Pirate King (23 page)

But it was a question he clearly did not care to answer, saying weakly, “He often requires a book-keeper.”

“But I thought he was a semi-retired fisherman?”

The pasty face turned even paler; the narrow throat swallowed; the eyes darted around in search of rescue. “I’m … it’s a family matter. I, that is, I couldn’t afford to get to Morocco on my own, but I have family there, and Captain La Rocha said, he thought if I took this job …”

I’d known we would soon be interrupted, but Gröhe didn’t feel Samuel’s approach until a big hand clapped onto his shoulder, at which time he gave a shrill cry remarkably like mine the night before.

Samuel left his hand where it was and leant past the small man, baring his teeth in a grin that contained none of his earlier affection towards his human parrot. “What you asking my friend, here, Miss Russell?”

I raised a face of good-natured innocence. “I recognised this gentleman from the day Mr Fflytte asked him to leave. I wondered why he hadn’t gone.”

I kept the expression raised like a mask, kept my feet casually swinging, although I could feel the rapid beat of my heart and wanted nothing more than to flee from those black eyes. They bore into me, and after a minute, I permitted myself—permitted my character, Miss Russell the assistant—to frown a little. “Is there something wrong?”

“You can tell me that, I think.”

“Well, if you mean am I going to report it to Mr Hale, no, I hadn’t intended to. I mean, what could he do, throw the poor fellow overboard? As far as I can see, there’s little harm done. However, perhaps he shouldn’t collect any more pay packets from Fflytte Films.” I pronounced the last sentence like a chiding schoolteacher. Then I waited, hoping his ears wouldn’t pick up the pounding of my heart over the music.

Samuel’s eyes slid shut in a slow blink, then he was looking at the book-keeper and I was breathing again. He spoke, and Mr Gröhe tugged at his hat and scurried away, below decks. Then Samuel turned back to me.

“You will not tell Mr Fflytte and Mr Hale about this.”

I decided that Miss Russell had taken enough. I tipped my head to the side, frowning. “You know, that sounded suspiciously like a command. I’m going to assume it is a problem with your English and not that you imagine me to be one of your employees. I told you I did not intend to expose your Mr Gröhe. But I’ll admit that if you try to bully me about it, I’ll be tempted.”

His eyes went even darker; the fingers of my left hand crept towards the blade in my boot-top.

And then he smiled. In amusement and appreciation, as if I’d done something just adorable. He stretched out the hand that had dug into Gröhe’s shoulder and patted my cheek, then turned on his heel and passed through the revolving couples to the quarterdeck.

Furious and perplexed, I realised that we’d had an audience for the tail end of our meeting. Annie stood nearby, watching Samuel’s retreat. Behind her I spotted Holmes, alert to the tension and oblivious of the demands of the dance.

“Did you want something?” I snapped at the girl. (Silly, really, to call Annie a girl—she was older than I was, no matter what she claimed.)

“Oh! Sorry. It’s just, well, some of us were just wondering how long we’re going to be at sea, but there’s something rather intimidating about the quarterdeck, isn’t there, even though it’s only a couple of steps above the rest. And when I saw Mr Samuel come down I thought I might ask, only he seemed somewhat … preoccupied.”

I pulled myself together and shot Holmes a glance while summoning a rueful laugh for Annie’s benefit. “He’s a strange one, isn’t he? Touchy.”

“Oh, isn’t he just? At first one thinks Mr La Rocha the more terrifying of the two, but then Samuel will snap at one of the men over something and one feels oneself sneaking off like a scolded kitten.”

Annie had more intelligence in her than those wide blue eyes and ripe-cherry mouth suggested. I turned the talk to the approximate length of journey ahead of us, and from there to supplies, and then to Maurice’s cooking.

But my mind was holding up Samuel’s words to Gröhe, examining them, considering.

Samuel had spoken in Arabic, a language I understood well enough:
If you don’t want me to feed you to the fish
, he had said,
you will disappear until we hit land
.

The party showed all signs of continuing until luncheon, and no doubt after that, Fflytte would claim the deck and all actors for his purposes. If Holmes and I were to finish our conversation, we had to be out of earshot for longer than three minutes at a time.

The only way I could think of required steeling my nerves and donning an additional layer of clothing. And if I found the below-decks deserted, as I expected I would, I could take the opportunity for a bit of snooping.

But as I made my way to the common cabin, I was surprised to hear voices from below—surely everyone was on deck except Mr Gröhe? And Maurice, of course, at work transforming inadequacy into magnificence. But this was a woman’s voice, answered by a child: Aha, Edith and her mother, Mrs Nunnally.

I pressed my ear against the cabin door. What was the woman doing? Edith’s whines of complaint were punctuated by sharp exclamations of discomfort: “Ow! I wasn’t doing anything, I was just dancing like Mrs Grimley taught— Ouch!”

“I
told
you to take care, that we didn’t have a chance to do this yesterday and that if anyone came too close—stand still!”

Edith’s voice kept whining, until I could not stand it. Yes, the child had made my life a trial, but there was no cause to mistreat her. I lifted the iron latch and stepped inside. I am not sure what I expected to see, but it was not what lay before me.

Mrs Nunnally was bent over Edith’s face, the customary below decks gloom brightened by the light from a small lamp. She whirled, and I looked in confusion at the object in her hands. A pair of tweezers. What …?

She dropped the implement into a pocket and presented me with a wide and utterly artificial smile. “We were just finishing up here, I noticed that my Edith had neglected to keep her eyebrows neat, and there’s nothing Mr Fflytte dislikes more than—”

I looked around her at the child, whose cheeks gave clear evidence that the tweezers-work had not been above the eyes. Many things about my tom-boyish admirer fell into place.

“Perhaps I should call you Eddie?” I asked.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

SERGEANT
: With stealthy step the pirates are approaching.

“Oh please, Miss, have mercy on us!”

T
HE WOMAN BURST
into tears and threw herself on my mercy and at my feet, but as she pleaded and tried to explain, all I could think was, why had it taken me so long to recognise a child of changed gender? Heaven knows I’d dressed in boys’ clothing often enough myself.

I pushed the dreary female to one side and dropped to my heels before Edith. “Do you want to continue on this picture?” I asked her—or, him.

He nodded. I could see a couple of dark hairs Mrs Nunnally had missed, where this adolescent chick was beginning to fledge. It explained the sudden height gain as well.

“If I let you stay on, you have to promise me: no more pranks. No more cutting June’s hair or gluing together the pages of Celeste’s romantic novels or putting push-pins through the soles of Linda’s shoes. No more torturing the others, or me. Absolutely none. Or I tell Mr Hale, who will send you home instantly. Agreed?”

The pretty blonde head jerked vigorously up and down. I held the child’s eyes long enough to be sure he meant it—and long enough for him to know that I did, too.

God knew where Fflytte Films would find another blonde child at this late date. And Edith was going to have a tough enough time concealing all that sprouting pubescence by the time filming ended next month.

It was not really my problem.

I fetched my jumper and went back up on deck.

Holmes was dancing—still, or again—with his buxom admirer, and I thought it would not be long before his desperation began to show to the others. I pulled on the woollen garment and set my fingers into the rope ladder—no, call it by name: the ratlines of the fore shrouds.

I had seen the men climbing often enough to know it was not only possible, but possible to do it with equanimity. The first few hemp rungs were easy; then the ship rolled to the side I was occupying, and I knew instantly, without a doubt, that the entire vessel—deck, rigging, French cook, and parrot—was about to tip over and come down on top of me, smashing me into the surface of the sea.

I clung, whimpered, and waited to die.

And after a minor eternity, the ship’s roll slowed, and paused, then returned the way it had come. The angle of the shrouds returned to the oblique, the mast ceased to loom above me, the rope ladder I clung to stopped sagging and went firm again. I could not move, but I could breathe. When the ship rolled back again, I was ready for it; I ignored the looming mast, the sag of the shrouds, waiting for
Harlequin
’s pause. When her mast swung back away from me, I managed to climb three whole hempen rungs before feeling her collapse again onto me.

It was inelegant, and a sailor would have been laughed off the ship, but I climbed.

At the lower yard—the top of the lowest sail—I made the mistake of looking down. I probably whimpered again, although I could not hear myself over the wind. My insouciant air became a great deal more difficult to maintain after that, even though I had seen Holmes’ head near the base of the mast and knew it would not be long before he found excuse to join me in the heights. I resolutely turned my gaze upwards, to where the mast tapered into nothingness. And, more encouragingly, to where a simulacrum of solidity awaited me.

Just above my head was the tops, what I would previously have called a crow’s nest—or parrot’s nest—with a bit of a hole in the bottom next to the mast that had lines passing through it. I wriggled in beside the lines, knowing full well that using this “lubber’s hole” was scorned as cowardly. Inside the tops, I let go a deep breath, profoundly grateful for the faint sense of protection imparted by the shrouds around me and the wood beneath me. This was quite far enough, to escape inquisitive ears. The protection was spurious, the deck’s mild sway giving way to a sense that I was about to be violently flung through the air. I wrapped both hands around nearby ropes, hoping with some small part of my mind that from below, my appearance would preserve some vague attitude of nonchalance rather than appear what it was: a landlubber clinging for dear life.

Rosie came to see what I was up to. I was grateful that she—he—took up a position ten feet down the yard, rather than directly overhead.

A cough came from below. Without loosing my fists, I leant a fraction forward, far enough to see the crown of Holmes’ head. I tried to move clear of the hole, but my hands would not obey.

However, to my surprise, he appeared, not from the hole at my feet, but among the lines at the outer edges of the platform, clambering the shrouds with the ease of a monkey.

“Show-off,” I muttered.

“If you shift a bit to the right, I can get past you,” he suggested.

“I don’t think I can move,” I informed him. The wind, nonexistent fifty feet below, snatched the words from my mouth and threw them towards the African coastline.

“Try.” He waited, to all appearances oblivious to the wind’s attempts to slap him from his perch, for the several minutes it took me to commit my weight a few inches to the right. Then he swung a long leg around the shrouds and dropped in beside me with nothing but the fingers of his right hand to hold him in place.

There were times when I came near to hating the man I had married. “Don’t tell me: You spent two years before the mast when you were a lad.”

“Only eight months. When I was twenty.”

“I think I’d prefer sea-sickness.”

“Yes, I’d noticed you seem remarkably free of the affliction here.”

I groaned.

“What did our Mr Samuel have to say?”

With an effort, I recalled that earlier sense of threat, and told Holmes about the conversation.

“Interesting,” he remarked. At some point while I’d been talking, he had looped his arm through a rope and was picking at a frayed place on his shoe. I shuddered, and squinted at the distant horizon. “You’ve told me about your Mr Pessoa, and I have a basic picture of Fflytte and Hale. Perhaps you’d give me your opinion of any others who have made an impression upon your mind.”

“You probably did not receive my third letter?” I said. “Then I shall start with William Currie, the cameraman. He’s been with Fflytte since the very beginning, including the War years. An intelligent man and a likeable rogue. Although I’d say that, despite his popularity, he keeps himself to himself. Unlike his bosses.” I reviewed for him my points of interest from the missing letter: June’s mother working for Fflytte Films in 1909; June’s birth in 1910; June’s sharing of Hale’s colouration; Hale and Mrs Hatley’s ship-board conversation that ended with a slap.

“Unlikely to be blackmail,” he said.

“I agree, plus they act like old … well, perhaps not friends. Acquaintances. Although I can’t decide if Hale doesn’t realise June may be his, or if he knows and they’re all just very casual about it.”

“With stage people—or in this case, cinema folk—it could easily be the latter. Have you uncovered the process by which this production came into being?”

“What do you mean?” A question I always disliked having to ask Holmes.

“Oh, surely—”

“Let’s leave out the rebukes, Holmes. Just tell me what you’re getting at.”

“If we are to solve the disappearance of Lonnie Johns, and prevent some hypothetical further crime, it might help to know what the end point of this elaborate project is to be. Other than a cinema adventure.”

I clung and I pondered, then shook my head. “I still would not wager that there is any further crime in the offing here, Holmes.”

“With La Rocha and Selim involved?” he scoffed.

“Oh, I agree those two have something in the works, I meant on the part of Fflytte Films—which is where I was brought in, if you remember. The criminality of our pirate crew could be nothing more than two men following the scent of money: Randolph Fflytte walks into Lisbon and starts littering the streets with pounds sterling; he’s practically begging to be taken advantage of.” What was the Portuguese for
to fleece
? Or the Arabic?

“So the ship, the men, the smooth arrangement under the nose of the Englishmen,” he said. “You suggest that all that is mere opportunism?”

“Look at the sequence: Geoffrey Hale hires Pessoa; Pessoa introduces Fflytte to La Rocha; La Rocha sees a man with far more money than sense; he uses his authority on the Lisbon waterfront to bully the
Harlequin
’s owner to sell it cheap to Fflytte, arranging that all the paperwork is ready to go when Fflytte walks up. No doubt La Rocha also received a slice of the takings from the ship chandlers, the sail-makers, and everyone else along the line. Just as he’ll have claimed a percentage from the pay packets of the crew we hired—and got free passage for any of his men headed for Morocco.

“In fact, even if the men have different accents, it wouldn’t surprise me if all of them were headed home. What would you wager that if we told them in Arabic to see the bird, every pirate on the ship would look up?

“And,” I added as I mentally sorted through our large collection of troubling details, “Hale told me about something odd that happened the other day. After the first filming, one of the pirate crew—Jack, the second youngest—started to say something about practice not mattering because they weren’t going to—but before he could complete the sentence, Samuel smacked him down. Although that might only mean that the crew don’t intend to bother finishing the picture because they’re just here for a ride to Morocco.”

Holmes was shaking his head before I finished. He protested, “Never have I known those begging a free ride to be so industrious.”

I added, “When they are accumulating generous pay packets in the meantime?”

It was Holmes’ turn to ponder, a juncture at which, had we not been in a young gale and surrounded by tar-soaked rope and dry canvas, he might have brought out his pipe. I shifted, to keep my backside from going numb against the wood, and allowed my gaze to go down. The sails beneath me were pregnant with wind, a vista of living cloth. It would have been quite beautiful, had I been able to see past the terror. Holmes finally said, “It is a poor fit. Sixteen pay packets is petty crime, for those two.”

“Portugal doesn’t have a lot of ready cash lying around, just at the moment. And—wait.” A thought was tapping at the back of my mind, a faint thought, pressing to get through. What …

He was still talking. “However, if this is but the tip of an iceberg, if what we are seeing is the Moroccan equivalent of the Italian criminal syndicate currently taking such a firm hold in America, thanks to their Prohibition—the Brotherhood of the
Jolie Rouge
, shall we say, along the lines of the Red Circle—”

And then I had it. I broke into his monologue, smiling for the first time since laying my hand on the ratline. “The paint! Holmes, when I first saw her, I noticed that
Harlequin
’s name was the only relatively intact paint in sight. One could even see the ghost of a former name. Which I think was ‘
Henry Morgan.
’ ”

“The privateer.”

“What if this ship actually belonged to La Rocha all along? What if it’s a nice simple swindle: La Rocha finds a rich victim, sells him a ship under another name so it doesn’t look suspicious when La Rocha takes charge of fixing the old tub up, tricking his mark into spending money right and left to refit her? I was impressed by how fast they laid their hands on sails that fit, used riggings that were precisely what was needed. Even the oars.”

“Sweeps,” he corrected me absently, chewing on his lip.

I leant forward, an angle that would have been impossible five minutes earlier. “I know you’d prefer to find that La Rocha has woven an elaborate tapestry of crime, but isn’t it more likely he’s just grabbing at passing opportunities? Nine years ago, with the Turkish gold: Did he actually plan the theft? Or did he simply catch its scent and reach for it?”

“Your theory being that there is nothing to the sale of guns and drugs? That Lestrade has a bee in his bonnet? That the death of Lonnie Johns—the apparent death—was the suicide it appears?”

“Not necessarily. I’m merely suggesting that the one has nothing to do with the other.”

“Coincidence?” He pronounced the word with distaste.

“Co-existence, say. A man with a history of felonies would readily seize the chance to commit another.”

“Which brings us back around to the question: Which man?”

“I do not know. But I believe we will have at least a couple of weeks to figure it out: Hale doesn’t distribute the final paycheques until the picture is in the can.”

He said nothing, thoughtfully, just looked downwards. “Perhaps we ought to descend, and continue our investigations.”

“I’m not sure I can.”

He ignored me, and instead wondered aloud, “How are we to explain our prolonged conversation up here, before they come to see?”

I put my head beside his, looking down the long stretch of mast to the deck below. Annie and Edith were peering up the mast in curiosity; any moment now, one or both would scramble up like a monkey. I peeled a hand recklessly from its iron grip and waved to the pair of faces, letting them know I was coming down. Then I forced my feet to inch towards the access hole.