“Well, the last thing I cared about, I’ll say it right out, was him resting in peace. The less peace he got, the better, and amen. So I didn’t do anything. I had a son, by then, and a drunk for a husband who was as pitiful as my father was and who I hadn’t seen in a fortnight and hoped never to see again. But I was never a lucky one. That part don’t matter, though. What matters is that there
are
these papers that he mentions, this notebook. And I know that it’s him—the one you claim is dead up in Scandinavia—that wants the papers now. No one else knows about them, you see, except him and a couple of old hypocrites from the Royal Academy, and they wouldn’t need to ask
me
about them, would they, having stolen the damned things themselves. He’s got his methods, the doctor has, and this letter doesn’t come as any surprise to me, no surprise at all. If you know him half as well as you claim to, gentlemen, then it won’t come as any surprise to you either, no matter how many times you think you saw him die.”
And so ended her speech. It just rushed out of her, as if none of it were calculated, and yet I was fairly certain that every word had been considered and that half the story, as they say, hadn’t been told. She had edited and euphemized the thing until there was nothing left but the surface, with the emotional nonsense put in to cover the detail that was left out.
She had got to St. Ives, too. And Godall, it seemed to me, was weighing out the same bag of tobacco for the tenth time. Both of them were studying the issue hard. If she had come in through the door intending to address their weightiest fear, she could hardly have been more on the money than she was. Something monumental was brewing, and had been since the day of the explosion and the business down by the Embankment. No run-of-the-mill criminal was behind it; that weeks had gone by in the meantime was evidence only that it was brewing slowly, that it wouldn’t be rushed, and was ominous as a result.
“May we keep the letters?” asked St. Ives.
“No,” she replied, snatching both of them off the counter where Godall had laid them. She turned smiling and stepped out onto the sidewalk, climbing into the waiting cab and driving away, just like that, without another word. She had got us, and that was the truth. St. Ives asking for the letters had told her as much.
Her sudden departure left us just a little stunned, and was Godall who brought us back around by saying to St. Ives, “I fancy that there is no Professor Frost at Edinburgh in any capacity at all.”
“Not a chemist, certainly. Not in any of the sciences. That much is a ruse.”
“And it’s his handwriting, too, there at the end.”
“Of course it is.” St. Ives shuddered. Here was an old wound opening up—Alice, Narbondo’s death in Scandinavia, St. Ives once again grappling with weighty moral questions that had proven impossible to settle. All he could make out of it all was guilt—his own. And finally he had contrived, by setting himself adrift, simply to wipe it out of his mind. Now this—Narbondo returning like the ghost at the feast…
“It’s just the tiniest bit shaky, though,” Godall said, “as if he were palsied or weak but was making a great effort to disguise it, so as to make the handwriting of this new letter as like old as possible. I’d warrant that he wasn’t well enough to write the whole thing, but could only manage a couple of sentences; the rest was written for him.”
“A particularly clever forger, perhaps…,” began St. Ives. But Godall pointed out the puzzle:
“Why forge another man’s handwriting but not use his name? That’s the key, isn’t it? There’s no point in such a forgery unless these are deeper waters than they appear to be.”
“Perhaps someone wanted the letter to get round to us, to make us believe Narbondo is alive…”
“Then it’s a puzzling song and dance,” said Godall, “and far more a dangerous one. We’re marked men if she’s right. It’s Narbondo’s way of calling us out. I rather believe, though, that this is his way of serving her a warning, of filling her with fear; he’s come back, he means to say, and he wants that notebook.”
“I believe,” said St. Ives, “that if I were her I’d tell him, if she knows where it is.”
“That’s what frightens me about the woman,” said Godall, sweeping tobacco off the counter. “She seems to see this as an opportunity of some sort, doesn’t she? She means to tackle the monster herself. My suggestion is that we find out the where-abouts of this man Piper. He must be getting on in age, probably retired from Oxford long ago.”
Just then a lad came in through the door with the
Standard
, and news that the first of the ships had gone down off Dover. It was another piece to the puzzle, anyone could see that, or rather could sense it, even though there was no way to know how it fit.
***
The ship had been empty, its captain, crew, and few paying passengers having put out into wooden boats for the most curious reason. The captain had found a message in the ship’s log—scrawled into it, he thought, by someone on board, either a passenger or someone who had come over the side. It hadn’t been there when they’d left the dock at Gravesend; the captain was certain of it. They had got a false start, having to put in at Sterne Bay, and they lost a night there waiting for the cargo that didn’t arrive.
Someone, of course, had sneaked on board and meddled with the log; there had never been any cargo.
What the message said was that every man on board must get out into the boats when the ship was off Ramsgate on the way to Calais. They must watch for a sailing craft with crimson sails. This boat would give them a sign, and then every last one of them would take to the lifeboat and row for all he was worth until they’d put a quarter mile between themselves and the ship. Either that or they would die—all of them.
It was a simple mystery, really, baffling, but with nothing grotesque about it. Until you thought about it—about what would have happened if the captain hadn’t opened the logbook and those men hadn’t got into the boat. The message was in earnest. The ship sank, pretty literally like a stone, and although the crew was safe, their safety was a matter of dumb luck. Whoever had engineered the disaster thought himself to be Destiny, and had played fast and high with the lives of the people on board. That had been the real message, and you can bank on it.
The captain lost his post as well as his ship. Why hadn’t he turned about and gone back to Dover? Because the note in the log didn’t hint that the ship would be destroyed, did it? It was more than likely a hoax, a prank—one that would kill a couple of hours while they tossed in the lifeboat and then rowed back over to her and took possession again. He had never even expected to see the doubtful sailcraft. And they were already a day late because of the stopover at Sterne Bay. It was all just too damned unlikely to take seriously, except the part about getting into the boat. The captain wouldn’t risk any lives, he said.
But there it was: the ship had gone down. It hadn’t been the least bit unlikely in the end. There were only two things about it that
were
unlikely, it seemed to us: one was that the crew, every man jack of them, had remained in Dover, and shipped out again at once. The word of the captain was all that the authorities had; and he, apparently, was a Yank, recently come over from San Francisco. The second unlikelihood was that this business with the ship was unrelated to the two London incidents.
The Practicing Detective at Sterne Bay
We had no choice but to set out for the coast by way of Sterne Bay. It wasn’t just the business of the downed ship; it was that St. Ives discovered that Dr. Piper, of the Academy, had retired years past to a cottage down the Thames, at Sterne Bay. Godall stayed behind. His business didn’t allow for that sort of jaunt, and there was no reason to suppose that London would be devoid of mysteries just because this most recent one had developed a few miles to the east.
St. Ives had put in at the Naval Office, too, in order to see if he couldn’t discover something about this Captain Bowker, but the captain was what they call a shadowy figure, an American whose credentials weren’t at all clear, but who had captained small merchant ships down to Calais for a year or so. There was no evidence that he was the sort to be bought off—no recorded trouble. That was the problem; nothing was known about the man, and so you couldn’t help jumping to the conclusion that he was just the sort to be bought off. It seemed to stand to reason.
We rattled out of Victoria Station in the early morning and arrived in time to breakfast at the Crown and Apple in Sterne Bay before setting about our business. Nothing seemed to be particularly pressing. We took over an hour at it, shoving down rashers and eggs, and St. Ives all the while in a rare good humor, chatting with the landlady about this and that—all of it entirely innocent—and then stumbling onto the subject of the ship going down and of Captain Bowker. Of course it was in all the papers, being the mystery that it was, and there was nothing at all to suggest that we had anything but a gossip’s interest in it.
Oh, she knew Captain Bowker right enough. He was a Yank, wasn’t he, and the jolliest and maybe biggest man you’d meet in the bay. He hadn’t an enemy, which is what made the business such a disaster, poor man, losing his ship like that, and now out of a situation. Well, not entirely; he had taken a position at the icehouse, tending the machinery—a good enough job in a fishing town like Sterne Bay. He was generally at it from dawn till bedtime, and sometimes took dinner at the Crown and Apple, since he didn’t have a family. He slept at the icehouse too, now that his ship was gone and he hadn’t got a new one. He was giving up the sea, he said, after the disaster, and was happy only that he hadn’t lost any men. The ship be damned, he liked to say—it was his men that he cared about; that was ever the way of Captain Bowker.
St. Ives said that it was a good way, too, and that it sounded to him as if the world ought to have a dozen more Captain Bowkers in it, but I could see that he was being subtle. His saying that had the effect of making her think we were the right sort, not busybody tourists down from London. That was St. Ives’s method, and there was nothing of the hypocrite in it. He meant every bit of it, but if being friendly served some end too, before we were done, then so much the better.
Now it happened that Hasbro had an aunt living in the town, his jolly old Aunt Edie. She had been a sort of lady-in-waiting to St. Ives’s mother—almost a nanny to him—and now, as unlikely as it sounds, she had taken to the sea, to fish, on a trawler owned by her dead husband’s brother, Uncle Botley. So after breakfast St. Ives and Hasbro went off to pay her a visit, leaving me to myself for an hour. I wanted to sightsee, although to tell you the truth, I felt a little guilty about it because Dorothy wasn’t along. I’ve gotten used to her being there, I guess, over the years, and I’m glad of it. It’s one of the few things that I’ve got right.
It was a damp and foggy morning, getting along toward late—the sort of morning when every sound is muffled, and even though there are people out, there’s a sort of curtain between you and them and you walk along the damp cobbles in a gray study, lost in thought. I strolled down the waterfront, thinking that Sterne Bay was just the sort of place to spend a few leisurely days, maybe bring along a fishing rod. Dorothy would love it. I would propose it to her as soon as we got back. The thought of proposing it to her, of course, was calculated to rid me of some of the guilt that I was feeling, out on holiday, really while Dorothy was stuck up in London, trapped in the old routine.
Then I thought of poor St. Ives, and of Alice, whom he had loved for two short years before that awful night in the Seven Dials. Thank God I wasn’t there. It’s a selfish thing to say, perhaps, but I can’t help that. The man had lived alone before Alice, and has lived alone since. And although he’ll fool most people, he doesn’t fool me—he wasn’t born to the solitary life. He’s been worn thin by it. Every emotional shilling was tied up in Alice. He had put the lot of it in the savings bank until he had the chance to invest it in her, and it had paid off with interest. All that was gone now, and the very idea of a romantic holiday on the water was impossible for him to bear. He’s been disallowed from entertaining notions that other people find utterly pleasant and common…
And just then, as I was strolling along full of idle and sorrowful thoughts, I looked up and there was a three-story inn, like something off a picture postcard.
It was painted white with green gingerbread trim and was hung with ivy vines. From what I could see, a broad veranda ran around three sides of it. On the veranda sat pieces of furniture, and on the willow furniture sat a scattering of people who looked just about as contented as they had any right to look—a couple of them qualifying as “old salts,” and very picturesque. There was a wooden sign over the stairs that read THE HOISTED PINT
,
which struck me as calculated, but very friendly and with the right general attitude.
I stepped up onto the veranda, nodding a hello in both directions, and into the foyer, thinking to inquire about rates and availability. Spring was on the horizon, and there would be a chance of good weather—although the town was admirably suited to dismal weather too—and there was no reason that I shouldn’t simply cement the business of a holiday straightaway, so as to make Dorothy happy.
She would love the place; any doubts I might have had from the street were vanished. There were wooden floors inlaid with the most amazing marquetry depicting a whale and whaling ship—the sort of work you don’t see anymore—and there were potted plants and a great stone fireplace with a log fire burning and not a piece of coal to be seen. A small woman worked behind the long oak counter, meddling with papers, and we talked for a moment about rooms and rates. Although I didn’t like her very much, or entirely trust her, I set out finally for the door very well satisfied with the inn and with myself both.
That’s when I thought I saw my rubber elephant lying atop a table, half hidden by a potted palm. I was out the door and onto the veranda before I knew what it was that I’d seen—just the bottom of him, his round feet and red-painted jumbo trousers. It was the impossibility of it that made it slow to register, and even by the time it did, by the time I was sure of it, I had taken another step or two, half down the stairs, before turning on my heel and walking back in.