Crimson Rose

by M. J. Trow

  ‘So we are looking for a Catholic spy,’ Windlass reasoned. ‘One of the Mission, perhaps, a Jesuit?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Marlowe nodded. ‘But then there’s God’s Word Garrett. What links has he with the safe house?’

  ‘But he was a Puritan,’ Windlass said, rubbing his finger absentmindedly around the rim of his goblet. ‘A Jesuit might well have him in his sights too.’

  Marlowe shook his head. ‘No, if that were the case, why not get a few more of them? Send one of William Waad’s bristle bombs to St Olave’s and bring the roof down? No, John Garrett died for another reason.’

  ‘This was the Bear Garden, wasn’t it?’ Windlass was thinking aloud. ‘Down from the Rose.’

  Marlowe nodded, knowing the way this was going. ‘So we’re back to the theatre.’

  ‘Stands to reason.’ Windlass shrugged.

  ‘Nicholas Faunt points to the neatness of the killings,’ Marlowe said. ‘A single shot for Eleanor. A clean stab for God’s Word.’

  ‘What’s his point?’ Windlass asked.

  ‘He was ruling out street crime,’ Marlowe told him. ‘The daily casual violence in this great city of ours.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Windlass snorted. It was something both men lived with.

  ‘But then,’ Marlowe poured himself another drink, ‘he wasn’t including Simon Bancroft in that.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A tobacconist found in the river with his head caved in.’

  ‘Yes.’ Windlass nodded. ‘That’s more casual.’

  ‘His cousin is a backer at the Rose,’ Marlowe said.

  ‘So it is about the theatre!’ Windlass looked triumphant.

  ‘No, Jack.’ Marlowe shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. What do a tobacconist, the runner of a safe house and a Puritan have in common?’

  Windlass had heard jokes like this before, except that he knew there was nothing funny about this one. He shrugged.

  ‘Money,’ Marlowe said. ‘Think about it. The tobacco trade is doing well, but not well enough to enable a man to buy an extremely costly gun, almost one of a kind. Your master, Burghley, pays a tolerable salary to the keeper of a safe house, but not enough for her to buy a unique jug of solid silver that even the Queen’s Magus is afraid of. And as for the Puritan who should care nothing for the riches of the world, why does he have a chest of gold that could buy an entire Terra Incognita. No, Jack, that’s what this is all about. Too much money.’

  The Bancrofts’ tobacco warehouse at Three Crane’s Wharf was easy to find. The family name was proudly emblazoned across the front, which was certainly one clue. But the other was a row of men standing outside by the loading bay doors, smoking pipes of tobacco, in the concentrated way of those who wanted – no, needed – to drink some smoke and only had five minutes in which to do it. As Marlowe approached, he saw them all knock out the embers on the soles of their shoes and solemnly troop back inside, leaving just some crawling sparks in the ash and the whiff of the weed in the air.

  Marlowe followed them inside to find that they had all gone back to their tasks of weighing out damp wedges of the packed leaves on to squares of sacking, which they then folded into a tight package with practised hands and closed with a few stitches of coarse linen thread, which also attached a label. They then turned over a piece of thin paper from a pile and impaled it on a wicked-looking spike, set into a block of wood on each desk. There was no talking, just the thick silence of men helping someone else make a lot of money. Marlowe hovered in the doorway for a moment, not certain which of the men, if any, was in charge, but he was saved from disturbing one of them by a familiar voice calling his name.

  ‘Master Marlowe!’ He turned to see Thaddeus Bancroft clattering down some stairs precariously attached to the far wall. On a gallery above the stacked bales of tobacco, there was a walled-in area, positioned so as to command a view across the open space of the warehouse. ‘Come on up.’ He gestured to the stairs. ‘I assume you want to speak to me, rather than simply buy some tobacco in bulk?’ He smiled and Marlowe remembered that, unless the man’s inamorata had told him, he knew nothing of the little contretemps back at his house, although he could scarcely have missed the drama of the plummeting workman. Marlowe crossed the floor of the tobacco store and followed him up the stairs.

  On the gallery was a snug room which had clearly grown as the business had grown. The basic structure was of rough wood, cut to length and closed in with what, on closer examination, were sections of the packaging in which the huge tobacco blocks arrived, simply stretched and nailed over the carcase. But inside this box was a chair, carved and embellished with stylized tobacco leaves and softened with two enormous pillows, indented though they were by the shape of the man who spent most of the day sitting there, engrossed in the ledger open on the desk in front of it. Bancroft had the slightly cross-eyed air of a bookkeeper who had been too long at his books and he flopped back into the cushions, moulded to another body altogether, waving Marlowe into another, less well-used chair, with relief.

  ‘I have been trying to run my business and Simon’s from our different warehouses since he … since he died,’ he said. ‘I decided yesterday to move everything into this one, as he has a rather better working space than my own.’ He glanced around. ‘I am going through his books,’ he added.

  ‘I rather thought that you shared a warehouse,’ Marlowe said. After all, he thought, they seemed to share everything else.

  ‘No, dear me, no,’ Bancroft said. ‘Our businesses are side by side, as you see, but Simon had gone down a rather different path. I simply import the tobacco and then sell it on almost as it arrives in my warehouse, to certain people throughout the country. My profits are lower –’ he tapped the ledger – ‘and as it turns out, considerably lower, than Simon’s, but I only need two men to help me, so my overheads are lower also. The rest is down to factors and packhorses – not my problem. Simon sells – sold – his tobacco in smaller amounts, mainly to men who sell it in their ale houses or even just by the roadside, to anyone who wants a fill of a pipe. With every transaction a little is added, of course. Simon was able to charge more, but he had more men to pay, I suppose, so it all evens out in the end. But, even with his extra income, I am finding it hard to work out how he was so rich. The stock here is not so much greater than mine, he had no more ships than I do and yet …’ He looked up, hopefully. ‘Do you understand finance, Master Marlowe? Along with your many other talents?’

  ‘Master Bancroft,’ Marlowe said, regretfully, ‘I understand what money does to a man, to what crimes it can drive him. But sadly, although I can sum a line of numbers, I don’t understand how one man can make more than another, doing the same thing. Unless …’

  Bancroft looked at him, one eyebrow raised. ‘Unless that man is involved in something underhand,’ he completed the sentence. ‘Something criminal, even.’

  Marlowe shrugged. ‘You knew your cousin, Master Bancroft, where I did not. Do you think he was involved in something underhand?’

  ‘My cousin was a meticulous bookkeeper,’ Bancroft said, with the air of someone embarking on a lecture. ‘As you saw, he wrote down even the smallest transaction and Mary – his widow, as I am sure you remember –’ Marlowe was not likely to forget, but Thaddeus Bancroft didn’t know that – ‘Mary often said that he would stay up all night worrying over a ledger if there was so much as a ha’penny unaccounted for. So, I have gone over every page of this ledger to find where his extra income – and I believe it to be quite substantial, Master Marlowe – came from.’ He twiddled the goose feather between his finger and thumb. ‘I need to know, because Mary has become rather used to that kind of life. I don’t want her to have to go back to how she lived before.’

  ‘Which was?’ Marlowe had seen the light of the professional whore in the woman’s face before she had fled.

  ‘I believe … I believe Simon met her when he was employing her services. I see no reason to hide that fact, Master Marlowe. She is a dear, go
od woman who had fallen into a life of sin. It could happen to anyone.’

  Perhaps not anyone, exactly, Marlowe thought, but he got the general gist. Without wishing to be rude, he felt he had to add a comment. ‘This would be a while ago, though, surely. Mary is not …’

  ‘Not in the first flush of youth, perhaps not, no. She and Simon had been married for ten years or more when he … when he died. But it is only in the last few years that his fortunes have been on the rise. However, I digress. My main worry is that I simply can’t find where his money has been coming from.’ He dropped the quill and massaged his temples, leaving inky thumb prints on his jaw.

  ‘Might there not be another ledger, a private one?’ Marlowe asked him.

  ‘That occurred to me,’ Bancroft said. ‘I have searched the house from top to bottom. All I could find was his household ledger and that balances to the last farthing. I even went so far as to check the food in the pantry – the cook was livid and threatened to give notice. But everything that was there was in the ledger.’

  ‘And you’ve searched here, of course,’ Marlowe prompted. The room would not offer much of a challenge. It was so small that the desk and chair almost filled it and the ledgers on the single shelf had not been touched for years, if the dust and cobwebs were anything to go by.

  ‘Not yet,’ Bancroft said. ‘I thought I would go through the ledger first.’

  ‘And therein lies the main difference between us,’ Marlowe said with a smile. ‘You are a man for adding columns. I am a man for turning out drawers. Let’s put our talents together. I will search and you can go through anything I find. Does that seem to be a good plan?’

  Bancroft nodded and smiled his diffident smile. ‘That seems like a very good plan,’ he said. ‘Where do you want to start?’

  Marlowe had not been wasting his time whilst Bancroft had been sharing his innermost thoughts, which he seemed to do without too much persuasion. Master Topcliffe’s talents would be wasted on this man; he would have told all before the pincers were even warm. He had already decided that the old ledgers on the shelf were not likely to yield much information. The desk was very simple, with just one drawer. It didn’t seem to fit very well, which was rather at odds with the carving on the legs, which suggested expense. ‘Let’s start in the desk drawer,’ he suggested and Bancroft pushed the chair back and pulled the drawer open. For such a relatively large space, there was very little in it, just some goose feathers and a penknife, against the day when a new quill needed to be fashioned.

  ‘Well,’ Bancroft said, disappointed, ‘I didn’t think it could possibly be that easy.’

  ‘May I?’ Marlowe got up and went over to the desk and looked more closely at the drawer. ‘Does it look rather shallow to you?’ he asked the tobacco importer.

  ‘A false bottom!’ Bancroft said. ‘Simon’s father, my Uncle Reynold, had a desk with a false drawer. I’ll wager this one is the same. There is a knob at the back.’ He reached in, running his fingers along the wood. ‘There is a knob at the back,’ he repeated, then sat back, defeated. ‘There doesn’t seem to be a knob at the back, Master Marlowe. It’s clearly just a very badly made drawer.’

  Marlowe set him gently aside. ‘I think we are just being a little too clever, Master Bancroft,’ he said and took the sharp little knife from the drawer. Then, leaning down, he felt under the bottom and there was a soft twang as he cut a string. A small book fell to the ground, face down. It was bound in soft leather and was smaller than the palm of a man’s hand.

  ‘How did you know it was there?’ Bancroft asked, amazed.

  Marlowe shrugged. He could hardly tell the man of the things he had done, the things he had seen since he turned twenty. The priest holes where the Jesuits crouched in their silent terror, not daring to breathe; the secret places where men hid their darkest thoughts. ‘The drawer didn’t close properly. It seemed to catch halfway. It was the string, stretched between the sides, which was snagging on the runner. You’d have found it eventually.’ He smiled encouragingly and, picking up the little book, handed it to him. ‘Come on, you’re the money man. We’ve already agreed that.’

  Bancroft picked up the flint from the desk top and lit another candle. Drawing it closer, he opened the book, flicking through it to find the last page with writing on. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing at the date. ‘The tenth of March; the last day we saw him alive.’

  Marlowe looked over the man’s shoulder and examined the page. It was ruled downwards to create columns. In the left-hand column was the date. The page was almost full and it had seven dates on it, each one with several entries. The second column was wider and had the same three letters in it – KTJ. Bancroft pointed. ‘What does this mean? Someone’s initials?’

  ‘Let’s just try and get the general flavour first, Master Bancroft,’ Marlowe said, ‘before we go into details. All of the figures in the third column are the same look. Twenty, followed by the letter “l”.’

  ‘Twenty pounds,’ Bancroft said, automatically. ‘Simon always wrote sums like that when it was monies of account.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  Bancroft blew out his cheeks in a huge sigh. ‘Money isn’t always money, Master Marlowe. Sometimes, it is money as you have it in your purse, angels, groats, perhaps the odd ryal still knocking around. Monies of account is …’ He glanced up into Marlowe’s face, which had assumed the bland politeness of someone who was drifting away from the conversation in hand, no matter how important it might be. Bancroft decided to shorten his lecture. ‘Monies of account are amounts that you don’t actually own, or at least not for long enough for it to matter. In other words, if someone paid you an angel they owed you and you immediately paid it to me, in payment of another debt, that would be monies of account. Do you see?’

  ‘I do believe I do,’ Marlowe said happily. ‘So that third column stands for money that passes through Simon’s hands, no matter how briefly.’

  ‘Correct!’ Bancroft said cheerfully. ‘Or near enough. Now,’ he drew his finger along the line, ‘there are no more entries on that line. But look above, to the date preceding it, and you will see that there are more entries. And so it goes,’ he flicked back the pages, ‘right to the beginning of the book. So, looking at the entry above, in the fourth column, but one line down, is the same entry, twenty pounds, in Simon’s manner, with a little tiny … what is that? Is it a letter “h”, do you think? Then, in the fifth and final column, a number two. Note, there is no “l”. I think this is money that Simon received.’ He looked back a page. ‘Look, at the bottom, the totals only represent the twos, not the twenties.’ He tapped his teeth with a forefinger. ‘This looks like … It’s on the tip of my tongue.’

  ‘May I?’ Marlowe said, holding his hand out. Bancroft handed over the book, with some reluctance. The page before the last was the same in every particular, except that it was full and at the bottom, two boxes were ruled. In the right-hand one was the figure 20, which didn’t take long to work out was the total of all of the twos. In the other box, was the number 502. He flicked back further. The larger figure was clearly a cumulative one, he could see. ‘What kind of profit do you make a year?’ he asked Bancroft.

  ‘In general, or from tobacco?’ Bancroft asked. ‘The success of your plays has had a very gratifying effect on my income.’

  ‘From tobacco, just for the moment.’

  ‘Umm …’ Bancroft cast up his eyes and seemed to be working something out in his head. ‘Approximately six hundred pounds. Give or take.’

  ‘So, here,’ Marlowe pointed, ‘is that profit again. Give or take.’

  Bancroft craned round to see. ‘Yes. So it seems.’

  Marlowe looked at the first date in the book. ‘This goes back longer than a year,’ he said, ‘but even so. A nice little extra, I think you’d agree.’

  ‘May I?’ Bancroft held out his hand for the book. ‘I know what these figures mean, I’m sure of it. My father made sure I knew all about how to keep accounts, before he died.
His old bookkeeper knew all there was to know and he … Oh, my head is like a sieve sometimes.’ He bent his head, shaking it slowly and making little tutting noises. For his part, Marlowe was in a similar quandary about the initials. They must mean something – or someone. Suddenly, his heart was in his mouth. Bancroft had leapt up from his seat and was hugging Marlowe round the chest and bouncing them both up and down. He felt the flimsy floor shake with his gambolling and down below a parcel of tobacco for Lyme Regis ended up with a good layer of wood dust in the mixture.

  ‘I am an idiot, indeed I am, Master Marlowe.’

  Marlowe knew that, and not just because he couldn’t remember what rows of figures reminded him of.

  ‘Double stoccado, that’s what it is.’

  ‘Double …?’

  ‘Stoccado, yes. It’s a moneylender’s scam, so that there is interest paid many, many times any legal limit. It’s very simple, really.’ His face clouded and he stopped hugging Marlowe, to the playwright’s relief. He had now been hugged by both of the surviving Bancrofts and it was two too many. ‘I am distressed that Simon should stoop to it, even so,’ he said, sadly.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse my ignorance, Master Bancroft. Explain as to a child.’ Marlowe could only sympathize when he knew what the man was talking about.

  ‘It doesn’t need simplification, Master Marlowe. It is simplicity itself. I will tell it as though it involves the two of us, then it will be easier to follow. If I may?’

  Marlowe nodded assent.

  ‘Well, let’s say you need to borrow … let’s say fifty pounds, quickly. You are well-to-do but with few liquid assets. You come to me and ask to borrow the sum. I say that I can’t lend you such an amount as a pure loan, the laws of Usury being what they are, but I can sell you something in my possession, which is worth the sum in question. You give me your promissory note for fifty pounds, signed and witnessed, often by a servant of the house. I know a friend who will buy the item from you for fifty pounds, forty five at the very least. You are happy to do that – all you want is the money. So, we go to my friend’s house with the item …’