Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (14 page)

 
          
 
"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 far more 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 it 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 the
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 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 fmd out the whereabouts 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
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.

 
          
 
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.