Dark Waters (38 page)

‘Yes, but someone did poison Allcroft. We cannot get away from that.'

‘Not with the motive of punishing him, merely of removing him. Did Maggie have any reason to wish for Allcroft's silent removal? I doubt it. We have not uncovered any connection between them, except that she brought him his meals.'

As ever, Fidelis's reasoning looked strong.

‘In my heart, I agree with you. Talking to her I have felt her innocence, Luke. My Elizabeth is less sure. Her instinct finds something secretive about Maggie.'

Fidelis was smiling. We rode side by side and he punched me lightly on the upper arm.

‘You know what I think of instinct, Titus. We should be suspicious of it. Animals have it so that they will perform the tasks of life without hesitation or question. People are well advised to steer clear of instinct, I think. If that rat had had the power of reason she would have looked into the question of why I was giving her this strange-tasting food, and left it alone. Instead she ate it by instinct and died.'

I refrained from asking what impulsion it was, if not instinct, that had made Fidelis fall for the charms of Lysistrata Plumb.

Instead I warned, ‘Don't dare put in question my wife's instincts, Luke.'

Ten minutes later we crossed the stone bridge at Bamber and, taking the left fork, followed the course of the river towards Hoghton. Shortly afterwards the windmill appeared, still distant enough to look like the silhouette of a stout man with arms outstretched, standing proudly alone between road and river. By the time we had turned down a track of about 100 yards to reach him, this quixotic giant had dissolved. Now we saw only a soaring brick tower, tapering upwards towards a dome-like roof of heavily tousled thatch. Indeed, the mill's entire fabric was badly neglected. Grass, nettle and willowherb sprouted from places up and down its wall where the mortar had fallen out, while its sail frames displayed only a few tatters of remnant sailcloth. Birds flitted in and out of the thatched eaves at the very top, above the axle shaft, but of other life there was no sign.

We dismounted beside a stout arched door that was firmly shut and locked. Leading our horses around, Fidelis going one way and I the other, we met on the other side having found no sign of humanity. Equally spaced on the circumference of the wall there were three windows about 5 feet up and, much higher, four more lights. They were all blinded by shutters. Turning our backs to the windmill on that far side we saw that the river flowed past less than 30 yards away.

Fidelis's hand came down on my shoulder.

‘Wait here, Titus. I see the way in.'

Handing me his hat he remounted his horse and placed it under the bottom edge of the downward-pointing mill sail. I would like to say he hauled himself effortlessly onto the frame, but in fact it was only with extreme effort and at the third attempt that, having stood up on his saddle, he heaved high enough to hook a leg around the lowest bar. After that it was easier. He was quickly on the wooden frame itself, on its inside, and going step by step upwards until he reached the central boss and the axle. This he stepped onto and across, and succeeded in squeezing though a ragged aperture next to the axle hole, where some bricks had fallen away. He was dangerously high on the wall but now, at least, inside the mill.

I waited. After a minute I tethered the horses to a bush and called out to him. There was no reply. Then I heard his voice and walked around the mill until I saw him leaning out from an aperture larger than the windows, which was positioned under a hoisting beam.

‘Hello, Titus,' he called, with a wave and a grin.

Then he disappeared again.

Another minute passed, and then another. I could hear thumps and other sounds inside, but could not imagine what they meant. Had Luke crashed through a rotten ladder, or demolished a tottering gallery? I was just wondering what I should do if he broke his leg when the shutters over the ground-floor window nearest me, at the height of my head, creaked and opened. Luke Fidelis's face looked cheerfully out.

‘Jump onto the sill and come in. It's rather dark in here but, with this open, we shall see well enough.'

I hesitated. Strictly, to avoid trespassing, I should have a warrant. But armed with my summons, I thought, and if we were careful and took nothing away, I would be able to justify this as coronor's business. So, from the back of my horse, I got myself onto the sill and was soon over the window ledge and inside.

The circular interior was filled with blocks of shadow, pierced here and there with shafts of light from above. Looking up I saw that Fidelis had descended via a succession of narrow galleries, attached to the walls and connected by ladders. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw that, once, a wooden floor had stretched across the space at 20 feet above our heads, but woodworm or rot had brought most of it down, and we could see right up past the axle and gearing as far as the roof. Light rayed in from wide air holes placed between the top parapet and the roof itself. Pigeons burbled melodiously. A rodent was scuttling around somewhere.

‘It's been a few years, I'd say, since they reduced corn to dust in this place,' said Luke.

At ground level, the original pulverizing gear had been cleared. The grinding stones were disconnected and put aside, two gigantic wheels of granite leaning aslant against the mill wall. The rest of the machinery had been taken entirely away and the central area was now occupied by three large heaps of crates, packages and bulging sacks, each covered like hayricks by sheets of protective sailcloth.

‘It looks as if it's being used for a warehouse,' I said.

‘Of what, I wonder. Let's take a look.'

Fidelis untied the ropes tethering one of the canvases and pulled it off. Then he seized a box from somewhere in the middle of the pile, pulling it out. The extracted box had been a load-bearing element of the structure, for there now followed a sound midway been a creak and a wheeze, and the whole pile tottered and collapsed in a choking plume of dust. Fidelis and I barely had time to jump out of the way.

‘No matter,' I said, fired now with eagerness to know what was in these bags and boxes. ‘Such a thing could have happened naturally. What's in there?'

Fidelis prised open the lid of the box he held.

‘Combs,' he said. ‘Three score of them, at least.'

I was loosening the string around the necks of two linen sacks.

‘I have ribbons in this one and … lace in this,' I said. ‘What's in that other?'

‘Buttons. And these long rolls must be bolts of cloth.'

Searching through the fallen merchandise we found containers, some intact, other spilled open, containing fans, buckles, reels of cotton, needles, and balls of knitting wool.

‘Well, it's obvious what kind of warehouse it is. This is an Aladdin's cave of haberdashery. It's—'

I interrupted myself and looked at him, and he at me, in a simultaneous moment of understanding.

‘Michael Drake!' he said in a low voice. ‘This is the haberdasher's warehouse.'

‘By God,' I said. ‘So what was Hamilton Peters doing here when we saw him?'

We surveyed the avalanche of female accoutrements that lay before us.

‘I think we had better go back to town, and ask Mr Drake.'

I crouched and conscientiously began restoring some of the spilled goods to their boxes while Fidelis walked around the back of one of the two intact piles. I heard him moving about, the sound of a pair of shutters opening, and then his voice, again rather low.

‘Titus. Come over here.'

He was standing before the window on the south side, whose shutters he had opened. Under it was a wide table covered in dark green baize – a cloth-cutting table, apparently, for there was a steel rule on it and a pair of shears, as well as an oil lamp. Fidelis had opened his pocketbook upon the table, and was picking something up from beside it between his finger and thumb.

‘I think we have stumbled on the place where poor Wilson died,' he said solemnly.

He showed me what he had picked up. It was a silver thread which he had placed in his pocketbook beside the thread we had recovered from Wilson's mouth earlier that morning. They were exactly alike. Then his fingers pointed to the baize. It displayed a pattern of dark stains, dried and encrusted.

‘That will be his blood. It scattered like this when his head hit the tabletop.'

‘How do you know his head hit the tabletop?'

‘Because I know what happened,' said Fidelis. ‘Wilson was standing facing this table, perhaps looking out of the window. His murderer came up behind and struck him right handed with the bludgeon, or whatever it was, and he pitched forward, face down on the table. He then probably slid back towards the floor arse first as his legs gave way. His face was still squarely down against the cloth and, as he slid, his mouth was pulled open and the bit of thread probably snagged between his teeth.'

I looked again at the surface of the cutting table. There were several curly fragments of the same thread on it, glittering like stars as the light fell on them.

I said, ‘It seems we have suspected Peters's waistcoat in vain.'

‘Yes, though it was a damn good idea, while it endured.'

‘The murderer may yet have been Peters,' I pointed out. ‘We saw him here, after all.'

Fidelis went down on one knee to inspect the floor beneath the table.

‘There must have been much more blood down here but, as far as I can tell, it has been cleaned away. It would be good to light that lamp and see better.'

I crouched down and could see no trace of any stain on the floor.

‘The murderer, whoever he was, probably waited until dark,' Fidelis went on, who had now crawled right under the table, ‘then he carried Wilson down to the river and pitched him in. What's this?'

I caught the whites of his hands reaching into the shadow and drawing something out. It was a long roll of blanket. We both stood up and he laid the roll on the table.

‘It was tucked in by the wall. Difficult to see.'

‘It's only a roll of blanket. Shouldn't we be on our way?'

‘No, wait, there's a sausage in this roll.'

Carefully he unrolled the bundle. It was not a sausage. It was a full-length flintlock hunting gun.

Chapter Twenty-six

T
HE SKY WAS
still pale, though the earth was shadowed, as we rode back into town. The last of the votes had now been cast and the results of the election were to be announced on the steps of the Moot Hall the next day at noon. But the election-time mob was still out on the street, unruly and drunken, roaming around singing and squaring up here and there for sudden bouts of fist fighting. As the evening fell they began to light torches and braziers, and to establish fixed camps, four or five in Market Place, and others at the town bars, at the top of Stoney Gate, on the patch of common that surrounded the theatre and at other strategic places. The more prudent townspeople stayed within doors.

Riding in through the Church Gate bar past one such camp, I remembered that I myself had been due to appear at the Moot Hall at four that afternoon to cast my votes. With so much to think about, I had utterly forgotten to do it, but I didn't mind very much. As a fellow lawyer, whose legal knowledge I respected, Nicholas Fazackerly would have had my vote, but the other three men in the ballot weighed no heavier than feathers in my scale of things, and would have been difficult to choose between.

Eager to learn if Elizabeth had been successful in finding Barty, I brought Fidelis first to my house. My wife was sitting by the fire calmly stitching, while on a stool in the corner sat the chastened child.

‘As you see,' she said, ‘I have brought the boy back.'

‘Where did you find him?'

‘I asked around the market until I had an idea of the various places he sleeps at night, his refuges if you like. He has a big brother, a labourer when he can get work, that lives off Back Weind, but he only lets the boy stay odd nights. I went directly there but drew no luck, though his brother did tell me the secret of Barty's most favourite place to sleep – the hayloft at Old Shambles.'

She meant the loft above the livery stables, the same where my own saddle horses were cared for.

‘So there I went next,' she continued, ‘and there I happened to find him amongst the straw, didn't I, Barty?'

Barty shifted nervously on his stool, but said nothing.

‘Well, young Barty,' I said, approaching the boy, and going down on my haunches to be at the same level. ‘Do you know where Maggie is now?'

He shook his head, full of woe. I went on.

‘You were just going to tell me something about her when we were interrupted. The name of the man she went to, after you got her out of the constable's house. But instead you ran off. Why didn't you wait to tell me?'

‘To give them time to get away, see?' Barty's voice was hoarse and low, in the way of all children's who are close to crying. ‘They're looking all over for her now, Mr Cragg. Constable's right angry and he's got deputies out.'

‘I know. I've seen them.'

‘He's sworn he'll break her head for her when he brings her in.'

‘Has he? That's the sort of fat talk you get from Constable Mallender. He'd be advised not to do any such thing. But, in case he does, would it not be better if we found Maggie first, and brought her safely back?'

Barty's head was sunk down, his chin on his chest. His hands clasped and unclasped as he mumbled something inaudible.

‘What was that, Barty? Speak up.'

Barty lifted his head.

‘Aye, if you could, if she's not got away clean.'

‘Well then, let's do it. Who is this man of hers? What's his name?'

Barty sniffed, and the action seemed to help him make up his mind, for he straightened his back and spoke in a clear voice for the first time.