The Duke's Agent

by Rebecca Jenkins

  He strained up again, searching over the sea of heads for that one distant figure. No sight of him. Duffin was up, hunched and growling like a bear. His opponent lowered his own head and tried again. Moving with more speed than might be expected from a man of his years, Duffin blocked the feint in passing and kicked the weight-bearing leg from under the youth, just as his right fist was picking up speed. With a grunt of surprise the lad toppled past him into the arms of Will Roberts. The young giant swung him up and over the parapet. The splash from his fall nearly reached the bridge. Duffin and Will gazed over the wall.

  ‘He’ll do,’ Duffin said after a moment. Below, a boatman was pulling a bedraggled figure from the water.

  They passed the crest of the bridge and the dense pack of human flesh eased. Jarrett’s keen eyes quartered the crowd, examining every movement and shape. The hope that had flared with his brief glimpse of the miner dissolved into barely caged frustration. He had an acute sense that he was falling behind in this race. They found themselves at the door of the Swan. Leaving Walcheren in the charge of an honest-looking old man who stood apart from the fray, Jarrett followed Duffin into the inn. As they crossed the threshold the purpose of the riot became clear. The flags of the narrow passage were awash with aromatic liquid. A vast vat of beer had been emptied and rolled, blocking the doorway into the yard. They heaved it aside to reveal a cat crushed beneath its iron hoops, slimy coils of intestine bellying out from the wet fur. Duffin kicked the foul mess aside.

  A figure staggered out of the sun towards them. It was the sergeant, one eye opaque and rimmed with blood. The skin of his head puffed out, blue and mottled; brown rivulets of blood marked trails from his nostrils. His voice issued vitriol from a mouth of broken teeth.

  ‘You’re a nothing, Will Roberts – you’re a worm, a puling, crawling, little man. Where have you been hiding?’

  Will stood his ground. ‘Where’s Mary?’ he demanded.

  There was a crash and across the yard a man leapt from an attic window on to the low roof of an outbuilding. Jarrett caught an impression of basalt eyes glittering in a grimy face. The figure scrabbled over the river wall and was gone. A muffled explosion, smoke billowed and red tongues of flame began to slither in the recesses of the window. Tolley threw himself at his son-in-law.

  ‘You come with me,’ he snarled. ‘They’ll not burn me out.’

  He fastened on to the youth’s shirt and tried to haul him into the inn. The dead weight of Will’s six-foot frame defeated his battered strength.

  ‘You leave me be,’ Roberts spat out.

  Swearing terrible oaths the sergeant pushed him aside. ‘They’ll not burn me out.’ He repeated the words like a bitter prayer as he clawed his way up the stairs. The yard resonated with the snap of glass giving way before heat and in the depths of the building the fire roared. Jarrett moved as if to follow the man up the stairs but Roberts barred his way. The handsome face was fixed with a new determination.

  ‘Leave him be. Let his fate have him.’

  Across the bar room there was a window cut into the thick wall overlooking the river. Jarrett caught the movement of a head. It bobbed as if its owner dragged his feet or rocked on unsteady legs. He pushed past Will, leaving Duffin standing amazed. Outside, he ran up towards the bridge. A steep stone staircase dropped beside the riverside wall of the Swan. Narrow and ancient, it curved down to the secretive shadows under the bridge. He leant over the parapet straining to see into the well below. He could hear the sounds of a man hurrying down the steps. The hidden presence dragged against the stone in passing as if in panic or injured. Jarrett reached the first curve of the stair. He saw a back view foreshortened. A long coat like many travelling men wore. The outline of the shoulders was a possible match. Turn, man, turn!

  Down below him the man was almost at the landing. A boat waited under the shadow of the arch. The figure paused and turned, his face raised awkwardly. It was a mask, marred as if the maker had thought to begin again, one side all livid and swollen about a gash that ran from eye socket to chin. It was the miner of the churchyard. Jarrett opened his mouth to shout. As he heard his own voice he knew it to be useless. The man’s eyes recorded something that could not be reversed. For a moment he stood on the quay and they looked at one another, then the connection broke. The miner turned away and stepped into the boat.

  A larger craft drew up at the landing disgorging a party of brawny men carrying buckets. Faces determined, they piled up the narrow staircase. The first one shouted to Jarrett, who blocked their path.

  ‘Get away, man! That fire needs tending or it’ll spread.’

  Reluctantly Jarrett backed up the steps. People were everywhere, blocking him, jostling him as he fought his way from side to side of the bridge. The river was dotted with boats but he could not make out his man. The miner had disappeared.

  Jarrett sensed an urgent figure bearing down on him from behind. He turned a split second before Duffin grabbed his arm.

  ‘Reckon you’ve lost your chance to have a word about them books of yorn. They’ve found the Tallyman.’

  *

  The Tallyman lay in a few inches of stinking water, his huge frame stretched out like the waxen effigy of a Viking. Dirty skeins of yellow hair floated on either side of the brutal, pock-marked face, an unwholesome weed on the surface of the oily water. A passer-by on his way to the Three Pots had stopped to relieve himself in the dry sluice of Bedford’s Mill and found him there. Now Captain Adams stood up on the road in urgent discussion with a couple of vestrymen, while the red coats kept the crowd at bay.

  ‘Well, it’s clear what did him,’ Duffin remarked. A broad slash had severed the throat nearly to the spine.

  Jarrett touched the clammy skin. ‘He’s not been dead long.’

  For a moment he was sealed in a humming sense of an ending. So the chase finished here. All the days he had spent pursuing this malignant, ghostly Tallyman – perhaps it was only fitting that when at last he looked upon the infamous features he should find the bogeyman nothing but the dumb shell of a corpse. He lifted the body experimentally as if he hoped life might still linger. The weight of death impressed its finality on him. Had the miner killed this man in revenge for the marks on his face? The notion had a neat symmetry to it.

  The Tallyman wore a blue coat, torn at the left shoulder seam, the front creased and stiff with blood. Duffin fingered its texture. ‘You see what I see?’ he asked.

  ‘Your whore said she’d seen him wearing a new brown coat.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘And I have seen this coat before, two nights back in the possession of another man. I suppose there would be a lot of blood – a man’s throat being cut like that.’ Jarrett grimaced. ‘But this garment looks as if it’s been used to swab up a floor of blood.’ Grasping the filthy hair he lifted the head forward, and picked back the coat collar. Underneath the coarse shirt was saturated with blood. It stuck to the waxy skin of the neck, but the wool cloth on the inner side of the coat collar, where the hair had protected it from the outer mud, was merely smudged.

  ‘This is not the coat he died in, Duffin,’ he said.

  If the miner had killed this bully, why change his coat? To mark him as the murderer of the crofter? The miner’s character was not so subtle. That touch had to belong to another. There was a splash of colour. Like a sudden clap of thunder that underlines the lightning as it fades, Raistrick stood framed against a patch of sky up on the road above the ditch, watching him.

  Captain Adams called out. Colonel Ison had arrived and behind him Constable Bone stood with his hand on the shoulder of a boy. Raistrick swung himself down into the drain. He moved jauntily as if he had been recently refreshed. He greeted the agent with a carved smile and a bow.

  ‘Mr Jarrett.’

  Behind him, the Colonel followed more cautiously. Producing a copy of the Brough murder bill from his pocket, the Chairman of the Bench examined the corpse at a distance, checking off details as if from a list.
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br />   ‘Tear at the left shoulder seam. Yellow hair, braided and worn in a tail behind in the custom of sailors – this would appear to be your man, Mr Jarrett. Constable! Bring the boy.’

  The boy of the murdered crofter, the witness fetched from Stainmoor, was barely eight or nine years old, with a head too big for his thin body. Next to him the gory corpse of the Tallyman was like some slain monster of fable. Jarrett moved to interpose himself.

  ‘For God’s sake, sir, he is but a child,’ he protested.

  The Colonel lifted his eyebrows at such tender sensibility. He did not even bother to make a show of speaking privately.

  ‘These peasants are raised in a hard school, Mr Jarrett. It does no good to coddle them. Now, lad, there is nothing to fear. This man has gone to account for his sins. Is this the fellow you saw the night Crofter Gates died?’

  Constable Bone patted the boy, as if to encourage him, his face pursed up in disapproval. Ruben Gates’s son stared at his father’s murderer with primitive curiosity. ‘’Tis him,’ he said and spat.

  Constable Bone shuffled awkwardly into the silence. ‘Well, Mr Justice Ison, sir, if that’s done – might I take the little lad up to Mrs Bedlington? He could do with a good meal.’

  The Colonel waved them off. He nodded briskly to his fellow magistrate in a pleased way. ‘A most satisfactory day. We have our murderer, gentlemen.’

  Raistrick bent over the body, nonchalantly turning over its clothes. He wiped blood from his fingers on a cleanish piece of the blue coat.

  ‘What’s this here?’

  He held a package wrapped in a red silk handkerchief in his brown palm. He shook out the material to reveal a shiny silver disc on a long chain. A watch.

  ‘Fancy thing from foreign parts,’ Jarrett murmured to himself.

  Raistrick met the steel-blue eyes unflinchingly. He wound the watch and pressed it to his ear.

  ‘Broken,’ he said and held it out.

  Jarrett turned over James Crotter’s fine German pocket watch in his hand. The golden deluding voice rolled past him.

  ‘Colonel, I believe that some days back Mr Jarrett was asking after just such a watch; it was missing, I understand, from the effects of the unfortunate Mr Crotter – the Duke’s previous agent.’

  ‘Is that so, Mr Raistrick?’ exclaimed the Colonel. ‘That is strangely interesting. Two birds with one stone, eh, gentlemen?’

  ‘I wish I could agree, Colonel.’

  ‘What now, Mr Jarrett?’

  ‘Surely this death raises more questions than it answers, sir. Who killed this man? How comes he to be found so conveniently just as Captain Adams is sent to bring him in for questioning? And what was his connection to James Crotter?’

  ‘Mr Jarrett, I sympathise. It is indeed inconvenient to be denied the opportunity to question the felon – but in truth what mystery is there? A thief happened upon a house where he discovered the sole inhabitant had recently succumbed to a weak heart.’ Colonel Ison shrugged. ‘What should a thief do but carry off whatever he could find?’ Scarcely pausing for effect, the Chairman of the Bench sailed on, determined to dispel all objections with his reason. ‘And as for the manner of his death, I have not been a Justice for near twenty years in this district without recognising the signs of a river brawl.’ The Colonel was comfortable in his superior wisdom. ‘Why, you know yourself, Mr Raistrick here was just called this very morning to investigate reports of a knife attack during some taproom brawl. Perhaps this fellow here is one party to that encounter – the one who got the worst of it.’ He raised a hand to arrest Mr Jarrett’s protest. ‘This was a villain, Mr Jarrett. We are not in Hartlepool or Newcastle here. We have our rogues but murder is a serious matter in a quiet district such as this. It is a kind of justice – not one I might support officially,’ the Colonel gave a brisk shrug, ‘but a murderer is despatched. Let us bless our good fortune!’

  ‘So you will not pursue the author of this death, sir?’

  The Colonel was scornful. ‘A river-rat, Mr Jarrett? He’ll be long gone. Unless his wounds fester and kill him,’ he added as a pleasant afterthought.

  The more Jarrett argued, the more the Colonel’s impatience grew. He began to sigh heavily, his eyes wandering over the river and the crowded road. ‘We may review these objections more thoroughly in private another time, Mr Jarrett,’ he cut in. ‘But now we must let Adams remove this corpse and have the people disperse. We want no more unrest.’

  Raistrick took no part in the exchange. He stood apart, watching the fire-fighters at the Swan Inn across the river. At the Colonel’s last words he turned expectantly. His point won, Colonel Ison’s manner relaxed.

  ‘I understand from Captain Adams that you are to be congratulated on clarifying our other little mystery, Mr Jarrett.’ Ever the politician, he clapped the agent on the back. ‘An accident eh? Always thought the wench jumped.’

  *

  It took three men to sling the massive form of the Tallyman into the open cart. It slumped there uncovered for all to see, and many came. They pressed five or six deep about the cart and at first were strangely silent. They gazed and pointed to the blood that dripped between the boards and the distorted face and the gory coat. Then someone began to rock the cart. Captain Adams hurried his men, bayonets fixed, to clear a way. A howl went up and a handful of mud was thrown. Then more mud, and stones and vegetable matter began to rain down as they hastened away the remains of the notorious Tallyman.

  Jarrett watched the procession move off, the howls and jeers receding down the narrow street. He rubbed his head wearily.

  ‘Could do with a dram myself,’ a familiar voice said. The poacher was crossing the empty street towards him leading his tall bay. Jarrett’s face broke in to a slow grin. He was opening his mouth to make Duffin some wry response when he felt a tug on his coat sleeve. He looked down at the diminutive errand boy from the Three Pots. The urchin handed him a note and scuttled off. Straightening out the crumpled sheet he deciphered a flamboyant scrawl.

  ‘Mr Raistrick desires that Mr Jarrett will favour him with a visit,’ he announced. ‘He claims to have some items of interest to me. He is waiting at the Three Pots.’

  ‘And you’re going?’ The poacher eyed him with a dour face as he rubbed Walcheren’s ears.

  ‘How can I resist, Duffin?’

  *

  It was a plain room; bare lime-washed walls and sufficient light from a window overlooking the river. Raistrick sat by a table to the left of the light, a bottle and a couple of glasses by his elbow. The man’s presence was such he could make the most elaborate room his frame, but this rough, bare setting struck Jarrett as particularly eloquent. The scene which seemed stark at first sight was full of incident and detail. The river view beyond the window was not a mere stretch of water at sunset. The oily surface reflected the moving colours of the flames as the Swan Inn burned. The sounds of the fire-fighters and the crackle of the fire seeped into the room, a disturbing counterpoint to the regular lapping of the water outside.

  ‘You must forgive these poor surroundings, Mr Jarrett. This tavern happened to be convenient and I wanted to waste no time in showing you these. A scavenger came upon them at the river’s edge and brought them to me.’

  The lawyer tapped a muddy parcel lying on the table beside him. ‘They are sadly damaged, but I believe they will interest you.’ He wiped carelessly at the muddy coating with a bit of cloth and pushed the object towards Jarrett with a little gesture of invitation. The agent approached the table. It was the remains of a pair of leather-bound books. They were burnt and charred and pulpy with mud. Inside there was scarcely anything left that could be called pages, but on the cover of one it was still possible to make out the embossed crest of the Duke of Penrith.

  ‘We must suppose that someone – this Tallyman, perhaps – took them from the manor in the hope that they would prove of value, then, finding they had none, discarded them.’ Raistrick leant back in his chair, his posture relaxed, a faint sense of elati
on shimmering about him. ‘Now, what else would you seek, Mr Jarrett?’

  Jarrett’s previous encounters with both the Three Pots and Raistrick’s own chambers had not led him to expect excessive cleanliness in either. And yet this room had been recently scrubbed, and a patch of wall appeared to be freshly limed.

  ‘It is an Englishman’s right and duty to protect his neighbours – your words, Mr Raistrick. I would add: and to seek justice for them all. Is that not the aim of all just laws?’ the agent responded.

  The lawyer laughed out loud. ‘Just laws! A truly radical fancy, Mr Jarrett! The law has little to do with justice. It is about maintaining the order of things. And the law has been satisfied in this case. But why not sit down and join me in a glass? Come, draw up a chair,’ he invited. He poured the wine with a flourish and pushed a glass towards his guest, leaning forward to rest an arm on the table.

  ‘Let us review some practicalities, Mr Jarrett. You asked the Colonel earlier: Who killed this Tallyman?’ Raistrick boomed the question in mock-dramatic style and shrugged, both hands spread with palms up. ‘We have no witnesses. But then, why should we good citizens complain? The villainous murderer of an honest man is dead. Had we caught him alive we would have hanged him. Now we are saved the expense and trouble. Perhaps we should rather send up a little prayer of thanks to the good Lord that we are relieved of the necessity.’

  Jarrett took a sip of wine, heady with a touch of spice. The aura of confidence was palpable. The magistrate knew he had won, yet it seemed he needed his opponent to know more so that he might appreciate the full quality of his victory.