Dark Waters (40 page)

I looked down the length of the street, sloping away from us towards the town bar and then on to our small tidal port beyond. I could hear a band playing, and whoops and shouts. Great flaming torches, flaring in the darkness, were visible at the far end of Fisher Gate. I saw one particular torch go high into the air, and then come spiralling down into the hands of its bearer, to the hoots and applause of the crowd. This was the head of the procession.

‘Come on,' shouted Fidelis, ‘we are not too late. We must get to the Bryce house before they do.'

But our progress was being impeded by the people milling around in the street and a moment later I had bumped and rebounded off one of them. I realized it was Adam Lorris.

‘Eh, Mr Cragg,' he said, failing to read the signs of my haste. ‘It's ready! Your Aesop. It's done. Shall I—?'

‘Not now, Adam,' I said. ‘I am in something of a hurry.'

I pushed on but then, quite involuntarily and without a spark of warning, the words of Elizabeth about Maggie – ‘If she runs, it will condemn her' – and the fable Lorris and I had discussed on the morning they found Antony Egan in the river – the one called
The Scarecrows and the Foxes
– fused together in my head and exploded. By virtue of the association of ideas, or the concatenation of memory and experience, I suddenly saw their true significance for the present moment. Is
that
it? I thought. Is
that
what she's doing?

Immediately the tension began to leave me, the coil to unwind, the balloon to go flat. I stopped pushing forward and stood still in the midst of the turmoil, lucidly calm.
The Scarecrows and the Foxes.
Of course: how obvious.

I no longer faced down the street towards the procession but revolved on my heel to survey the view back the way we had come. Fidelis, who had gone ahead of me, now returned and grabbed my arm, tugging it.

‘Titus! What are you doing? We have no time to lose. Come along!'

I put a restraining hand on his arm. All the urgency and hurry had left me.

‘No, Luke,' I said. ‘If we go anywhere, we should go back – but I doubt that is necessary either.'

‘What, Titus? I don't understand.'

I looked at him, rather enjoying the moment.

‘The game is played,' I said. ‘The cards are back in the pack. The players have gone their ways.'

‘Have you taken leave of your senses?'

‘No, I have come to them. Light has suddenly dawned. There is no attack on the mayor. There is no murderous Whig plot, and in fact there never was. It is a pack of lies, Luke. We have been spun a yarn, and it is all a cock and a bull – or should I say a couple of scarecrows and a female fox.'

Chapter Twenty-seven

I
T WOULD BE
no great exaggeration to say that Luke Fidelis took this rather like a man interrupted in coitus. He was flushed in the face, blowing hard: I had never seen him so fired up and passionate of purpose at one moment, and so frustrated at the next.

He shook loose from my hand and made a step away from me.

‘You
have
taken leave of your senses. I'm going on. The risk is too great.'

I found myself smiling.

‘Give it up. There is no risk at all. It is all quite clear to me. None whatsoever.'

The fight went out of Fidelis at last. To go bursting alone into a house such as Mrs Bryce's – if, indeed, he got in at all – and to try to apprehend desperate men would be a very different matter from going in with one to back him up.

‘Very well, Titus,' he said, brandishing his index finger in my face. ‘But you had better have very good reasons for this.'

We moved down the street, more slowly now, until we stood with crowds of other spectators on the opposite side of the street from Mrs Bryce's house. This address was still subject to the attentions of a group of Tory zealots, shouting slogans against Hoghton, Reynolds and Walpole, and constantly raising three cheers for the ‘martyr' John Allcroft.

‘They are sadly deluded,' I said with seraphic confidence. ‘He was no martyr at all.'

The torch throwers and the band approached with the coach immediately behind. Some in the crowd threw streamers of paper, which occasionally caught fire from a torch and caused screams of delight as they flared and died, like parodic streaks of lightning. As the mayoral coach came up, the band launched into the tune of the moment, ‘Rule Britannia!'. I looked up at the two windows of Mrs Bryce's music room. On the right I saw a downcast-looking Reynolds with Mrs Bryce herself. She was at one moment laughing and cheering, because she could not help it, and at the next patting Reynolds on the shoulder, and running the backs of her fingers fondly across his cheek. On the left stood Denis Destercore, scowling down at the revellers. Though the results had not yet been announced, few held out any hope for the Whigs.

The mayor's coach drew level with the house. I was aware of Fidelis craning his neck by my side, but I felt quite complacent as the mayor rumbled safely on, past Miss Colley's and past Wilkinson's pie shop, and up the gently sloping street without harm or incident.

Fidelis turned to me and gripped my upper arm a fraction tightly. ‘How could you be so sure?' he demanded.

‘I had sensed something at Drake's shop, something not right. It was dark and impossible to be certain, and it wasn't until after we'd left that I knew what it was.'

‘And?'

‘That shop was a shell. There was no stock. A haberdasher's should be full of cloth, bolts of it, and boxes of ribbons and trinkets and suchlike lining the walls. That room where we sat had nothing in it that absorbed sound. It was hollow, empty. The stock was gone and it resounded.'

Fidelis thought for a moment. He was recalling the interior scene, when we were listening to Maggie's sad tale.

‘Yes, you are perfectly right. I did not notice but, now you mention it, the place felt as if it had been hollowed out.'

‘And I think we know where the goods that used to fill it are to be found now.'

‘Yes. Those boxes and packages heaped up without any system.'

‘I would say they were the whole contents of the shop brought higgledy-piggledy in three cartloads and dumped in a hurry.'

‘But why? That's the question we must address now. Drake could tell us, but where is he?'

‘He's running,' I said simply. ‘Running, while Maggie lurks in the covert.'

‘In the
covert?
What in heaven's name are you babbling about?'

I had not seen my friend at such a loss for a long time. For once he had been distracted from dispassionate observation – something with which the heart-melting prettiness of Maggie Satterthwaite had much to do – and now he was groping for a logical solution to a problem created by forces that were not logical.

‘I read it in a story when I was a child. A fable. Come along. I know where we can get more information.'

‘What about Maggie?'

‘I think she will stop where she is but if not, there is no great danger in it.'

I led the way back to the Old Shambles, which we cut down before crossing to the north side of Market Place.

‘So, where
are
we going?'

Fidelis was growing a little tetchy, his brain still unable to establish the connections that would explain my actions, or rather my failure to act. I admit I was rather enjoying his bemusement.

‘Molyneux Square. I intend to look into Mr Drake's finances. And to do that we must find his man of business.'

Preston's three money-lenders – or money-scriveners as we called them – all lived on the substantial square built during the last century for the dwellings of Preston's richer merchants and professional men. The first address we tried was Frederick Taylor's, but he was not at home. The second was that of John Furbelow, where the door was opened by the old father, Ezekial, in his nightshirt and cap and with candle in hand.

Ezekial had himself been a scrivener in his day but, he told us curtly, ‘I have never to my knowledge had any dealings with a haberdasher, sir. Goodnight to you.'

Finally we came to the house of Alphonsus Parr, a fellow bibliophile and genial friend of mine.

‘Yes, Titus,' he said in reply to my enquiry, ‘Mr Drake does indeed do business with us – or rather he did. Come into the library, both of you, and take some wine and a pipe.'

Parr's collection of books was twice the size of mine, and included many volumes that I would not have refused the gift of. But he collected more for show than I did and, settling into one of his comfortable chairs and looking around at the long, expensive sets of Milton, Shakespeare and Bishop Atterbury in folio, with their tooled bindings, I wondered how much he read them.

‘What is it about Mr Drake that you would like to know?' Parr asked me.

‘About his accounts, his financial affairs – anything you can tell us.'

Parr cleared his throat.

‘Well, normally, that would be bound under the seal of discretion, as you ought to be glad to hear, Cragg. We professional men are nothing if not discreet.'

There was caution in Parr's voice. The scrivener's reticence is always a little different, I find, from that of the attorney or, for that matter, the doctor. When called upon to be discreet Fidelis and I can hide behind professional mysteries. But, since everybody believes they know money, the scrivener finds it harder to erect barriers of mystique between himself and the enquirer. He is forced back on the weaker notions of confidence and trust.

‘However,' he went on, ‘I believe I no longer owe a duty of discretion to Mr Drake comparable to what I would extend to you.'

He drew on his pipe thoughtfully.

‘The fact is that Drake has been a persistent defaulter for years. He owes money everywhere. He raises mortgages and then does not honour the repayments; he borrows privately and does not pay back; he orders stock that he does not pay for.'

‘Is he insolvent?'

Parr held up his hand, with finger and thumb a quarter of an inch apart.

‘If you ask me, he is that close to imprisonment, Cragg.'

*   *   *

We returned once again to the town's centre where, under the portico of the Moot Hall, its main door now locked, Oswald Mallender had set out a table and an oil lamp, and was sitting with pen in hand puzzling over a large sheet of paper. I went to speak to him.

‘Mr Mallender,' I said. ‘Are you still commander-in-chief of the search for the absconded prisoner?'

He fixed me with his small eyes, upholstered with fat.

‘Yes, I am still engaged in that business. We have looked all over, sir, and found not a hair of her head.'

He tapped the paper.

‘I have listed here all the places my men have searched. I have now sent them out again and await their return. But it is my belief she quit the town as soon as she left my custody.'

‘Really? Then she must have returned very promptly, for I have seen her in the past hour. I had thought you must have discovered her by now.'

Mallender looked up at me with increased suspicion.

‘You saw her and did not report the matter?'

‘I am reporting it now. I strongly recommend you try Mr Drake's shop in Stoney Gate. If you go there straight, I believe you'll find she is waiting there, ready for you to take her.'

We walked on, leaving the constable open mouthed.

‘Is it not a bit hard, Titus, turning the poor girl in like that? You were previously convinced of her innocence.'

‘If that is hard, she's harder, Luke. Parr's information has capped it for me. She's not a poor girl, she's a killer, I'm sure of it now. I also hope that having her publicly arrested once more will flush out her accomplice.'

‘I would not think Drake – a debtor, dodging prison – will show himself.'

‘Maybe not. But there is also her admitted lover, Hamilton Peters. That kiss Barty saw was not a trivial thing. What did he say? “Like biting each other.” That's passion, is that.'

‘Come into the Turk's Head and we'll have a bottle,' urged Fidelis. ‘I want to talk this out.'

But I was too tired. It had been an extraordinary day, and a long one.

‘No, Luke, go to bed. That's what I'm doing. We shall meet in the morning and when you have slept on it, you'll have the answer for yourself.'

‘That is my worry, Titus – that I won't sleep on it. That you are condemning me to a sleepless night while I hunt for the truth.'

‘Your brain's too quick for that, Luke. Just loose it and it will run down the hare.'

*   *   *

I woke at the late hour of eight o'clock. As soon as I'd returned the night before Elizabeth had given me soup and a few cuts of ham, and warmed a cup of punch for me, before sending me straight to bed to cure my yawns. It had been a deep and dreamless sleep and I rose feeling as sharp and shiny as a needle. The day, bright and clear, matched my mood.

Straight after breakfast I was in the office, talking to Furzey. He told me how he had lodged Wilson's body in the vestry, and how Churchwarden Fleetwood had wailed despairingly at the prospect of the parish giving hospitality to yet another dead guest. We discussed inquest arrangements, and I told him we could safely have the hearings on Monday, using the same panel of townsmen for both. I told him I would have to think about whom we should call: with criminal charges impending, these inquests might by Monday be reduced to formalities.

‘Did you find the note I left about the letter to the jurors who sat on Allcroft?' I asked.

‘Aye, the letters went out by six.'

‘Good. I ask only because you were late back, or so I thought.'

‘Not late. Voting. Not that it did any good. It seems we took a beating.'

‘Yes, that is what everybody is saying.'