Crimson Rose (27 page)

‘And from what I hear from Will Shaxsper, you’re very handy with a lead cosh.’

‘Lucky strike.’ Windlass shrugged.

‘Perhaps.’ Marlowe sank back into his chair. ‘But there’s nothing lucky about deflecting the High Constable, is there?’

‘No.’ Windlass was shaking his head. ‘No, you’ve lost me.’

‘He was at the Rose,’ Marlowe reminded him, ‘on his way, I suspect, to arrest me. Until you had a word. Then he left. I know he’d seen me, so what could you have said that made him leave? “No, High Constable, that fellow over there just
looks
like Kit Marlowe.” Or “Don’t bother him now, sir, he’s a little busy.” Perhaps it was “But my master is such a nice man, sir,
and
a genius. Let him off just this once. Ah, go on!” None of this sounds quite right, does it, Jack? And as I said, it was all too pat – you being a masterless man at the very time I was looking for a servant and you bumping into me in Paternoster Row that day. So.’ He folded his arms. ‘Time for the truth, I think.’

Windlass knew when the game was up. He pulled the badge from his doublet and flicked it to reveal the coat of arms on the back. Marlowe nodded. ‘Burghley,’ he said, grimly. ‘What is it that you do, exactly? Apart from shin of beef, that is?’

‘Whatever’s needed, Master Marlowe,’ Windlass said, sitting opposite him. ‘I am paid to watch your back.’

‘Gratifying,’ said Marlowe, ‘if unnecessary.’

‘Ah.’ Windlass wagged a finger at him. ‘That’s what they all say. John Winthrop said something similar before the Dons got him. And of course, Hector Moncrieff dispensed with my services the day before they found what was left of him in Damnation Alley. And I don’t want to think about Peter Hopton …’

‘If this is a list of your previous “gentlemen”, Windlass, it’s not exactly impressing me. If I remember you had a character from a Henry Goring.’

‘Also known as Nicholas Faunt.’ Windlass smiled. ‘And please note that disasters only befell my gentlemen when I was variously unavailable. As long as I’m around …’

‘As long as you’re around,’ Marlowe interrupted, ‘you may as well help me dispense with this bottle of claret and talk me through a murder or two.’

Windlass smiled and wrestled with the bung before pouring the burgundy liquid into goblets. ‘I don’t usually do murders, sir,’ he said.

‘Glad to hear it. Indulge me, however. Eleanor Merchant. Where did she die?’

‘At the Rose, sir.’

Marlowe nodded. ‘Shot – and not by accident – by a temporary replacement among the orchestra. We can rule out Shaxsper. Our killer had to be someone who knew
Tamburlaine
well enough to know there was an execution scene involving guns.’

‘Someone with a theatrical bent?’ Windlass hazarded.

‘Don’t get me started,’ Marlowe muttered. ‘Yes, it could have been any member of the cast, although most of them were on stage at the time and highly visible. Backstage crew? Possibly. The truth is that all plays are read in advance – censored, if you will – by the Master of Revels.’

‘Sir Edmund Tilney,’ Windlass enthused. ‘I always had him down as a wrong ’un.’

‘Then there are the compositors and printers.’

‘Sneaky lot. Those apprentices aren’t called Devils for nothing.’ Windlass nodded. Marlowe was starting to list half of London.

‘And of course, a lot of them go upstairs.’

‘Upstairs, sir?’

‘To Walsingham, even Burghley himself, looking for anything Papist, blasphemous, unpatriotic. Everybody has servants – saving your presence, Jack – who have friends, wives, sweethearts. It’s quite conceivable rather a lot of people knew there were guns in
Tamburlaine.
Will was just a convenient idiot.’ He looked at Windlass. ‘But since it turns out we’re in the same business you and I, safety-of-the-realm-wise, what do we know about Eleanor?’

‘She ran a safe house,’ Windlass said. ‘In Blackfriars.’

‘A safe house where the disaffected paid visits, men of dubious reputation, men on the run, double agents … Men perhaps with murder in their hearts.’

‘So we are looking for a Catholic spy,’ Windlass reasoned. ‘One of the Mission, perhaps, a Jesuit?’

‘Perhaps,’ Marlowe nodded. ‘But then there’s God’s Word Garrett. What links has he with the safe house?’

‘But he
was
a Puritan,’ Windlass said, rubbing his finger absentmindedly around the rim of his goblet. ‘A Jesuit might well have him in his sights too.’

Marlowe shook his head. ‘No, if that were the case, why not get a few more of them? Send one of William Waad’s bristle bombs to St Olave’s and bring the roof down? No, John Garrett died for another reason.’

‘This was the Bear Garden, wasn’t it?’ Windlass was thinking aloud. ‘Down from the Rose.’

Marlowe nodded, knowing the way this was going. ‘So we’re back to the theatre.’

‘Stands to reason.’ Windlass shrugged.

‘Nicholas Faunt points to the neatness of the killings,’ Marlowe said. ‘A single shot for Eleanor. A clean stab for God’s Word.’

‘What’s his point?’ Windlass asked.

‘He was ruling out street crime,’ Marlowe told him. ‘The daily casual violence in this great city of ours.’

‘Oh, that,’ Windlass snorted. It was something both men lived with.

‘But then,’ Marlowe poured himself another drink, ‘he wasn’t including Simon Bancroft in that.’

‘Who?’

‘A tobacconist found in the river with his head caved in.’

‘Yes.’ Windlass nodded. ‘That’s more casual.’

‘His cousin is a backer at the Rose,’ Marlowe said.

‘So it
is
about the theatre!’ Windlass looked triumphant.

‘No, Jack.’ Marlowe shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. What do a tobacconist, the runner of a safe house and a Puritan have in common?’

Windlass had heard jokes like this before, except that he knew there was nothing funny about this one. He shrugged.

‘Money,’ Marlowe said. ‘Think about it. The tobacco trade is doing well, but not well enough to enable a man to buy an extremely costly gun, almost one of a kind. Your master, Burghley, pays a tolerable salary to the keeper of a safe house, but not enough for her to buy a unique jug of solid silver that even the Queen’s Magus is afraid of. And as for the Puritan who should care nothing for the riches of the world, why does he have a chest of gold that could buy an entire Terra Incognita. No, Jack,
that’s
what this is all about. Too much money.’

The Bancrofts’ tobacco warehouse at Three Crane’s Wharf was easy to find. The family name was proudly emblazoned across the front, which was certainly one clue. But the other was a row of men standing outside by the loading bay doors, smoking pipes of tobacco, in the concentrated way of those who wanted – no,
needed
– to drink some smoke and only had five minutes in which to do it. As Marlowe approached, he saw them all knock out the embers on the soles of their shoes and solemnly troop back inside, leaving just some crawling sparks in the ash and the whiff of the weed in the air.

Marlowe followed them inside to find that they had all gone back to their tasks of weighing out damp wedges of the packed leaves on to squares of sacking, which they then folded into a tight package with practised hands and closed with a few stitches of coarse linen thread, which also attached a label. They then turned over a piece of thin paper from a pile and impaled it on a wicked-looking spike, set into a block of wood on each desk. There was no talking, just the thick silence of men helping someone else make a lot of money. Marlowe hovered in the doorway for a moment, not certain which of the men, if any, was in charge, but he was saved from disturbing one of them by a familiar voice calling his name.

‘Master Marlowe!’ He turned to see Thaddeus Bancroft clattering down some stairs precariously attached to the far wall. On a gallery above the stacked bales of tobacco, there was a walled-in area, positioned so as to command a view across the open space of the warehouse. ‘Come on up.’ He gestured to the stairs. ‘I assume you want to speak to me, rather than simply buy some tobacco in bulk?’ He smiled and Marlowe remembered that, unless the man’s inamorata had told him, he knew nothing of the little contretemps back at his house, although he could scarcely have missed the drama of the plummeting workman. Marlowe crossed the floor of the tobacco store and followed him up the stairs.

On the gallery was a snug room which had clearly grown as the business had grown. The basic structure was of rough wood, cut to length and closed in with what, on closer examination, were sections of the packaging in which the huge tobacco blocks arrived, simply stretched and nailed over the carcase. But inside this box was a chair, carved and embellished with stylized tobacco leaves and softened with two enormous pillows, indented though they were by the shape of the man who spent most of the day sitting there, engrossed in the ledger open on the desk in front of it. Bancroft had the slightly cross-eyed air of a bookkeeper who had been too long at his books and he flopped back into the cushions, moulded to another body altogether, waving Marlowe into another, less well-used chair, with relief.

‘I have been trying to run my business and Simon’s from our different warehouses since he … since he died,’ he said. ‘I decided yesterday to move everything into this one, as he has a rather better working space than my own.’ He glanced around. ‘I am going through his books,’ he added.

‘I rather thought that you shared a warehouse,’ Marlowe said. After all, he thought, they seemed to share everything else.

‘No, dear me, no,’ Bancroft said. ‘Our businesses are side by side, as you see, but Simon had gone down a rather different path.
I
simply import the tobacco and then sell it on almost as it arrives in my warehouse, to certain people throughout the country. My profits are lower –’ he tapped the ledger – ‘and as it turns out, considerably lower, than Simon’s, but I only need two men to help me, so my overheads are lower also. The rest is down to factors and packhorses – not my problem. Simon sells – sold – his tobacco in smaller amounts, mainly to men who sell it in their ale houses or even just by the roadside, to anyone who wants a fill of a pipe. With every transaction a little is added, of course. Simon was able to charge more, but he had more men to pay, I suppose, so it all evens out in the end. But, even with his extra income, I am finding it hard to work out how he was so
rich
. The stock here is not so much greater than mine, he had no more ships than I do and yet …’ He looked up, hopefully. ‘Do you understand finance, Master Marlowe? Along with your many other talents?’

‘Master Bancroft,’ Marlowe said, regretfully, ‘I understand what money does to a man, to what crimes it can drive him. But sadly, although I can sum a line of numbers, I don’t understand how one man can make more than another, doing the same thing. Unless …’

Bancroft looked at him, one eyebrow raised. ‘Unless that man is involved in something underhand,’ he completed the sentence. ‘Something criminal, even.’

Marlowe shrugged. ‘You knew your cousin, Master Bancroft, where I did not. Do
you
think he was involved in something underhand?’

‘My cousin was a meticulous bookkeeper,’ Bancroft said, with the air of someone embarking on a lecture. ‘As you saw, he wrote down even the smallest transaction and Mary – his widow, as I am sure you remember –’ Marlowe was not likely to forget, but Thaddeus Bancroft didn’t know that – ‘Mary often said that he would stay up all night worrying over a ledger if there was so much as a ha’penny unaccounted for. So, I have gone over every page of this ledger to find where his extra income – and I believe it to be quite substantial, Master Marlowe – came from.’ He twiddled the goose feather between his finger and thumb. ‘I need to know, because Mary has become rather used to that kind of life. I don’t want her to have to go back to how she lived before.’

‘Which was?’ Marlowe had seen the light of the professional whore in the woman’s face before she had fled.

‘I believe … I believe Simon met her when he was employing her services. I see no reason to hide that fact, Master Marlowe. She is a dear, good woman who had fallen into a life of sin. It could happen to anyone.’

Perhaps not anyone, exactly, Marlowe thought, but he got the general gist. Without wishing to be rude, he felt he had to add a comment. ‘This would be a while ago, though, surely. Mary is not …’

‘Not in the first flush of youth, perhaps not, no. She and Simon had been married for ten years or more when he … when he died. But it is only in the last few years that his fortunes have been on the rise. However, I digress. My main worry is that I simply can’t find where his money has been coming from.’ He dropped the quill and massaged his temples, leaving inky thumb prints on his jaw.

‘Might there not be another ledger, a private one?’ Marlowe asked him.

‘That occurred to me,’ Bancroft said. ‘I have searched the house from top to bottom. All I could find was his household ledger and that balances to the last farthing. I even went so far as to check the food in the pantry – the cook was livid and threatened to give notice. But everything that was there was in the ledger.’

‘And you’ve searched here, of course,’ Marlowe prompted. The room would not offer much of a challenge. It was so small that the desk and chair almost filled it and the ledgers on the single shelf had not been touched for years, if the dust and cobwebs were anything to go by.

‘Not yet,’ Bancroft said. ‘I thought I would go through the ledger first.’

‘And therein lies the main difference between us,’ Marlowe said with a smile. ‘You are a man for adding columns. I am a man for turning out drawers. Let’s put our talents together. I will search and you can go through anything I find. Does that seem to be a good plan?’

Bancroft nodded and smiled his diffident smile. ‘That seems like a very good plan,’ he said. ‘Where do you want to start?’

Marlowe had not been wasting his time whilst Bancroft had been sharing his innermost thoughts, which he seemed to do without too much persuasion. Master Topcliffe’s talents would be wasted on this man; he would have told all before the pincers were even warm. He had already decided that the old ledgers on the shelf were not likely to yield much information. The desk was very simple, with just one drawer. It didn’t seem to fit very well, which was rather at odds with the carving on the legs, which suggested expense. ‘Let’s start in the desk drawer,’ he suggested and Bancroft pushed the chair back and pulled the drawer open. For such a relatively large space, there was very little in it, just some goose feathers and a penknife, against the day when a new quill needed to be fashioned.