Shark Island (18 page)

And the sense of something huge and living and ferocious nudged horribly at his consciousness again. It was the ghastliness of the body that affected him so—Kingman's body, he told himself, and with a thrust of legs and arms swam up to the corpse. The eyes were gone already, the lips and nose nibbled away. Kingman, who had been as thin as a mummy in life, now looked like a skeleton already, his floating garments pulled hard against his bones by the current. That he was wearing uniform made the sight still more grotesque.

A rope tied his shinbones to a heavy grindstone, which kept the cadaver standing upright in the bottom of the channel—and the knife that had presumably been used to cut the rope had been casually jammed into his thigh. Wiki grabbed it, and hauled it out, clenching his throat so he wouldn't be sick. It was a long skinning knife with a pointed blade. He bent and sawed at the rope with the blade, which was so blunt he managed only to fray it—and a huge force slammed past his bent back and seized Kingman's body in enormous jaws that were rimmed with jagged teeth. Then it shook the cadaver with brute force, breaking the shreds of the line that held its prize to the bottom of the sea.

Wiki had just one appalled glimpse of the shark's oyster-dead eye as the great creature writhed and vanished, parts of the corpse dangling out of each side of its jaws. Kelp sucked and waved frantically in its wake. Every muscle in Wiki's body spasmed—he surged to the surface and kept on going, scrambling up the straking of the schooner without knowing he was going to do it, to arrive on the deck without the slightest idea of how he had got there. Then he stood still, shaking too much to take a single step, water streaming off his long hair and his chest and shoulders and down his naked loins and legs to pool on the planks.

He was still holding the skinning knife. That was his first conscious thought. Then, as the red haze that blurred his sight cleared, he saw Annabelle. She was standing in the doorway of the after house, her mouth gaping wide open with shock, her dark eyes huge in the whiteness of her face. She was half the ship away from him, but he could have sworn he heard her gasp. Then she turned and disappeared. He could hear her running down the stairs.

The air was full of the ghastly scent of … burning feathers. Wiki identified the stench only because of the sight of all the dead chickens lying on the planks about a bloodied chopping block. That was how Mrs. Coffin's cook used to prepare a hen for dinner—she had been a stout, practical woman, who would grab a fowl, chop off its head, and then singe its feathers to make the plucking easier.

Then Wiki saw a short, squat, heavyset man standing by the block, holding a bloody hatchet in one hand. He must be the cook—Robert Festin, Wiki remembered. In the other fist he clutched—a bird, but not a hen. It was a parrot—the parrot that had been in the captain's cabin. Its head and breast were horridly burned, blackened and seeping red; its eyes were dead, burned out to blindness like spark holes burned into a rug. Then Wiki saw it move, and realized the bird was still alive. For a moment he thought he would vomit.

The cook—Festin?—was staring at him, openmouthed. Then, as Wiki watched, the cook's eyes flickered about the otherwise empty deck. Festin looked back at him, and then moved abruptly, thrusting the feebly pulsing parrot at him, saying something urgent in an incomprehensible gabble of sounds. Wiki stared, immobile, wondering what it all meant. Then he heard Sua calling out in Samoan from below the rail. Blessedly, this time he heard and understood him—he was telling him to get into the boat. When he looked down at the boat the oarsmen were standing in the bottom, all gaping up, Midshipman Keith in the stern sheets; all their faces were shocked.

The paralysis fled away. When the cook thrust the weakly struggling bird at him again, Wiki grasped it, clutched it to his chest, turned, and jumped down into the boat. He landed awkwardly, but without falling into the water, because Tana and Sua grabbed him and held him steady. He had dropped the knife, but it hadn't fallen into the water, either. Instead, it dropped into the bottom of the boat.

“My God,” Midshipman Keith said in a scared, shocked voice as the boat pulled away. “Did—did you see that—that monstrous shark? We—we saw it carry a body away, and we—we thought it was you, Mr. Coffin! Are you all right? Are you hurt? Mr. Coffin,” he insisted, his voice shaking.

Sua and Tana were saying the same things, but in their own language. Wiki opened his mouth to tell them all that he was perfectly fine, but the words wouldn't come. So he sat silently on the middle thwart and shivered, clutching the poor burned parrot to his chest.

Nineteen

The saloon of the
Swallow
was very crowded. Dressed, but still shivering with shock, Wiki sat on the bench at the foot of the saloon table, his hands tightly clasped around his warm mug. Stoker, the steward, was clucking agitatedly as he tenderly applied strips of thin wet cloth to the burned parrot, which was perched miserably on the back of Rochester's chair. It looked extremely odd, festooned with ribbons of torn fabric which were draped from the top of its head, the whole dripping freely as Stoker gently squeezed more water onto it from a soaked flannel. Every now and then he put a finger under the poor blistered, blackened beak that protruded from the draperies, lifting it to dribble water inside. The saloon was full of the stink of wet, burned feathers.

The cutter and boat had returned to the brig in response to the signals that had been set to recall the men who had been searching the island all night, and George had called all hands, and briefly broken the news. Now the men were gathered in traumatized huddles about the decks, aghast that their efforts to find Zachary Kingman had been so doomed to failure. While it was officially Constant Keith's watch on deck, Captain Rochester had decided it would be both unfair and unwise to have him there right now, when the men were so confused and upset, so, after ordering a ration of rum to be given out, he'd put the boatswain, who was a very steady and experienced old fellow, in charge.

Now, Midshipman Keith was hunkered on the bench on the starboard side of the table, his gangly body crammed into a corner. Rochester was sitting opposite; he had swung a leg over the end of the larboard bench near the stairs, and was ready to go up at an instant's notice. Forsythe was slumped on the starboard bench next to Midshipman Keith, his bloodshot eyes glazed and unseeing, his weathered face so bleached of its usual color that old fighting scars stood out on his chin and cheeks. Nobody had liked Zachary Kingman, but somehow that made the sight of Forsythe's grief more terrible, not less.

He looked bleakly at Wiki, and said hoarsely, “You're the one who found him?”

“Aye—when I was swimming.”

“So he drowned?”

Wiki swallowed, and then said, “His feet had been tied to a grindstone, and he'd been dropped into the sea.”

“
What?
Oh, Jesus, so they murdered
him,
too.” Forsythe rubbed a broad hand over his cheeks, scrubbing away wetness, and then said shakily, “Do you reckon the poor bastard was alive when they dropped him over?”

“His throat was cut first.” When Wiki lifted his coffee mug his teeth knocked against the rim. He might have spent the last seven years a-whaling—a hard trade that created hard men—but, as tough as he might have become over those seven years, he knew he was going to be haunted for the rest of his life by the ghastly memory of the wide grin that had opened and closed as Zack Kingman's head flopped back and forth.

“Oh,
Christ.
” Forsythe's eyes were squeezed tight.

Wiki said quietly, “I found a knife, too—though I don't believe it's the knife that killed him. Evidently it had been used to cut the length of rope that tied him to the grindstone.”

Without describing where he had found it, he produced the knife he had plucked out of Kingman's dead thigh. They all stared at it. There were rust spots on the blade, and the handle was rough. Salt water didn't account for this—it was a long time since this knife had been cleaned, honed, and oiled.

Wiki looked up at Forsythe and said, “It's blunt. When I was trying to cut him free from the grindstone I had to saw at the rope. That's why I don't think this was the knife that was used to cut his throat.” Then he added deliberately, “It's not sharp enough—not like
your
knife.”

“What the
hell
do you mean?”

“When Hammond gave you
your
knife, he said it was the one that had been pulled out of Captain Reed, and yet it had blood on it that was reasonably fresh. I think
your
knife was the one that was used to cut Zachary Kingman's throat.”

“
My
knife—
my
goddamned knife?” Forsythe shouted. His face flooded with red, and then went white again.

“Aye,” said Wiki, indicating the sealing knife on the table. “And I think that
this
knife is the one that killed Ezekiel Reed. It mightn't be sharp enough to cut a man's throat, but the point's sturdy enough to stab a man—and I believe this is the handle I saw sticking out of Reed's back. Also, I'm not sure that your knife is long enough to go right through a man's chest, while this one is. We can compare them to make sure, but I have a strong feeling that your knife was switched with the one that killed Captain Reed.”

Rochester got up from the table and fetched Forsythe's knife, and they laid them side by side. The skinning knife was a good three inches longer than Forsythe's knife, and slenderer in the blade. While it was not nearly as well maintained as his, it still looked lethal.

Forsythe said, “You haven't told me where you found him.”

“Off the larboard bow of the
Annawan,
in amongst kelp in a deep part of the channel. Though the grindstone had been tied to his ankles to weigh him down, with time the seaward current would have dragged his body away. However, I got there first.”

“Where is it?” the southerner demanded. “I want to be the one to sew his shroud.”

It was traditional for the dead man's best friend to put the last stitch through his nose, Wiki winced. “A shark—a huge shark came before I could cut him free.”

“A shark?” Forsythe echoed blankly.

“Aye. When I hunkered down to cut the rope, a shark charged from behind, grabbed the body, and tore it away. If I hadn't ducked down at that precise moment,” Wiki said, his voice beginning to shake again, “he'd have got me. Instead, he swam off with Zachary Kingman's body in his jaws.”

“Oh,
Christ,
” said Forsythe. He pushed his hand over his big craggy face again, and then looked at Wiki and demanded, “What the hell were you doing there, anyway?”

Wiki said, “I was checking the damage in the hull of the
Annawan.
”

There was a blank pause as they all stared at him. George said, “What did you find?”

“There's a lot of damage. The straking is started and splintered, and there are two holes, not one—but it's mostly all in one plank. If she was careened, we could fix her.”

Forsythe exclaimed, “We fix her so the bastard who slit Zack's throat can sail free?”

“It's better than having an unknown killer on board during the passage to Rio.”

Forsythe nodded grimly. “That's a very good point.”

George Rochester suggested, “We could carry the
Annawan
crew to the expedition fleet, and hand over the problem to Wilkes. He could hold an inquiry.”

There was another silence while everyone contemplated this unpleasant prospect, and then Midshipman Keith piped up, “Why don't we try to catch the foul murderer ourselves?”

They all stared at the lad, and he blushed, but said gamely, “Mr. Coffin could do it.”

“That's true,” Forsythe exclaimed, and rounded on Wiki. “You're supposed to be a goddamned sleuth—you've got that paper from the sheriff of Portsmouth deputizing you to be an agent of law and order on the high seas, right?”

“But I have no authority on board the
Annawan
—you know what Joel Hammond is like!” Wiki objected. The derisive words
godless Kanaka
were ringing in his head.

“You can find murderers; you've done it before,” Forsythe urged. “Now find this one—for me, for Zack!”

When Wiki looked at George Rochester, his friend had his head tilted in deep thought. Then, he nodded encouragingly, so Wiki turned to Forsythe and took a deep breath. Then he managed to say, remarkably steadily, he thought, “So you wouldn't object if I asked you some questions right now?”

“Go ahead,” said Forsythe grimly.

“You were the last of us to see him alive. Can you remember where?”

“Of
course
I can bloody well remember!” Then Forsythe's aggressive stare faltered, and he said, “No, I can't. That's a lie, because I was drunk. I was
bloody
drunk,” he mourned, staring down at the table. “I was so drunk I thought he was with me when they dumped me on the beach, and for a long time I was quite certain the poor bastard was on the island, too. So,” he said, looking up at Wiki again, “that means the last time I saw Zack was on the foredeck of the schooner.”

“Can you tell me anything about the boat's crew that carried you to the beach?”

“I'm not even sure I was awake.”

“That doesn't make it very easy for me,” Wiki pointed out.

“It wasn't supposed to be goddamned easy!”

George Rochester said in placatory tones, “Why don't you start from the beginning—from the time when you left the
Swallow?
”

“Wa'al, as you know, the cutter's men came and fetched me, and then dropped Zack and me off at the schooner before headin' back to the beach.”