by Robin Blake
Ambler’s eyes darted to right and left. He knew now he was in a corner. I went on, unrelenting.
‘Furthermore, I know the precise origin of these things. Each one is an unredeemed pledge that Mr Pimbo kept in his strong room, to which you somehow gained access, and from which you took them. How long have you been a thief, Ambler? Did you take them piecemeal as and when the occasion arose, or did you rather sweep them up in one haul?’
He swallowed, making the Adam’s apple bob up and down in his neck as he struggled to compose himself. When he spoke, his voice was low and full of husks.
‘It’s a long story, Mr Cragg. And it’s all because, and only because, I was there when it happened.’
‘When what happened?’
‘When Mr Pimbo was shot, Sir.’
I was engaged in picking out a small snuffbox from the sack, but immediately swung round in astonishment.
‘Great heavens, Michael! You saw Mr Pimbo shot?’
‘I didn’t say I saw it. I said I was there.’
‘I see. Then you had better tell me your long story – and make it the whole truth, mind!’
It came out haltingly at first, but Ambler was cocksure by nature and gradually as he unfolded the tale his crest began to rise and his tongue grew more valiant. On the fatal morning, he had come early to the shop, being behind with his work on a bespoke golden watch-chain. He let himself in at a little before six o’clock thinking the premises empty, and went directly to his work-bench. Only a few minutes had passed before he jumped at the sound of a gunshot coming from Pimbo’s room, and went to the closed door with its pasteboard sign forbidding entrance. He called out and knocked and, getting no response, tried the door, which was unlocked. So Ambler had entered the room and there found his employer sprawled across his desk, with blood in every direction. Ambler stood aghast until thought prevailed over horror, and he concluded that Pimbo had deliberately killed himself – there was no one else in the room but the dog – and so he began looking around for a letter Pimbo may have written to explain this terrible action. He found none, but he did see that the door of the strong room was open, with both keys in place. Curiously – for he had never been allowed to do so before – he went inside.
‘It was then that I felt the hand of the Devil on my shoulder, Mr Cragg, truly I did. He was a-whispering in my ear that my master was dead, and what was to stop me now from taking his place as Preston’s goldsmith, and becoming a gentleman, which is every man’s desire who has a head on his shoulders? Of course I had no money, as yet, to realize my ambition – but what of these silver oddments that people had pawned and never claimed? Mr Pimbo always kept the Pledges Book under his own control and I knew that if these things disappeared no one would ever know what became of them.’
Seizing the Pledges Book he matched the ticketed objects on the shelf with entries in the book, and selected only the things that he thought no one would miss. These he put in a linen bag that he fetched from the shop and, when he had what he considered a sufficient collection of silver, he locked the strong room, returned Hazelbury’s key to its place in the drawer under his writing desk and lodged the bag out of sight beneath his work-bench. He had gone back into Mr Pimbo’s room one last time to make sure there was no trace of his presence there, when he heard Hazelbury arriving for work. Now his escape was blocked and he had a vision of himself discovered in the fatal room, with his employer’s corpse and a discharged gun – circumstances that, combined with the fact that he had stolen from the strong room, would undoubtedly lead to an appointment with the public executioner.
Ambler had spotted the office’s key in the lock on the inside of the door. Quickly he locked that door and waited. But as the apprentice came in to work, and then a succession of early customers, he knew that he had missed the chance of a simple escape. He bitterly regretted not having made his presence immediately known to the Chief Cashier, but now it was too late. With just the dog for company he had waited an hour or more in the agony of suspense and then heard the locksmith’s first efforts to open the door. Stationing himself against the wall that would be behind the door when it swung open, he waited. And, when at last the crowd came bursting in, he took his chance and contrived to escape unnoticed, in the exact manner that Fidelis had sketched to me when propounding his ‘Hidden Man’ hypothesis.
‘I couldn’t believe my good fortune, Mr Cragg,’ said Ambler. ‘There was so many coming into the room, and all looking in the one direction, that no one took notice of me when I slipped out from behind the door. I was just one of the crowd that was crying ooh, and shoving, and gawking at the dead man, until someone chased them out.’
‘When did you take the silver out of the shop and hide it in the rabbit burrow?’
‘At dinnertime. No one saw me. I used to go a lot to the Bale Stone as a lad and I knew about the rabbit hole. Unlike most, I was not afraid of it. It was the best place I could think of to hide the silver.’
‘How did one of the spoons get into the hands of Adam Thorn? Did you give it to him?’
‘I got the spoons before. It was them that gave me the idea to steal the rest, when I had the chance that morning. It was months earlier. I’d been into the strong room for some unworked silver sheet and I saw them and took them. They were the first things I put in the rabbit hole, but I must have dropped one on the Moor, and that were the one Adam found.’
‘Why did you do it, Michael? Why, finally, did you steal?’
‘I am no hardened thief, Sir. You must believe me. But I needed money for my future plans. I thought with Mr Pimbo dead I must do all I could to make the shop my shop.’
‘Was that all? You said you had “plans”.’
‘Must I tell, Sir?’
‘You must.’
‘I meant to be Miss Ruth Peel’s husband too.’
‘You wanted to marry Miss Peel?’
‘Yes, Sir, for is she not a fine woman?’
‘I would not dispute that. Did she know of your plan?’
‘No Sir. I was biding my time.’
A silence fell between us. The conversation with the love-sick Ambler had made me gloomy. Yes, it had shed light on events in Pimbo’s office on the morning of his death. But I was oppressed by doubts about how I should use the revelation. If I passed the information to the magistrates, Michael Ambler would be sent for trial on a charge of larceny against his lawful employer, and would likely be hanged.
He seemed to read my thoughts, for he asked,
‘What are you going to do, Sir?’
‘I will give it further thought, Ambler. In the meantime do not go chasing after Miss Peel. Confine any chasing you do to rabbits – understood?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘There is one more thing that I would like to know. Why did you not replace Mr Pimbo’s key to the strong room, in his pocket, or wherever it was that he kept it?’
‘I was afraid of the body, Sir. I had meant to put it into his pocket, but I hesitated and slipped it in my own pocket instead. Then I forgot about it.’
He reached into the pocket of his coat and took out a generously proportioned brass key, which he placed without another word on my desk.
* * *
I dined that day with Luke Fidelis, who insisted on treating me at the White Bull Inn on the north side of Market Place, which boasted Preston’s grandest kitchen. We ordered a fine meal of spit-roasted eels in their own sauce, then broiled pigeon-squabs and finally a dressed knuckle of veal, with which we drank Bordeaux wine in cork-stopped bottles – part of a consignment imported before the French war broke out and kept in the inn’s cellars. As we waited he told me of his visit to Cadley Place in the morning, and that Miss Peel was recovering well.
As we began dinner I was burning to ask one question.
‘How did you know in advance that the legs of the fellow I pulled from the bramble bush were those of Michael Ambler?’
‘I didn’t know. It was a rational guess. I realized you must have run i
nto either the actual thief of the silver, or his accomplice, or a third party who had found out about the silver’s hiding place. On the assumption that it was the person who himself stole the silver, I was pretty sure that person was Ambler. No one else, of all the people who might have had access to Pimbo’s strong room, would in my judgement have had the courage or the desire to commit such a theft.’
‘Not Hazelbury, I agree. He is honest. But what of the apprentice?’
‘I think he’s too young, and too timid. If it had been money that was stolen I would have considered him but I do not think he would know what to do with plate. Ambler would. He was the smith. And he was confident of himself.’
‘Would it surprise you that I know, in advance, that you are right?’
‘How?’
‘What I tell you is in confidence, Luke, for I don’t know yet how to proceed.’
‘I’ll tell no one.’
So I set out everything that I had just learned from Michael Ambler.
‘And that’s why I must congratulate you, Luke,’ I finished. ‘Your “Hidden Man” in the Pimbo case was real, after all. My difficulty is that I find it hard to condemn Michael Ambler to death for this, though he admits he is a thief and, worse, has stolen his master’s property.’
‘What then is your decision?’
I sighed.
‘In confidence?’
‘Of course.’
‘I shall do nothing.’
* * *
Elizabeth shut her book with a sound between a slap and a pop.
‘There! I’ve finished it, Titus. I’ve finished Pamela.’
We were lying in bed, each with candles beside us to light our books. I looked up from mine.
‘Are you pleased with the ending, my love?’
‘No, indeed I am not, though I never had so much fascination for a book before.’
‘That I noticed.’
‘Yet now I feel utterly unsatisfied.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she marries him, the silly chit, so that all is to be happiness for ever and ever, which I cannot believe.’
I took off my spectacles and said,
‘Novels, or so I understand, must always have a happy end.’
‘Nonsense. It is not a happy end that I look for when I read a novel, but a just one; one in which good people are vindicated and villains are punished.’
‘Is that not what happens in Pamela?’
‘Not at all. The second title of the book is Virtue Rewarded, but I don’t see a reward for Pamela. She marries a man who has proven himself a terrible satyr. In one attempt to seduce her – and I do not exaggerate, Titus – he dresses himself up in the guise of an old serving woman, so that he can slither safely into her bed. If she hadn’t locked her thighs together the story would have ended there. And he’s supposed to be a fine gentleman! I could never have forgiven that, or respect him after. Yet Pamela does.’
‘Mr B is landed and rich I suppose?’
‘Of course, vastly.’
‘That would explain it. Her reward is to marry money.’
‘You are cynical. For real happiness she should have married the Reverend Williams, and that would have been quite just besides.’
‘Williams? Who is he?’
‘You must read the story. Mr B has a clergyman’s living in his gift: Williams holds it, and is in love with Pamela himself. He is a good young man and would have made her a good husband, I think, for he loves her tenderly, and not savagely like Mr B.’
‘Well, well!’ I said.
I had suddenly remembered my earlier conversation with Michael Ambler, which I had not told her about. ‘Didn’t you say the other day that the circumstance of Ruth Peel and Phillip Pimbo was just like that of the novel? I have learned today who it was that played the role of the wretched Reverend Mr Williams in this real story. Michael Ambler told me he wanted to marry Ruth Peel.’
I gave her a full account of how Ambler had been in the next room when Phillip Pimbo had died, and seized the chance to steal from the strong room because he would need the capital to carry out his plan to take over the goldsmith’s shop.
‘It was then that he confided to me his other plan: to marry Ruth Peel. In your story this man Williams wished to marry the woman who resisted the lust of her master, a man who was also his master. It is an example of the coincidence of literature and life, is it not?’
‘The difference is more instructive than the parallel, Titus. Pimbo died, unsatisfied. Miss Peel received an uncertain and circumscribed inheritance. And Ambler is not good, like Mr Williams, but a thief and a liar. Oh well! However hard we may try, we cannot turn our true lives into moral fables.’
‘Characters in novels are the toys of their author, my love, and must stand for whatever that author decrees. We, on the other hand, are the playthings of Fortune, who is morally blind.’
‘Blind, and deaf, and a mountebank, or so I think. Consider poor Amity Thorn. She thought her husband had found Benjamin Peel’s hoard: all he really had was one stolen spoon.’
* * *
My own participation in the matter of Tybalt Jackson’s death ended with the inquest, over which I presided at the White Bull Inn in front of as great an audience as I have ever attracted. A verdict of murder by Moreton Canavan, John Barton, Edward Doubleday and Zadok Moon was returned, and so the matter was passed to the magistrates and then, a few weeks later, to the Assizes.
John Barton did not stand trial, for he was quick to turn King’s Evidence and testify against the merchant and the sea captain, by which he saved his own miserable skin. He told how he himself had been the mysterious second guest at the Lamb and Flag, and brought Jackson to the stables that fatal night, on the promise that he would meet Canavan and Edward Doubleday and hear from the captain’s very lips the story of The Fortunate Isle’s sinking. Jackson did indeed meet the two men; he also met his death when the captain, supposedly in a fit of anger, attacked his head with a hatchet.
According to Barton, the disposal of the body on the Moor had been Canavan’s idea, which I found implausible. The body had been arranged on the Bale Stone under the pretence of a savage ritual which, so the villains had hoped (and as Elijah Quick had surmised), people would think had been performed by the victim’s negro servant. It was Barton, not Canavan, who possessed the knowledge of the Moor and its history; only he would be likely to suggest the Bale Stone as a suitable place for a pretended satanic ritual. But Barton was the Crown’s witness, and these considerations counted for nothing.
Doubleday did not stand trial either. Having evaded capture at Garstang, and despite further attempts to run him down, the captain got clean away into Scotland. From there it was thought he travelled to Holland, and beyond the reach of English legal authority. Canavan from the dock tried to follow Barton’s example in placing all blame on Doubleday for the killing, but he failed to convince the court. Standing alone in the dock, he was speedily convicted and, a few days later, they hanged him at the gallows on Lancaster Moor. I did not attend: the legal rituals of death do not attract me.
It was not until some time after this that we learned the truth about The Fortunate Isle. A ship trading from Ireland had put into Liverpool with the name Looby painted on her. An old mariner sitting by the dock loudly said he’d be damned if she weren’t The Fortunate Isle, that had sailed for Guinea a year before. Captain O’Riordan, who had been in command of the Looby a bare two months, claimed to have little knowledge of his vessel’s previous history. One of his crew, however, gave a statement to Messrs Willoughby and Pickle of Lombard Street, marine insurers, that he had served on the ship three years continuously and that she had indeed put to sea previously as The Fortunate Isle. He also attested that she had never sailed further from Liverpool than the port of Galway on the western coast of Ireland. So it was that we knew the whole of her Guinea voyage, and supposed end in the Spanish Main, had been a sham.
And what of Zadok Moon? He seemed to have disapp
eared into the air.
Chapter Thirty-one
FOR THOSE OF us who could remember the festivities of twenty years earlier, the Guild Merchant that opened on the penultimate day of August 1742 was composed of all the expected elements. In between the pompous bestowal of freemanships and promulgation of by-laws, the town danced and drank its way through the fortnight. The trade guilds put on their fancy hats and decked their carts with flags, banners, fruits and flowers and rode through the streets singing and posturing as they had always done – except for the goldsmiths, who had had the festive spirit somewhat knocked out of them by the Pimbo scandal. There was also a string of assemblies, masquerades, banquets, concerts and balls for the quality, who came to town from near and far to enjoy themselves, and at the same time court popularity by distributing largesse to the poor.
Yet the grand programme that Grimshaw had hoped to provide contained rather too many disappointments for the Mayor’s own comfort. All summer he had barked for the Guild whenever he spoke in public. He had boasted that Mr Thomas Arne would return, with a performance of music from his opera The Judgement of Paris; but Arne it seemed had better things to do. Grimshaw then claimed to have engaged a company of players, ‘that has lately acted to public acclaim in Dublin, with Mrs Woffington and Mr Garrick’, according to the programme he had printed. The town was agog for their appearance on the Preston stage, but the celebrated pair, like Thomas Arne, let us down. Many explanations were bandied around: Arne had made enemies in Preston during his last visit; Garrick was opening a new season in London; Peg Woffington was with child; adverse winds had pinned their ship inside Dublin harbour. The more likely truth was that insufficient fees had been offered, for this was, in truth, a relatively impoverished Guild following the loss of all the money entrusted to Pimbo.
There was further humiliation for the Mayor at the races, when The Flanders Mare came last in the main prize, as well as in his attempt to stage the first bear-baiting to be held in the town for fifty years. He had made a grand announcement that a full-grown animal had been obtained with great difficulty for the purpose, but a committee of ladies was immediately formed against the project and the brown bear was left to sit out the fortnight in a cage in Market Place, a passive object of vulgar curiosity.