‘That political fellow,’ said Mannering. ‘Lauderback. He was the first upon the scene. Maybe he’s mixed up in this business somehow. Maybe he told Löwenthal about the fortune hidden in the cottage. Maybe he saw the fortune—and told Löwenthal about it—and then Löwenthal told Clinch! But that’s foolish,’ he added, rebutting his own hypothesis. ‘There’s nothing in that for him, is there? And nothing for the Jew. Unless everyone’s getting a cut, somewhere along the line …’
‘Nobody got a cut,’ said Frost. ‘The fortune’s being held in escrow at the bank. Nobody can touch it. At least not until the business with the widow gets straightened out.’
‘Oh yes—the widow,’ said Mannering, with relish. ‘There’s a turn of events for you! What do you make of her? She’s an acquaintance of mine, you know—an acquaintance. Greenway, that’s her maiden name. I never knew her as Mrs. Wells—the mistress Greenway, she was to me. How do you like her, Charlie?’
Frost shrugged. ‘She’s got paperwork on her side,’ he said. ‘If the marriage certificate turns out to be legal then the sale will be revoked, and the fortune will be hers. That’s in the hands of the bureaucrats now.’
‘But how do you like her, I said?’
Frost looked annoyed. ‘She cuts a fine figure,’ he said. ‘I think her very handsome.’ He stuck his cigar in the side of his mouth, and bit down upon it, lending to his expression the shadow of a wince.
‘She’s handsome all right,’ said Mannering happily. ‘Oh, she’s handsome all right! Plays a man like a pianoforte, and what a repertoire—indeed! I suppose that’s what happened to poor old Crosbie Wells: he got played, like all the rest of them.’
‘I cannot make sense of their union at all,’ Frost admitted. ‘What could an old man like Crosbie Wells have to offer—well, even a plain woman, let alone a handsome one? I cannot make sense of her attraction; though of course I can well imagine his.’
‘You are forgetting his fortune,’ Mannering said, wagging his finger. ‘The strongest aphrodisiac of all! Surely she married old Crosbie for his money. And then he hoarded it up, and she had nothing to do but wait for him to die. What else could explain it? When she popped up so soon after his death—like she’d been planning it, you know. Oh, Lydia Wells is a canny soul! She keeps her eyes on the pennies and her fingers on the pounds. She wouldn’t sign her name except to profit.’
Frost did not respond at once, for Mannering’s response had cued him to remember the reason for his visit, and he wished to collect his thoughts before he announced his business; after a moment, however, Mannering gave a bark of laughter, and thumped his fist upon the desk.
‘There it is!’ he exclaimed, with much delight. ‘I knew it! I knew you were in a fix one way or another—and I knew I’d smoke you out! What is it, then? What’s your crime? What’s the rub? You’ve given it away, Charlie; it’s written all over you. It’s something to do with that fortune, isn’t it? Something about Crosbie Wells.’
Frost sipped his brandy. He had committed no crime, exactly—and yet there was a rub, and it did have to do with the fortune, and it did concern Crosbie Wells. His gaze slid over Mannering’s shoulder to the window, and he paused a moment, in contemplation of the view, deciding how best to phrase the matter.
After the fortune discovered in Wells’s cottage had been valued by the bank, Edgar Clinch had made Frost a very fine present, to acknowledge his role in facilitating the sale: a banknote made out to the sum of thirty pounds. The receipt of this banknote had a sudden and intoxicating effect upon Charlie Frost, whose income was devoted, in the main, to the upkeep of parents he never saw, and did not love. In a frenzy of excitement, unprecedented in his worldly experience, Frost determined to spend the entire sum of money, and at once. He would not inform his parents of the windfall, and he would spend every last penny on himself. He changed the note into thirty shining sovereigns, and with these he purchased a silk vest, a case of whisky, a set of leather-bound histories, a ruby lapel-pin, a box of fine imported candies, and a set of monogrammed handkerchiefs, his initials picked out against a rose.
Lydia Wells had arrived in Hokitika some days after this prodigal fit. Immediately upon her arrival she visited the Reserve Bank, announcing her intentions to revoke the sale of her late husband’s cottage and effects. If this revocation proved successful, Frost would be obliged, he knew, to recover those thirty pounds in turn. He could not sell the vest back again, except as worn goods; the books and the lapel-pin he could pawn, but only at a fraction of their worth; he had opened the case of whisky; the candies were gone; and what fool would want to buy a handkerchief embroidered with another man’s name? All in all he would be lucky to recover even half of the amount that he had spent. He would be forced to go to one of Hokitika’s many usurers, and beg for credit; he would bear his debt for months, perhaps even for years; and worst of all, he would even have to confess the whole affair to his parents. The prospect made him sick.
But he had not come to Mannering to confess his humiliations. ‘I am not in a fix,’ he replied curtly, turning his gaze back to his host, ‘but it is my guess that someone else very well might be. You see: I do not believe that fortune belonged to Crosbie Wells at all. I believe that it was stolen.’ He leaned over to tap the ash of his cigar, and saw that the end had gone out.
‘Well—from whom?’ Mannering demanded.
‘That is precisely what I wish to speak with you about,’ the young banker said. There were lucifers in his vest pocket; he transferred his cigar to his right hand, to retrieve them. ‘I had a notion just now, this afternoon, and I wanted to run it by you. It’s about Emery Staines.’
‘Oh—no doubt he’s wrapped up in it all,’ Mannering said, throwing himself back into his chair. (Frost set about lighting his cigar a second time.) ‘Disappearing that very same day! No doubt he’s connected. I don’t hold out much hope for our friend Emery, I’m telling you that. We have a saying on the fields: it’s unlucky to be lucky for long. Have you heard that one? Well, Emery Staines was the luckiest man I’m ever likely to know. He went from rags to riches, that boy, and all without a helping hand from any quarter. I’m wagering that he was murdered, Charlie. Murdered in the river—or on the beach—and his body washed away. No man likes to see a boy make his fortune. Not before he’s thirty. And especially not when that fortune’s clean. I’m wagering whoever killed him was twenty years his senior, on the inside. At least twenty years. How about that for a bet?’
‘Forgive me,’ Frost said, and shook his head very slightly.
‘Oh yes,’ Mannering said, disappointed. ‘You don’t place your money, do you? You’re one of those sensible types. Never toss a coin except to lay it in your purse.’
Frost did not reply to this, having been put in mind, uncomfortably, of the thirty pounds he had recently squandered in such a profligate way; after a moment Mannering cried, ‘But don’t leave me waiting!’—feeling embarrassed, for his last remark had come out rather more as an insult than he had intended it to seem. ‘Give it up! What’s your notion?’
Charlie Frost explained what he had discovered that morning: that Frank Carver owned a half-share in the Aurora goldmine, and that he and Emery Staines were, to all intents and purposes, partners.
‘Yes—I suppose I knew something about that,’ Mannering said, vaguely. ‘That’s a long story, though, and Staines’s own business. Why do you mention it?’
‘Because the Aurora claim is connected to the Crosbie Wells debacle.’
Mannering frowned. ‘How so?’
‘I’ll tell you.’
‘Do.’
Frost puffed on his cigar a moment. ‘The Wells fortune came through the bank,’ he said at last. ‘Came through me.’
‘Yes?’
Dick Mannering could not bear to let another man hold the stage for long, and tended to interrupt frequently, most often to encourage his interlocutor to reach his own conclusion as quickly and concisely as he could.
Frost, however, was
not to be hurried. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘here’s the curious thing. The gold had already been smelted, and not by a Company man. It had been done privately, by the looks of things.’
‘Smelted—already!’ said Mannering. ‘I didn’t hear about that.’
‘No; you wouldn’t have,’ said Frost. ‘Every piece of gold that comes over our counter has to be retorted, even if the process has been done before. It’s to prevent any makeweights from slipping through, and to ensure a uniform quality. So Killarney did it all over again. He smelted Wells’s colour before it was valued, and by the time anybody saw it, it had been poured into bars and stamped with the Reserve seal. Nobody outside the bank could have known that it had been retorted once before—save for the man who hid it in the first place, of course. Oh, and the commission merchant, who found it in the cottage, and brought it to the bank.’
‘Who was that—Cochran?’
‘Harald Nilssen. Of Nilssen & Co.’
Mannering frowned. ‘Why not Cochran?’
Frost paused to draw on his cigar. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last.
‘What’s Clinch doing, dragging another body into the affair?’ said Mannering. ‘Surely he might have cleared the place himself. What’s he doing, dragging Harald Nilssen into the mix?’
‘I’m telling you: Clinch never dreamed there’d be anything of value in the cottage,’ Frost said. ‘He was flabbergasted when the fortune turned up.’
‘Flabbergasted, was he?’
‘Yes.’
‘That your word, or his?’
‘His.’
‘Flabbergasted,’ Mannering said again.
Frost continued. ‘Well, it worked out famously for Nilssen. He was set to take home ten percent of the value of the goods in the cottage. Lucky day for him. He walked home with four hundred pounds!’
Mannering still wore a sceptical expression. ‘Well, go on,’ he said. ‘Smelted. The gold had been smelted, you were saying.’
‘So I had a look at it,’ said Frost. ‘We always write a short description of the ore—whether it’s in flakes or whatnot—before it’s smelted down. The practice is no different when the gold’s been smelted already: we’re still obliged to make a record of what the stuff looked like when it came in. For reasons of—’ (Frost paused; he had been going to say ‘security’, but this did not exactly make sense) ‘—prudence,’ he finished, rather lamely. ‘Anyway, I examined the squares before Killarney put them in the crucible, and I saw that at the bottom of each square the smelter—whoever he was—had inscribed a word.’
He paused.
‘Well, what was it?’ said Mannering.
‘Aurora,’ said Frost.
‘Aurora.’
‘That’s right.’
All of a sudden Mannering was looking very alert. ‘But then these squares—all of them—were retorted again,’ he said. ‘Pressed into bullion, by your man at the bank.’
Frost nodded. ‘And then locked up in the vault, that very same day—once the commission merchant had taken his cut, and the estate taxes had been paid.’
‘So there’s no evidence of that name,’ Mannering said. ‘Do I have that right? That name is gone. That name has been smelted away.’
‘Gone, yes,’ said Frost. ‘But I made a note of it, of course; it was officially recorded. Written down in my book, as I told you.’
Mannering set down his glass. ‘All right, Charlie. How much to make that one page disappear—or your whole book, for that matter? How much for a little carelessness on your part? A touch of water, or a touch of fire?’
Frost was surprised. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘Just answer the question. Could you make that one page disappear?’
‘I could,’ Frost said, ‘but I wasn’t the only one to notice that inscription, you know. Killarney saw it. Mayhew did too. One of the buyers saw it; Jack Harmon, I think it was. He’s off in Greymouth now. Any one of them might have mentioned it to any number of others. It was quite remarkable, of course—that inscription. Not something a man would easily forget.’
‘D—n,’ said Mannering. He struck the desk with his fist. ‘D—n, d—n, d—n.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ Frost said again. ‘What’s this all about?’
‘What’s the matter with you, Charlie?’ Mannering burst out suddenly. ‘Why—it’s taken you two bloody weeks to front up to me about this! What have you been doing—sitting on your fingers? What?’
Frost drew back. ‘I came to see you today because I thought this information might help recover Mr. Staines,’ he said, with dignity. ‘Given that this money very plainly belongs to him, and not to Crosbie Wells!’
‘Rot. You might have done that two weeks ago. Or any day since.’
‘But I only made the connexion to Staines this morning! How was I to know about the Aurora? I don’t keep a tally of every man’s bankroll, and every man’s claim. I had no reason—’
‘You got a cut,’ Mannering interrupted. He levelled a finger at Frost. ‘You got a cut of that pile.’
Frost flushed. ‘That’s hardly pertinent.’
‘Did you or did you not get a cut of Crosbie Wells’s fortune?’
‘Well—unofficially—’
Mannering swore. ‘And you were just sitting tight, weren’t you?’ he said. He sat back, and with a disgusted flick of his wrist, threw the end of his cigar into the fire. ‘Until the widow showed up, and you got backed in a corner. And now you’re showing your cards—and making it look like charity! Well, I’ll be d—ned, Charlie. I’ll be God-d—ned.’
Frost had a wounded look. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s not the reason. I only put the pieces together this morning. Truly I did. Tom Balfour came by the bank with this cock-and-bull story about Francis Carver, and asked me to look up his shares profile, and I found out—’
‘What?’
‘—that Carver had taken out shares against Aurora, soon after Mr. Staines purchased it. I didn’t know about that before this morning.’
‘What’s that about Tom Balfour?’
‘And when Mr. Balfour left I looked up the Aurora’s records, and I noticed that Aurora’s profits started to fall away right around the time that Carver took out his shares, and that’s when I remembered about the name in the smelting, and put it all together. Truly.’
Mannering raised his voice. ‘What’s Tom Balfour wanting with Francis Carver?’
‘He’s wanting to bring him to the law,’ Frost said.
‘On what account?’
‘He said that Carver lifted a fortune from another man’s claim, or something to that tune. But he was cagey about it, and he began with a lie.’
‘Hm,’ said the magnate.
‘I brought the matter to you directly,’ Frost went on, still hoping for praise. ‘I left the bank early, to come to you directly. As soon as I put all the pieces together.’
‘All the pieces!’ Mannering exclaimed. ‘You haven’t got all the pieces, Charlie. You don’t know what half the pieces look like.’
Frost was offended. ‘What does that mean?’
But Mannering did not reply. ‘Johnny Quee,’ he said. ‘Johnny bloody Quee.’ He stood up so suddenly that the chair fell away behind him and struck the wall; the collie-dog leaped to her feet, overjoyed, and began to pant.
‘Who?’ said Charlie Frost, before he remembered: Quee was the name of the digger who worked the Aurora. His name had been written on the record at the bank.
‘My Chinese problem—and now yours too, I’m afraid,’ said Mannering, darkly. ‘Are you with me, Charlie, or against me?’
Frost looked down at his cigar. ‘With you, of course. I don’t see why you have to ask questions like that.’
Mannering went to the back of the room. He opened a cabinet to reveal two carbines, sundry pistols, and an enormous belt that sported two buckskin holsters and a leather fringe. He began buckling this rather absurd accessory about his ample waist. ‘You ought to be armed—or are y
ou already?’
Frost coloured slightly. He leaned forward and crushed out his cigar—taking his time about it, stabbing the blunt end three times against the dish, and then again, grinding the ash to a fine black dust.
Mannering stamped his foot. ‘Hi there! Are you armed, or are you not?’
‘I am not,’ said Frost, dropping the cigar butt at last. ‘To be perfectly honest with you, Dick, I have never fired a gun.’
‘Nothing to it,’ said Mannering. ‘Easy as breathing.’ He returned to the cabinet, selecting two smart percussion revolvers from the rack.
Frost was watching him. ‘I should be a very poor second,’ he said presently, trying to keep his voice calm, ‘if I do not know the subject of your quarrel, and I do not have the means to end it.’
‘Never mind—never mind,’ said Mannering, inspecting his revolvers. ‘I was going to say I’ve got a Colt Army you could use, but now that I think of it … it takes a bloody age to load, and you don’t want to bother with shot and powder. Not in this rain. Not if you haven’t done it before. We’ll make do. We’ll make do.’
Frost looked at Mannering’s belt.
‘Outrageous, isn’t it?’ said Mannering, without smiling. He thrust the revolvers into his holsters, crossed the room to the coat-rack, and detached his greatcoat from its wooden hanger. ‘Don’t worry; see, when I put my coat on, and button it up, nobody will be any the wiser. I tell you, my blood is boiling, Charlie. That rotten chink! My blood is boiling.’
‘I have no idea why,’ said Frost.
‘He knows why,’ said Mannering.
‘Stop a moment,’ said Frost. ‘Just let me—just tell me this. What is it exactly that you’re planning?’
‘We’re going to give a Chinaman a scare,’ said the magnate, thrusting his arms into his coat.
‘What kind of a scare?’ said Frost—who had registered the plural pronoun with trepidation. ‘And on what score?’
‘This Chinaman works the Aurora,’ said Mannering. ‘This is his work, Charlie: the smelting you’re talking about.’
‘But what’s your grievance with him?’
‘Less of a grievance; more of a grudge.’