‘How do you know this?’ Balfour persisted.
‘I apprenticed on the dockyards there,’ the stevedore said. ‘Hey, now—that’s a corker!’
For he had struck the gull across the back with his stick.
‘You don’t happen to know what Carver was booked for—do you, lad?’
‘Trafficking,’ the stevedore said immediately.
‘Trafficking what?’
‘Opium.’
‘What—into China? Or out?’
‘Couldn’t tell you.’
‘Who booked him, though? Not the Crown.’
The stevedore thought about this, and then shrugged. ‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘I thought it was something to do with opium. But maybe that was just something I heard.’
Presently Balfour bid them both goodbye, and moved on along the spit. As soon as he was well alone, he planted his feet apart, thrust his hands into his pockets, and looked out over the white roar of the ocean—past the screw jacks and greased rollers, past the wooden lighthouse at the spit’s far end, past the dark hulks of the ships that had foundered on the bar.
‘See, now!’ he muttered to himself. ‘That’s something—that’s something, all right! Carver must be the man’s real name! He can’t be using an alias—not in Hokitika, under the gaoler’s own nose—when he served time beneath the man, in a penitentiary!’ Balfour slicked his moustache with his finger and thumb. ‘Here’s the rub, though. What in heaven’s name provoked him to make the claim—with proof in writing, to boot—that his name was Francis Wells?’
SATURN IN LIBRA
In which Joseph Pritchard outlines his theory of conspiracy; George Shepard makes a calculated offer; and Harald Nilssen agrees, in a tone of remonstration, to pay a call upon Ah Quee.
It was at this point that Balfour’s role as narrator was usurped—a transferral that was marked, on the shipping agent’s part, by the lighting of a new cigar, the filling of a fresh glass, and an enthusiastic ‘Now, correct me if I’m wrong, boys!’
This exhortation was apparently directed at two persons: Joseph Pritchard, the dark-haired man on Moody’s left, whose stifled intensity of silence was matched, as Moody soon discovered, by the stifled intensity of his unhurried speech, and another man whose physical presence we have not yet had cause to remark. This second man had been playing at billiards when Moody first made his entrance; Balfour now introduced him, with an admiring thrust of his cigar, as Harald Nilssen, born in Oslo, late of Bath, undefeated master of the three-card brag, and a d—ned fine shot—to which Nilssen added, springing forward to augment his own commendation, that he carried a muzzle-loading Enfield musket, the British Empire’s finest, and the only firearm he had ever deigned to touch. These two men were more than willing to take Balfour’s exhortation at face value—Nilssen for reasons of vanity, for he could not bear to be the leading role in a sensational tale, and not the leading actor, too; and Pritchard for reasons of precision.
We shall therefore leave Thomas Balfour standing on the wharf with his hands in his pockets, squinting into the rain. We shall turn our gaze some two hundred yards to the north, and alight at the Auction Yards on Gibson Quay—where, behind the rostrum, an unpainted door leading to a private office bears the legend Nilssen & Co., Commission Merchants.
In deference to the harmony of the turning spheres of time we shall resume our tale exactly at the moment Balfour left off—in Hokitika, on Saturday, the 27th of January, at five minutes before one in the afternoon.
At midday on a Saturday Harald Nilssen could usually be found in his office, sitting before a stack of contracts, wills, and bills of lading, patting his breast every ten minutes or so to check again the silver pocket watch that would release him to his luncheon—which he took with medical regularity each day at the Nonpareil. Nilssen recommended this routine to any who would listen, believing very stoutly in the curative properties of dark gravy, pastry, and ale; he did much recommendation, in fact, and often made an example of his own customs for the profit of other, less visionary men. He derived an especial pleasure from argument, so long as it was of the preposterous, hypothetical variety, and so loved to fashion absurd theories of abstraction from the small but dedicated circle of his own tastes. This attitude was affectionately reinforced by his friends, who thought him vivacious and amusing, and scorned by his detractors, who thought him affected and self-absorbed—but these latter voices were subdued in Nilssen’s ears, and he spent no effort to better make them out.
Harald Nilssen was famous in Hokitika for the high style of his dress. That afternoon he was wearing a knee-length frock coat with silk-faced lapels of a charcoal hue, a dark red vest, a grey bow tie, and cashmere striped morning trousers. His silk hat, which was hanging on a hatstand behind his desk, was of the same charcoal hue as his coat; beneath it was propped a silver-tipped stick with a curved handle. To complete this costume (for so he perceived of his daily dress: as a costume that could be completed, to effect) he smoked a pipe, a fat calabash with a bitten-down stem—though his affection for the instrument had less to do with the pleasures of the habit than for the opportunity for emphasis it provided. He often held it in his teeth unlit, and spoke out of the corner of his mouth like a comic player delivering an aside—a comparison which suited him, for if Nilssen was vain of the impressions he created, it was because he knew that he created them very well. Today, however, the mahogany bowl was warm, and he was pulling on the stem with considerable agitation. The hour of his luncheon was past, but he was not thinking of his stomach, and nor of the ruddy-cheeked barmaid at the Nonpareil, who called him Harry and always saved the choicest edges of the piecrust for his plate. He was frowning down at a yellow bill upon his desktop, and he was not alone.
At length he pulled his pipe from his teeth and lifted his eyes to meet the gaze of the man sitting opposite him. He said, in a low voice, ‘I’ve done no wrong. I’ve done nothing below the law.’
He spoke with only a very slight Norwegian accent: thirty years in Bath had made him all but British in his inflexions.
‘It’s who stands to profit,’ said Joseph Pritchard. ‘That’s what a justice will be looking for. Seems you made a very tidy profit by this man’s death.’
‘By the legal sale of his estate! Which I took on after he was already in the ground!’
‘In the ground—but warm, I think.’
‘Crosbie Wells drank himself to death,’ said Nilssen. ‘There was no cause for an inquest, nothing untoward. He was a drunk and a hermit, and when I received these papers I believed his estate would be small. I had no idea about the ’bounder.’
‘You’re saying this was just a lucky piece of business.’
‘I’m saying I’ve done nothing below the law.’
‘But someone has,’ Pritchard said. ‘Someone is behind this. Who knew about the ’bounder? Who waited till Crosbie Wells was six feet deep, then sold off his land so quiet and so quick, without ever going to auction—who put the papers in? And who planted my laudanum under his cot?’
‘You say planted—’
‘It was planted,’ Pritchard said. ‘I’ll take my oath on that. I never sold that man a dram. I know my faces, Harald. I never sold a single dram to Crosbie Wells.’
‘Well then, there you are! You can prove that! Show your records, and receipts—’
‘We have to look beyond our own part in this design!’ Pritchard said. When he spoke vehemently he did not raise his voice, but lowered it. ‘We’re associated. Trace it back far enough, and you’ll find an author. It’s all of a piece.’
‘Do you suggest this was planned—in advance?’
Pritchard shrugged. ‘Looks like murder to me,’ he said.
‘Conspiracy to murder,’ Nilssen corrected him.
‘What’s the difference?’
‘The difference is in the charge. It would be conspiracy to murder—we’d be convicted for the intention, not for the act itself. Crosbie wasn’t killed by another man’s hand, yo
u know.’
‘So we’ve been told,’ Pritchard said. ‘Do you trust the coroner, Mr. Nilssen? Or will you take a spade in your own hands, and bring the hermit’s body up?’
‘Don’t be ghastly.’
‘I’ll tell you this: you’d find more than one corpse in the hole.’
‘Don’t, I said!’
‘Emery Staines,’ Pritchard said, relentlessly. ‘What the devil happened to him, if he wasn’t killed? You think he turned to vapour?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Wells died, Staines vanished. All in a matter of hours. Wells is buried two days later … and what better place to hide a body, than in another man’s grave?’
Joseph Pritchard always sought the hidden motive, the underlying truth; conspiracy enthralled him. He formed convictions as other men formed dependencies—a belief for him was as a thirst—and he fed his own convictions with all the erotic fervour of the willingly confirmed. This rapture extended to his self-regard. Whenever the subterranean waters of his mind were disturbed, he plunged inward, and struggled downward—kicking strongly, purposefully, as if he wished to touch the mineral depths of his own dark fantasies; as if he wished to drown.
Nilssen said, ‘That’s useless speculation.’
‘Buried together,’ said Pritchard. He sat back. ‘I’d bet my life.’
‘What does it matter what you guess—what you wager?’ Nilssen burst out. ‘You didn’t kill him. You didn’t murder anybody. It’s on another man’s head.’
‘But somebody certainly wants to make it seem as if I did. And somebody’s certainly made you look like a d—ned fool, for chasing a herring that turned out to be red!’
‘You’re talking appearances.’
‘Juries care about appearances.’
‘Come,’ said Nilssen, somewhat weakly. ‘You can’t really think that a jury—’
‘—Will be necessary? Don’t be an ass. Emery Staines is Hokitika royalty. Strange as that sounds. Folk who couldn’t pick the Commissioner from a line-up of drunks know Staines’s name. There’s no doubt there’ll be an inquest. If he fell down the stairs and broke his neck with a dozen men to witness, there would be an inquest. All it’s going to take is one shred of evidence to connect him to the Crosbie Wells affair—his body, probably, whenever they find it—and bang, you’re implicated. You’re a co-conspirator. You’re on trial. And then what are you going to say to defend yourself?’
‘That I’m not—that we didn’t—conspire—’
But uselessness overcame him, and he did not go on.
Pritchard did not interrupt the silence. He stared intently at his host and waited. At length Nilssen resumed, struggling to keep his voice calm and practical:
‘We mustn’t keep anything back. We must go to the justice ourselves—’
‘And risk the charge?’ Pritchard’s voice became lower still. ‘We don’t know half the players, man! If Staines was murdered—look, even if you don’t believe the rest of what I’m saying, you must admit that it’s a d—ned coincidence he disappeared when he did. If he was murdered—and let’s say he was—well, somebody in town has got to know about it.’
Nilssen tried to be haughty. ‘I for one am not going to stand about and wait with a noose around my neck—’
‘I am not proposing that we stand about and wait.’
The commission merchant sagged a little. ‘What then?’
Pritchard grinned. ‘You say there’s a noose—well, all right. Follow the rope.’
‘Back to the banker, you mean?’
‘Charlie Frost? Maybe.’
Nilssen looked sceptical. ‘Charlie’s no double-crosser. He was as surprised as anyone when the ’bounder turned up.’
‘Surprised, that’s easy to fake. And what about the fellow who purchased the land? Clinch—of the Gridiron Hotel. He must have been tipped off somehow.’
Nilssen shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it.’
‘Perhaps you ought to try.’
‘Anyway,’ Nilssen said, frowning, ‘Clinch doesn’t stand to gain a penny, now that the widow’s made her claim. She’s the one you should be worried about.’
But Pritchard did not have an opinion about the widow. ‘Clinch doesn’t stand to gain a penny—from Crosbie Wells, maybe,’ he said. ‘But think on this. Staines leases the Gridiron to Clinch, doesn’t he?’
‘What are you driving at?’
‘Only that a fellow’s never sorry when his creditor is dead.’
Nilssen turned red. ‘Clinch wouldn’t take another man’s life. None of them would. Charlie Frost? Come off it, Jo! The man’s a mouse.’
‘You can’t tell from looking at a man what he’s capable of doing. And you certainly can’t tell what he’s done.’
‘This kind of speculation—’ Nilssen began, but he did not know what form his protestation was to take, and he again fell silent.
Nilssen did not know the vanished prospector, Emery Staines, at all well—though if asked, he would have declared the opposite, for Nilssen tended to profess intimacy whenever it flattered him to do so, and Staines was very much the kind of man with whom Nilssen would have liked to forge an intimate acquaintance. Nilssen loved to be dazzled, and never was he more dazzled than by the selfhood of a man he very much admired. Emery Staines, being possessed of both youth and conviction, was naturally an enviable type. Calling him to mind now, Nilssen had to agree with Pritchard that it was exceedingly unlikely that Staines had departed Hokitika in secret, of his own volition, in the middle of the night. His claims required constant maintenance and supervision, and there were more than fifty men in his employment—why, his absence would be costing more than pennies, Nilssen thought, and the debt would be mounting every day. No: Pritchard was right. Staines had either been kidnapped, or—far more likely—he had been killed, and his body had been very effectively concealed.
The current information held that Emery Staines had last been seen around sundown on the 14th of January, walking south down Revell-street in the direction of his house. What happened after that, nobody knew. His barber came calling at eight the next morning, and found his door unlocked; he reported that the bed was rumpled, as if recently slept in, but the fire was cold. All valuables were present and untouched.
Emery Staines had no enemies, as far as Nilssen was aware. His disposition was bright and very open, and he had the rare gift of managing to act both generously and humbly at once. He was very rich, but there were many rich men in Hokitika, and most of them were a good deal more unpleasant than he. It was unusual that he was young, of course, and that might be a cause for envy in an older, more disappointed man—but envy was rather a weak motive for murder, Nilssen thought, if indeed the young man had been killed.
‘What would drive any man to quarrel with Staines?’ Nilssen said aloud. ‘That boy radiates luck—the Midas touch, he has.’
‘Luck is not a virtue.’
‘Killed for his money, then—?’
‘Let’s put Staines aside for the moment.’ Pritchard leaned forward. ‘You took home a fair cut of Crosbie Wells’s fortune.’
‘Yes—I told you, ten per cent,’ Nilssen said, turning back to the yellow bill of sale on the desk before him. ‘Commission on the sale of his effects, you know; but now that the will’s been disputed, the payment’s void. I shall have to pay it all back again. The property ought not to have been sold.’
He touched the edge of the bill with his finger. He had signed the document, and its copy, at this very desk two weeks prior—and how his heart had sunk as he had penned his name. In Hokitika the sale of effects on a deceased estate was never a profitable venture, but his business was not prospering, and he was desperate. How shameful it was (he had thought), to have travelled half the girth of the globe only to see his fortunes fall so far—only to scrabble for scraps beneath the tables of richer, luckier men. The name on the bill—Crosbie Wells—had meant nothing to him. From what he knew Wells was just a loner, a wretched twist of a man w
ho drank himself into a stupor every night and dreamed of nothing. Nilssen signed his name in bitterness, in exhaustion. He was going to have to rent a horse, sacrifice a day of work, ride out—where?—to the forsaken Arahura, and pick over this dead man’s effects as a vagrant trawls through a gutter, looking for food.
And then, wedged into the flour canister, the powder box, the meat safe, the bellows, the cracked basin of an old commode—and all of it glistering, heavy, and soft. His commission had come in at just over four hundred pounds; for the first time in his life, he was flush. He might have packed up and sailed to Sydney; he might have returned home; he might have begun anew; he might have married. But he had no time to enjoy it. The day his commission was finally cleared was the very day of Mrs. Wells’s arrival; within hours, the sale of the estate had been appealed, the inheritance disputed, and the fortune seized by the bank. If the appeal was granted—as it certainly would be—Nilssen would be obliged to pay his commission back again, in full. Four hundred pounds! It was more money than he earned in a year. He ran his finger down the edge of the bill, and felt a lonely stab of outrage. He wished, as he had wished many times in the last week, that he could be given someone to blame.
But Pritchard was shaking his head: he wasn’t interested in the dead man’s will, nor in the legal implications of its contest. ‘Never mind all that, for the moment,’ he said. ‘Think back to the cottage. You saw the pile with your own eyes?’
‘I was the one to discover it.’ Nilssen spoke with a touch of pride. He relaxed a little at the memory. ‘Oh—if you’d seen it—I might have turned it into leaf and covered a whole billiard table, legs and all. Heavy as anything. And how it shone.’
Pritchard didn’t smile. ‘You said that it wasn’t dust and it wasn’t nugget. Do I have that right?’
Nilssen sighed. ‘Yes, that’s right: it had all been pressed into squares.’
‘Retorted,’ Pritchard said, nodding, ‘—which takes equipment, and skill. So who was the smith? Not Wells himself.’