The Body in the Thames (5 page)

Chaloner nodded his thanks as he handed back the baby and took his leave, but the information was not very helpful. Every
spy knew that ‘Mrs Riley’ was the codename used for the King during the Commonwealth – the Hectors had been having a joke
at Ibbot’s expense. Or perhaps Ibbot had just been cautious with a wife who had, after all, been willing to gossip to a stranger
who had paid her. Either way, Chaloner knew this particular line of enquiry was at an end: the Hectors were not the kind of
men to answer questions, and trying to locate ‘Mrs Riley’ would be futile.

So what had happened? Had someone hired the Hectors to snatch Hanse, perhaps in an effort to sabotage the
peace talks? Somehow, Chaloner did not believe it was coincid ence that a driver with dubious connections – now mysteriously
dead – should have been the one to drive Hanse home. Bowed down with anxiety for a man he liked, Chaloner turned homewards.

Hannah was asleep when he reached their cottage on Tothill Street, which was not surprising given that it was well past midnight.
It was unbearably hot in the bedroom, because she believed that night air caused fevers, and never slept with the windows
open. As she had lost her first husband to a sudden and inexplicable illness, Chaloner had been unable to dissuade her of
the notion.

His concern for Hanse and the stifling heat meant he slept badly in the few hours before it became light, and he found himself
reviewing again and again the last moments of the evening they had spent together. They had walked outside the Sun, and Hanse
had raised his arm to flag down the hackney that had been trundling towards them. Ibbot had smiled in a friendly fashion,
and there had been nothing about him – not even with hindsight – to suggest anything untoward. Chaloner had started to follow
Hanse into the coach, but the Dutchman had pushed him back.

‘You are tired,’ he had said firmly. ‘Go home to your new wife.’

‘Not too tired to see an old friend home,’ Chaloner had argued, trying to enter a second time.

The next shove had been rather more forceful. ‘What can happen between King Street and the Savoy? It is a journey of a few
minutes! But to take your mind off it, accept this gift – two pairs of fine Dutch stockings. The ones you wear are a little
tatty.’

Hanse
should
have been safe, Chaloner thought bitterly, as he tossed and turned. So where was he? Dead? Or were the Hectors holding him
somewhere until the peace talks foundered?

He rose as soon as it was light enough to see, donned clean clothes and left while Hannah was still asleep, unwilling to risk
another row about the long hours he was working. He wandered through the wakening city, aiming for nowhere in particular,
and had just reached King Street when he met Bulteel, who lived in nearby Old Palace Yard.

‘I
know
I am up early, but my cousin snores,’ explained Bulteel. ‘And I cannot cook while he is there, either. He tells me that baking
is an unsuitable pastime for gentlemen, and recommends dancing lessons instead. However, making cakes has a soothing effect
on me: if I am tired, unhappy or worried, then producing a tray of biscuits makes me feel so much better.’

‘Playing the viol does the same for me.’ Chaloner spoke hesitantly, unused to sharing such intimate confidences. ‘Unfortunately,
Hannah does not like me making a noise at inconvenient hours, so …’

‘So you cannot do it as often as you would like,’ finished Bulteel sympathetically. ‘There is a lot to be said for living
alone. But you once told me that all intelligencers have accommodations away from their homes, lest they are working on a
dangerous case, and do not want villains to know where they live. Why not take your viol there?’

Chaloner experienced a twinge of guilt. All spies
should
have boltholes, so as not to endanger their families, and he knew he was remiss in not finding a refuge to replace the one
he had lost in February. The fact that he had
not had a spare moment since his return from the United Provinces was a poor excuse.

‘I have a second home in Chelsey,’ said Bulteel. He smiled, revealing his brown teeth. It was a sinister expression, and went
some way to explaining why he was not popular in White Hall. ‘I use it rarely, so you may take your viol there, if you like.’

Chelsey was an attractively rural village two miles to the west. It was too far away to be practical as a regular sanctuary,
although Chaloner appreciated the offer, and thought a distant safe haven might come in useful in the future. He nodded his
thanks.

‘You have bought a new house?’ he asked, wondering how the secretary could afford it. Clarendon did not pay his people well,
and Bulteel was known for declining to supplement his income with bribes.

‘An uncle left it to me in his will. I wanted Griffith to live in it while he teaches me manners, but he insisted on staying
with me in Westminster instead. When the weather cools, perhaps you will come to see it. It is a lovely place, near the church.
You could bring Hannah, too. I suppose.’

To Chaloner’s great sorrow, his wife and friend did not like each other, and the fact that Hannah had ‘forgotten’ to invite
Bulteel to the wedding had not helped. Bulteel still had not forgiven her, while she treated him with a disdain that ran contrary
to her usually easy-going nature. Bulteel was trying to build bridges by inviting her to Chelsey, but Chaloner suspected it
would not be a good idea to accept on her behalf. There would almost certainly be trouble if he did.

‘You have not mentioned the message I sent last night,’ Bulteel said, as Chaloner struggled to think of a polite
way to decline. ‘About the missing Dutchman. Did anything come of the matter?’

Chaloner stared at him. ‘What message?’

‘Hannah probably recognised my writing and threw it away,’ said Bulteel resentfully.

‘She was asleep when I arrived home, and I left without waking her,’ said Chaloner defensively, although Bulteel’s claim was
not entirely without foundation – she had ‘mislaid’ missives before, and had been defiantly unrepentant when Chaloner had
tackled her about it. ‘She did not have the chance to pass me anything.’

Bulteel sniffed disbelievingly. ‘My note was about Hanse. Mr Kersey, down at the charnel house, has a body matching his description.’

Westminster’s mortuary was a grim building, located between a granary and a coal yard. It comprised a long, low cellar for
storing bodies, with two more pleasant rooms near the door. One of these chambers was the office in which the charnel-house
keeper collected his takings. John Kersey charged an admission fee for spectators, and also ran a small museum containing
some of the more unusual artefacts he had collected from his charges over the years. The other was a comfortable parlour in
which he explained formalities to grieving friends and families.

Despite the early hour, Kersey was at his place of work. He was a neat, dapper little man whose fine clothes and expensive
wig said he made a decent living from his grim trade. Chaloner might have suspected him of dressing himself with garments
retrieved from his wealthier corpses, but they fitted him far too well, and were obviously the work of bespoke tailors.

Soberly confiding that the hot weather meant he was much busier than usual, Kersey conducted Chaloner to the main chamber,
where the stench was enough to make a man light-headed. The place hummed with flies, and Chaloner’s stomach began to churn.
Although not a religious man, he found himself praying that the body he was about to be shown would not be Hanse’s.

‘Here,’ said Kersey, stopping next to a table that was about halfway down the room and lifting the sheet that covered it.
‘Is this him?’

Chaloner felt a great wave of sadness wash over him as he gazed at his brother-in-law, a man he had liked and respected, despite
the fact that they had met rarely since his first wife’s death twelve years before. Familial ties were important in both Dutch
and English society, and were rarely severed because someone died or remarried, so Chaloner was still kin as far as Hanse
was concerned, and vice versa.

Their paths had crossed by pure chance in White Hall the previous Wednesday, and Hanse had been so delighted that he had hauled
Chaloner immediately to the Savoy to pay his respects to Jacoba – his own wife and Aletta’s sister. Their next meeting had
been in the Westminster tavern two days later, after which Hanse had disappeared.

‘You look as though you could do with a drink,’ said Kersey gently, after some time had passed, and Chaloner had done nothing
but stare.

Wordlessly, Chaloner followed him through the mortuary to the parlour, flapping bluebottles from his face as he went. Once
there, he sat on a chair and watched Kersey pour wine into a pair of handsome crystal goblets. He usually avoided drinking
from Kersey’s cups, on the grounds that the charnel-house keeper was
in the habit of letting them be used for unpleasant procedures in the mortuary, but such considerations were a long way from
his mind that day, and he accepted without thinking. When he sipped the brew – dawn was a little early in the day for wine,
but Kersey was right in that he needed something – he was surprised by its fine quality. Clearly, Kersey was a man who knew
how to cater to his personal comforts.

Gradually, the wine settled Chaloner’s roiling innards. Seeing Hanse dead had upset him more than he would have anticipated
given the number of people he had lost in his life – to the civil wars, to sickness, and because he had chosen a dangerous
occupation. He could only suppose that meeting Hanse in London, combined with his recent visit to the States-General, had
resurrected memories and feelings about his first family that he had thought were well and truly buried.

‘Can I assume it
is
the Dutchman?’ asked Kersey, his voice intruding on Chaloner’s thoughts. ‘I need a name, you see. For my records.’

‘It is Willem Hanse,’ replied Chaloner, wishing with all his heart that it was not.

Kersey went to a desk and began writing. ‘We have Surgeon Wiseman to thank for getting him identified. He is the one who matched
the description of the missing diplomat to this corpse.’

‘Was he able to deduce how Hanse died?’

‘He said he drowned – could tell by the state of the lungs, apparently.’

Silence reigned again, broken only by the buzz of flies and the scratch of Kersey’s pen. Chaloner berated himself yet again
for not overriding his kinsman’s objections and accompanying him back to his lodgings anyway. Then
he took a deep breath and pushed such thoughts from his mind: wallowing in guilt was helping no one, and he needed to concentrate
on what
had
happened, not what might have been different.
How
had Hanse come to drown? Was it an accident? Chaloner could not see how, given that Ibbot should have taken Hanse nowhere
near the river.

Had he tossed himself in the Thames deliberately, then? Chaloner thought that was unlikely, too. Hanse had mentioned pains
in his stomach, but surely they would not have driven him to take his own life? And he had not seemed worried or in low sprits.
As always, he had done the lion’s share of the talking, chatting about good times spent in Amsterdam when Aletta had been
alive, his hopes for successful peace talks, and a book he was writing on stockings. Chaloner had raised his eyebrows at this
last subject, but Hanse had always been interested in decorative legwear.

Absently, he watched Kersey sprinkle sand on his wet ink. So if accident and suicide could be discounted, then all that was
left was murder. The conclusion came as no surprise, given Ibbot’s connection with the Hectors.

‘I heard about the man who was killed at your wedding,’ said Kersey conversationally as he wrote. His profession meant he
tended to be interested in unusual deaths. ‘Did you know him?’

‘Yes, but not well. His name was Alden, and he was a one-time Royalist spy who had fallen on hard times. I suspect he was
there to see whether he could inveigle a free meal.’

‘So he was in the wrong place at the wrong time? Someone wanted a warning delivered to one of your
guests, and pinned it on him because he happened to be sitting at the back?’

‘It looks that way.’

Kersey shook his head in disgust. ‘So who was the intended recipient of this vile communication? What did it say? “Do not
interfere”?’

Chaloner only nodded, unwilling to admit that he had failed to unravel
that
mystery, too. Most of the guests had been strangers to him, because Hannah had invited a large number of courtiers, not to
mention members of the Privy Council. Being politicians and aristocrats, many indulged in shady dealings, but – not surprisingly
– no one had been inclined to discuss them with him.

‘What about your colleagues?’ asked Kersey. ‘Fellow intelligencers? Could the message have been intended for one of them?’

Chaloner shook his head. Hannah had not invited any of those to her elegant celebrations. Besides, espionage was a dangerous
way to earn a living, and most of them were dead.

‘Are you looking into the matter?’ persisted Kersey, trying a third time to solicit a verbal reply.

Chaloner made a noncommittal gesture. Hanse’s death, along with the missing Privy Council papers, meant Alden would have to
be shelved for a while. But only for a while, he determined, because no villain was going to commit murder during
his
wedding and get away with it.

‘Well, at least there is no suggestion of foul play with Hanse,’ said Kersey, setting the lid on his inkwell. ‘He must have
fallen in the Thames. It was an accident.’

‘I disagree. He had no reason to be near the river. I think he was pushed.’

‘It is possible, I suppose,’ acknowledged Kersey, although he did not sound convinced. ‘But I hear he was fond of his wine,
and he would not be the first drunkard to topple into water.’

‘He did drink a lot,’ conceded Chaloner. ‘But he was not drunk the night he disappeared.’

Kersey regarded him curiously. ‘How do you know?’ ‘Was anything recovered with his body?’ asked Chaloner, unwilling to tell
him.