . . . preoccupied with the new plants from Otaheite.” Brown’s
voice is soft and precise, with more than a hint of Scots. It has been seven years since he returned from his great voyage of discovery, but even so Harriott finds it difficult to see how a man who presumably spent hours, days, and weeks beneath beating Southern suns could now be so pale, so smooth, so scrubbed clean. He tries to imagine this precise stick of a man hauling on a sheet in a tropical storm. He fails.

Graham continues, and Harriott lets him. This is his world, after all.

“Our gratitude to you for seeing us. May I introduce John Harriott, my equivalent at the River Police Office in Wapping.” Brown nods in greeting to Harriott. “I should explain to you the reasons for our visit.”

“I understood that in your positions as magistrates you are investigating the demise of one of the crew of Sir Joseph’s ship. Captain Hopkins informed me of this on Friday.”

The formulation
Sir Joseph’s ship
seems interesting.

“Ah,” says Graham. “You have not been kept fully informed, Brown.”

“I have not?”

“No, indeed. I’m afraid there have been two further deaths.”

Brown says nothing to that, but raises an eyebrow as if Graham has just presented a particularly interesting species of slug to him.

“Two crewmen of the
Solander
have been killed in Rotherhithe, Brown,” Graham says. “They were discovered by a shipmate, and Harriott’s officer happened to be in the vicinity.”

“The same officer who discovered the first murder?” asks Brown.

“Indeed,” growls Harriott. Brown looks at him, and the
moment is uncomfortable for Harriott. The man’s cool brown eyes have a similar searching air to those of Charles Horton.