Come to Grief

by Wendy M Wilson

  Mette picked up the baby and the book and gave Frank a look. He escaped to the upper deck to see the captain. He knew when he was in the way.

  The captain was in the wheelhouse deep in discussion with the first officer. He turned when Frank tapped on the door frame and said a brusque, “Yes?”

  “Frank Hardy. I asked Miss Aitken to tell you I wanted to speak with you.”

  “Ah, yes. Sergeant Hardy. What can I do for you? Miss Aitken didn’t say.”

  “The Armed Constabulary sent me to follow three suspected gold robbers…”

  “Again?” The captain frowned. “This ship was robbed last year. Does the Constabulary think someone intends to rob us again? I don’t believe we’re carrying any gold, although we do have a shipment of silver.”

  “This is about the last robbery,” said Frank. “Three crewmen from that trip purchased tickets for this one. We think they may be picking up the ingots somewhere and taking them to Melbourne.”

  Captain Garrard shook his head. “Hard to believe…everyone has been investigated very thoroughly. Do you have the names of the men you’re following?”

  Frank took out a piece of paper from his pocket. “The first is Robert Hinton. He was a steward I believe.”

  “The American,” said the captain. “The Melbourne police had him under surveillance for months. I heard he joined the Otway, on the Western Australia run. He’s on the ship now, you say?”

  “He bought a ticket, or so I was told.”

  “Tall, dark red hair. Yankee way of talking. I saw him in Melbourne a couple of times. He doesn’t know me though. Who else?”

  “William Sampson. He was part of the crew.”

  “Less likely to have done it then. Access to the key was an important feature of the robbery, or so I heard. I don’t know him.” He turned to his first officer who was charting a course at the map table. “How about you, Mr. Maloney? William Sampson sound familiar?”

  The first officer scratched his cheek with his pencil. “I think so. We were on the Hawea together at one point. Average height and heavyset. Dark hair with mutton chops lining his jaw, a surly expression at all times. You know, I believe I saw the two of them boarding together earlier. I didn’t think anything of it. I should have, I suppose.”

  Frank consulted his list. “The third man is William McNab. Another steward. He’s not on board yet; he’s boarding in Port Chalmers.”

  The captain and the first officer glanced at each other. “Never heard of him,” said the first officer.

  “I’ll ask Miss Aitken to point him out to you after he boards,” said the captain. “But I don’t recognize the name. Are you sure he was one of the crew?”

  “His name is on my list,” said Frank. “What was that you said about access to keys?”

  “The company had a special strongroom built for gold, in the stern of the ship under the saloon. Only two people had a key. Officials of the Bank of New Zealand brought the gold on board in Port Chalmers; eleven boxes valued at five thousand pounds each. When the ship reached Queen’s Wharf in Melbourne and officials came on board to carry it off, there were only ten. One had been stolen.”

  “Were either of the two men with keys considered suspects?”

  “One of them was Captain Muir. That was why he lost his job — and his reputation. He runs a hotel in Melbourne now. I’ve spoken to him. He seems like a decent chap. I believe he was cleared. But after the gold went missing, police discovered that a year earlier one of the keys to the strongroom had disappeared from the bar room where it was generally left. Something should have been done at the time, of course, but it wasn’t. And the lock wasn’t changed, either. The police believe the robber was waiting for the right opportunity. With that many boxes it was hard to tell at a glance that one was missing. And the ship doesn’t often carry that much gold. A steward would be more likely to hear there was a large amount of gold on that trip than a crew member.”

  “Would you like to see the bullion room, Sergeant?” asked the first officer. “Give you a feel for the situation? There’s no gold there at the moment, just some silver bullion.”

  Frank followed the first officer down into the bowels of the ship and through the crew’s quarters. As they passed the ladder to steerage he saw two men huddled by the emergency life jackets: one was tall with dark red hair that ran down the side of his face into a pair of bushy whiskers, the other was short, stocky, and dark-haired. The first officer caught his eye and gestured slightly with his head. Frank nodded at the men and said, “Good evening,” which he would have done even if they weren’t suspects in a gold robbery. He felt them watching him as he continued down the passageway to the bullion room. Were they planning to rob the ship again? He’d have to keep an eye on the strongroom, just in case. No use accepting the job of watching two suspects and letting them rob the ship again. No one was going to give him a reward if that happened.

  The first officer showed him the door to the bullion room. He tried the handle and attempted to push the door open with his shoulder. The door didn’t budge. It was a sturdy door made of heart of kauri, fortified with iron bars. No one could get into this room without a key.

  The first officer slipped the key from his pocket and unlocked the door, which opened to a small dark room with a metal locker on one side.

  “Was the gold in the locker?” Frank asked.

  “On any other trip it would have been, but because there were so many boxes, they piled them in the corner. The captain and the first officer checked it every hour, but eleven boxes suddenly reduced to ten - that would have been hard to see. I heard they took one from the back of the pile so it was less apparent.”

  He returned to the cabin to find Mette, her hair brushed and braided, ready to go to the saloon for dinner. Sarah Jane was asleep on the lower bunk, propped in place by a pillow and Mette’s Gladstone bag.

  Mette touched Sarah Jane’s head gently. “She’ll sleep for the next four hours. We can leave her for an hour. I’d like a tour of the ship, and then I’d like to have tea.”

  Climbing the ladder to the upper deck, he heard someone come up from steerage and fall in behind him on the ladder. He turned to greet the person: Robert Hinton, the red-haired American, stared back at him, a faint sneer on his face. He turned back and continued to the saloon. Something in the way Hinton had sneered at him was worrying. Did he suspect something? Had someone recognized him and talked to Hinton? Or worse, had someone already warned Hinton that an investigator was on the ship?

  4

  Mette in Dunedin

  After a restless night fighting off queasiness from the movement of the ship, and a difficult day pacing the deck with a fretful baby, Mette was feeling out of sorts when they docked at Port Chalmers at four o’clock in the afternoon. The view that met them was not encouraging. The day was chilly, and a sharp wind whipped across the railway tracks leading out to the wharf. Old newspapers and dead leaves were piled in front of the transit shed where an elderly man huddled by the door, floppy hat resting almost on his shoulders, hugging his coat around knees to keep himself warm.

  They had managed to spend some time together, but not long enough to satisfy either of them. After wedging the sleeping Sarah Jane in the top bunk with pillows and coats, they squeezed into the lower bunk, laughing quietly as they manoeuvred awkwardly in the short, narrow bed. But before they could find a comfortable position, the baby heard her parents beneath her and began to whimper. Frank rolled on his side, propped himself up on one elbow, and banged his head against the ladder to the upper bunk.

  “Damn.”

  Mette shushed him as he rubbed the back of his head, but too late. The whimpers turned to sobs.

  She climbed over him and out of the bunk. She knew he would be disappointed; they hadn’t been together for over a week, and the baby wasn’t helping. But she was unable to leave Sarah Jane by herself, crying.

  Frank rolled out of the bed, shook his head regretfully as he accepted the inevitable, and
climbed into the upper bunk. “I hope the bed in the hotel in the Bluff is more comfortable than this. I can barely fit up here.”

  She snuggled with Sarah Jane, talking softly to lull her to sleep. Finally, the baby drifted off, her thumb slowly slipping from her mouth. Mette’s arm was trapped in an awkward position and went to sleep. She was unable to move and wished she was rocking from side to side and not end to end. She had forgotten how much that movement had upset her stomach on the ship from Copenhagen to New Zealand. In the upper bunk, Frank’s snores echoed around the cabin. In spite of his complaints, he was able to sleep anywhere. She envied him. Since Sarah Jane’s birth she had not had one single full night’s sleep.

  Sarah Jane woke early and Mette took her up to the fore deck to watch as the ship passed through the heads and entered Otago Harbour, which was bathed in a fine mist. The purser and his wife were enjoying the sight as well, discussing the way the light reflected off the water, and how they planned to paint the scene when they anchored in Bluff Harbour. She listened to them talk, and thought about the book she had translated for Mrs. Halcombe. She hoped Professor Mann’s book would be half as interesting.

  She could see the lights of Port Chalmers in the distance and was entranced by the beauty of the morning. But she was forced to return to her cabin when the mist turned to rain and the fore deck became too slippery to walk on carrying a baby. By then, the purser and his wife had already gone below. Mr. Jones had smiled at her as he left. “No rest for the wicked.”

  “He has to serve second breakfast this morning,” his wife had explained to Mette. “Perhaps we’ll see you and your daughter in the dining room.”

  With the ship finally tied snuggly against the wharf, they trudged down the gangplank, stepping aside briefly to let a young woman walk by on her way up. The woman held a baby on her right hip, slumped forward like a bag of corn; she glanced at Mette and Sarah Jane, not responding to Mette’s friendly smile. As she passed them, she hoisted the baby from one hip to the other, causing it to whimper, and tucked her own straw-coloured hair behind her ear, her bracelet slapping against the baby’s head. Mette longed to take the poor baby and put her against her mother’s shoulder. If she carried Sarah Jane that way, her baby would soon make her displeasure clear.

  A man of about thirty with similar light-coloured hair followed several feet behind the young woman, not talking to her and not helping her. He had the look of a soldier: upright, squared shoulders, striding up the gangplank. The pair were alike enough to be brother and sister and must be travelling together. Mette wondered where they might be going, the three of them; she was interested in people’s stories. Why was the young woman with straw-coloured hair with her brother, if that’s what he was? Where was the baby’s father? And why wasn’t her brother helping her to board?

  Frank said a curt, “Good afternoon,” to the couple as each one squeezed by him on the narrow gangplank. The woman ignored him, but the man nodded to him and raised his hand in a half-salute, as if he recognized Frank as an ex-soldier.

  As they continued down the gangplank, Frank said to Mette, “I’m happy that you’re not the only woman travelling with a baby.” He looked relieved. She could tell that having the baby on the trip was weighing on him. She knew him well and was sure he was sorry he had encouraged her to go off on her own with Sarah Jane. Strangely, the companionship of Sarah Jane was a comfort to her. It was only the second time she’d been anywhere by herself, and she was not sure how well she would manage. Sarah Jane needed frequent feeding and changing, but she also provided smiling approval, especially when she was being fed; during those times, she stared at Mette as if the feeding nourished her both physically and emotionally. It was the most wonderful emotion Mette had felt since the day she met Frank, and it gave her courage.

  She forced herself to seem cheerful as he escorted her to the train, Sarah Jane once more strapped to her back, but grizzling. Her mood almost always mirrored Mette’s.

  “I can’t wait to see Dunedin. Professor Mann said it’s a beautiful town.”

  “Don’t see too much of it,” he said, with an unconvincing casualness. “Find yourself a decent boarding house and stay in your room for the night. It’s cold out.”

  He helped her on to the Dunedin train, which was sitting at the station waiting for passengers from the Tararua, and then kissed her goodbye, hugged Sarah Jane, and left in the direction of the ship.

  As soon as he was out of sight, Sarah Jane’s grizzle changed to a wail. Mette took the baby from her back and walked up and down the aisle rubbing her back, but nothing seemed to help.

  A man getting on the train glared at her as he shoved his bag — a brown leather Gladstone bag identical to the one she carried — onto the rack above his seat. “Can’t you keep that blasted baby quiet?”

  Mette stuck her little finger in Sarah Jane’s mouth. “She’s just a baby,” she said. “She’s had a hard night on the ship and she’s sleepy and hungry.”

  “Aren’t we all bloody sleepy and hungry?” he said. “You don’t see me crying about it.”

  She walked away from him and stared out at the platform. Bugger him. How dare he criticize her beautiful little girl. She thought she’d seen him on the ship somewhere — she recognized that ugly red hair and long, narrow face framed with red whiskers. By the way he had said can’t - more like cant - she thought he might be an American or a Canadian. Not that she had anything against Americans or Canadians, but she disliked the idea of someone from another country criticizing her little New Zealander. The cheek of him!

  The trip into Dunedin was rapid. The train raced along billowing dark clouds of smoke, the wheels making a hypnotic clickety clack sound. Mette had always been nervous about trains, but she felt safe on this one. Sarah Jane fell asleep in her arms, and when the time came to leave the train, she squatted down and lifted her bags, holding the baby in place against her chest. A conductor was waiting on the platform and took her bags from her and held her elbow as she negotiated the steep steps without being able to see them.

  “Thank you very much. Oh, what are you…?”

  The red-haired American had appeared from nowhere and picked up one of her bags.

  “That’s my bag,” she said. It was the brown leather Gladstone bag she had borrowed from Frank, because it was large enough for a manuscript.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s mine. It’s one I’ve had for years and I recognize it. It isn’t a bag that a lady would carry, either.” He shrugged and walked away. The conductor ran after him and grabbed him by the shoulder. “The lady handed it to me from the carriage. I saw her coming along the aisle with it. Where was yours?” He took hold of the handle and pulled, but the American resisted.

  “She was sitting near me. She got confused by that bloody baby of hers. Mine was above my seat. I hopped out to have a smoke and it was gone when I came back.”

  The conductor gestured to the back of the train. “We took off some bags that didn’t seem to have owners. They’re down there. Check before you try to take this lady’s bag from her.” He gained control of the bag and put it by his feet. “I’ll keep it here until you come back.”

  The American glared at Mette. “Don’t leave with that bag.” he said. “Or there’ll be hell to pay.” He strode off to the rear of the train. They saw him pick a bag from a pile and leave without saying anything to them or offering an apology.

  “A real gentleman,” said the conductor. “He must have something important in his bag. Do you need help? I can get you a porter for sixpence.”

  She nodded. She could afford sixpence, just this once.

  He woke the old man sleeping by the transit shed door and thrust Mette’s bags at him.

  “This is old Jack. Get up Jack. The lady needs a hand with her bags.” The old man tottered to his feet, rubbing his eyes. He was not what Mette had expected when she heard the word porter, but he would have to do.

  “Give him his sixpence when he gets you to where you�
�re going,” the conductor advised. “Where is that, anyway?”

  “I’m not sure…I need to find a hotel or rooming house. Something inexpensive but nice.”

  “Moray Place,” he said. “That’s the street with the most reasonably priced rooming houses. It’s an uphill walk so you’ll be glad of the help. Jack, take this lady to Mrs. Bentley’s on Moray Place.” He took out his watch. “Dinner is in thirty minutes, so be quick. You’ll like Mrs. Bentley. She cooks a nice joint with lots of roasted potatoes and carrots. And the beds are soft. She’ll be happy to see a woman with a baby. Loves babies, she does.”

  Her mouth watering in anticipation, Mette followed Jack through a maze of streets and up a long stretch of hill. They circled a stone church sitting on a grassy knoll, with a huge spire that reacher towards heaven. She took note of it, thinking it would help her find her way back to the train station tomorrow. The train to Bluff left at ten the next day, and she had already purchased her ticket. She needed to pick up the manuscript before she caught the train as well.

  They arrived in front of a three storey house with a cheerful red door and a pot of blue cornflowers on the step. She gave Jack his sixpence and knocked on the door. As she waited for someone to answer, her mood was ruined when she glimpsed the red-haired American entering a house a few doors down. He was carrying his bag — the one like hers — but did not see her.