The Poisoned Island (28 page)

On Harriott’s instructions, Charles Horton heads for Ratcliffe. Like his magistrate, he is becoming frustrated with this case. There seem to be countless threads, but they tangle themselves in his hands. He has still to interview the gardeners in Kew, and had intended to travel there today, before this new interruption. He believes there is more, a lot more, to discover about Peter Nott’s involvement in the affair. He has tried to speak again with Jeremiah Critchley, who lives at the Pear Tree in Wapping. He has walked past that place dozens of times since it formed a central part of the previous year’s Ratcliffe Highway investigations, but he has never once gone in before now. Reacquainting himself with the house—and its landlady, Mrs. Vermiloe, a key witness in the 1811 inquiries—was uncomfortable and frustrating. He has knocked on Critchley’s door four times now, and has received no response. The door is always locked and Mrs. Vermiloe, now a legal expert, has refused him entry without a warrant
from his magistrate. Harriott has now promised this, but not before Horton looks into whatever new horror has been perpetrated in Ratcliffe. That name—
Ratcliffe
—rattles in his head, speaking of earlier horrors and secrets, as if the word itself haunted him.

In a different time and place the chance to investigate fresh bodies in a case which seems to be generating more and more of them would be irresistible to him. So why this great reluctance? Is it because more bodies will just mean more threads to thicken the knots he is already failing to unpick? No, not that. Edward Markland is the problem. He goes to meet the Shadwell magistrate with no enthusiasm and with that constant sense that his past is waiting to snatch at his clothes and pull him down. Markland is a dangerous man. In the past he has alluded to knowledge of Horton’s past—of the mutiny in the Nore, of Horton’s purchase of his freedom with information on his shipmates. It gives Markland a power over him, and one such as Markland is not to be trusted with power. When talking to Markland he feels like a man tied and bound in a room full of spiders.

He walks along the river, deliberately avoiding the route through Shadwell. Thirty minutes of walking brings him to Rose Lane, and the boardinghouse which is his destination. There is a small crowd of people outside the house. Horton pushes through them, not without stirring some complaint, and goes inside.

The stench in the hallway is terrible: shit and death, the odor roiling through the air like the pollen of doomed plants. Markland, despite Horton’s roundabout efforts at avoidance, is there. He is accompanied by two of the Shadwell constables, Hope and Hewitt, a partnership of particular viciousness. Their presence depresses Horton immediately. If
this is the standard of investigation Shadwell has conducted so far, Horton has little hope for it.

“Ah, Constable,” says Markland. He does not offer a hand, but smiles like he might at a new manservant. “We have been waiting quite some time for you. I fear you must inspect the scene immediately so we may clear it. The smell is almost overwhelming.”

Horton looks around him.

“Where are the residents of the house?” he asks Markland. He ignores Hope and Hewitt, and feels rather than sees the scowls with which they have welcomed him.

“Removed to . . . well, somewhere,” says Markland. “The landlady alerted the local constable yesterday evening. There was a man here, she says, who went upstairs and then left in a great hurry. She went to investigate and discovered the bodies. We emptied the house then so we could secure it. I believe this is the kind of procedure you think important.”

“It is vital to secure the scene in case of evidence, yes. But have your own men not investigated the evidence?” At this he does look at Hope and Hewitt, who look back at him as if ready for a fight. He very much hopes Markland answers no.

“Oh, they surely have,” says Markland. “But as I explained to your magistrate, I believe you have unique experience of this kind of thing.”

So Markland has no faith in his own officers. His deal with Harriott is to secure his own reputation and to avoid the incompetence of his own men. Horton sees the truth of this immediately.

“We have names for the men?”

“Well, of course, Horton. For two of them, in any case. The landlady furnished us with those. Elijah Frost and Colby
Potter. The third body is unidentified. I believe Frost and Potter were crewmen on the
Solander
.”

Horton does not respond to this. He tries to remember if Frost or Potter’s name came up in his interviews with the crew. He rather thinks neither did.

“Did the landlady describe the man she saw running away?”

“She did indeed. A tall blond man with blue eyes. Unusual. I do believe she found him rather handsome.”

Horton thinks:
Critchley?

“The room is upstairs?”

“On the top floor. There is a small room up there. That is where the murders were transacted.”

“I shall head up there immediately, then.”

He makes for the stairs, and Hope and Hewitt make as if to follow him. Horton stops on the bottom steps and turns around, speaking directly to Markland.

“If it pleases you, sir, I’d rather inspect the room on my own.”

He does not look at Hope and Hewitt, but the savagery coming off them almost breaks through the stench coming from the top of the house. It has a sour reek all of its own. Markland frowns for a moment, irritation breaking through his smooth exterior, but then smiles that empty deliberate smile.

“Very well. Officers, await Mr. Horton down here. Now he has made an appearance I shall return to the Shadwell office. Horton, I’d appreciate a report this evening.” He places a hat on his head, and taps his elegant cane on the wooden floor of the hallway, before disappearing out of the front door. Horton turns and heads up the stairs, still not looking at Hope and Hewitt, still sensing their intense wish that they be allowed to take him in hand and inflict careful injury upon him.

The stench deepens as he climbs to the top of the house, such that he covers his nose and mouth with a handkerchief. The final flight of stairs is almost beyond endurance. There is a terrible buzzing of flies in the air—it has been warm this past night and day. The door into the room at the top of the stairs is open, and he steps inside.

He is struck immediately by the similarities with the room in Rotherhithe, but also by the obvious differences. The similarities, first: two men have had their throats cut while, apparently, lying asleep on their beds. Flies buzz around the open necks of both men, and around the thick bloodstains which cover the walls, again a clear echo of the room in Rotherhithe. Both men’s sea chests have been pulled out from under the beds and opened. Both men are holding little wooden cups at the bottom of which is the same residue Horton found in the cups in Rotherhithe.

Then, the differences. The third body, for one: lying on the ground, facedown, a thick leather lace lying around its neck, the obvious instrument of death. There is a lack of any other mayhem in the room, too, as if the killer performed no search this time, finding what he was looking for (assuming, of course, he was looking for
something
) quickly and efficiently. Or perhaps he knew where to look.

As he did in Rotherhithe, Horton stands still for a while, not consciously watching anything. The room gives up no other secrets, but it suggests a narrative to him just as the Rotherhithe room had done. Something about the way the third body is lying, as if the man had been looking at the bodies on the bed, and someone had come up behind him . . . Yes, he can perhaps tell a story of the third death. So did this man discover the two other men sleeping, as Peter Nott claims to have done? Or were they already dead?

He kneels down and turns the facedown man over, and recognizes him immediately. It is Robert Craven, one of the crew he’d interviewed in the Narwhal. The man who’d intimated that Attlee, Arnott, and Ransome had shared a great secret. Had they shared it with the two dead men in this room? And had Craven discovered it?

After perhaps thirty minutes, Horton shuts the door and walks back downstairs. Hope and Hewitt are waiting for him, and begin to speak, but he walks past them to the door in the street and, turning back on the way out, says only this:

“You can clear the room now. Call the coroner. I’ll report to Markland.”

If Hope or Hewitt had a gun at this point, Horton is sure he’d be feeling a lead ball in his back. Instead all they have is enraged silence, so Horton gets out of the house alive, his head churning with possibilities. He says nothing about Robert Craven.

*  *  *

By the time he gets to the Shadwell office, Markland has already departed, a casual neglect of duty which Horton finds frankly astonishing. John Harriott would be waiting behind his desk, blustering and impatient. Therein lies the difference between the two men.

Still he does not go home. Not yet. His brain is fiercely alive and aware, and he needs to let it run its course lest he spend the entire evening discussing the case with Abigail. Her exposure to the scenes in Rotherhithe is still a fresh wound to him; he has no wish to return home this evening with more tales of slashed throats and unhinged slaughter. So he stops in at the Prospect of Whitby for a pint of ale and a think.

A man he recognizes is sitting in the corner of the tavern: Angus Carrick, known to the rest of the
Solander
’s crew as Red Angus. He’d been the first man Horton had interviewed in the Narwhal. Carrick is working his way through a huge plate of herring, and a jar of whisky and a glass sit alongside. It is a quiet night, with only a few drunken workers from the dock keeping him company.

Red Angus scowls at Horton as the constable sits down. He downs a half glass of whisky with barely a flicker of a grimace before slamming it down on the table.

“You again,” he says.

“Me again.”

Horton waits and watches the
Solander
’s cook.

“Please join me, Constable. You’re welcome to make free with my comp’ny.” Carrick sneers sarcastically, and then starts again on his plate of herring.

“I’ve been to Ratcliffe.”

“Have you, now? Bugger all in Ratcliffe, is there?”

“More than you’d imagine.”

Red Angus looks at him, his mouth full of fish. It is a long, appraising look.

“You playin’ with me, Constable? Havin’ a little joke at my ill-educated expense?”

“Why do you believe that?”

“Because ye’ve a smug air about you, Constable. An air of knowing more than the rest of us, and of wonderin’ when and where you’re going to put us all in our place.”

This shocks Horton. Is he really like that?

“Tell me about Robert Craven,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because he told me about a secret that Ransome had, with Attlee and Arnott.”

“Craven told you that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, ask him about it, not me. Wasn’t much happened on the
Solander
Craven didn’t know about it. Oh, he’s no killer, mind. But he’s a quiet, creepy little sod. Always watching and listening. Bit like you.”

“You strike me as an unusual man, Mr. Carrick.”

“Mr. Carrick? No one’s called me Mr. Carrick since my ma died.”

“What would you prefer I called you?”

“I’d prefer if you fucked off.”

“Well, I’ve got a job to do.”

“Aye, ye have. And I canna help you do it.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both.”

He pours out another huge shot of whisky from the jar and downs it.

“You Scots like your drink.”

“We Scots like to forget what you English have done to us. Whisky is a great aid to forgetting.”

“Who might have wanted Attlee or Arnott dead?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. They were good lads, as I say.”

Horton sees with interest that he’s considering the matter. There is a quick brain behind those bristling red whiskers.

“One of us
could
have done it. But I don’t know why we would. None of us had any particular time for Ransome, but none of us had any particular grudge with him neither. And that goes double for Attlee and Arnott. Of the men you had speak to you in the Narwhal, I’d say Critchley was the closest to Attlee and Arnott.”

“Jeremiah Critchley?”

“Yes. Come to think of it, he was tight with all three of
them, he was. Ransome too. We assumed they were all buggering each other. On the island, they were forever disappearing into the night.”

Horton leans forward.

“Disappearing?”

“Now, don’t get excited, Englishman. There was a lot of
disappearing
went on in Otaheite, believe me. The women, you see. They’d fuck you seven shades of blue and then they’d fuck you again, and then their mothers would fuck you, all for a few nails and a bit of old iron that might be lying around. Some of us was almost sick of it by the time we got back.”

“So where did these men disappear to?”

“No idea. But they went off together more than once. Potter and Frost, too.”

Carrick ponders.

“Bloody hell. I think they’ve rooms over in Ratcliffe.”

Horton stands.

“Enjoy your herring, Red,” he says as he leaves.