The senior officer, Major Kendall, made us wait before he saw us. But he could not have been more obliging once he realized who we were. He was interested in our story, too, and so was the man who came with him, Mr Carne, an American gentleman with whom both Wintour and I were slightly acquainted. It was an open secret that Carne was an intelligence-gatherer. I knew that he was vouched for both by General Tryon and the Deputy Adjutant General at Headquarters.
It was too late for us to go on to the city that evening. Besides, Wintour and I were so tired we could barely walk. Two rooms were bespoken for us at a nearby inn. We were invited to sup with Major Kendall and Mr Carne. Kendall found us clean shirts, stockings and small-clothes. His man-servant even produced two pairs of shoes which, though much worn, fitted tolerably well. When I asked the fellow how he had come by them, he laughed and said that people were always coming and going at King’s Bridge; and usually they shed some of their possessions as they came and went.
Wintour and I spruced ourselves up as best we could at the inn. Our chambers were small and meanly furnished but the luxury of solitude and a bed of my own seemed a foretaste of paradise to me. Wintour finished his sketchy toilet first and came along to my room.
‘We have had quite an adventure, have we not?’ he said as he watched me fumbling with my neckcloth.
‘I’m rejoiced that it’s over,’ I said. ‘There were times when—’
‘I know. I’m sorry for it, Edward, believe me. If I could turn the clock back, I would. But now we shall reap the benefit, hey? We shall celebrate our happy return tonight – and other nights as well. And tomorrow we shall be back in New York.’
Back with the family in Warren Street, I thought, back with Mrs Arabella. And back with the mystery of Roger Pickett’s death, which had only deepened since I had discovered the true significance of the box of curiosities. In our desperate flight from Mount George all these considerations, even Mrs Arabella, had retreated from my mind; but now they flooded back.
But tonight I would ignore them, I told myself – tonight Wintour and I were in our own debatable ground, a brief neutral space between past and future, between the perils of our journey to Mount George and the difficulties of our return to New York. Tonight, at least, tonight we might enjoy ourselves.
Shortly afterwards, we strolled the short distance to the Major’s quarters. It was an extraordinary release not to be on our guard, fearful for our lives, and not to be in a desperate hurry.
Wintour was humming a marching song and beating time with his hand against his leg. He seemed almost drunk already.
I touched his arm. ‘Jack, for God’s sake have a care what you say. Don’t let slip your reason for going into the Debatable Ground. Not to anyone.’
‘I shall be as secret as the grave,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I’m famished. I shall have no time for talking.’
We reached Kendall’s door. I smelled the intoxicating scents of roasted meat. A few minutes later we were at table. The food was indifferent but we fell upon it like starving wolves. As for the wine, both of us drank deep and drank quickly.
The Major and Mr Carne were particularly interested to hear about the state of the country we had passed through, and about enemy troop movements there. They had heard that Piercefield and his men had been defeated in a skirmish, but they knew little of the circumstances apart from a rumour that Piercefield himself had been among the dead.
‘It was coming to him sooner or later,’ Mr Carne observed. ‘I could never understand the trust that Governor Franklin placed in him.’
The bottle continued to circulate. Mr Carne suggested a game of cards. Wintour agreed with enthusiasm. By now it was nearly one o’clock in the morning. My head was reeling from the unaccustomed wine. Weariness engulfed me like my feather mattress in Warren Street.
I made my excuses and left them to it. The major summoned a soldier to light me to the inn. I am sorry to say that I needed the support of his arm as well.
When at last I found myself in my chamber, I opened the bed-curtains and sat down on the bed. It took me a moment to struggle out of my coat, which seemed reluctant to be parted from me. I pulled off my necktie, unbuttoned my waistcoat and kicked off the borrowed shoes. This last exertion overbalanced me. I fell back on the bed. I looked up at the canopy, which was made of dirty green cloth and swayed to and fro like the branches of trees in the forest.
I do not remember more. I fell into a deep sleep. I did not hear Wintour’s return. I did not hear anything until I woke the next day.
My mouth was dry. My head felt as if someone had cut it in two with an axe. I lay there, allowing consciousness to seep into my head by fits and starts. I knew from the sunlight that the day was already well advanced.
I eased myself into a sitting position and swung my legs off the bed. The movement intensified my headache and brought on a fit of nausea. When I had recovered I stood up, supporting myself on the bedpost, and looked about me for the chamber pot.
Ten minutes later, I buttoned my breeches with trembling fingers and hobbled like an old man along the passage to the chamber where Wintour lay.
The door was locked or bolted. I called his name. There was no answer. I called again and then hammered on the panels with increasing vigour. I bent down and looked through the keyhole. The key was not in the lock. I could see nothing but part of the bed-curtains. I thought I heard a susurration within. It was like the purring of a cat or the humming of bees.
I banged the door again. The racket I made brought the landlord puffing up the stairs.
‘I can’t rouse Captain Wintour,’ I said.
Still panting, the man grinned. ‘He was late last night, sir, and he was merry.’
‘Have you a spare key?’
The landlord fetched his keys and unlocked the door. I pushed it open. The buzzing sound was at once louder. There was a terrible stench. Sunshine streamed through the window, which was open. Dust motes danced in the air. Despite the open window, the room was very warm. Wintour’s clothes were strewn across the floor. Somewhere in the yard below a woman was singing a ballad I did not know in a remarkably pure voice.
‘Jack?’ I said. ‘Come, you sluggard – it must be nearly midday.’
The curtains were partly drawn about the bed. I crossed the room and pulled back the nearest one.
Jack Wintour was lying on his back with his head resting on a low pillow. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The sheet beneath him was soaked red. On and above his body were scores, perhaps hundreds, of large black flies gorging on his blood, their constant movements lending a simulacrum of vitality to the mutilated body.
‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ moaned the landlord.
He turned away and retched. The singing stopped. But the buzzing grew louder and louder.
The more I looked, the more blood I saw, and the more flies. Jack’s cheeks had been slit from the outer corners of each eye to the corners of the mouth. He was clad only in his borrowed shirt. This had been sliced open from the throat to the genitalia.
So had the skin beneath. I glimpsed the shocking white of bone, the blood and the glistening organs. And above all, the flies.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
I have waking memories and, worse than these, I have dreams. I still see the pools of blood in my nightmares and the wide, staring eyes. The guts that spilled out of the belly, the genitalia almost severed from the body. And then the flies, always the flies, the endless, buzzing, feeding, bloated flies.
The landlord, when he had done retching, set up a great wailing and howling. I retained presence of mind enough to push him out of the room. The passage was crammed with domestics and idlers and drinkers, drawn by sounds he had made. I summoned one of the maids, a sensible-looking woman for whom the first blush of youth was only a distant memory, and sent her to find Major Kendall.
‘Tell him,’ I said, ‘that Captain Wintour is dead and he must come at once.’
My mind was still clear and rational. Indeed, it seemed
to me that the crisis had had the effect, only temporary alas, of intensifying my intellectual faculties and accelerating their operation. I knew exactly what I must do, and also that there was little time to do it.
Giving the landlord into the charge of his wife and daughter, I ordered them to take him downstairs and give him a dram or two of rum. Then I set one of the serving men, a big, burly fellow with the belly of an alderman and the carriage of an ex-soldier, to clear the passage of bystanders and to stand watch with me until Major Kendall’s arrival. When the situation was somewhat calmer, I slipped back into Wintour’s chamber and locked the door behind me.
The singing outside had stopped but the buzzing of the flies seemed louder than before. The sour taste of bile was in my mouth. I looked away from the bed.
The room was still obscenely cheerful with sunlight. I went to the window and glanced out. A stationary wagon stood immediately below in the yard. It had a raised seat at one end and was carrying a part load of roughly trimmed logs. If the window had been open last night, it would have been perfectly possible for a reasonably agile man to enter the chamber by using the wagon and perhaps one of the logs to raise him within reach of the sill.
I steeled myself to look at poor Jack Wintour. I thought it probable that most of his injuries had been inflicted after death: for otherwise there would have been a deal of noise that would have aroused the house, and possibly more blood as well. A robber might conceivably have killed him if Wintour had disturbed him in the course of a robbery – but why such a violent and unnecessarily prolonged attack? Such wanton violence seemed to serve no purpose; in that quality, if in no other, it reminded me of the destruction of Mr Froude’s laboratory: I simply could not understand the nature of it.
I turned aside and examined the clothes that were strewn on the floor. Some were stained with blood. Wintour had kept his purse in a concealed pocket inside his coat. I looked for it there and found it gone. So too were his pistols.
I searched the rest of the room, which was too small to have many hiding places. I went down on hands and knees and peered under the bed. Finally, I screwed up my courage and returned to Jack Wintour’s mutilated body, to the congealed blood and the shifting veil of flies.
Something caught my eye – a glint of light at the end of the pillow nearer the window. I bent closer. It was a steel buckle.
Gingerly I stretched out a hand and pulled it free from underneath the pillow. With it came the strap it held together. There was a little blood on the leather, but not much because Wintour’s head was on the other end of the pillow.
I tugged harder. The satchel itself emerged in a rush. The movement was violent enough to affect the whole pillow, which moved an inch or so. This in turn dislodged Wintour’s head, which rotated a few degrees towards me, so his eyes stared sightlessly at mine and the great wound across his throat gaped at me like a second mouth.
I snatched up the satchel and turned my back on him. I knew at once from the weight that it still contained the ore. I removed the three pieces and placed them in the pocket of my coat.
At the bottom of the satchel was a square of oilskin, folded over and sewn roughly with coarse thread to make a small packet. I rubbed it between finger and thumb and it bent under the pressure. I put that in my pocket too. I dropped the unbuckled satchel on the floor and kicked the coat over it.
I unlocked the door, stepped into the passage and turned the key in the lock.
I do not think my absence had even been noticed. The serving man had persuaded most of the bystanders to leave, but one of the women had gone into a fit of hysterics. She was lying on the ground, weeping and drumming her feet on the bare boards. Two of her fellow servants were trying to calm her and to make her leave.
‘We shall all be murdered,’ she was shrieking. ‘Murdered in our beds.’
The serving man bent over her and slapped her so hard on the cheek that her skull knocked on the floor. The slap and the sudden, shocking silence that followed operated on my sensibilities like the tug of a lever.
My eyes blurred. I turned away and let the tears run unchecked down my cheeks.
Major Kendall arrived with Mr Carne at his heels. Four soldiers accompanied them to the inn but remained below.
I went back to my own room and sat near the window. The maid brought me rum, tea and bread, without my asking for them. I could not face the rum or the bread, but I was grateful for the tea.
Kendall and Carne examined the body and the chamber in which it lay. At length they came to interview me. There was, I noticed, a formality to their questioning; and Mr Carne made notes in his pocket-book as the conversation went along.
At first I answered their questions mechanically. They took me through the circumstances of my discovery of the body. It was when Mr Carne began to ask in minute detail about the door to Wintour’s bedchamber that I paid more attention.
‘Have you found Wintour’s key?’ I said, interrupting him.
‘No, sir.’
Carne’s eyes met mine for a moment. Their irises were almost colourless, bleached of personality. He was an intelligent man and I believe that each of us had a fair notion of what was in the other’s mind. He was trying to establish whether the killer might have entered from within the house rather than by the open window.
‘Pray search this room if you wish,’ I said. ‘And my person.’
‘No, of course not,’ Major Kendall said, shocked by this ungentlemanly suggestion. ‘Upon my honour, sir, there’s no need for that sort of thing.’
‘The man who brought you here last night said you were so drunk he had to carry you up the stairs.’ Carne’s voice was cool and faintly scornful. ‘Having watched you last night, sir, I was not surprised.’
I coloured but said nothing.
‘We all drank our bottle, sir,’ Kendall said. ‘I dare say I was a trifle foxed myself by the end of the evening.’
Carne gave a barely perceptible shrug. ‘Whoever killed Captain Wintour needed a clear head and a steady hand. To be quite candid, I do not think that you had either of those last night, Mr Savill. Even now, perhaps—’
‘You’ve made your point, sir,’ I snapped. ‘Nor did I have any conceivable reason to kill him. And, even if I had wished to, I have had far more convenient opportunities since we went into the Debatable Ground. I should hardly have killed him now or in that way.’
‘No, no,’ Kendall said. ‘My dear sir, I’m sure that nothing could be further from Carne’s thoughts. Eh, Mr Carne? To my mind, whoever did this came through the window and went out the same way. Probably locked the door to delay pursuit and pocketed the key.’
‘But it’s curious, all the same,’ Carne said. ‘Curious that the murderer left no bloodstains behind him. He must have been covered in blood.’
Chapter Sixty
Later that day I was taken under escort to New York. I was in no sense a prisoner, of course. I had not been charged with anything. But Kendall – or rather Carne, perhaps – was taking no chances.
The latter accompanied me. We exchanged hardly a word on the journey. I felt the pieces of ore in my pockets weighing down my coat. They made an unsightly bulge and I feared that they might arouse my companion’s curiosity.
We had nearly reached the city when an orderly from King’s Bridge caught up with us. He brought a note from Major Kendall. Carne broke the seal, read it and passed it directly to me.
Kendall wrote that a servant at the tavern had gone to the well in the yard to draw water. Something had snagged on the bucket which, upon investigation, proved to be a long nightgown. Despite its immersion in the water, it was clear that it had been badly stained with blood down the front, from the neck to the hem and also on the arms.
The Major had given orders to investigate the bottom of the well, if that were possible, and to bring up any items deposited there. He had made enquiries about the nightgown and discovered that it belonged to the landlord’s wife, a woman of ample proportions and unusual height. I
t had been washed the previous day and hung out to air overnight in an outbuilding.
‘I rejoice for you,’ Carne said to me as he scribbled a reply in pencil for the orderly to take back to King’s Bridge.
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
The American looked up and, for the first time that day, smiled. He did not respond but handed the note to the orderly and gave the signal that we should ride on.
Carne was a man who did not waste words if silence would do. I understood him well enough, as he had known I would; in many ways he and I were two of a kind. If the murderer had put on a nightgown before the frenzied attack and then thrown it into the well, he must have left by the window. It would not have been possible either to leave or to re-enter the inn without rousing the house, for the doors were of course locked and barred at night.
Now that Carne was convinced that I could not be the murderer, his manner became markedly more cordial. Nevertheless we had little conversation during the rest of our journey. My mind was elsewhere and so, no doubt, was his.
For the nightgown had other implications than my innocence. It suggested that the murder had been carefully planned and that the killer had worked out every stage of it with care, including the violence of the attack and his line of retreat.
There was an element of calculation about this, a sense of steady, almost rational malevolence – and also a degree of stealth or caution. That last quality reminded me of those strange and inexplicable events in the Debatable Ground: not just of the two murders at Mount George, but of the hints I had had on our way back that we were not alone.
Was it merely coincidence that Jack Wintour had been killed at the very first moment we had relaxed our guard?
We reached New York in the evening and went straight to Headquarters, where Major Marryot, alerted by a letter from Kendall, was waiting for us in his private room. Several other gentlemen joined us, including General Tryon and the Deputy Adjutant General.
We discussed the murder as if we had barely known the victim in life. Carne pointed out that the purse had been stolen, which at least suggested that robbery might be the motive, though it did not account for the violence of the attack.
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