The Poisoned Island (32 page)

And now there are more pressing needs. His chamber pot is full, the piss and shit of almost two days filling the room with an awful stench. He is hungry, so enormously hungry that his stomach has stopped chirping and farting and now he feels it is beating, a great beating void of emptiness that cries out to be filled. He is thirsty, his mouth as dry as the stones of the Otaheite
marae
.

Am I to die here? Am I to just sit here and die?

He decides the answer is no. He pulls himself to his feet and a swirl of exhaustion hits him. His knees feel suddenly old and useless, and the mighty Viking Jeremiah Critchley
nearly falls onto his face in his little Wapping bedroom. But then he gets hold of himself, straightens his back and pictures the redheaded girl in the tavern, and starts to remember who he is.

He takes the small leather pouch, still almost full, and hangs it around his neck, beneath his shirt, just as it had hung during the long journey from Otaheite. He removes the chair from the door, and unlocks it. He stands for a moment with his hand on the door handle, but then reminds himself who he is once more, and opens the door.

The landing is quiet. From somewhere in the house he hears Mrs. Vermiloe singing, a wavering tuneless ditty about a packet sailing down the Ratcliffe Highway, and he heads for the stairs after locking the door and placing the key in his pocket. He thinks again and for the last time of the redheaded girl, and as he steps out into the street, where the normal swirl of humanity goes about its normal business, he wonders what to do about Frost and Potter and Craven. Is there anyone he should tell? None of the men have wives or even parents as far as he knows. He worries about drawing attention to himself by reporting it to the authorities, whatever those authorities might be. And then he remembers the landlady and the fuss he’d made about her and the way he’d run out into the street, and remembers how blame could attach itself to him, and then he feels a knife press into his side and the warm breath of a man in his ear.

“So there you are, Jeremiah,” a voice says. “Keep walking and don’t look back, if you know what’s good for you.”

They walk out into the street, in amongst the warm grubby well of humanity, and the stranger’s knife is hard and insistent against the small of his back. They turn into New Gravel Lane, and Jeremiah thinks of escape, but his body must tense
in anticipation because the stranger’s knife is pushed into his back, only breaking the surface but enough to make him shout, and there it stays, the stranger hissing: “Move suddenly and this goes into your liver.”

They reach a storehouse and go inside, and the pressure on the knife in his back eases for a moment, just before an enormous pain blooms in the back of his head and he falls down into a gray fog.

Sometime later he surfaces back into the light, feeling something pulling him to his feet, something steady and insistent that has got him to his knees and is now forcing him to stand and then has him off the ground. Rope, a thick rope, round his neck, lifting him from the floor, gravel strewn in piles beneath him as he is raised, up and up and up, the air emptying from his lungs and spots of purple light appearing before his eyes, one after another until they all merge together into a velvety blackness, and Jeremiah dies.

Horton is waiting with the chief warder in the gatehouse of Coldbath Fields. One of the warder’s underlings has been sent to collect Peter Nott from his cell. The chief warder claims to have become fascinated by the missionary’s son.

“Is it normal—is it
right
—for our missionaries to be fathering half-breeds with savages?” he asks Horton. “Is it not the case that our missionaries are in the business of bringing God to these animals? Not fucking their women and raising their brats.”

“You would have our missionaries be Catholic priests, celibate and robed?” says Horton, as much to pass the time as anything. The warder believes that Peter Nott is the natural son of a missionary, as indeed did Horton, until John Harriott passed on what Banks told him over dinner. Henry Nott cannot be the natural father of Peter Nott, or whatever the young man’s real name is. Which means the chaplain is either lying or has been adopted by the old missionary. Either, supposes
Horton, is possible. The chaplain is clearly of mixed parentage. So is his father a native, or his mother?

The question will have to wait, for now Nott must be released. It is clear that Nott cannot be the killer they are looking for. Frost and Potter and Craven were killed while Nott was under lock and key. Harriott has no reason and little right to keep Nott in Coldbath Fields, but he does want to question the
Solander
’s chaplain. The man has been deliberately obtuse in his evidence, and may even be obstructing justice. Harriott’s orders had been to bring Nott back to Wapping to answer for himself, but Horton has suggested a different course. His magistrate has reluctantly agreed.

“Papists?” says the chief warder. “No, no. But why can’t they take Englishwomen with them to satisfy their needs? Lying with all these dirty pagan whores. What’s it doing to their good Christian souls?”

“The East India Company has long had a policy of encouraging its officers to marry local women and sire children with them. It is thought it strengthens connections with the indigenous peoples.”

“ ‘Strengthens connections’? A strange euphemism indeed!”

“Our overseas possessions increase with every year. We need the locals in these places to work with us, not against us. We must therefore fraternize with them closely, and that will inevitably lead to relations as between husbands and wives, and offspring descended from both cultures.”

“And what about good old English stock, eh? How do we preserve that? Are we just going to end up a mongrel nation of half-breeds and half-savages?”

“The Romans shared their Empire—and themselves—with peoples far and wide.”

“And look what happened to them. I’m a man of learning, I am, Constable. I’ve read my Gibbon.”

Horton wonders if this is true, and decides it may well be. One can always be surprised by the knowledge of even the most dissolute of men.

A junior warder appears, bringing Peter Nott into the gatehouse where Horton waits. The chief warder smirks at the chaplain.

“Well now, young
sir
. It seems you’re to be let out, back into the big wide world.”

Nott stares at him and does not answer. Horton rather admires the young man for this, even if it is done with the same kind of affected disdain the young man had once tried on Harriott. The chief warder is angered by Nott’s reaction, which only increases Horton’s admiration.

“Now, my advice to you would be don’t go sticking it into any English girls,” says the chief warder. “And watch out that any
Romans
don’t try and stick it into you. Take him away, Constable. He’s nothing but a complaining woman. I’m glad to be rid of him.” The chief warder, Horton notices, speaks of Coldbath Fields as if it were some kind of private gentlemen’s club of which membership is a desirable commodity.

Horton nods at Nott, who stares at him and then walks to the door. As they are stepping out, the chief warder shouts something more.

“And ’ere’s your letter,
missionary
.” He throws it at Nott, who scoops down quickly to pick it up before Horton can read the address. “Next time, pay the fucking fee.” And he grins at Horton, a brown gap-toothed smirk of defiance, brazen in his corruption, firm in his prejudices, happy in his work.

Outside, Nott looks around him in some confusion, clearly not knowing where he should go next. Horton’s carriage is the
only vehicle waiting in the street. A small knot of children are staring at the horse, contemplating some mischief or other. The carriage driver is eyeing them with endless wariness.

“I am going back to Wapping,” Horton tells Nott. “You may accompany me in my carriage.”

“I am free to do as I please?”

“You are. The charge has been lifted.”

“Then I will not return to Wapping. I have business in town.” With that final prim little assertion, and without saying goodbye, Nott begins to walk smartly down the hill towards Clerkenwell. Horton watches him for a moment, and then walks over to his carriage, through the knot of children. He speaks to the driver, and then selects the tallest of the children, a gangly youth who is almost as tall as Horton, and gives him a coin and his hat. The youth climbs into the carriage and puts on Horton’s hat. The carriage leaves, passing Nott on the road, who glances at it as it passes, seeing a constablelike shape within.

Horton follows Nott down into London.

*  *  *

It had been a struggle, persuading Harriott to release Nott. But Horton had impressed upon him the need for some drastic action to move the case along. There are only two leads: Nott and Critchley. Horton had gone to Critchley’s rooms at the Pear Tree this morning. This time the door was unlocked, but Critchley was nowhere to be seen. The room was in a primitive, awful state, the chamber pot overflowing, the bedding rancid and stained with sweat, piss, and even excrement. Beside the bed Horton had found another cup, with another layer of residue at its bottom. So whatever the
men who’d died were taking, Critchley was taking it too. And now Critchley has gone.

That leaves Nott. Horton had persuaded Harriott to release the chaplain, but only to allow him to be observed. Horton would keep an eye on him, in case he might incriminate himself or some other. Already, Nott is heading away from Wapping, Rotherhithe, and the eastern part of the metropolis. He is heading south and west. Horton’s hopes begin to rise.

There is an art to following, and it is one Horton has been developing these past few months. Prior to the Ratcliffe Highway murders, he had done little following. A good deal of
waiting
and of
watching
, usually on the water, but very little actual following. He thinks back to jurisdiction again, and wonders if the land-bound constables of Shadwell ever follow suspects or witnesses. He decides almost certainly not. The men of Shadwell have little interest in the innovations of detection which Horton finds so fascinating.

But he has not yet followed someone quite so important to him as the
Solander
’s chaplain. Losing sight of Nott now would be a disaster. He has assured his magistrate that he will discover today who Nott really is. Questioning the man further is, Horton believes, pointless; he has a stubborn, somehow alien resistance to interrogation. That had become clear when Harriott tried to get answers from him in the garden of Coldbath Fields. Nott is hiding something, clearly, and the obvious mistake both Horton and Harriott had made about his parentage is as wincingly painful to Horton as it was to the old magistrate. Discovering why Nott is really in London is a puzzle both men want resolved for reasons as much personal as professional.

They stay on the Westminster side of the Fleet. Nott had turned first of all into Coldbath Square, in front of the prison,
and then had asked for directions from a young woman carrying a baby, pointing at the letter the chief warder threw at him. So, he had decided to deliver the letter himself. The woman pointed to the right, and Nott headed off down Great Bath Street, then Eyre Street, then across Liquorpond Street. Meux’s Brewery, which brewed the porter that John Harriott and the Royal Philosophers had enjoyed the previous evening, appears on their right.

Following at its most basic means keeping your quarry in sight but making sure he doesn’t see you. The balance to those two things is the essence. However, that balance changes around every London corner. Some streets bustle with people, and in those streets one must keep close to one’s quarry, running the risk of being seen. Other streets are almost empty, and here the follower must hang back, sometimes hundreds of feet, lest he be spotted.

Then there are the people on the street. London’s streets are full of watchers—standing, sitting, talking in groups, looking out of windows, boot polishers and barrow boys and hawkers and porters and all. Any one of them can take pleasure in shouting at a suspicious-looking follower, merrily asking “Wot you up to, guv?” in the full knowledge that the follower is up to no good and, more to the point, does not wish to be identified. This cheery sabotage has interrupted a dozen or more of Horton’s pursuits, and always ends in an embarrassing piece of street theater whereby he tries to pretend not to be aware of the quarry or the saboteur, and turns the nearest corner and disappears.

Compared to these earlier episodes, following Peter Nott is relatively straightforward. The streets they are walking through are neither busy nor empty. They are at the northern and relatively prosperous (by Wapping standards) edge
of London, where rambling streets go up and down gentle hills and are surrounded by recently built houses and older warehouses, manufactories, churches, and taverns. Smart squares with cobbled streets and new pavements abound. Nott walks somewhat at random, and stops occasionally to ask directions, heading broadly downhill and south, towards the river and into town.