Chords and Discords (18 page)

His casual tone in referring to such a large sum of money took my breath away.

“You do not buy a ticket yourself?” he asked.

I felt the few coins in my pocket wryly; I could not afford even one ticket. “I trust Bairstowe will pay me, not the other way around.”

I left Heron waiting for the boy to finish with the other gentlemen, and went in search of Bairstowe. I chased his trail through coffee houses and taverns, through chandlers’ shops and
into the printing office and out again, and finally ran him to ground on the Key, looking over a stock of Baltic timber, newly unloaded.

His clothes were grubby and creased, his shoulders slumped. He did not see me at first and when he did look up there was no recognition in his eyes. I addressed him by name, and only at the
third time did he say heavily: “Patterson. Yes. Patterson.”

I drew him aside, nodding apologetically at the timber merchant, and pushed him down on to one of the timber baulks. We sat looking across the river. Seagulls wheeled over the moored keels, a
faint twist of smoke trailed upstream. Looking downriver towards the coast, I saw a murky haze gathering over the salt works at Shields.

“I know why you’re here,” Bairstowe said, at last.

“Your wife was attacked.”

“It was meant for me.”

In the darkness, an attacker might just have confused the two. But I knew that was not what had happened. I intended to question Mrs Bairstowe again in the light of Hugh’s revelations but
not quite yet. She would simply deny my accusations and stick to her own account of what had happened; I needed more evidence before confronting her.

“It’s my turn next,” Bairstowe said, dully.

God, he was in a self-pitying mood. I reminded myself of the thirty guineas. “Where were you last night?”

Again, I had to repeat the question before he answered. He had indeed been with a woman although he grew coy when I pressed him for a name. Was the lady more respectable than I had thought? I
began to wonder if Mrs Bairstowe might have set the spirits on him as punishment for a wandering eye.

But simple jealousy could not explain this affair. It could not explain the attack on Mrs Bairstowe last night, or that charade brother and sister had played out for my benefit. Perhaps Mrs
Bairstowe had a lover. They had met, argued and he had hit her. She didn’t want to reveal his name, out of love, and Holloway was helping her to conceal the affair. No, I could not envisage
Mrs Bairstowe swooning with passion.

Bairstowe started to shake. “It’s me next,” he said again. A pair of merchants strolled past behind us, discussing the latest taxes; a seagull pecked at the remains of a gutted
fish. I was afraid that if I questioned Bairstowe too closely he would break down completely, so I hunted round for an unexceptional topic of conversation to calm him.

“Your brother – ”

“Edward?” And then he was off, the words tumbling out of him so quickly I could hardly catch half of it, as if his fear and anguish had to find some outlet, no matter how
trivial.

He told the story of his childhood and he told it, as I had anticipated, from the opposite perspective to his brother. Edward had called him a spoiled, indulged child who had never had to do any
work; William said he had never been allowed to do anything, that his father had not trusted him with any responsibility.

And, of course, Edward had never done a day’s toil. He had spent money like water, had never done the accounts, had wined and dined the gentlemen customers, and whored with them, and left
William all the hard labour, the searching out of supplies, the buying and selling. I thanked God that none of my baby brothers and sisters had survived, if this was what siblings came to.

Bairstowe caught hold of my sleeve, gripped so hard that I feared the cloth would tear.

“What is the point?” he said.

“Of what?”

“Of living? There’s nothing but labour and misery, from childhood to grave. Nothing but wretchedness and persecution. The spirits are after me, Patterson. And there’s no point
in dying,” he added, bitterly. “I’d kill myself like Edward did, except there’d still be misery. Just a tiny stone to be trodden on and pissed on and laughed at.
What’s the point of dying?”

Tears glistened in his eyes.

“What’s the point in looking for meaning?” I responded, after a moment. “We’re here. We can’t do anything about it. And that being so, we might as well be
happy as not.”

Bairstowe sneered with a touch of his old insolence. “That’s easy for you. You’ve got money and friends, a rich patron. What chance have I got? Nothing.”

He pushed himself clumsily to his feet. “I’ll you what I am going to do. I’m going to give you three days.”

“Three days?” I echoed blankly.

“Find me the fellow who’s threatening me before the end of the week, and I’ll pay you your thirty guineas. But if you can’t, I’ll take the money and go off to
London. And I’ll spend every last penny I have, on whoring and gaming and drinking and any other pleasure I can think on, and to hell with the rest of the world and what happens afterwards.
And especially to hell with my wife!”

And he turned sharply away, stumbling as he tried to stride off.

I watched him go, torn between the irritation that always possessed me after my dealings with him, and a reluctant pity. What was this obsession with London? Holloway, Mrs Bairstowe, then her
husband. It had the air of an old argument between them. They would find the city a sad disappointment if ever they got there. And the fifty guineas Bairstowe would receive for the organ, which
seemed so much here in Newcastle, would hardly last a month there.

William Bairstowe had decided against suicide, but he was still in a self-destructive mood. I had an unpleasant feeling that, unless I was very careful, he would drag me down with him.

Three days. What could I do in three days?

“You’ve come about this business of Bairstowe’s.” Armstrong looked at me over the top of his wine glass, lines wrinkling his forehead in a hint of a
smile.

I had half-expected to meet Mrs Jerdoun at lawyer Armstrong’s office – I recalled her telling me she had a meeting with him. But she must have finished her business and gone, for
when I sent my name in to Armstrong he agreed to see me at once.

He was a tall, lanky individual with the ungainly gait of a boy, which sat oddly with the face of a middle-aged man. His room was a miracle of papers; books and boxes on a multitude of shelves
were neatly ordered and labelled with not a speck of dust anywhere. In the middle of all this, he sat at a table that seemed too small for him, a bottle of wine and two glasses before him.
“Claret, Mr Patterson?” He was already pouring. “I’m glad of your company, sir. Legal work is more paper than people, I regret to say.”

I sat in the chair opposite him and sipped my claret. It was of a quality I had previously sampled only at Claudius Heron’s house and no doubt extremely expensive.

I answered his first question. “Which Bairstowe do you mean, Mr Armstrong – William or Edward?”

He nodded slowly, as if in compliment. “I agree with you, Mr Patterson. The matters are connected.”

It was rumoured that Armstrong knew the business of the entire town and I was quite prepared to believe, from his expression, that he knew everything I had already discovered. I cast an uneasy
glance around for a spirit, the most likely informant; if Armstrong had such a spirit, however, it was not in this room.

“I hoped for information, sir,” I said. “If, however, you cannot give me it – for reasons of confidence and so on – I would rather you told me at once and saved us
both time.”

He considered me. “There may indeed be one or two private matters I cannot divulge but I suspect there is much information that does not come into that category. May I first say, sir, how
impressed I was with your conduct of that matter several months ago.”

He had thrown me off balance again. Armstrong waved away my protests. “Nothing to know, you say? That is precisely my point. You dealt with the matter and most of the town is ignorant of
anything untoward having occurred. Most impressive. May I also say that I was most surprised that the gentlemen directors of the concerts did not give you a benefit?”

I hesitated over that. There was a significance in his voice that told me he meant the comment as more than mere politeness. Armstrong is no fool; he knows that a benefit concert can supply a
musician with enough income to last a year. As, I suspected, he knew that William Bairstowe had offered me a large sum to find the man threatening him.

“Now,” Armstrong said, “Edward Bairstowe first. We’ll come to William later. I presided over the inquest on Edward, you know.”

“I wondered if you had, sir.” Armstrong is one of the two coroners for this town.

He got up, unfolding his long legs from the ludicrously small table, and mused over the shelves behind him. Drawing down a box, he lifted some papers out of it, and folded himself back under the
table. He read through the papers carefully, murmuring to himself.

“Now, Mr Patterson,” he said, looking up, “I think we may proceed best if you tell me how you understand Edward Bairstowe’s death to have occurred, and I will inform you
if your account differs from that discovered at the inquest.”

It was, I found, a very good exercise. Making a concise statement of the facts required careful thought, and cleared my mind. I recounted what Edward had himself told me, detailed the
Courant’
s account and finished with Thomas Saint’s comments.

“There are,” I said, “a number of points to consider. The first is the matter of the knife. At the inquest, both William Bairstowe and his wife said that Edward snatched it up
before leaving the house. Yet when William first talked to Bedwalters about it, he said that his wife had taken it with her.”

“That, I think, is easily dealt with,” Armstrong said. “The postboy was on his way to his lodgings after having been delayed, and gave evidence that he saw Edward Bairstowe at
the foot of the Side with the knife in his hand, and his sister and brother hurrying after him.”

“Why then did William Bairstowe lie when he spoke to Bedwalters?”

“He said later that he had simply been mistaken. The agitation of the moment and the dreadful distress of the unhappy outcome confused him. Not an unreasonable supposition, I think. What
were your other matters?”

“The death itself. It was plainly suicide. The spirit is anchored to a single stone.”

“And railing against his fate, no doubt,” Armstrong said with a chuckle.

“Endlessly,” I said. “But I cannot fathom the state of his mind at the time of his death. He snatched up a knife from the kitchen – ”

“ To cut his throat.”

“Then why did he not do so at once? Why rush out on to the street?”

Yes, this was a most useful exercise; I had been thinking all these things yet not acknowledging to myself how important they might be.

For the first time, Armstrong looked uncertain. “Perhaps he had changed his mind. Perhaps he hated the thought of the pain, and believed throwing himself from the bridge would hurt
less.”

“Then why take the knife with him?”

Armstrong began to show signs of enjoying himself. “He forgot he held it,” he speculated. “Or he feared that his brother would overwhelm him before he could get to the bridge.
Edward was a slighter man than William.”

That theory I could accept. I could imagine Edward Bairstowe brandishing the knife and threatening to use it if they came near him. “So he rushed down to the bridge, climbed up on to the
parapet and threatened to throw himself into the river.”

“Indeed.”

“How did he climb up on to the parapet with a knife in his hand?”

Armstrong started to speak, changed his mind. “Ah,” he said.

“Indeed, I’m not sure how he could pull himself up on to the parapet at all, even with the use of two hands.” I tried to picture the scene. “ To clamber over the parapet
is one thing, to stand on it quite another, particularly for any length of time. It is very narrow, and just at the point where Edward must have stood there is nothing to hold on to.”

Armstrong perused the papers again with pursed lips. “I have been most remarkably remiss. You have a very practical mind, Mr Patterson.”

I was in my stride now. I did not know precisely how Edward’s death related to his brother’s present predicament but I sensed it must do. Perhaps both brothers had been the victim of
one malevolent attacker? “Let us suppose Edward did climb up on to the parapet. According to all the accounts, his brother persuaded him to abandon his scheme and climb down.”

“With the knife in his hand,” Armstrong murmured.

“Edward says that the ground was slippery.”

“The first sleet of the year.”

“He says he lost his balance and fell forward on to the knife. But in that case, his death must surely have been accidental. Yet the confinement of the spirit tells us otherwise. For the
spirit to be anchored to the stone, there must have been some element of intention in his death. And that is not explained by any of the accounts. If William had indeed just persuaded Edward not to
jump, why should he set his feet on solid ground and immediately cut his throat?”

“He was – ” Armstrong paused, and chose his words carefully. “An unstable man. One never knew what he would do next. I had dealings with him over various business matters
and could never predict how he would react. He was capable of great vindictiveness.” He chuckled dryly. “He and his sister-in-law were a matched pair.”

“Perhaps that’s why they hated each other.”

He stretched against the confines of the small desk. “Oh, that is relatively new. There was a time when they were thick as thieves. Kindred spirits. She would excuse him anything, tell you
he was only a lad. A lad! He was a mere year younger than she – both of them in their forties when she married William.”