The Poisoned Island (41 page)

To the Matter, then. I feel great Reluctance in setting this down on Paper, and you will see why when I explain. My name is Peter Nott, and as far as the World is concerned I am the son of the great British missionary Henry Nott, of Otaheite. But Henry Nott is not, in fact, my Father. He adopted me as a young child. He has always showered me with Devotion and with Care. But my real name is Heywood. My real father is Peter Heywood.

I have travelled to England to seek out my real Father and to make my Peace with him. You know better than anyone the Circumstances under which my Father was taken from me, and it is on to your good Mercies I now throw myself.

I have done terrible things to be able to reach you, Mr. Graham. And I now find myself in a most terrible Place, a kind of Hell on Earth which encases me and which may eventually kill me. But I know you are a Legal man, a man who knows of Courts and Charges and the like. I know how you helped my Father and I pray—even now I am kneeling as I write this—I pray that you will find it within yourself to help me also. If you turn away from me, the Pit is open, and the Lies I have told purely to make my way to you will devour me, as sure as they will devour the desperate, evil Men who share this place with me.

I pray to the Lord that this letter finds its way to you, and I pray to his Son that you have the Charity to help me.

Yours

Peter Nott (otherwise Heywood)

“He was terrified,” says Horton as he finishes. “Why did you not mention that he was terrified?”

Harriott begins to splutter at his officer’s impertinence, but Graham holds up a warning hand. Harriott sees for the first time that Graham will take a good deal of impertinence from Charles Horton. Whether from guilt or respect or a complicated compound of the two, he does not know.

“Of course he was terrified,” says Graham. “He was locked in Coldbath Fields. He gave this note to the warden to be delivered to me, but the warden demanded payment, which he was unable to provide. So he delivered it himself when he was released.”

“But there is something else here, is there not?” says Horton. “An admission of a kind of guilt.
I have done terrible things to be able to reach you.
What things?”

“Are you saying Nott may be the killer?” asks Harriott.

“Well, sir, the handwriting matches.”

At this, the two magistrates rise out of their seats, as Horton lays down the letter alongside the suicide note from the storehouse.

“By God,” says Graham, who is able to see the notes more easily. For Harriott, they are upside down. “Nott wrote Critchley’s suicide note.”

“Yes, sir,” says Horton. “But he did not kill everyone. He was in Coldbath Fields when the Ratcliffe murders were perpetrated. We do not know exactly when Critchley was killed. But Nott must have either been in the prison or under the watch of Mr. Graham’s officers, even then.”

“So why did he write this note?” asks Harriott.

“Well, that would seem to be the question, wouldn’t it?” says Graham.

Peter Nott stands on the stairs at Rotherhithe, opposite the
Solander
, waiting for a wherry to row over and pick him up. When one arrives, the waterman inside gives him a strange look, but then shrugs as if to say one man’s money is as good as another’s, even if the man is a half-breed dressed like a rector.

He’d walked from Bow Street this morning, exhausted from lack of sleep, playing over that awful final conversation with Aaron Graham. He had listened to Graham’s story of the encounter with Peter Heywood, and he’d said little, only asking certain questions about the appearance of Captain Heywood, the place in which he lived, his family settlement and suchlike.

When Graham had finished, he’d asked Nott if he had understood what he’d told him: that Heywood would have nothing to do with him, and that there was little if any recourse to the law for the purpose of challenging his decision.
Nott was free to go wherever he wished, but perhaps Graham might recommend the London Missionary Society, who after all were employing his father and would no doubt wish to assist the man’s son. The words
father
and
son
had been spoken with small hesitations on either side of them, as if the words no longer quite meant what they once did. At the mention of the society, Nott had only smiled, remembering how the Otaheite missionaries had reacted to the news that one of their number was to adopt a savage, even one with English blood in his veins. That blood, which had marked him out as different since his birth, now feels like a kind of poison.

Graham had left Nott to his rest, and Nott noticed how the magistrate placed an officer at the door of the small room of the Bow Street office which had been his home for the previous three days. Graham had made it clear that Nott was a free man and could come and go as he pleased, and had said nothing about how long he would be welcome to sleep at the Police Office. So the constable was not a guard, then. Nott realized with icy amusement that Graham half expected him to destroy himself.

He had slept not at all, although the constable watching him had fallen almost immediately into a slumber after Graham left. His snores echoed through the door of the room in which Nott lay, wide awake, trying to picture Peter Heywood, looking at his hands as if they might give a clue to the hands of his natural father, while all the time the notion that he had damned himself to no purpose clattered at the back of his brain.

Graham had looked in on him this morning, saying he was free to wait out the day here in Bow Street, or do otherwise, as he pleased. Nott had thanked the magistrate, and then had
waited for him to leave. He had nodded to the officer who’d been watching him, walked out into the street, and started making his way towards Rotherhithe.

Along the river, of course. Graham had explained where his father was—downstream from here, out towards the open ocean. So every step down the river was a step towards his father. He crossed the river at Blackfriars, making his way to the Surrey shore, the same shore where his father dwelt, and continued his journey downstream, as if being taken out to sea on a falling tide.

It took him almost three hours to reach Rotherhithe, and then he stood for a while, looking out at the ugly ship which had brought him here, across thousands of miles towards a hopeful destiny. Which, it had turned out, was instead a sordid rejection.

The wherry reaches the
Solander
. He pays the waterman what is left of his wages as ship’s chaplain, then climbs up onto the deck. Nott has the ship to himself. She is deserted, her hold empty, no one even left to guard her. He walks back to the stern of the vessel, and stands there for a long while, his legs tired from the walk, looking downstream once again, his mind as empty as his hopes.

After a long while, he hears his name shouted up from the water. He looks down and across and sees Captain Hopkins arriving in a boat, waving fiercely. The captain disappears behind the side of the ship for a moment, but soon Nott can hear him climbing up, and he turns away to face the river again as the captain walks up behind him.

“Well,
this
is a surprise,” says Hopkins. “When did they release you?”

The question confuses Nott for a moment. When was he released? And from what? The prison had happened to another
person, one for whom a meeting with his father was still a possible dream.

“They released me soon after your visit,” he says.

“Did you speak to Graham?”

“Yes, Captain, I did. And he did indeed know of my father.”

“And? What then?”

Nott says nothing, his eyes flat and set.

“Ah. I see. Well, Nott, ’twas likely to end thus.”

“It did not seem so to me.”

“So, what now?”

“Now, I will tell them of our arrangement. I will tell them that you told me on Tahiti of my father and told me how I could reach him, in return for my cooperation in your own transactions.”

It is now the captain’s turn to be silent for a moment, but Nott does not turn to see his face. He feels a great calm.

“That would not be wise, Nott.”

“Perhaps not. But it would be right, Captain. And I am very much minded to do what is right, after having done so much wrong.”

“Have you forgotten what we said? Of how your father would hear of all this?”

“Which father?”

“The one you will be returning to.”

“Ah. Well, perhaps.”

Hopkins puts a hand on his shoulder now, and gently turns him around so the two are facing.

“You spied for me, Peter.”

“Yes.”

“You are complicit in all that has happened.”

“Yes.”

“You led me to them.”

“Yes.”

“You wrote the note, in your own hand.”

“Yes.”

“If you do not hang, you will be abandoned by the only father that remains to you.”

“Yes.”

But being abandoned already, what of it?

Nott turns back to the river. Behind him, the captain picks up a coil of rope from the deck.

*  *  *

It is Peach, once again, who rows Horton out to the
Solander
. They are become like an old married couple, hating each other yet forced to live side by side. Horton does not smile at the thought.

The squat, solid little ship occupies all his attention as it grows bigger and bigger. The noise and clamor of the river are barely more than background. Even the sound of Peach’s oars in the river water is louder, to him, than the men shouting up from a lighter to the side of a ship which looks like it has been half torn to pieces on its journey here from the Baltic or Newfoundland. There is only he and Peach and the wherry and the
Solander
.

He sees, straightaway, that somebody is on the ship. He would have expected at most a cursory guard, given that the ship is empty. But there is a shape moving around inside the captain’s cabin, pacing apparently even within the neat confines of that space, which he’d inspected so long ago and yet just the other day.

As the wherry passes beneath the cabin, Horton sees the
pacing stop, as if whoever is inside has heard the precise
slap-slap
of Peach’s oars in the water.

Peach ties up the wherry alongside the
Solander
and Horton grabs the ladder.

“Wait for me here.”

“Aye-aye,
Captain
,” says Peach with his customary insolence. Horton ignores him and begins climbing up onto the deck.

He steps over the rail, and there is Captain Hopkins, standing on the quarterdeck beside that strange plant house. The whole ship has an emptied air about it. The holes along the edges of the decks and in the planking running beneath the rails (made, of course, by Critchley) are now devoid of their half barrels and their strange Pacific plants. The
Solander
has been so comprehensively retooled as a ship for botanizing that Horton wonders if she will ever be good for anything else.

“Constable Horton. First a nighttime visit to my wife, and now a daytime visit to me. Perhaps I should formally adopt you as my cousin so you can move among my family without disgrace.”

Hopkins’s tone is light, but there is a fierce aggression underneath. Horton thinks it has perhaps always been there, that fierceness.

“I meant no disgrace by my visit last night, Captain,” he says. “I was returning from Kew, and wished to speak to you of what I learned there. It seemed to make sense, as it was on the return journey.”

“Oh, yes, no doubt it made a good deal of
sense
. And did you learn anything from my lady wife?”

“Learn anything? I did not
question
her, Captain.”

“You did not? You strike me as someone who is always
questioning
, Constable. Whether or not your interlocutor is aware of it.”

Horton says nothing to that, and simply waits.

“Do you wish to
question
me, then, Constable?”

“I wish to discuss matters with you, Captain, yes.”

“Well, perhaps we should seek out a more appropriate location. Follow me to my cabin.”

He turns, abruptly, and Horton walks behind him.

The cabin is as neat and tidy as when he first visited. The log is open on the desk, as if Hopkins had just been adding to it. The captain shuts the log as they go in, but leaves it upon the desk. He sits in the chair, but does not offer the bed as a seat to Horton, who stands with his head slightly bent and does not acknowledge the slight. It seems bizarre to be standing in this enclosed space when the rest of the ship is so empty.

“Jeremiah Critchley is dead,” says Horton.

Hopkins makes a church roof of his fingers and presses the point of it to his lips. His eyebrows go up and he stares at Horton. Then he breathes in and out through his nose in something like a sigh, and looks down at the surface of the desk and the log upon it.

“Sit down, man. I can’t talk to you with you looming above me so.”

Horton takes a seat on the bed and watches Hopkins carefully. The captain unmakes his church roof and drums the fingers of one hand on the log, as if pondering evasive maneuvers in the face of a French attack. Eventually, he speaks, but without looking up, his fingers still thrum-thrum-thrumming on the log.