The Scent of Death (35 page)

I tugged harder. The satchel itself emerged in a rush. The movement was violent enough to affect the whole pillow, which moved an inch or so. This in turn dislodged Wintour’s head, which rotated a few degrees towards me, so his eyes stared sightlessly at mine and the great wound across his throat gaped at me like a second mouth.

I snatched up the satchel and turned my back on him. I knew at once from the weight that it still contained the ore. I removed the three pieces and placed them in the pocket of my coat.

At the bottom of the satchel was a square of oilskin, folded over and sewn roughly with coarse thread to make a small packet. I rubbed it between finger and thumb and it bent under the pressure. I put that in my pocket too. I dropped the unbuckled satchel on the floor and kicked the coat over it.

I unlocked the door, stepped into the passage and turned the key in the lock.

I do not think my absence had even been noticed. The serving man had persuaded most of the bystanders to leave, but one of the women had gone into a fit of hysterics. She was lying on the ground, weeping and drumming her feet on the bare boards. Two of her fellow servants were trying to calm her and to make her leave.

‘We shall all be murdered,’ she was shrieking. ‘Murdered in our beds.’

The serving man bent over her and slapped her so hard o
n the cheek t
hat her skull knocked on the floor. The slap and the sudden, shocking silence that followed operated on my sensibilities like the tug of a lever.

My eyes blurred. I turned away and let the tears run unchecked down my cheeks.

Major Kendall arrived with Mr Carne at his heels. Four soldiers accompanied them to the inn but remained below.

I went back to my own room and sat near the window. The maid brought me rum, tea and bread, without my asking for them. I could not face the rum or the bread, but I was grateful for the tea.

Kendall and Carne examined the body and the chamber in which it lay. At length they came to interview me. There was, I noticed, a formality to their questioning; and Mr Carne made notes in his pocket-book as the conversation went along.

At first I answered their questions mechanically. They took me through the circumstances of my discovery of the body. It was when Mr Carne began to ask in minute detail about the door to Wintour’s bedchamber that I paid more attention.

‘Have you found Wintour’s key?’ I said, interrupting him.

‘No, sir.’

Carne’s eyes met mine for a moment. Their irises were almost colourless, bleached of personality. He was an intelligent man and I believe that each of us had a fair notion of what was in the other’s mind. He was trying to establish whether the killer might have entered from within the house rather than by the open window.

‘Pray search this room if you wish,’ I said. ‘And my person.’

‘No, of course not,’ Major Kendall said, shocked by this ungentlemanly suggestion. ‘Upon my honour, sir, there’s no need for that sort of thing.’

‘The man who brought you here last night said you were so drunk he had to carry you up the stairs.’ Carne’s voice was cool and faintly scornful. ‘Having watched you last night, sir, I was not surprised.’

I coloured but said nothing.

‘We all drank our bottle, sir,’ Kendall said. ‘I dare say I was a trifle foxed myself by the end of the evening.’

Carne gave a barely perceptible shrug. ‘Whoever killed Captain Wintour needed a clear head and a steady hand. To be quite candid, I do not think that you had either of those last night, Mr Savill. Even now, perhaps—’

‘You’ve made your point, sir,’ I snapped. ‘Nor did I have any conceivable reason to kill him. And, even if I had wished to, I have had far more convenient opportunities since we went into the Debatable Ground. I should hardly have killed him now or in that way.’

‘No, no,’ Kendall said. ‘My dear sir, I’m sure that nothing could be further from Carne’s thoughts. Eh, Mr Carne? To my mind, whoever did this came through the window and went out the same way. Probably locked the door to delay pursuit and pocketed the key.’

‘But it’s curious, all the same,’ Carne said. ‘Curious that the murderer left no bloodstains behind him. He must have been covered in blood.’

Later that day I was taken under escort to New York. I was in no sense a prisoner, of course. I had not been charged with anything. But Kendall – or rather Carne, perhaps – was taking no chances.

The latter accompanied me. We exchanged hardly a word on the journey. I felt the pieces of ore in my pockets weighing down my coat. They made an unsightly bulge and I feared that they might arouse my companion’s curiosity.

We had nearly reached the city when an orderly from King’s Bridge caught up with us. He brought a note from Major Kendall. Carne broke the seal, read it and passed it directly to me.

Kendall wrote that a servant at the tavern had gone to the well in the yard to draw water. Something had snagged on the bucket which, upon investigation, proved to be a long nightgown. Despite its immersion in the water, it was clear that it had been badly stained with blood down the front, from the neck to the hem and also on the arms.

The Major had given orders to investigate the bottom of the well, if that were possible, and to bring up any items deposited there. He had made enquiries about the nightgown and discovered that it belonged to the landlord’s wife, a woman of ample proportions and unusual height. It had been washed the previous day and hung out to air overnight in an outbuilding.

‘I rejoice for you,’ Carne said to me as he scribbled a reply in pencil for the orderly to take back to King’s Bridge.

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

The American looked up and, for the first time that day, smiled. He did not respond but handed the note to the orderly and gave the signal that we should ride on.

Carne was a man who did not waste words if silence would do. I understood him well enough, as he had known I would; in many ways he and I were two of a kind. If the murderer had put on a nightgown before the frenzied attack and then thrown it into the well, he must have left by the window. It would not have been possible either to leave or to re-enter the inn without rousing the house, for the doors were of course locked and barred at night.

Now that Carne was convinced that I could not be the murderer, his manner became markedly more cordial. Nevertheless we had little conversation during the rest of our journey. My mind was elsewhere and so, no doubt, was his.

For the nightgown had other implications than my innocence. It suggested that the murder had been carefully planned and that the killer had worked out every stage of it with care, including the violence of the attack and his line of retreat.

There was an element of calculation about this, a sense of steady, almost rational malevolence – and also a degree of stealth or caution. That last quality reminded me of those strange and inexplicable events in the Debatable Ground: not just of the two murders at Mount George, but of the hints I had had on our way back that we were not alone.

Was it merely coincidence that Jack Wintour had been killed at the very first moment we had relaxed our guard?

We reached New York in the evening and went straight to Headquarters, where Major Marryot, alerted by a letter from Kendall, was waiting for us in his private room. Several other gentlemen joined us, including General Tryon and the Deputy Adjutant General.

We discussed the murder as if we had barely known the victim in life. Carne pointed out that the purse had been stolen, which at least suggested that robbery might be the motive, though it did not account for the violence of the attack.

‘There may be another reason for that,’ he went on. ‘We have seen so much violence in this war, so much blood …’ His voice died away.

‘Well, what of it, sir?’ Tryon demanded.

‘I believe that a few men, sir, a very few, find that carnage creates a strange appetite for bloodletting within their bosoms. I have seen several cases of soldiers or old soldiers afflicted with a form of madness that drives them to commit terrible deeds.’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘I do not pretend to understand it at all, but it is a phenomenon I have observed. If you ask the surgeons at the hospital I believe they will tell you the same.’

Marryot snorted but, mindful of his manners in this company, tried to turn the sound into a cough.

Tryon rose to his feet. ‘It seems there’s nothing more we can do at present, gentlemen. Pray keep me informed if there’s fresh intelligence. I shall call on Judge Wintour to pay my condolences in a day or two.’

The others drifted away in his wake, leaving Marryot and me alone.

‘The Wintours must be told,’ I said. ‘The news will be all over the city in five minutes, if it isn’t already.’

He bent his head and rubbed at a spot of grease on his breeches. ‘Will you do it, sir?’

‘Yes,’ I said, for I thought it might make it a little easier to have the news from me, who at least knew more of the circumstances than anyone else.

‘You will break it to them gently, I know,’ he said. ‘Is there anything I can do? Anything at all?’

I thought of the diminished family in Warren Street. ‘There’s nothing anyone can do.’

‘I shall call on them, of course,’ Marryot went on. ‘Tomorrow, if it would not be too early. I should not wish to intrude on their grief. Do you think it would be too early?’

I did not know how to answer, so I said something vague about the Wintours needing their friends at a time like this.

As I took my leave, he said what I think he had really wanted to say all along: ‘Pray give my deepest sympathy to Mrs Arabella. I … She …’

He ran out of words to say or the courage to say them. He bowed and turned away.

I believe Judge Wintour knew from the moment he saw my face.

I stood in front of the empty fireplace in the library and told him in as few words as possible what had happened to his son. While I spoke he sat quite still at his open secretary. He stared at the quill lying before him on a sheet of paper. The paper was blank apart from a cluster of ink-drops that had fallen from the discarded pen.

Afterwards he tried to ask questions but on that occasion his heart was not in it. He had no room for anything except the fact of his son’s death.

I waited a moment or two and then suggested gently that Mrs Arabella should be told. He did not hear me. I said the words again, and then again, until at last he gave a nod.

When I said I would ring the bell and send Josiah to fetch her, he nodded once more; he heard me but I am not convinced he understood what I was saying.

Josiah came almost at once. He had guessed the news must be bad when he opened the street door to me alone. He must have already said something of his fears to Mrs Arabella. Her face was unusually pale. She gave me the briefest of curtseys and went at once to her father-in-law.

‘Well, sir? You have news?’

The old man swallowed. He glanced towards me and waved his hand, asking mutely for me to do it for him.

‘Will you not sit down, madam?’ I asked, drawing out a chair.

She shook her head. ‘You have come alone, sir.’ Her voice was flat, purged of expression, and she did not look directly at me. ‘Is that your news?’

‘I’m afraid Captain Wintour is dead,’ I said bluntly and quickly, for I could not find a kinder way to do it. ‘I am so sorry.’

She took Mr Wintour’s hand in both of hers and squeezed it. ‘What – what happened?’

So I told her, and the Judge as well. I told them that we had survived many perils together on our journey to Mount George and back. I told them of Jack Wintour’s courage and resource, of his kindness to the unfortunate Tippets and his desire to honour his dead child. I told them how Abraham and Corporal Grantford had died. I told them that Captain Wintour had brought the two of us safely through the lines and then been foully murdered when he thought himself among friends again. I told them that the killer was still at large.

Mrs Arabella listened without interruption. But when I stopped, she demanded to know more of the circumstances of the murder. So I told her, for it was better that this story of butchery should come from me now and as a plain narrative of events I had witnessed myself; and not later from a stranger and perhaps in a garbled form. At last her calm deserted her. Her body began to tremble. I took her arm and insisted that she sit down. She allowed me to bring a chair for her but she would not relinquish her hold on Mr Wintour’s hand.

‘Why, sir?’ the Judge asked when I had finished speaking. ‘Why should anyone take the life of a fellow creature with such needless brutality? I simply cannot comprehend it, Mr Savill – it’s beyond belief.’

‘Captain Wintour’s purse was taken, sir, so we must assume that robbery was the motive. But, as for the violence of the attack, I understand that it may have been the work of a madman.’

We sat in a dreary silence. It was a warm evening but the room felt cold and clammy.

Mr Wintour stirred. ‘We need to keep this from my poor wife,’ he said. ‘I believe the news would kill her. If she asks, we must say that John has rejoined his regiment. Will you warn the servants, my dear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Mrs Arabella said. She turned to me and for the first time looked straight at me. ‘Tell me, sir, do they have any idea who the murderer might have been? Any at all?’

‘I believe not. The officer at King’s Bridge suggested he might be a deserter.’

‘But they know nothing?’ she said. ‘Not even a hint?’

Her persistence surprised me. But it was natural enough, I thought, for no one finds comfort in the inexplicable.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Nothing,’ she murmured, like an echo.

The inquiry was entirely a military affair. At the time of his murder, Captain Wintour had held the King’s commission and he had been travelling, in theory at least, for military purposes and by the authority of the Commander-in-Chief himself.

Major Marryot was involved and so I believe were his superiors. Marryot summoned me to Headquarters on the day after my return to New York. He interviewed me formally with his clerk taking down my answers. Once again he took me through what had happened at King’s Bridge in great detail. He also asked me about our journey in the Debatable Ground.