Dark Waters (42 page)

Fidelis puffed deeply on his pipe.

‘A smokescreen,' he said, laying a fairly heavy one himself. ‘The thicker they could make it, the more chance of obscuring the real evil underneath. But there is little doubt of two things – that Drake killed Satterthwaite in Fisher Gate and that he did so with Jotham's assistance, since the shot must have been from the attic window above the pie shop.'

I nodded.

‘Yes, he was expert with a hunting gun, so I believe, and rabbits are more difficult to shoot than people. I don't believe, however, that he would have contemplated trying the shot from Mrs Bryce's house. Too many people might have seen him – the servants, for instance, and there are other residents.'

‘Agreed. But who do you say killed Wilson – Drake again?'

‘Yes. He must have lured him to the mill. And I also fancy it was Michael Drake that tried to crack open my head. I thank you again for my preservation.'

‘It was nothing.'

Fidelis rubbed his hands together.

‘So we are left with Destercore and Reynolds. And Peters, of course, the first we suspected.'

He was the younger, but he was testing me, I felt, just as a master puts a pupil through his exercises.

‘I believe Destercore and Reynolds are completely innocent,' I said. ‘As to Peters—'

‘He remains a puzzle, does he not? Who is the fellow, what is his game, and where is he now? Well, he needs catching, or we will never be sure.'

‘He must already be far from Preston. He's too clever to be seen again in these parts. I think he hoped to take Maggie with him when he got her out of Mallender's house.'

‘Yes, she played him for as much of a fool as she played the rest of us.'

Fidelis's eyes were gleaming, with that chess player's look again. He was imagining the final crushing moves of the game.

‘And there is one more thing, Titus. We must decide where the death of your kinsman fits into the scheme.'

But his move would have to wait for, at this moment, I spotted Barty threading his way between the coffee house's mid-morning customers, and looking one by one into the booths. When he found ours he handed me a note:

Mr Cragg, sir,

Maggie Satterthwaite has asked to see you. They have her in the House of Correction. The Mayor has this morning committed her for trial.

R. Furzey

I handed the note to Fidelis who said when he'd read it, ‘I always think the best time for interesting things is now.'

I rose and picked up my hat.

‘Yes, I think I will go straight there.'

*   *   *

The Old Friary lay in ruins between Marsh Lane and Friar Gate, but a few of its better-preserved buildings had remained in use. One of these was the House of Correction, where civil malefactors who refused to pay their fines received brief incarceration, and where women prisoners awaiting criminal trial were sometimes sent as an alternative – and a welcome one – to the damp cellars under the Moot Hall.

Maggie's cell was dry and airy enough, about 12 foot square. It had a high, barred window and a brick floor, a single chair, a worm-eaten table and a pallet bed. I found the prisoner disinclined to answer questions or to converse to and fro in the usual way. Instead she pointed me into the chair, perched herself on the edge of the bed, and started to talk.

‘You and me, Titus Cragg, and the way things are between us, they're different now, do you see? I can say what I like to you. There's no call for “Yes sir, no sir, three-bags-full, sir.” I can say, “Kiss-my-arse, sir,” if I want to. See, as soon as they arrested me I lost my place in this town. I've come off, like a loose buttonhook off a dress. I'm a nobody in Preston, or an
any
body, either of the two. So I may be locked up just now, but you can also call it some kind of freedom.'

She wore a crumpled dress of plain unstarched lockram, but she herself looked surprisingly fresh, her complexion creamy and her eyes flawless, big and blue. With a little tilt of her chin she flashed those eyes at me in a kind of challenge.

‘They won't hang me, you know. Transportation's for me. King's evidence, that's what I am. And them jurors and judges, they'll look at me and I shall fill their heads with thoughts of their own angel daughters – all dimpled and pretty, but not too saucy. That I can do, easy – charm them. Of course, they'll hang Jotham Allcroft, my intended husband, because I'll tell them what he did. And they'd hang Michael Drake if they caught him, because I'll also tell them what
he
did. But the fox has run and he's not for being caught. I suppose, if I am to go to America, we may meet up again, but I hope not for I don't like him, with his lecherous looks and lying promises.'

She was fiddling with her hair, not looking straight at me, but vaguely regarding the space between us.

‘The vicar came in first thing. He talked to me about how I must repent and henceforth be good and preserve my soul for going to heaven. But I know it's just a story. The immortal soul! I've watched you gentlemen, you lawyers and doctors and clever folk, and you don't believe in it, not deep down, you just pretend to because the idea of it keeps us poor clods in our places. But I could never let a fairy tale get between me and what I heartily desire.'

In the momentary pause that followed, I risked a question.

‘But what
do
you desire, Maggie?'

‘To be rich, if you want to know. To have meat every day and never wear clogs and find more than just two changes of clothes hanging in my cupboard. So when I set eyes on Jotham Allcroft in the shop – and, you know, I never saw a man so knocked into next week by the sight of me as him – I knew then that I would have him and all his inheritance, one way or another, and soon I found a way, which
he
could never do, but
I
dared.'

She might have been talking to herself by now, almost dreamily and hardly seeming to expect a response from me.

‘The night Antony Egan was drowned, drunk, in the river, was when I thought of it. Tom Wilson and Michael Drake went out late for a breath of air outside my grandfather's house – this is after cards were finished and Reynolds gone across on the ferry, and my grandfather gone to bed.'

‘Was Destercore still there?'

She looked at me, momentarily recalled to time and place.

‘The agent from London? No, he'd long gone. Not one for cards, him.'

‘What happened when Wilson and Drake went out?'

‘As I was going to
tell
you, they saw Antony the sot on the riverbank. They saw him lose his balance and slide in down the bank.'

‘But you said before that they pushed him!'

She gave me a slow, crafty smile.

‘I lied about that. But they might as well have, for all the help they gave him. They just stood on the bank in the shadows and had a laugh. He'd lost his hat and they threw it in after him, they said. They thought it was great sport and were still laughing about it as a prank when they came back in the house, they were that callous. And when I'd taken stock of it all I said to them that they could get rid of some more Tories before the election, if they'd a mind to it, and that I knew one they could start with. It went off from there. First a joke and then dead serious. Well, I couldn't believe my luck next, when my – what shall I call him? – my
beloved
's Tory father turned up staying at the very inn where I worked. It were easy, after that. Easy for me, any road, because I find men don't look at what I do – they look at my bosom, and my bottom, and my ankles and my neck. Their eyes do have a way of taking their minds off the job – like yours are now, don't think I don't see it.'

In the middle of her speech I had raised my hand to interrupt her, like a child in a dame school. Now she tilted her head back, giving permission for me to speak.

‘Is all this your confession, Maggie?' I asked. ‘Is it for writing down?'

‘No, this is for you alone, Mr Coroner. I'll be telling it them again, don't fret. I'll be telling them all, every bit.'

‘What will you say about the murder of your grandfather, then, that housed you, fed you and loved you?'

‘Love? He never! What he was like behind the closed door, that's what you should know, but it's a long story. Granddad was old, his time had come and any road I had nowt to do with his killing, nor with Wilson's neither. You'd have to talk to Mr Michael Drake about them.'

‘Shouldn't I talk to Hamilton Peters too?'

Following all the callous ugliness of what she had been saying, a delightful smile now lit her face. She closed her eyes.

‘Oh, aye, Hamilton,' she whispered. ‘I tell you, I never had so much joy out of a man as him.'

Then, opening her eyes, she spoke more deliberately, and more harshly.

‘He knew how to give pleasure to a girl, he did, and that's why I liked him. But, see, he's a rover, a fly-by-night, though I admit I was tempted to go off with him, even that first time, which is what? More than a year ago.'

‘You knew him then?'

‘Yes, but I thought better of it, for all the fun we had.'

‘Why exactly was he here – do you know?'

‘Some political business, he had. It were his visit to Ferry Inn, when he bedded me, that got me dismissed.'

‘But you said Wilson—'

‘Did I? No. He'd have liked to do it to me, of course. So would Michael Drake. But I don't let just anyone have me, Titus Cragg. I am not a common whore, whatever Grimshaw and his clack will say about me.'

All this time she had been sitting upright on her bed, but now she sprang to her feet and took two steps to the window, looking up through the grille to the sky, where high white clouds scudded across the blue.

With her back turned to me, she said, ‘Well, you can nearly leave me now, Titus Cragg. I've had my say, except for one thing. I brought you here because it were you, and your doctor friend, ruined what I thought would be my life as a rich farmer's wife. Well, now I've been dwelling on it, I want you to know that maybe you've done me a favour, when all's said and done. In America, I hear, it's kiss-my-arse for everybody, you see, and I can hardly wait to get there.'

She turned around with a coquettish twirl, parted her lips in a smile so wide that it would challenge any man to say it was not a truthful one.

‘So, it would be churlish of me not to thank you, wouldn't it, Mr Coroner? Well, so I do, and now you may kiss my—'

She extended her hand.

‘What would you say to my hand?'

I was so surprised that I kissed it.

Chapter Twenty-nine

I
WALKED AWAY WONDERING
if I had been listening to the ravings of lunacy. According to Fidelis, when I told him later, this was precisely the effect Maggie was trying for.

‘For a person facing the gallows, to be mad is a perfectly rational object,' he said.

I am not so sure. Maggie was not the kind of girl who would deliberately swap the noose for a cell in Bedlam. Transportation was what she was set on, and that would depend upon her convincing the court at trial that she was a poor put-upon girl, quite sane, who had fallen into wickedness by the persuasion of men.

With her beauty and quick wit, this ought not to be difficult and it, too, was a rational object. America had suited Moll Flanders well enough, and it would probably agree with Maggie Satterthwaite just as much. But all the same I think there truly was a vein, at least, of madness in Maggie's discourse. She had been perfectly reckless in what she said to me, admitting the utter venality of her ‘love' for young Allcroft, owning that the murder of old Allcroft was all her idea, and confessing to unnumbered sexual acts with Hamilton Peters and, by implication, other men. Despite her airy confidence about the future, in her ability to survive, Maggie Satterthwaite's fate was still in considerable doubt.

Elizabeth had gone to visit her cousins at the Ferry Inn and I would have to tell her later of the new information Maggie had given me about the death of her uncle, though whether this could be relied upon as being true I was not sure. I made my dinner at home a quick one, knowing that Furzey and I still had not engaged a room for the two inquests on Monday, and that we must settle on witnesses. Only four would be needed, I thought: a pair from the many on Fisher Gate who saw Satterthwaite fall, Dick Middleton who found Wilson, and Fidelis for his medical opinion. Their summonses would have to be issued today, but there would be no need for detailed investigation into responsibility for the deaths. I knew now that criminal proceedings were in motion and that all that would be required of the inquest was to record how death occurred. The rest would be for the assizes.

When we had discussed all this, Furzey told me that if I went out to the Moot Hall now, I would be just in time to hear the announcement of the election result, which had been deferred from noon to two o'clock. We locked the office and went together, finding a tightly packed crowd about to hear from Mayor Biggs on the hall's steps. Shifting from foot to foot, and waiting to hear their fates, the four candidates were ranged under the portico behind the mayor.

‘As recording officer and mayor for this ancient borough of Preston,' he intoned, ‘I, William Biggs, hereby declare the votes cast in the late election to have been…'

The crowd stirred and then was still. Their murmuring ceased.

‘For Mr Nicholas Fazackerley…'

He paused, looked up as if to make sure all were duly listening, then returned his eyes to his paper.

‘Three hundred and ninety-one votes.'

There was a solid cheer and a few boos. The votes looked enough to take Fazackerley back to Westminster.

‘For Mr James Shuttleworth, three hundred and eighty-four votes.'

This was greeted by a thinner, reedier cheer, but one that still prevailed over a few Whig catcalls.