by Paul Finch
“What now?” Hendricks asked tremulously. He looked pale, sickly. Neither a soldier nor a policeman – probably never anything more than an academic – the stress of the last few days and nights was visibly damaging him.
“I’m here in the capacity of detective,” Craddock muttered, vexed with himself. “So I suppose I’d better start detecting. But first … breakfast.” He rolled his shoulders. They were stiff and aching. “And a good hot bath. I’m afraid I’ll be leaving you to your own devices today.”
By the looks on Hendricks’s face, he was just glad the night had ended.
The Wake-on-the-Water was slowly coming to life when Craddock returned to it.
The front door stood open and new flames crackled on a heap of kindling in the hearth. Nobody was around, but he could hear the sound of someone working – stacking crates and bottles in the ante-room behind the bar-counter. He went straight upstairs to change his muddy clothing. The narrow stair was deserted, as was the landing at the top. No sound stirred from beyond the closed doors of the other bedrooms.
The curtains were still drawn inside his room; it was dim and cold. Wearily, he threw his hat and scarf onto the bed, and stripped his gloves and greatcoat off. He yawned and stretched. His cramped muscles cracked; a timely reminder that he wasn’t a dashing young blade any more. He went to the crockery on the dresser, to splash water on his face, but it did little to revive him – he was too tired. He decided he’d lie down for a couple of hours, and get back on the case around mid-morning. It was only as he towelled his face that he caught a flicker of movement in the mirror. His soldier and police instincts combined in quick-fire association: movement – intruder - danger!
He spun around.
But not quickly enough.
A blunt object smashed across the back of his skull, throwing him forwards over the dresser. It didn’t have the desired effect. On first spotting his assailant, he’d moved – infinitesimally, but enough to avoid the full impact.
His head swam and sparks flashed before his eyes, but he retained consciousness sufficiently to scrabble around for a weapon. His revolver sat in his coat, which was out of reach on the bed. But from the jumble of crockery in front of him, he grabbed the water-jug, flung himself around and swung it in an arc. It connected with the head of a squat, ape-like figure behind him, and shattered, shards shooting everywhere.
The head went sideways as though hinged, the body beneath it buckling. Craddock caught a glimpse of a criminal’s cosh – a hunk of wood, wrapped in coarse material – dropping to the carpet. He also saw several other figures behind the one he’d just felled, maybe three or four. Only the handle of the water-jug remained in his grasp, but it was heavy and jagged, and he drove it at the closest target the way a prize-fighter would a slugging punch. The blow was full-on, impacting on the bridge of a nose. There was a mighty crack, and it wasn’t the jug-handle. Craddock’s fingers were crushed with the force; it jarred his arm. But the attacker staggered backwards, black blood cascading down the white smudge of his face.
Then the others joined in.
It was no contest. Craddock struck again and again, as cleanly and viciously as he could. But a second cosh smote his temple, and sent reality reeling. A heavy fist hacked into his belly, expelling the wind from his lungs. Another blow landed from a cosh, this one across the back of his neck. He collapsed to his knees. Someone twisted the shattered remnant of water-jug from his hand, and used it against him. It gashed his brow, set the bones in his head ringing. The dim world of his hotel room was blotted out.
The last thing he remembered was lying on his back, gazing up at a gaggle of intruders. Of all their leering faces, only one was familiar: he had an ashen pallor and thick, heavy cheek-bones. An aged scar linked the left corner of his mouth to his left ear; strands of lank red hair dangled from under his greasy bowler. Even as consciousness faded, Craddock remembered the boor on the stagecoach from Norwich.
The next few hours passed like a blur.
Craddock was vaguely aware of being bundled down a darkened stair, and out into an open yard. After that, he was on a trolley or cart, being pushed along a pathway. The outlines of burly men surrounded him. They spoke together quietly, but he detected Cockney accents and coarse colloquialisms. His face was slathered with clotting blood, his hair a matted, gluey mess. He passed in and out of consciousness, though the cold morning air was slowly reviving him. He thought there were five ruffians in total. They were of brutish build, and wore brightly-coloured neckerchiefs, which, with the exception of the stagecoach man – who behaved like their leader – they’d drawn up to over their faces. Despite this, two of them bore marks of the major’s resistance; one had a deep, bloody gash across the bridge of his nose, while another’s cheek was black with bruising. These two were particularly hostile to him, glowering down as he was trundled along.
All of them were armed. Coshes and knives were shoved into the tops of boots. One wore a cutlass, while others carried pistols in their belts. The stagecoach man carried a heavy-bore shotgun, which he’d sawn down to half a foot in length.
Craddock saw all this through puffy, bloodshot eyes. When he tried to move, he felt knotted ropes holding him down. The stagecoach man noticed that he’d come back to his senses, and laughed.
“Nothing like a toff who’s found his proper place in the world, eh?”
In bright daylight, his broad face had a mottled, leathery complexion, as though the dirt and grime in which he’d been raised had become part of his being. From out of this leaden mask, his eyes glittered like chips of tarnished metal.
“What … what are you about here?” Craddock found the strength to ask.
“Want to be gagged, cozzer?” The man held up a wad of bloodstained cloth. “Then shut your piggin’ hole!”
Craddock was still groggy, still wrestling with stupour. He tasted blood in the back of his throat; it had probably dribbled there from inside his broken nose.
“You men realise you’ll to spend the rest of your lives in fetters for this?” he said. “On the treadmill, or the rock-pile.”
There were snorts of laughter as they drove him on. Skerries of gray cloud scudded by overhead. The cart bounced and slid. There was now a smell of salt in the air. The tall lashes of reed-ronds were visible to either side.
“You’ve assaulted a senior constable,” Craddock added. “Have you any idea what penalty that will bring?”
“We’re familiar with the law and its penalties, major,” the stagecoach man replied.
“You know who I am?”
“I reckon. How couldn’t I, you meddling the way you have?”
“You mean at the church? You’re the ones who’ve been trespassing at St. Brae’s?”
“Trespassing?” one of the other men said, laughing “In the house of God? Where’s it written that even the commonest folk can’t go to the house of God?”
“Enough horseshit!” the stagecoach man said harshly. “We’re here!”
They cantered down a steeply sloped track, loose ground crumbling beneath them, finally coming out onto a swathe of river-debris; sand, mud, bleached pebbles. Craddock craned his neck to look. They were in a depression, a natural trough. Ripple-ridged flats and pieces of driftwood suggested it was a small estuary. The white skeleton of a tree stood in the middle of it at a crazy angle, like some forlorn remnant of the saurian age. They pushed the trolley over to this, and stripped the major of his bonds. Lifting him up, they thrust him against the tree-trunk and bound him in place, fastening his hands tightly behind his back, drawing a length of cord across his throat, almost cutting his air-supply.
When they stood back, they looked grimly satisfied.
“Five of you against one,” he gasped. “You must be pleased with yourselves.”
The stagecoach man gave a toothy grin. “Oh we are. One peeler less in the world makes it a good day’s work.”
“I doubt you know the meaning of ‘work’.”
The stagecoach m
an grinned all the more. “Just you have a good gander round … mainly down that way, towards the coast. It’s about a mile off from here.” He pointed north-east. “Course, this being spring and all, and a good time for high tides, it won’t be that far for long.”
The other men chuckled.
“I see,” Craddock replied.
“You soon will. You’ll see the sea alright. How’s that, lads?”
The chuckles became hoots of laughter.
“And which lunatic asylum did you escape from?” Craddock asked.
The man’s smile became a vicious snarl. He rammed the barrels of his shotgun under the major’s chin. “If only it was that easy,” he snarled. “If only that was the reason.”
Craddock said nothing. He fancied something of importance was coming.
“In case you’re interested, cozzer … I’m Charnwood.”
“Jake Charnwood?” Craddock asked, astonished.
“That’s right, major. You rode in a carriage all the way from Norwich with the most wanted man in the United Kingdom … some cozzer you are!”
Craddock tried to recollect what he knew about Jake Charnwood, the notorious robber and murderer, who, even by the standards of the London stews, was regarded as highly dangerous. He’d started off life as a soldier, but had been discharged on the grounds of insanity. After that he’d drifted into crime, first as a violent house-breaker, then as a highway man haunting the secluded lanes on the outskirts of the city. He’d finally found full-time employment among the capital’s criminal gangs, whom he worked for as an enforcer and assassin, a man who killed and tortured for pay. His crude likeness adorned ‘wanted’ posters everywhere from Birmingham to the South Coast, but little ground had been made. On one occasion, three London detectives had tracked him to a hideout on Jacob’s Island, on the south bank of the Thames. But Charnwood had killed them all.
“What the devil are you doing out here?” Craddock demanded.
“At the moment, disposing of you.”
“Did you kill those two clergymen?”
Charnwood laughed. “I’m quite prolific, as you know. But it’s always been my curse that every murder the London peelers can’t solve, they pin on me. Are you northern filth no different?”
Unlikely though it was that Jake Charnwood would ever tell the truth about anything, on this occasion he probably was. Craddock had seen him arriving in the district several days after the Reverend Allgood and his deacon had been attacked.
“They’ll have a hangman’s rope for you, Charnwood,” Craddock warned him. “But things might not get that far. There’s something else out here. And it’s even more adept at taking life than you are.”
“I’m really scared.”
“You ought to be.”
“So should you!” Charnwood barked. He glanced east along the estuary “Turn o’ the tide’s imminent, I reckon.”
He backed away, towards higher ground. His men accompanied him.
“Charnwood, you’re a hopeless case!” the major shouted. “A lunatic beyond redemption! But the rest of you are making a serious mistake!”
“Save your breath, major,” Charnwood replied, as he and his gang ascended to a ridge. “You’ll need it in the next hour.” One by one his men vanished, but Charnwood lingered. “I’d love to stay and watch, but we’ve got other work to do, and we don’t get paid by the hour.”
“You’re dead men, you know that?” Craddock said.
Charnwood winked. “You first.”
And then he was gone.
Craddock hung there, helpless. Struggle as he might, he couldn’t loosen his bonds. He slumped down, gasping, wondering why Charnwood had gone to all this trouble, why he hadn’t just pulled a trigger and been done with it. But no, that would have been too simple. Murdering in this dramatic fashion was much more to Charnwood’s taste; a sure-fire method, but also elaborately sadistic, so that it would serve both as punishment and warning. Craddock gazed through bleary eyes over the rippled sand-flats – and now saw a line of foam approaching.
His spine stiffened.
Only seconds seemed to pass before wavelets were swirling around his feet. They were numbingly cold. The next thing, they were half way up his legs, slapping first his knees, then his thighs, then his groin. The cold deepened to an astonishing level. He fancied that he wouldn’t have time to die from drowning out here; that hypothermia would claim him first. By the time it was rolling around his waist, he was calling desperately for help. But his mouth was so beaten and bloodied, his teeth chattering so violently that he could barely get a word out. In any case, who would hear him in this forgotten place? If nothing else, he supposed, the authorities would know that he’d been murdered. Fastened to this stump, no undertow would carry him away. Of course, that was assuming he hadn’t rotted to carrion before someone came along.
The tide crept steadily up his body, now muddy with sand and debris. Craddock’s sense of perception slowly altered. It was almost as though he was sinking, the world towering above him with all its tumbling storm clouds and high, grass-topped sandbanks. The sea surface, though pouring past him in great gushes of white foam, seemed flat, rolling smoothly off to an immense horizon. Wavelets were now slopping around his chin. He battled to lift his head, but swallowed mouthfuls of brine. His body was frozen through, and though he continued to fight against his restraints, they were clumsy, vain efforts. The tree-trunk meanwhile remained fast in the ground, a rock-solid fixture that had resisted the elemental might of the ocean for centuries. A wave now hit his face full on, cutting a prolonged V-wash around it, boiling up his nose. Craddock knew he was doomed. There was nothing else he could do.
And, startlingly, someone was alongside him.
His first demented thought was that it was Abigail, come in ethereal form to guide him to the other side. But then he realized that dirty, whitish locks hung around her head in a drenched mop; that she wore working-clothes, the ragged skirts and shawls of which billowed about in the flood; that her face – a mask of determination as she fought hard to get a grip on him – was strong and lined, but aged far more than Abigail’s had been when she’d finally relapsed into death.
Just before Craddock’s head went under completely, he saw a metallic glint in the woman’s submerged fist. It was a blade, and it was moving back and forth, sawing vigorously at his bonds.
They made a bedraggled pair as they assisted each other along the footpath. With a combined age of over a hundred years, they’d worn themselves to a point from just beyond which there’d perhaps have been no return. They trudged wearily, leaning on each other’s shoulders, the icy wind lashing at them in their wringing-wet clothes. It was sheer torment. But it was life.
“I … I was looking for the first coltsfoot of the year,” Madam Godhigfu gasped, fingering the garden-knife now tucked in her belt. “I suffer from bad coughs.”
“Thank God for coltsfoot,” Craddock stammered.
Fifteen minutes later, they were back in the parlour of her cottage. Craddock sat on the armchair, wrapped in plaid blankets. The grate had been freshly stacked with logs, which burned feverishly. An iron guard had been set up in front of it, and his sodden clothes were draped over this. He clutched another mug of sweet mint-tea, the hot fumes of which, themselves alone, were proving sufficient to revive him.
He peered into the orange flames. Without doubt, that was the closest he’d come to death since his army days; so close in fact that even now he was having difficulty accepting that he’d survived it. This was a feeling he’d experienced once or twice before, but it was a feeling no man could get used to – when you’d missed death by such a hair’s breadth that, the more you dwelled on it, the more it occurred to you that you’d somehow cheated God, that you’d actually been supposed to die and because you hadn’t, fate would come to call again in the very near future.
“How are you now?” Madam Godhigfu asked.
She was standing by the door, also bundled in blankets and drinking one of
her potions. Her damp hair was combed out to inordinate length. It fell almost to her waist.
He nodded. “I’m well. Thanks to you.”
“Dare I ask how it was you came to find yourself in that position?”
“You can ask, but I think you already know the answer.”
“The fabled treasure?”
He took a sip of tea. “Initially, I wasn’t sure whether to take you seriously. But I can’t think of anything else that would have attracted the gentlemen I met today to a place like King’s Fen.”
“No-one knows where the treasure is,” she said. “If it exists at all.”
“But there’s been some excavation. I’ve seen it for myself … in a second chamber beyond the crypt. Curate Hendricks thinks it an old working, a leftover from before the renovation, but I’m not so sure. If it was, it doesn’t seem to go anywhere.”
“And you think these men are responsible for it?”
“Well someone’s been visiting the crypt at night. On the other hand, it could have been the work of Reverend Allgood.”
She looked surprised. “The one who died?”
“I’m told he volunteered to re-open St. Brae’s. I’m also told he was given to good living.”
“That would certainly explain how these scoundrels knew where to dig.”
Craddock pondered that. He’d come to suspect that Allgood might have been looking for the gold, but he’d never considered that the vicar would actually have been in league with criminals; not criminals of the Jake Charnwood variety.
“St. Brae’s is a large church,” Madam Godhigfu added. “ An opportunist thief would have his work cut out getting anywhere near the treasure. Allgood, on the other hand, would probably have made a detailed study of the building before taking up his post. He’d have memorised every scrap of information … historical, archaeological.”
The major tried to recall what he knew about the Reverend Allgood. By reputation, he’d been an old and ample man, and would certainly have needed assistance with any heavy work down in the crypt. But then he’d had the young athlete, Arrowsmith, with him. And surely a scholar and cleric, formerly of York Minster, wouldn’t have had any truck with a London crime syndicate? Would he even know who they were, not to mention how to contact them?