Dark Waters (7 page)

His tongue had loosened itself up, as if its very use made it freer.

‘Hear what?' Fidelis persisted.

‘Talking. Antony were talking. So that's why it's wrong, I'm saying. By the talking, I could tell there was someone with him.'

‘Did you see this other person that he was talking to?'

Middleton widened his eyes and shook his head.

‘Happen there was someone in the shadows, or in the trees. There must've been, if he were talking.'

‘And what was he saying?'

‘That I don't know, sir. I heard the voice coming and going, but missed the words in the water's noise and the wind. See, the wind were first class right there for finding eels on north bank. So I were just pulling in one of my traps when Antony came in my sight, and he were talking. I heard the sound of his voice.'

‘What did his voice sound like?'

‘It sounded vexed.'

‘Like a lot of complaining…?'

‘Yes, that'll do. And here's another word: peevish.'

‘And what time was this?'

‘High tide, like I said.'

‘But when by the clock?'

‘Maybe midnight, or a little after.'

‘And did you see Antony subsequently go into the water?'

‘I did not. The eels were in the traps so I were busy for the next five minutes. When I looked again there were no sign of Antony. No sign of anybody.'

‘You heard no cry or splash or other activity?'

‘There are always splashes. Moorhens and such. And, as I said, the wind were blowing the sounds away.'

‘Did you hear anything else?'

‘I thought I did, Mr Cragg. Laughing, it might have been. Very faint it were, and happen I were wrong and it were a duck. I thought no more of it till now.'

‘Why didn't you come forward and tell the inquest all this?' I demanded.

He touched his bifurcated mouth with his fingertips.

‘With this, Mr Cragg, people don't believe what I say. It makes me, as they think, a double talker at the best, and a liar at the worst. So I can't ever be a witness, not in a court of law. I'll not be believed.'

*   *   *

‘This changes things, Titus,' said Fidelis after we had left Dick Middleton and begun again to walk up the steep incline towards town. ‘We must think again.'

But I had been less impressed than he by the fisherman's tale.

‘Must we? I don't think what he said helps us towards the truth.'

‘Surely you don't believe this nonsense about his harelip?'

‘No, no. I don't think he's a liar, far from it. He is intelligent, though his tongue can't keep pace with his brain. But on this matter, I think, he must be mistaken. I don't think there
was
anyone else there. He said himself he saw no one.'

‘I am not disputing that. Let's leave that to one side.'

‘Then what is your point? I am not reopening the inquest just because a fisherman thirty yards away in the dark heard a few ducks and a drunken man doing what drunks do – talking to himself.'

‘It isn't about whether or not he was talking to himself. It's about the wind.'

‘The wind?'

‘Yes. You heard Dick state that the conditions were best for finding eel on the north side of the river.'

‘Yes, though I don't quite understand what he meant by that.'

‘The ideal spot to set your traps is on the lee shore when the tide is high.'

‘Is that the case? I didn't know that you were an eel fisher.'

‘As a boy. But then there was something else, even more directly bearing on the matter. He said he could hear the voice coming across the water, but he missed the words because of the noise of the water, and the wind blowing them away from him. These reports taken together strongly support my idea that the wind was blowing from the north.'

‘And what is the import of that?'

Luke clicked his tongue, exasperated at the snail pace of my thinking.

‘It was blowing from Dick on one bank towards Antony on the other, Titus.'

I still did not grasp it. Now Luke, as he sometimes did when I could not absorb what was obvious to him, spoke slowly, as to a recalcitrant pupil.

‘We have been blaming the wind, have we not? We have proceeded on the basis that Antony's hat was blown from his head and towards the river, precipitating a desperate attempt by him to catch it, followed by his fatal slip into the water. But if the wind was blowing from in front of him, if it was a northerly, as John Middleton's statement implies that it was, the sequence of events I have described could not have happened. If the wind blew his hat off his head at all, it must have done so away from the river, not towards it. The wind, I submit to you, is wholly innocent of this crime.'

I considered the argument.

‘That is pretty, but I have an objection. If the hat wasn't wind blown, how did it get into the bush overhanging the water?'

Fidelis turned and punched me lightly on the shoulder.

‘That's not an objection, Titus! That's the question we must ask. How do you think it did?'

‘It would have to be some person that threw it there.'

‘Yes, and perhaps that person was the one Dick Middleton heard Antony being angry with.'

I sighed.

‘I suppose it may be so, Luke. But isn't it more likely that Antony threw it there himself? This doesn't change anything, in my judgement. No other person was seen. There is no proper evidence that such another person was there. And overtopping all that there is the problem of Dick Middleton as a witness. Even if you and I, and every other educated person in town, thinks that a man with a harelip can indeed be a credible witness, the people of Preston as a whole will still doubt him.'

‘Damned superstitions.'

‘That sounds rich in your mouth, Luke. Don't you yourself believe in angels, and Hail Marys, and Christ's body in a little piece of round bread?'

Fidelis perceptibly stiffened at my jibe.

‘You are being unworthy there, Titus. Those are matters of religion; of faith, not reason. And, may I remind you that it's your wife's faith, as well as mine?'

In this he was perfectly right. Elizabeth, like my friend, was a papist. His reference to this made me regret my sally against the Church of Rome, though not the thinking behind it.

‘Well, I am sorry, but I am not going to reopen the inquest. The only reason to do so is the testimony of Dick Middleton and he swears he won't testify. So we must let poor Antony rest there.'

*   *   *

Yet I found myself for the remainder of the day dwelling on what the eel fisherman had told us, and feeling annoyed that it might overthrow our convenient theory that the wind had blown Antony's hat towards the water, and caused its owner, in chasing it, to bank-slide into the river.

My mother-in-law would be having a bed in our house for a second night in succession, as her brother's funeral was the next day. Her being there meant I had no chance, all evening, to talk with Elizabeth about Dick Middleton's story. Instead I fretted about it in my own head until after supper (the salmon at last, roasted with herbs) when I dived into my library, and took down Izaak Walton's hymn and vade mecum to an activity that I am insufficiently contemplative to take up myself –
The Compleat Angler.

Walton I found is an author riddled with contradiction. Angling is like poetry, he says in one place, and best practised by men ‘
born to the task'.
But I turned a few pages and found him arguing that ‘
as no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler
'. Angling must then be learned, after all. Oh no, declared our riverside friend at yet another juncture. Angling is ‘
so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned
'. I soon concluded that like every man ruled by one passion, Walton's confusion came from seeing his mania reflected in everything, and in everything's opposite, all at the same time.

But I had to allow he had authority on the practice of the sport and, turning the pages as far as chapter five, I read the following injunction:

‘
Take this for a rule: that I would willingly fish standing on the lee shore.
'

I took ‘lee shore' to mean the bank away from which the wind blows. Walton tells the reader that, since wind cools water, the fish prefer the warmest water they can find: that is, where it is sheltered from the wind by the riverbank – the lee shore. If Middleton was in agreement with Walton when he specified ideal conditions for eel fishing, he must have meant that the wind at the time he was fishing from the north bank had been at his back.

If that was the case, Fidelis's contention was confirmed. The wind on the night in question was from the north and, since Antony was walking on the south bank, it could hardly have blown his hat northwards into the bush where we found it hanging over the water.

With a sigh of perplexity I returned Walton to the shelf and myself to the parlour, where Elizabeth and her mother were companionably sewing. They were discussing Antony.

‘He was always a crybaby,' my mother-in-law was saying. ‘If something he wanted was denied him, or taken from him, he would sulk and sniffle for a week.'

She was a steely woman, with a sharp nose and a decided way of expressing herself.

‘When my nephew took himself away, and then got himself killed, my brother could never leave off bemoaning his lot – a father deprived of his only son.'

‘But that is a terrible loss for anyone, Mother,' Elizabeth objected. ‘It is why Uncle drank – to forget it.'

‘No, my dear. Antony drank so that others would be forced to remember, and so feel sorry for Antony for ever and ever.'

‘Which his own death the other night put the seal on,' I suggested.

‘Yes, it did. But it cannot have been deliberate, Titus,' the dead man's sister stated firmly. ‘One may love a life of misery, you know, as much as a life of joy. And he did.'

‘Then you think my jury was right to reject suicide today?'

‘Oh, I am quite sure of that, dear Titus,' she said, bending over her stitching.

*   *   *

‘Your mother is hard on the memory of her brother,' I said to Elizabeth as we lay in bed that night.

‘She is of such a different temperament. And years ago he abandoned our religion because he hoped to be made a burgess, which she never really forgave him for.'

‘Do you think she's right about his not having killed himself?'

‘Didn't you know? My mother is always right.'

‘So, like mother, like daughter,' I laughed.

I reached for her hand and described my meeting with Dick Middleton, and the way it had destroyed my hypothesis of how her uncle's hat had found its way into the upper reaches of the waterside bush.

‘Why does it matter, about the hat?' she asked.

‘It is not just the hat, you see. The blowing away of the hat, and his chasing it, was a tidy explanation for why and how Antony slipped into the river. Now, if that doesn't hold any more, we don't know what happened. I hate to reach a verdict only to have doubts cast on it.'

‘It was surely by some misadventure, at all events.'

‘Could he have thrown the hat out over the river, I wonder, and in doing so lost his balance and slipped, while the hat blew back and lodged in the bush?'

Elizabeth took her hand from mine and, raising herself up until she was propped on one elbow, gave me a tap on the forehead with her finger.

‘Now why ever would he do that? You will become brain feverish if you do not stop carrying on about this hat.'

‘There's another thing,' I persisted. ‘Dick Middleton heard Antony loudly talking. Who to?'

‘Himself, Titus. Doubtless him
self.
Now here is a kiss. You have need for distraction, I think, or you will never sleep.'

*   *   *

Next morning I stepped out at nine to visit Miss Amelia Colley, a client of more than modest means who wanted to revise her will. The sky was grizzly, and there was a sharp, damp edge to the wind. Seeing a small crowd around the fountain at the centre of the Market Place, I strolled over to see what interested them. They were being addressed, from the steps of the fountain, by young Mr James Shuttleworth. This was one of the candidates in the election, standing in the Tory or, as some then called it, the Country Party interest.

Positioned just behind him, with four or five other supporting gentry and members of the council, was his father Richard, a dour, cunning old campaigner with a reputation for being a secret supporter of the Pretender's claim to the throne. This may not have been true, since politics have less to do with truth than with useful lies, and the elder Shuttleworth was a politician to the roots of his hair. He had represented the surrounding county of Lancashire uninterrupted as one of its two Members of Parliament for thirty-five years. He was going for the seat again this year, without opposition, alongside a new parliamentary prospect, Lord Derby's son James. In the previous election, seven years before, Richard had schemed to get his own son, his elder, to join him in Parliament as one of Preston's borough MPs, but the boy had inconveniently died of the smallpox a few weeks before the poll. Now the old crocodile's hopes were invested in his next boy, another James, who had come of age in the meantime.

James Shuttleworth was at a disadvantage, compared to his father, in that he had to fight to gain the seat, which brought his personal attributes into play. Though tall and with regular features, he possessed a reedy voice that struggled just now to make itself heard in the open air. He was talking about the Spanish war.

‘England now fights,' I could just hear him say, ‘merely in order to extort money from the Spaniard for his attacks on our shipping. Is this, I ask you, a just cause for war?'