by Robin Adair
‘It was called “kill-devil” by the locals and “rum-bullion” by its white discoverers, after a country term for a brawl. I fear the connection is self-evident. And the name rum stuck.
‘Kill-devil has been back at work here, corrupting both business and lives, just as cheap gin – “drunk for a penny, dead drunk for threepence, dead for a shilling” – destroys Englishmen and women. And just as your “Indians” suffer from firewater – whiskey – ours are unmanned by rum.
‘Its value surfaced only when a Royal Navy Admiral, Edward Vernon, issued watered rum to sailors, who forever after called it “grog”, because Vernon was known as “Old Grogram”: he wore a proofed coat of that material.’
Miss Hathaway seemed puzzled. ‘That does not sound a very valuable or healthy habit to spread.’
‘But,’ continued Dunne, ‘after the juice of limes or lemons was added to the rum, and the issue was made compulsory from 1795, scurvy was reduced. The French Navy, on the other hand, issued only wine, which has no similar healthful benefit.
‘Thus, rum helped to make the English fitter sailors and gunners. The Duke of Wellington is said to have claimed that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. I may say that the Battle of Trafalgar was won on the playing fields of drinkin’!’
Any anticipated approbation for his wisdom and wit never came. His companion was suddenly serious. ‘You have not always had the best sailors or cannon-servers,’ she said coolly. ‘People here should still remember and fear the name Captain David Porter —’
A growing rumble on the road behind interrupted her remarks and made them both turn. Dunne recognised Captain Rossi driving wildly, with William the Pieman grimly holding onto his windblown hat with its Medusa-like streamers. The Police Chief was already shouting at them, although the message was whipped away and lost.
Only when the equipage had shuddered to a halt was Rossi able to call down clearly. ‘Forgive and forget, Dunne!’ he yelled, his Corsican accent thickened with excitement. ‘There’s been another death, a violent one. The castrato Bello has been murdered. Hurry, come aboard!’
‘I can’t abandon Miss Hathaway,’ the Patterer protested.
‘You don’t have to,’ that lady declared. ‘I’m coming too.’
Before the Captain could even protest, she had lifted her skirts high enough to reveal flashes of silk-stockinged calves topped by red garters below the knees and climbed lightly into the roomy carriage.
‘Come along, Nicodemus Dunne,’ she cried, ‘introductions later. Now, what do they say – two heads are better than one? More to the point: Daniel, chapter 12, verse 4.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked a bewildered Rossi.
The Patterer shrugged, but the Flying Pieman, who in an earlier life had been intended for the church, understood. As the now fully laden carriage wheeled hard and began to roll back to the heart of the township, William King smiled almost conspiratorially at Miss Hathaway.
‘I believe it simply means,’ he announced, ‘that “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased”.’
The singer nodded, beamed and blew him a kiss. ‘Amen to that, brother,’ she cried.
Chapter Twenty
Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1601)
There was nothing even remotely heavenly about the drama playing out at the Angel Inn, on Pitt Street, when the carriage bearing the Patterer, Captain Rossi, the Flying Pieman and Miss Susannah Hathaway creaked to a halt outside. Even the alleyway beside the pub had a hint of death in its name, Mort’s Passage.
A crowd spilling across the roadway was being herded away by constables, and one of their colleagues carefully checked anyone entering. He would let no one leave.
He saluted as the Police Chief led his party inside. On the first doorstep Rossi had tried to exclude the young woman, but she had said firmly, ‘Signor Bello was a colleague – and, anyway, I am a clergyman’s daughter!’ Taking advantage of his confusion, she had pressed ahead. And now it was too late to stop her.
The taproom had been cleared of drinkers and staff, and a charley directed his master to the staircase that could only lead to guest chambers above. The four clattered up wooden stairs to the first floor, where clearly the action was concentrated. One door there was not only wide open, it had been smashed down, the method employed doubtless involving the large sledgehammer leaning against the wall on one side of the corridor beside a sweating constable.
Inside the room were only two people. One was Dr Thomas Owens, yet again called from the hospital. The other was obviously, decidedly dead.
The Patterer took in the broad picture. The room was noticeably hot and airless – it had no windows or other door and the outdoor spring mean temperature for noon would be perhaps sixty-five degrees. It contained only a single bed, with a small table and chair beside it, a square of matting, a low garderobe and a travelling cabin chest, well worn.
It was clear from the face that the body was that of Signor Cesare Bello. He lay on his back on the floor, near the end of the bed, which placed him, rather neatly, almost in the middle of the small room.
He was spread-eagled; if he had been standing upright his outstretched arms and splayed legs would have mimicked the florid presentation of his stage persona. Even his mouth was wide open, as if releasing his last aria.
The singer wore neat street clothes, and the only obvious clue to his deadly injury was a crimson stain on his waistcoat, just above where his navel would crown his considerable paunch.
Before the newcomers could question Owens or further examine the scene of the crime – if such it was – a heavy-set man of middle years clumped up the stairway and barged past the constable into the room.
His first words were not muted or restrained in respect for the dead, nor were they garbled by grief. Instead, he thrust an angry, beet-red face close to Rossi’s and roared, ‘That’s a good door, ruined! Someone will have to pay. And if it can’t be him…’ he jabbed a forefinger at the corpse, ‘you’ll do, Captain.’ Clearly, to this intruder, the late lamented was wood, not flesh, thought Dunne.
This was Miss Hathaway’s violent introduction to Mr Samuel Terry, the owner of the inn, a man of large fortune and terrible temper. The others already knew him well. Indeed, he was one of the Patterer’s best customers, paying a regular fee of five shillings to be the first to hear business and shipping news. Sam Terry may indeed have been rich – among several epithets (not all flattering) he was known as the ‘Rothschild of Botany Bay’ – but Dunne seemed to have one literally telling advantage over this Croesus of the colony: Terry could neither read nor write and never denied it.
Not that this had hindered his rise to power. Now he was the wealthiest Emancipist – and, depending on one’s point of view, a rascal, a robber or a reformed soul. Perhaps in Australia, a land turned upside down, he could be all three.
Certainly, he had been a labourer in Manchester before the turn of the century, but was transported for seven years for stealing 400 pairs of stockings. When freed, he set up as a shopkeeper, publican, pawnbroker and moneylender. Each role fed the other: drunks and gamblers, some with money or land, others with both, poured themselves into debt and foreclosure. Defaulters received little mercy from Terry.
He soon owned ten per cent of all land held by Emancipists and more mortgages than the banks. He did not deny that he made 50000 pounds a year, yet people asked why he made the humble Angel Inn the heart of his empire.
‘Was there any trouble with Signor Bello?’ asked the Patterer. ‘Was he a good, quiet customer?’
‘He paid up when he should,’ answered Sam Terry rather grudgingly. ‘I don’t run no charity. “No money, no service and my door stayed shut” – that’s good enough for me —’
He was distracted from continuing by Thomas Owens’ voice, which was waxing lyrical and philosophical: ‘What did Seneca sa
y? Oh, yes: “Anyone can stop a man’s life, but no one his death”.’
Terry seemed unimpressed. ‘That may be well and good, Doctor, if there are a thousand doors to his death. But mine’s the only one here – and it’s busted.’
Captain Rossi ignored the outburst and eventually ascertained from the publican that Bello had lunched in the inn’s dining room before retiring to his chamber, never to be seen alive again. Terry was dismissed and stumped out.
Owens spoke up. ‘We’ll know more when I’ve fully examined him at the hospital, but I can already tell you that he was stabbed with one clean puncture of the abdomen – a very deep wound that would have caused profound damage to the internal organs and massive bleeding therein. Death would have followed very soon.’
‘When?’ Rossi was pointed.
The doctor cast a faintly amused look towards Nicodemus Dunne. ‘Ah, yes. The very inquiry I faced earlier about the Cockle Bay Irish cadaver, when Dunne was the inquisitor. Again, there are no certainties, and I would simply say that Mr Terry’s evidence and the body’s temperature, rigidity and lividity – allowing for the closeness of the room – suggest it was not long ago, no more than a few hours at most. Between luncheon and now. You may say he received his desserts, just or unjust.’
His companions, who had rejected Sam Terry’s tastelessness, accepted that Owens’ gallows humour was not malicious, but simply a reaction to his daily exposure to death and disease.
‘Well,’ said the Captain, ‘We must scour the hotel for any sighting of whoever entered the room and killed him.’
‘That may not be as easy as you think,’ said Thomas Owens, suddenly serious.
‘Oh, why not?’ interposed the Patterer.
‘Because,’ replied the doctor, ‘no one entered the room and killed him, as you put it.’
He was met with blank stares.
‘You see,’ he continued, ‘he died in an empty room, locked in by his own key.’
Miss Hathaway was the first to recover composure. ‘Then who possessed a second, spare key?’
‘Ah, yes, there may be such a one,’ said Owens. ‘But it plays no part in my riddle. For the door was also securely barred on the inside.’
‘The window —’ began Dunne, then stopped abruptly as he looked around at the blank walls. ‘Oh, damn. Of course not.’ He looked for signs of openings in the floor and ceiling, as Rossi rapped the walls with his cane. The Pieman followed him, running his hands over the lath and plaster, but there were no hidden entries.
‘Very well,’ said the Police Chief. ‘So he killed himself.’
The doctor shook his mop of unruly hair. ‘Sorry, Captain, but there is no weapon in, on or near him. Or anywhere else in the room.’
The Patterer broke his silence. ‘Then who ordered the door knocked down? And why?’
Owens gave a small nod of satisfaction. ‘Good thinking. It was none other than our theatrical friend, Mr Barnett Levey. He was worried about his distraught charge and came here to counsel him. Learning that he was in his chamber, it appears Mr Levey headed up the stairs. Failing to raise Signor Bello by knocking and shouting, he peered through the keyhole. It has a large aperture, suitable for an old-fashioned key, which, by the way, is safely resting in the corpse’s pocket. Mr Levey could see the body on the floor. Was he ill? Taken by apoplexy, perhaps? In the absence of Mr and Mrs Terry, Mr Levey took the responsibility for action upon himself.
‘Naturally, he cried “Fire!”.’ The men listening nodded, although Miss Hathaway required an explanation, which was that, in a society predominantly peopled by criminals, past and present, a call of ‘Thief’, ‘Rape’, or even ‘Murder’, might well fall on callous or deliberately deaf ears. Even the Police Chief acknowledged the logic.
‘He met a soldier in the corridor,’ said Owens, ‘but the man disgraced his uniform and hurried off. He then enlisted a constable in the street, who obtained the hammer you see and dealt with the door.
‘Mr Levey is now back at the theatre. There’s been a break-in, nothing serious, just clothing from the property room.’
The Patterer nodded and went to examine the shattered door more closely. Yes, the keyhole was indeed large, with an aperture almost an inch deep and half an inch wide.
As they retired from the room, Captain Rossi paused to accost a servant girl. ‘Where is your master?’ he asked.
‘Probably making himself scarce, again,’ she sniffed.
The Captain caught the reproof. ‘Why do you say “again”?’
‘Well, he were no use when they shouted, “Fire!”, not even when they was bashing down his door, were he?’
‘He was here, though, in the building?’
‘Yes, skulking, he was, in the attic.’
‘What’s there that’s so important?’
She shrugged. ‘Dunno. It’s always locked.’
Rossi dismissed her. For a moment he had been taken aback by the girl’s casual insolence. She obviously did not fear her master, as she might have done in England. There, to be discharged for such attitude or any other insubordination without a ‘character’, as a reference was termed, could put her on the streets and into an early grave.
But here, of course, where women were outnumbered by men by as much as three to one, she could have another job, a husband, or at least a protector, within the hour. Her behaviour was also doubtless a product of one of Sam Terry’s more gentle traits: the normally unbending businessman refused to have his servants whipped. Not that the system had flogged a woman for ten years. Sent them to the Female Factory, yes, but Sam did not like that as a threat either.
The Patterer thought deeply as they all – it now seemed that the American singer was an accepted partner – headed for the carriage. How very interesting. The poor castrato had, impossibly, been murdered. But why? Surely no disaffected member of the audience the other night had felt that strongly about his short-lived performance…
The theatre, of course! Bello had seen something – or someone – there he should not have seen. And why would Sam Terry have reacted to the threat of fire by going up, surely the most dangerous direction? Back in Bello’s room, there had been some by-play with Terry that floated out of reach of Dunne’s reason. And why had Levey promptly left after finding the body? Odd. None of this altered the Patterer’s earlier worries that others – Rossi and Thomas Owens – seemed to have lied, or at least bent the truth.
Something else surfaced in his brain: just before they were interrupted by the arrival of the Police Chief’s carriage, Susannah Hathaway had mentioned a name he believed he should recognise. But in all the new excitement he no longer remembered. Something Porter, had she not said?
One thing, however, was becoming crystal-clear – all the characters wandering around in his suspicious mind had been at the theatre that night and could have upset – or scared – Cesare Bello, who could no longer point a finger to explain or accuse.
Miss Hathaway broke his concentration by brushing vigorously at his coat sleeves and hands. ‘Goodness,’ she rebuked him, ‘you have red all over you. Not blood, I hope.’
He saw she was right. ‘No, it’s just red dust. Ochre. Something I touched must have been coated with the mess from a “Brickfielder” gale.’
That, he thought idly, made Terry’s wife a lazy landlady. Although, come to think of it, there hadn’t been a wind howling for days.
The Flying Pieman grinned at Dunne’s discomfiture. ‘She has made your face red too.’
It was time to make as dignified a withdrawal as possible. Such dignity was endangered by their having to step carefully again around a pile, once perhaps a full human cartload, of new bricks that had been delivered in the alley.
Chapter Twenty-one
Why this? why not that?
– Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Marginalia’, Democratic Review (1844)
The ‘holey’ dollar and its punched-out ‘dump’ proved a lifesaver.
Emerging from the Angel tavern into Mort’s Pass
age then Pitt Street, the team (as Nicodemus Dunne now thought of these friends, old and new) had to part.
Dr Thomas Owens was to accompany the castrato’s body to the death-house at the Rum Hospital. His associates would not have the results of his deliberations until later the next day, for all needed early nights to best face the different duties that would call them on the morrow.
Captain Rossi had to tell Chief Constable Jilks that he was now largely on his own with the bank robbery; after all, Rossi’s rival would be busy looking for the loot and preparing the police case against the thieves he had so cleverly and promptly put into custody. They would go to trial without much ado, and their punishment would be swift and draconian.
The Captain noted with grim satisfaction that here the mills of justice, unlike God’s, did not grind exceedingly slow. One gentleman convict who had continued his horrible habit of homicide was caught, tried and hanged within thirteen days.
Jilks need not bother himself over John Creighton’s death, and he, Rossi, would attend to the killer of the castrato and the matter of Bonaparte. If he still existed.
William King departed to prepare himself for an extraordinary athletics challenge, to be played out for huge wagers. This involved a race against the clock over half a mile – the test was that he had to walk backwards.
Miss Susannah Hathaway, of course, had to rehearse for a new theatrical divertissement and the Patterer realised with a guilty start that he, too, should be at work. He owed a reading visit to Mr Joseph Hyde Potts at the rival of the aloof Bank of Australia, the ‘People’s’ Bank of New South Wales.
The banker Potts would be eager to know all about the robbery, and Dunne had an exhaustive report to read him from The Gazette. He also had additional detail, furnished by Captain Rossi, to flesh it out.
One particularly interesting new piece of intelligence was that James Dingle had claimed (and this claim had been confirmed by Sudden Solomon Blackstone) that each of the six thieves – five in the tunnel, one out – had received an immediate share of banknotes amounting to 1133 pounds each. They seemed happy to have, for less than a week’s actual work, the money a labourer (at twenty pounds per annum) would make in nigh on fifty-seven years.