The Scent of Death (5 page)

Yours, etc. C. Townley

Judge Wintour came down the stairs, clinging to the rail.

‘Mr Savill, good morning. I hope you have passed a satisfactory night. You’ve breakfasted, I hear. Would you do me the kindness of sitting with me and taking another cup of coffee while I have mine? There is much I should like to ask you about the current state of affairs in London.’

‘Nothing would give me more pleasure, sir – but perhaps I might defer our conversation until later.’ I held up the letter. ‘I have to go out.’

The Judge’s eyes had strayed to the open door, where the messenger was waiting. ‘You there,’ he said, his voice suddenly sharp. ‘You’re Mr Townley’s man, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, your honour. He sent me for Mr Savill.’

‘Another dreadful crime, I suppose,’ the Judge said. ‘I have never known the city like this. We shall soon be murdered in our beds.’

‘Yes, sir. And murder it is. A gentleman, too – Mr Pickett.’

‘What?’ The Judge clung to the newel post at the foot of the stairs. Abraham moved instantly to his other side and took his arm. ‘Roger Pickett? But it can’t be.’ The old man turned his faded blue eyes from the servant’s face to mine. ‘Mr Pickett was in this very house, sir – not a week ago.’

‘Not a man of substance, as you see,’ Townley said. ‘Not now.’

The little room was at the back of the house in Beekman Street and on the third floor. The window overlooked a farrier’s yard. It was warm and close. I heard a roll of thunder in the distance.

Roger Pickett’s possessions were strewn over the bed, the table, the one chair, the chest and the floor. Mingled with them were unwashed glasses, plates, bottles, bowls and cups, many with scraps of rotting food still adhering to them. Widow Muller, the woman who kept the house, was a slattern. Besides, she had told Marryot that Pickett could not pay for the maid’s services.

I stood in the doorway, hat in hand. ‘Had he lived here long?’

‘A matter of ten days,’ the Major said. ‘Time enough to turn it into a pigsty.’

Townley was delving into the papers on the table. He raised his head and smiled at me. ‘I fancy he would have called on you, if his life had been spared.’

‘I suppose he desired compensation like the rest of them?’ Marryot said, opening the chest. ‘Dear God, you Americans are like hogs around a trough – not you, of course, sir; there must be exceptions to every rule – but I hold by the general principle.’

‘No doubt Mr Pickett suffered losses, sir,’ Townley said coldly. ‘Most of us have.’ He held up a sheet of paper. ‘It appears he came down from Philadelphia.’

‘After the evacuation?’

‘Yes. But he had only been there a matter of weeks. According to this he was originally from North Carolina.’

Marryot snorted. ‘Ha! I wager his loyalty has cost him a fortune. It is curious, is it not? All our refugees claim to have been as rich as Croesus before the war. It’s as if gold grew on the very trees here.’

I took a step into the room. ‘It should not be difficult to establish Mr Pickett’s situation, sir. Judge Wintour says he was acquainted with his daughter-in-law, Mrs Arabella.’

‘What?’ Marryot said. ‘What? No one told me that.’

Townley frowned. ‘Acquainted? How?’

‘Only slightly, I believe.’ I looked from one to the other. ‘It appears that Mrs Arabella’s late father met the man when he was in North Carolina before the war.’

‘Her father? Mr Froude?’ Townley rubbed his beak of a nose. ‘You are full of surprises, sir.’

‘Why did you not tell me earlier?’ Marryot said.

‘I’ve only just found you, sir,’ I pointed out. ‘And I did not hear of Mr Pickett’s visit to Warren Street until this morning – the Judge was with me when Mr Townley’s billet arrived. In any case, even if I had known about it yesterday evening, I could hardly have known its significance since the corpse had not been identified.’

Marryot coloured but did not apologize. ‘Why did Pickett call on them? And when, precisely?’

‘Last Thursday, sir – it was a morning call. He was but recently arrived and he called to renew his acquaintance with them, which I believe was very slight. He did not stay long for both the Judge and Mrs Arabella were obliged to go out.’

‘What did she say of him?’ Townley asked. ‘Mrs Arabella, I mean?’

‘I have not seen her this morning, sir. Indeed, I met her only for a moment last night.’

Townley shrugged. ‘It don’t signify – we shall probably find that Pickett called on everyone he had ever scraped an acquaintance with. All the refugees do that when they first come to New York. What else can the poor devils do? It is a form of genteel beggary.’

Marryot limped over to the table. ‘What have we here?’

‘I believe this to be a list of debts, sir.’ Townley handed him a sheet of paper. ‘Nearly two hundred guineas in all. But we cannot tell who his creditors are. There’s only a single initial beside each figure. Large sums. Guineas and pounds, not shillings and pence.’

‘A gambler,’ Marryot said. ‘What did I tell you?’

I slipped two fingers into my waistcoat pocket and took out the die I had found on Pickett’s body. It was made of ivory, not of bone or wood. A genteel die for a genteel beggar.

Townley smiled at me. ‘You have corroboration in the palm of your hand, I fancy. Faro? Backgammon? Fortunes change hands every night in this city at a throw of the dice.’

‘A man who gambles in Canvas Town is a fool,’ Marryot said.

‘Or desperate for money,’ Townley said. ‘Plenty of men go to Canvas Town after nightfall who would not be seen there in the day. Darkness covers a multitude of sins, does it not? And do you not think that if Pickett could not pay his debts … ?’

‘Very likely – but I doubt we’ll ever know.’ Marryot took up another paper. ‘Depend upon it, if we find the murderer at all, we shall find him in Canvas Town.’

‘When did the people of the house last see Mr Pickett?’ I asked.

‘Sunday afternoon,’ Marryot said. ‘He dined at the tavern over the way and came back here to change his shirt. He didn’t stay long – he went out at about five o’clock. That was the last they saw of him. We must trace the next of kin.’

We did not linger in Pickett’s chamber. It was stiflingly hot and so small that the three of us made it unpleasantly crowded. Marryot leafed through the rest of the papers. In a satchel, he found an unfinished and undated letter written in a sprawling, untidy hand.

My dear sister, I am safely arrived in New York from Philadelphia. My design prospers, and I have great hopes that my fortunes will soon

‘His design?’ Townley said. ‘A gambler’s new and quite infallible system, no doubt. The next turn of the cards, the next throw of the dice, and all will be changed.’

‘No indication who the sister is, where she lives,’ Marryot said. ‘Perhaps Mrs Arabella knows.’ He pulled out his watch. ‘We’ve done all we can here. I’ll leave a guard at the door and have the room sealed up.’

‘What other enquiries will you make now, sir?’ I asked.

‘I shall make my report to the Commandant and he will order me to do as he thinks fit. Which may very well be nothing. That would certainly be my advice. We are in the middle of a war, sir, and young men are dying every day. I cannot waste my time on every fool who pays the price for his folly.’

‘Very true, sir,’ Townley put in. ‘In any case, what can one do unless a witness comes forward? And I’m afraid one does not find many public-spirited citizens in Canvas Town.’

‘But is this your usual policy with murder, sir?’ I said to Marryot. ‘You bury the dead and let the perpetrator go free?’

‘May I remind you again, sir? We are at war.’ He limped to the door. ‘The civil population cannot enjoy the same privileges and the same degree of comfort as it does in peacetime. New York looks to the army for its protection, and military objectives are of paramount importance.’

Townley stared at the sloping ceiling. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I hope that the news of Mr Pickett’s death does not distress the Judge or Mrs Arabella.’

Once again, the blood rushed to Marryot’s face. ‘No, indeed. It is fortunate that the acquaintance was slight.’

There, I thought, my anger subsiding, there is the man’s weak spot: Mrs Arabella Wintour.

Shortly after one o’clock, there was an explosion.

It came without warning, an enormous, reverberating crash that swept over the city like an invisible tidal wave. For an instant, silence fell, an auditory equivalent to the trough following the wave.

Time seemed to elongate itself in defiance of the natural laws regulating the universe. I saw Townley’s face in profile beside me, the mouth open, the nose jutting outwards, his features as rigid as if turned to stone. The horses walking and trotting down Broadway stopped moving. Two oxen pulling a wagon not ten yards away might have fallen asleep where they stood. The trees on either side of the avenue were motionless. The leg of a dog lying in the shade of shop doorway was as stiff as a ramrod now though an instant before it had been a blur as the animal scratched its ribcage.

All this dissolved into a flurry of movement. The nearer of the oxen collided with the trunk of a tree. A horse reared and a Hessian officer tumbled from its saddle. The dog scrambled into the darkness of the shop behind him, its tail between its legs. A plump middle-aged woman fainted. Her maid tried to support her but her mistress’s weight was too heavy for her, and they both fell to the ground.

The sounds were slower to return. They came in scraps and fragments, muffled at first, and accompanied by a ringing in my ears. Townley yelped, ‘Christ!’ A window shattered across the street. Shouts and screams filled the air. Horses neighed. Oxen bellowed.

Several soldiers stumbled down the road at a trot towards Fort George. The middle-aged woman woke up and went into violent hysterics, pummelling the poor maid without mercy. Townley touched my sleeve and pointed over the roofline of the houses on the other side of the street. A feathery column of black smoke was rising into the sky.

‘The French fleet?’ I said, and my voice sounded muffled and remote.

‘There would have been some warning if they were that close inshore. I think one of the ammunition ships must have blown up.’

‘By accident?’

‘God knows.’ Townley dabbed his face with a scented handkerchief. ‘First the fire, now this. Look at that damned smoke – it’s like a black plume at a funeral. Either it’s cursed ill luck or we have enemies within.’

‘My windows!’ cried the plump woman, suddenly emerging from her hysterics. ‘Quick, girl, what are you about? Help me up, we must go home.’

The Hessian officer scrambled to his feet and stumbled after his bolting horse, leaving a stream of German oaths behind him. The shopkeeper, a perruquier in apron and shirtsleeves with a face as pale as his own powder, appeared in his doorway with the dog cowering at his heels as though it had been given one whipping and feared another.

Townley and I walked quickly down Broadway toward Fort George. But there was nothing to be learned at Headquarters, either about the explosion or about the unfortunate Pickett.

I scribbled a note to Mr Rampton and enclosed with it the letters I had earlier written to Lizzie and Augusta. Townley showed me to the Post Room and introduced me to the head clerk who guarded the mails. The letters would go out in the lead-weighted Government mailbags by the first packet that sailed for home.

‘Though God knows when that will be,’ the official observed. ‘What with the rebels within and the French fleet without.’

‘We might as well have our dinner now,’ Townley said afterwards. ‘Nothing else can be done at present until this fuss and bother die down.’

As we were leaving, one of Mr Townley’s servants approached him with the news that the fever had claimed the life of his clerk in the early hours of the morning.

‘The poor fellow,’ Townley said. ‘Troubles never come singly, do they? It is this damned heat – it encourages every kind of pestilence. I must send something to his widow.’

We walked slowly towards the Common. Townley knew of a little inn in King George Street – nothing to look at from the outside, he told me, but the cook was from Milan and could do quite exceptional things with the meanest materials. I had already learned that Mr Townley thought a great deal about his meals and how they were prepared.

The excitement had ebbed away from the city. The broken glass had been swept up. The shops were as busy as ever.

‘It’s as if nothing had happened,’ I said.

‘That is the nature of war, sir,’ Townley said. ‘Terrors succeed terrors, but one cannot be apprehensive all the time. These exceptional alarms are much less of an inconvenience than something more mundane – like the death of my unfortunate clerk, for example. In life he was sadly imperfect, but in death he will be sorely missed. A mass of tedious business must inevitably fall on my own shoulders.’

‘I wonder.’ I hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘I think I told you, I met an American on the voyage. He worked as a lawyer’s clerk in London, and even knows something of the American Department. I believe he is in want of a position.’

A happy coincidence. Indeed I even congratulated myself on this turn of events – at a stroke, I thought, I might be able to oblige a new acquaintance while discharging a debt I owed to an older one.

‘Really?’ Mr Townley said. ‘How very interesting.’

After dinner, I returned to Warren Street. I found the ladies of the house in the drawing room. Mrs Arabella was at a table by the window with a copy of the
Royal American Gazette
spread out before her. Old Mrs Wintour was sitting in front of the empty fireplace.

I bowed in turn to them and wished them good afternoon. The old lady nodded graciously to me. But she said nothing and in a moment began to stare fixedly at the fireback as if trying to commit its sooty surface to memory.

Mrs Arabella beckoned me towards her. For the first time I saw her by daylight. Her face was oval, the complexion pale and unblemished, the lips full and the eyes brown. Her hair was partly concealed beneath her cap, but what I could see of it was lustrous and so dark as to be almost black.