The North Water (32 page)

He raises his eyebrows and waits.

“Stevens was shot in the back of the head.”

“By Drax?”

Sumner nods.

“And what's become of the evil bastard now?”

“I killed him.”

Baxter nods slowly and purses his lips. He closes his eyes, then opens them again.

“Shows some boldness,” he says. “For a surgeon, I mean.”

“It was one of us or the other.”

“Will you have a glass of wine with me now?” Baxter asks. “Or sit yourself down at least?”

“I'll stay as I am.”

“You did well to come here, Patrick. I can help you.”

“I didn't come here for your fucking help.”

“Then what? Not to kill me too, I hope? What would be the good of that?”

“I don't believe I was just there as a lure. You wanted me dead.”

Baxter shakes his head.

“Why would I want such a thing?”

“You had Cavendish sink the
Volunteer
, and Drax and I are the only ones who might have known or guessed it. Drax shoots me, and then Stevens shoots Drax, and everything is neat and tidy. Except it didn't work like that. It misfired.”

Baxter tilts his head to one side and gives his nose a scratch.

“That's sharp thinking on your part,” he says, “but it isn't right, not right at all. Take heed now, Patrick, listen carefully to what I'm saying. The plain fact is there are two men lying dead in that timber yard, one of them murdered by your hand. I'd say that puts you in fair need of my assistance.”

“If I tell the truth, I have little enough to fear from the law.”

Baxter snorts at the idea.

“Come, Patrick,” he says. “You're not so innocent and childlike as to believe such a far-fetched notion. I know you're not. You're a man of the world, just as I am. You can tell the magistrate your theories, of course you can, but I've known the magistrate for some years, and I wouldn't be so sure he'll believe them.”

“I'm the only one left alive from the crew, the only one who knows.”

“Aye, but who
are
you exactly? An Irishman of uncertain provenance. There would have to be investigations, Patrick, probings into your past, your time in India. Oh, you could make things uncomfortable for me, I'm sure, but I could do the same for you and much worse if I wished to. Do you want to waste your time and energies like that? And for what end? Drax is dead now and the ships are both sunk. No bugger's coming back to life again, I promise you that.”

“I could shoot you dead right here and now.”

“You certainly could, but then you would have two murders on your hands and what good would that do you? You need to use your head now, Patrick. This is your chance to put everything behind you, to start afresh. How often in life does a man get such a rare opportunity? You've done me a great service by killing Henry Drax, however it came about, and I'll happily pay you for the work. I'll give you fifty guineas in your hand tonight, and you can put that gun down and walk out of this house and never look backwards.”

Sumner doesn't move.

“There's no train until morning,” he says.

“Then take a horse from my stable. I can saddle it for you myself.”

Baxter smiles, then stands up slowly and walks across to the large iron safe standing in one corner of the study. He unlocks it, takes out a brown canvas wallet, and passes the wallet to Sumner.

“There's fifty guineas in gold for you,” he says. “Get yourself down to London. Forget the fucking
Volunteer
, forget Henry Drax. None of that is real anymore. It's the future that matters now, not the past. And don't worry about the timber yard either. I'll make up some story about that to throw them off the trail.”

Sumner looks at the wallet, weighs it in his hand for a while, but doesn't answer. He thought he knew his limits, but everything is changed now—the world is unhinged, free-floating. He knows he must act quickly, he must do
something
before it changes back again, before it hardens around and fixes him. But what?

“Are we agreed then?” Baxter says.

Sumner puts the wallet on the desk and looks towards the open safe.

“Give me the rest of it,” he says, “and I'll leave you be.”

Baxter frowns.

“The rest of what?”

“All that's in the safe there. Every fucking penny.”

Baxter smiles easily, as though taking it for a joke.

“Fifty guineas is a good amount, Patrick. But I'll happily give you twenty more on top if you truly feel the need of it.”

“I want all of it. However much is in there. Everything.”

Baxter stops smiling and stares.

“So you came here to
rob
me? Is that it?”

“I'm using my head as you advised me to. You're right, the truth won't help me now, but that pile of money surely will.”

Baxter scowls. His nostrils flare, but he makes no move towards the safe.

“I don't believe you'll murder me in my own house,” he says. “I don't believe you have the balls to do such a thing.”

Sumner points the gun at Baxter's head and cocks the hammer. Some men weaken at the death, he tells himself. Some men start out strong, then soften. But that can't be me. Not now.

“I just killed Henry Drax with a broken saw blade,” he says. “Do you really think putting a bullet in your skull is going to strain my nerves?”

Baxter's jaw tightens, and his eager eyes jerk sideways.

“A saw blade, was it?” he says.

“Get that leather satchel,” Sumner tells him, pointing with the gun. “Fill it up.”

After a minute's pause, Baxter does as he is told. Sumner checks that the safe is empty, then tells him to turn about and face the wall. He cuts the satin cordage off the curtain swag with his pocketknife, binds Baxter's hands behind his back, then pushes a napkin into his mouth and gags him with his cravat.

“Now take me to the stables,” Sumner says. “You lead the way.”

They pass along the rear hallway and then through the kitchen. Sumner unbolts the back door and they step down into the ornamental garden. There are gravel pathways and raised flower beds, a fish pond and a cast-iron fountain. He prods Baxter forwards. They pass a potting shed and a fretworked gazebo rimmed with box. When they reach the stable block, Sumner opens the side door and peers inside. There are three wooden stalls and a tack room with awls, hammers, and a workbench. There is an oil lamp on a shelf near the door. He pushes Baxter into a corner, lights the lamp, then takes a length of rope from the tack room and forms a noose with one end of it. He puts the noose around Baxter's neck, tightens it until his eyes bulge, and loops the other end of the rope over a joist. He tugs down hard until the chamois soles of Baxter's embroidered slippers are barely touching the grimy floorboards, then makes it fast to a peg on the wall. Baxter groans.

“You stay calm and quiet, and they'll find you alive in the morning,” Sumner says. “If you fret or struggle, it may not end so well.”

There are three horses in the stable—two are black, young and lively-looking, and the other is an older gray. He takes the gray out from its stall and saddles it. When it snorts and shuffles about, he rubs its neck and hums a tune until it quiets enough to take the bit. He turns down the oil lamp, then opens the main doors and waits a minute, listening and watching carefully. He hears the whine and burble of wind in the trees, the hissing of a cat, but nothing worse. The mews is empty: light seeps upwards from the sentried gas lamps into an umbrous sky. He swings the satchel onto the horse's withers and pushes his boot into the stirrup iron.

*   *   *

Dawn finds him twenty miles to the north. He passes through Driffield without pausing. At Gorton, he stops to let the horse drink from the mere, then continues in the semidarkness northwest through the beech and sycamore woods and along the dry valley floors. As the sky lightens, plowed fields appear stretched out on either side, their deep furrows specked with brighter lumps of chalk. The hedgerows are tangled and crosshatched with dead nettle, knapweed, and bramble. Close to noon he reaches the brow of the Wolds' northern scarp and descends to the patchwork plain below. When he enters the town of Pickering it is night again, the blue-black sky is dense with stars, and he is dazed and queasy from hunger and lack of sleep. He finds a livery stable for the horse and takes a room at the inn beside it. When they ask, he tells them his name is Peter Batchelor and he is on his way from York to Whitby to see his uncle, who has taken ill and may be dying.

He sleeps that night with Drax's gun gripped tight in his right hand and the leather satchel shoved beneath the iron bedstead. In the early morning, he eats porridge and kidneys for breakfast and takes a heel of bread with dripping wrapped in butcher's paper for his tea. After six or seven miles, the road north begins to rise steadily past stands of pine and roughened sheep fields. Hedgerows stutter, then disappear, grass gives way to gorse and bracken; the landscape hardens and reduces. Soon he is up on the moor. All around him, continents of dark-edged clouds dangle above a treeless unbalance of purple, brown, and green. He feels a sharp new chill in the heightened air. If Baxter sends men to look for him, he is almost sure they will not look for him here, not immediately at least—to the west perhaps or to the south in Lincolnshire but not here, not yet. He has another day or so, he expects, before the reports from Hull reach Pickering, enough time for him to arrive at the coast and find a ship that will carry him east to Holland or Germany. When he gets to Europe, he will use Baxter's money to disappear, become someone else. He will take a new name and find a new profession. Everything erstwhile will be forgotten, he tells himself; everything that has lingered on will be wiped clean.

The clouds close together and darken; a steady rain begins to fall. He meets a carter traveling south with ewes for market and they stop to talk. Sumner asks him how far to Whitby, and the carter scratches his grizzled chin and frowns as if the question is a puzzling one, then tells him he will be lucky to get there afore dark. A few miles farther on, Sumner turns off the Whitby road and cuts northwest towards Goathland and Beck Hole. The rain ceases and the sky turns a pale, summery blue. The purple heather is patchy and burned over on the slopes near the road, and farther off there are clumps of trees and bushes gathered in the wet hollows. Sumner eats his bread and beef dripping, and scoops brown, peatish water from a stream. He passes through Goathland and moves on towards Glaisdale. The moor turns briefly back to grassland edged with bracken, stitchwort, and low elder, then rises again and reverts to its tight-shorn barrenness. That night, Sumner sleeps, shivering, in a half-collapsed barn, and in the morning he remounts and continues northward.

When he gets to the edge of Guisborough, he stops at a stable, sells the horse and saddle for half their value, then picks up his bag and walks on into the town. At a newsdealer near the railway station, he buys a copy of the Newcastle
Courant
and reads it on the platform. The report of the murder and robbery in Hull occupies a half column on the second page. Patrick Sumner, an Irishman and former soldier, is named as the culprit, and there is a description of the stolen horse and mention of a large reward offered by Baxter for anyone who comes forward with useful information. He leaves the newspaper folded on the bench and boards the next train to Middlesbrough. The compartment smells of soot and hair oil; there are two women talking together and a man asleep in the far corner. He tips his hat at the women and smiles but doesn't offer to speak. He lifts the leather satchel onto his knees and feels its reassuring pressure.

That night he seeks out foreign voices. He goes along the dockside from one tavern to the next listening for them: Russian, German, Danish, Portuguese. He needs someone who is clever, he thinks, but not too clever; greedy, but not too greedy. In the Baltic Tavern on Commercial Street he finds a Swede, a captain whose brig is leaving for Hamburg in the morning with a cargo of coal and iron. He has a broad face and red eyes and hair so blond it is almost white. When Sumner tells him he needs a berth and will pay whatever is required for the privilege, the Swede looks him over skeptically, smiles, and asks how many men he has murdered.

“Only the one,” Sumner says.

“Just one? And did he deserve it?”

“I'd say he deserved it sure enough.”

The Swede laughs, then shakes his head.

“Mine is a merchant ship. I'm sorry. We have no space for passengers.”

“Then set me to work. I can pull a rope if need be.”

He shakes his head again and takes a sip of his whiskey.

“Not possible,” he says.

Sumner lights his pipe and smiles. He assumes this firmness is just a show, a way of driving up the price of his passage. He wonders for a moment if the Swede might read the Newcastle
Courant
but decides that's hardly likely.

“Who are you anyway?” the Swede asks him. “Where do you come from?”

“That doesn't matter.”

“You have a passport though, papers? They'll ask for them in Hamburg.”

Sumner takes a single sovereign from his pocket and pushes it across the tabletop.

“That's what I have,” he says.

The Swede raises his pale eyebrows and nods. The roar of drunken voices swells around them, then deflates. A door swings open, and the smoke-filled air shudders above their heads.

“So the man you killed was rich?”

“I didn't kill anyone,” Sumner says. “I was only making a joke.”

The Swede looks down at the gold coin but doesn't reach for it. Sumner leans back in his chair and waits. He knows the future is close by: he can feel its tug and sprawl, its shimmering blankness. He is standing on the very lip, poised and ready to step off.