‘You really think it was the same man who killed Archer?’
‘As I said at Mr Stokes’s, there are good reasons why the killer might have wanted Daniel dead. Will you tell me about Drake’s attack on him? I need to know about the documents Daniel stole from Monday’s warehouse.’
Nathaniel shook his head. ‘Danny didn’t steal nothing. Who told you that? Let me guess. Brabazon.’
‘It isn’t true?’
His tone was bitter. ‘Danny came to me not long before your friend was killed. He said some papers had gone missing from the warehouse and everyone was convinced he’d taken them. He was frightened, worried someone was going to hurt him. He said the real thief put the blame on him to conceal what he’d done. Our good surgeon.’
‘Danny thought Brabazon was the thief?’
‘He said no one else went up to the warehouse office that night, apart from Monday and his wife. It wouldn’t have been either of them, so it must have been Brabazon.’
It didn’t make any sense. ‘But Archer’s inquiry was potentially to Brabazon’s detriment. He could even have hung for his crimes. Why would he have helped? Not for the money. He’s a wealthy man.’
‘I’m only telling you what Danny said. Archer did try to talk to him about those dead slaves, but Danny wouldn’t tell him nothing. He was like that – loyal. Drake took him to an abandoned warehouse and tried to make Danny tell him where the papers were. Danny didn’t know, but Drake didn’t believe him. He put Danny’s leg between two shipping crates, and hit it with a stevedore’s hammer.’
‘Did Danny say where this warehouse was?’
‘Just that it was somewhere near the dock.’
‘You never thought to involve Mr Child?’
‘What good would that do? Drake and Child are family. Ma says since Child’s wife died, it’s as if Drake has some sort of hold on him.’
‘How did Mrs Child die?’
‘Drowned in Deptford Reach. She took their son swimming in the creek, and they got caught in a rogue current.’
‘Child’s son died too?’
‘Yes, sir. He was not yet six years old.’
I felt a rush of pity for the man, and a pang of irrational fear for Gabriel. Now I understood why Child had turned on me so violently at the bull bait. I’d asked him if he ever thought about drowned children.
‘The night before you found Archer dead, Scipio said he saw you in the stable-yard. The obeah doll was left there that same evening. Miss Cinnamon came to tend to Waterman that night, didn’t she?’
‘Yes, sir. She came with Mrs Monday.’
‘Could she have put the doll there?’
‘Perhaps, but it was two men I saw running away the other time.’
‘You’re sure?’
He frowned. ‘Why would I lie?’
‘I only meant you might have been mistaken.’
He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t. Two muscular blacks who looked like footmen. That’s who I saw.’
I thought of the mayor’s footman, Abraham, who had been at the Mondays’ house the day the dead rooster was left on the doorstep. And yet Mrs Monday had told her husband that it couldn’t have been him.
‘I asked around about your ticket, sir, in all the brothels and the gaming dens. No one’s seen anything like it. Are you sure it’s from Deptford?’
‘Not sure, no.’ Perhaps it had nothing to do with this business after all. ‘Thank you for trying.’ I gave him half a crown.
He looked disappointed. Perhaps he’d hoped for more. ‘I’d better get on, sir. The undertaker’s coming for Danny.’
As we parted, I realized that I’d been trying to ignore an uncomfortable truth. Nathaniel’s father had been an officer on The Dark Angel, and had played an active part in the drowning of those slaves. He’d also received a portion of the voyage’s profit. If the fraud could be proven in court, then Amos Grimshaw’s family, already struggling, would have to repay money they’d likely already spent. That would mean bankruptcy. The horror of a debtors’ prison. It gave me pause.
I liked and pitied Nathaniel. I found him an intelligent, sensitive boy. It was hard to imagine him hurting anyone, let alone torturing one of his mother’s customers to death. Yet I had to be dispassionate, had to consider all possibilities, however unlikely. Against every instinct, I must treat Nathaniel as a suspect.
*
The interior of the church was Romish and theatrical, full of dark oak pews and galleries, and Corinthian columns. Everything gleamed, and I recalled Stokes saying the Deptford slave merchants gave a lot of money to the church. Perhaps, given the nature of their trade, they felt St Peter would strike a hard bargain at the gates of heaven.
John Monday was on his knees before the sanctuary. I couldn’t see anyone else around. His eyes were closed and his lips moved in prayer.
‘Do you pray for Daniel Waterman?’ I asked. ‘Or for Mr Archer? Or for three hundred dead Africans? That would take a lot of prayers.’
He opened his eyes, but otherwise didn’t move. ‘I pray for them all.’
‘How does insurance fraud sit with God? Where do the apostles stand on men murdered to line your pockets?’
‘It isn’t true,’ he said, eyes fixed ahead. ‘Evan Vaughan and Brabazon swore to me upon the Bible that it did not happen.’
‘Some part of you must have doubted them. Did you care? Or did you tell yourself that what was done was done? Nothing you did would erase the crime, so better to keep the money and pray?’
The scratch on his cheek stood stark in the light flooding through the Venetian window. A weathered crusader, kneeling before his God.
‘Or perhaps you took a more active part? Drake went too far with Waterman, and you decided you could no longer trust your own men to carry out your orders. Did you take up the sword yourself? Is it murder that sits so heavily upon your soul?’
‘No. Why would I? Even if what you say is true – that a fraud was committed – I had nothing to fear from Archer. The loss of my share of the profit, I could easily sustain. I had no cause to kill him. Nor these others.’
‘Are you sure? I’ve been thinking about those papers Waterman stole. They can’t have contained proof of the fraud, because why would you have kept that? Yet Archer wanted them enough to risk his life for them. Napier Smith mentioned legal documents, contracts. I’m guessing they were your contracts with the syndicate that financed The Dark Angel.’
He made no reaction, but I knew I was right. ‘There aren’t many men in the kingdom who can afford to invest in a slaving voyage. Prominent, wealthy gentlemen with reputations to protect. Drag their names into a courtroom, throw murder into the mix, and you have the makings of a modern scandal. I ask myself how your other investors would welcome that. Not well, I suspect. Atlantic Trading and Partners would do little trading, and have no partners. The consequences for you and your family would be catastrophic.’
All this time, while I’d been talking, he’d knelt there, gazing at the altar. Only when I’d finished, did he turn. His eyes held a strange glint, or perhaps it was just the light. His hand shook, as he touched the scratch on his cheek.
‘You think you understand the consequences of Archer’s visit here? You haven’t the first idea. Now leave me in peace, Captain Corsham. Let me pray.’
CHAPTER FORTY
I spent the rest of the day wandering the streets in and around the Public Dock. First I returned to the hook where Tad’s body had been found, and walked from there to the warehouses where Nathaniel kept watch. It was about two hundred yards, I judged, turning back to gauge the distance. A long way to come for a smoke at that time of night.
Unlike the Private Dock, many of the warehouses down here were in a sorry state of repair. Some looked to have been abandoned altogether. As Child had said, there were many quiet places where Tad might have been tortured and killed. I managed to get inside a couple of them, through holes in the rotting wood or crumbling masonry, but found only flocks of pigeons, empty shi
pping crates, and a musty stench of dust and decay. In one I found a beggarly family sitting around a fire. At least a dozen dirty children blinked at me through the smoke. Their mother stumbled towards me, eyes mazy with drink. ‘Thruppence for a fuck?’ I beat a hasty retreat.
If you were going to hide Captain Vaughan in Deptford, I thought, it would be somewhere like this. When Monday had disappeared after buying opium that night, it had been near here. And Tad had been looking for Vaughan, just as I was. He’d bought opium on his first visit to Deptford, when he’d spoken to Vaughan initially, perhaps to grease the wheels of their interaction. Then on his final visit, he’d bought opium again.
I went through it all chronologically, plotting each step. Tad had come to town that last time to collect the contracts stolen by Daniel Waterman – or Brabazon if you believed Nathaniel Grimshaw. He’d been intending to head directly back to London, taking Cinnamon with him. Yet something had changed his mind, something important enough to risk his life for. Looking around at the mouldering warehouses, the peeling paint, the empty windows, I wondered if he’d found Evan Vaughan.
*
Scipio came to my room just after nine as we’d arranged. ‘Did anyone see you?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
I had bought a bottle of wine, and we drank it sitting on the floor, away from the windows.
‘I didn’t find out much,’ he said. ‘Frank Drake likes to throw his weight around. Most in town give him a wide berth. He likes the usual things: women, beer, dice. Splashes a lot of gold around too. He has a house down here on the Green in Deptford Strand. A nice place for a third officer.’
‘Where’s he getting his money?’
‘No place legal, I would think. I’m told he goes fairly often to the city. He’s fond of the playhouse apparently. Comedies. He was in London the night that second African was killed.’
‘So were the rest of them. Did anyone say anything about a place Drake owns near the river? A shed or a warehouse? Another house?’
‘No. Why do you ask?’
‘The killer would have needed somewhere near the dock for the torture. I took a look down there today – there’s a lot of likely places, but it would take days to check them all. Wherever it is, I think Captain Vaughan might be there too. I think someone concealed him there – or he concealed himself – to keep him away from Archer. John Monday knows where, I think. I saw him buying opium in the Red House, and I don’t think it was for himself. The others might know too. I think Archer found out where Vaughan was, and when he went there, someone killed him. Perhaps none of them know which one of them it was – except the killer. It could even be Vaughan himself.’
‘Do you really think Monday could have killed him? The Bible has firm opinions about murder, as I recall.’
I remembered Monday whip in hand. ‘Perhaps he saw it not as murder, but as just punishment.’
‘And himself as judge and executioner?’ Scipio frowned. ‘The torture I understand, but why use the brand? It led you to the ship and its officers.’
I sighed, for I had pondered this myself. ‘Perhaps we are looking for rationality where there is none. Or rather, the motive may be rational, but the killing he enjoys. He may have wanted to leave his mark. Slaving seems to do dark things to men’s souls.’ I remembered Vaughan’s book, that silent, anguished scream.
He looked interested. ‘You think our killer is mad?’
‘I think he may not be entirely sane. To do what he does, how can he be?’
He was silent a moment. ‘When I first arrived in Dominica, I wanted more than anything to escape my new existence. I saw how men who disobeyed were punished, and those who did not were rewarded. I chose the latter course – a master’s nigger, as Jamaica Mary put it so eloquently last night. When I turned sixteen, I was made an overseer. I wielded the whip, I tied men to posts, I tortured them.’
I studied his tense, lined face. ‘You escaped slavery the only way you could. No one can blame you for that.’
‘Those men I flogged and tortured – they blamed me. But that is beside the point, I mean only to say that an act can be both appalling and rational.’
‘If there is any rationality in branding a man before you cut his throat,’ I said, ‘I struggle to find it. Have you ever read Spinoza?’
‘Let us presume not,’ Scipio said.
‘He believed emotion to be the enemy of the rational mind. Most people rarely pause to consider the effect of their emotions upon their decisions. They think they act rationally, but they do not. At the extremes, emotion may master a man entirely. His reasoning not only becomes irrational, but dangerous. I met men in America like that, scarred from battle on the inside. They’d found a taste for killing, lost touch with that part of themselves that corrects the basest desires. They looked quite sane, but I fear they were perfectly mad.’
Scipio frowned. ‘Can’t emotions lead us to better ways of thinking? What of love, for instance? Or honour?’
‘Spinoza didn’t think so. He never married, never had children. He placed intellectual love before all else.’
‘It seems a bleak existence.’
‘I concur.’
Something about the way I said this seemed to give him pause. ‘You are married, Captain Corsham?’
‘For nearly four years.’
‘Children?’
‘A boy, Gabriel. He’s not quite two.’
A faraway look had entered his eyes. ‘Childhood was my happiest time. I belonged to a tribe of fishermen, deep in the African interior. We liked to dance. I remember my brother spinning and spinning. A lot of laughter.’
‘Do you ever think about going back?’
‘Where would I go? My village was destroyed. My family are dead. I would be as much an oddity in Africa now as I am here.’
‘Your brother died too?’
‘Yes, we were captured together. I was eight and he was nine. We were taken to the slave fort at Whydah, where from the windows of our cell we could see the Guineamen anchored out at sea. Adebayo thought they were giant fish, waiting to swallow us up. He dashed his brains out on the wall, rather than face his terror.’
‘I’m sorry.’
His face creased with pain. ‘It gets harder to remember the time before. Sometimes I wonder if my memories are real, or if I have written them myself. When I have children of my own, perhaps I will remember it better.’
‘A fine ambition.’ I raised my glass. ‘First you need to find the right woman.’
‘So I do.’ He stared into his wine. ‘A hearth, a home. The warmth of a woman. Heaven indeed.’
‘To some heaven. To some hell.’ I was thinking of the Mondays’ marriage. Perhaps my own.
‘Not if it is God’s plan.’ He gave me a bleak, empty smile. ‘As for hell I’ve been there, and it’s called the Middle Passage.’
We had become distracted from what Scipio had learned about Frank Drake, and I was about to turn our conversation back to him, when a frenzied shout rang out below. ‘Fire in the stables! Fire in the yard!’
I ran to the window, and saw the yard was filled with flames and thick black smoke. Zephyrus. In two strides I was at the door.
Downstairs, the place was in chaos. No one wanted to be caught in a tavern blaze. I forced my way through a press of men fighting to get to the door. When I emerged into the yard, I was brought up short by the sight that greeted me there.
A large circle had been made from logs, saturated in whale oil – the air thick with its rancid, fishy odour. The logs blazed merrily away, and the horses, smelling the smoke, were kicking and whinnying in their stalls. Less merry was the thing in the centre of the circle. I shielded my face from the blaze and the smoke, trying to confirm what I knew I’d seen. The severed head of Jago, Nathaniel Grimshaw’s dog.
Nathaniel dashed into the yard and gave a hoarse cry. He ran towards the fire, and fearing he would harm himself, I caught him. He writhed in my arms, and I wrestled against his strength.
His face was yellow in the flames, and he was sobbing. ‘Bloody bastards. I’ll kill them all.’ He noticed Scipio, who had followed me out. ‘Was it you, blackbird? I’ll cut your balls off, shitten fuckster.’
Scipio was staring at the flames in horror. He turned at Nathaniel’s words. ‘What are you talking about? I had nothing to do with this.’
I wanted to speak up for him. He hadn’t left my side in the last half hour, but I couldn’t do so without revealing our association.
‘Liar,’ Nathaniel said. ‘I’ll find you, blackbird. One day when you least expect it. By the end you’ll be praying for the hangman’s rope.’
With a great wrench, he broke free from my grip, sinking to his knees. The groan he gave was one of utmost despair.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
If Deptford was a drunken doxy, ungainly sprawled on the banks of the Thames, then her neighbouring port of Greenwich was a dowager duchess, occupying her place upon the river with stately splendour. Elegant villas in pretty parks dotted the banks around the Naval Hospital, the town laid out in squares with fountains and pagodas.
I had come here inquiring after James Brabazon’s alibi on the night of Tad’s murder. Later I intended to visit the tavern where Jamaica Mary claimed to have seen him arguing with Tad. Nathaniel’s belief that Brabazon had stolen the contracts had lent these tasks a new urgency. I considered Frank Drake and John Monday more likely suspects for Tad’s murder, but I didn’t rule the surgeon out. Behind those smiles, I sensed a man close to the edge of his own denials.
After we’d put the fire out last night, I’d realized that Nathaniel hadn’t stayed to help. I’d gone down to the dock and looked for him at the warehouses, but I didn’t find him. I’d looked for him again at the stable-loft this morning, but my knocks went unanswered. The boy’s unhappiness concerned me – I suppose I saw parallels with my own troubled state after my father’s death.
The other matter preying on my mind was my appointment to meet Cinnamon later tonight. Earlier I had hired a horse from the coaching inn for her to ride. Anxiety made me twitchy. If I was caught, reprisals would surely follow. The law was ambiguous as to Cinnamon’s status as property, but in Deptford I knew they’d call it theft. I doubted I’d be able to count on Peregrine Child’s protection in the face of Stokes’s wrath. Even if we got safely to London, if my part in her escape was discovered, my conduct would invite public scandal. Another unravelling of the fraying ties that bound me to Caro. I tried not to dwell on it.
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