The Ebb Tide (2 page)

“And so ends the tale,” Tubby said. “Your device is lost, and two dead men to show for it.”

“One last, salient bit. Merton, you see, frequents the Bay, where he has family, and years ago St. Ives asked him to be on the lookout for anything remotely relevant to the case. Lost things turn up, you see, sometimes, along the shore, sometimes in dredgers’ nets. This is our first glimmer of hope.”

“Well,” Tubby said gloomily, “give me a kidney pie and a pint of plain over a glimmer of anything, especially if it’s buried in quicksand.” But Tubby was always a slave to his stomach, and there he was sitting beside me in the cab as we reined up in front of Merton’s, game as ever.

Merton’s Rarities, very near London Bridge, is part rare book shop, part curiosity shop, and a sort of museum of old maps and arcane paper goods, scientific debris, and collections of all sorts—insects, assembled skeletons, stuffed creatures from far and wide. Where Merton finds his wares I don’t know, although he does a brisk trade with sailors returning from distant lands. In his youth he worked in the stockroom at the British Museum, where he established a number of exotic contacts.

The shop was well lit despite the hour. Tubby and I hesitated only a moment in the entryway, spotting St. Ives and Hasbro bent over the body of poor Merton, who lay sprawled on the floor like a dead man. Roundabout the front counter there were maps and papers and books strewn about, drawers emptied. Someone had torn the place up, and brazenly, too. Merton’s forehead was bloody from a gash at the hairline, smeared by the now blood-stained sleeve of his lab coat. Hasbro was waving a vial of smelling salts beneath Merton’s nose, but apparently to no consequence, as St. Ives attempted to staunch the flow of blood.

“
Back room. Wary now
,” St. Ives told us without looking up, and Frobisher, no longer mindful of his kidney pie, plucked a shillelagh out of a hollow elephant leg nearby. He had the look of a man who was finally happy to do some useful work. I took out a leaded cane and followed him toward the rear of the shop, where we came to an arched door, beyond which there was a vestibule opening onto three large rooms: a book room, a storage room full of wooden casks and crates, and a workshop. The book room was apparently empty, although the storage room afforded a dozen hiding places. “Come on out!” I shouted, brandishing the cane at the shadow-filled room, but I was met with silence.

Then Tubby called out, “He’s bolted!” which didn’t altogether disappoint me. I found Tubby in the workshop, where a door stood open beyond a row of heavy wooden benches littered with half assembled skeletons. We looked out through the door, discovering a pleasant, walled garden with a paved central square surrounded by shrubbery. An iron, scrollwork table lay on the pavement, its feet pushed into the shrubbery along the wall, which the attacker had no doubt scaled, kicking the table backward when he boosted himself onto the copings.

We set the table up, which was very shaky, I might add, with a treacherously loose leg, and while Tubby held it steady, I climbed atop it and looked up and down the empty by-street, which dead-ended some distance up against a shuttered building. It lead away downwards towards the river, winding around in the direction, roughly speaking, of Billingsgate Market.

“Gone,” I said out loud. “No sight of him.” And I was just leaning on Tubby’s shoulder to climb back down when I saw a boy come out of an alley down across the way. He stood staring at me, as if trying to classify what species of creature I might turn out to be. To my utter surprise, he headed straight toward me, waving a hand in the air.

Chapter 2
What Happened to the Map

What’s
this
now?” I said, and Tubby, still holding steady, said, “Enlighten me,” with a good deal of irony, as if he was miffed that his only useful business was to anchor the table while I took in the view.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” the boy said, breathing heavily. “There was a man came over this wall. I seen him.”

“How long back?” I asked.

“Not ten minutes, sir. I followed him down toward the market, but lost sight of him. I thought at first he’d taken an oars downriver, but then I saw him duck into a gin shop, what they call the Goat and Cabbage.”

“Send the boy around to the
front
,” Frobisher said a little pettishly. “I’m not a damned
pi
laster.”

“Right,” I said, and was about to convey the suggestion when the lad took a mad run at the wall, sprang up, latched onto the copings, and heaved himself over, landing on his feet like a cat.

Tubby shouted and trod back in astonishment, letting go of the table, which toppled sideways, pitching me into the rock roses, thank heaven, and not onto the paving stones. It was the boy who helped me to my feet, dusting off my coat and asking was I injured, which I said I was not, although I gave Tubby a hard look for shirking his duty with the table. The boy might have been twelve or thirteen, and was in need of a haircut and a new pair of trousers a good three inches longer than the pair he wore.

“Finn Conrad, at your gentlemen’s service,” he said, holding out his hand, which I shook heartily enough. I immediately liked the look of the boy, who reminded me a little of myself at that age, but with considerably more gumption.

“Jack Owlesby,” I told him. “And this is Mr. Frobisher. They called him Pilaster Frobisher out in India, where he spent a great deal of time in the sun. If you’d just lead the way inside, Mr. Frobisher.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, young comet,” Tubby said to the boy, bowing in his portly way and shaking the offered hand before heading in through the open door “I’m speaking to an acrobat, I don’t doubt?”

“Duffy’s Circus, sir, born and bred. But I ran away two years back, after my old mother died, and I’ve been living hereabouts since, making my living in what way I can. Are these your whacking sticks?” he asked, gesturing, and we said that they were. He collected the leaded cane and shillelagh where they lay atop the workbench, surveyed the bones and skeletons as if they were pretty much what he expected to find under the circumstances, and went on into Merton’s like an old hand.

Merton wasn’t dead, thank God, but was sitting in a chair now, in that comfortable little browsing parlor he’s got at the front of the shop. He held a glass of brandy and wore a bandage round his forehead. St. Ives and Hasbro sat opposite, and Tubby and I took the two remaining chairs. Through the window I could see London Bridge. Upriver lay the Pool, the masts of the shipping just visible, and faint on the air you could hear bells and whistles and other sorts of nautical noise. “I saw his face clearly,” Merton was saying to St. Ives. “It was a broad face, nose like a fig and small eyes. Not a dwarf, mind you, but a small man. Apelike is the word for him. Quite horrible in appearance.”

“In a brown coat,” young Finn said, “begging your pardon, sir, and a watch cap. That’s the very man I was telling these gentlemen about.”

“What have we here?” St. Ives asked.

“Finn Conway, sir, at your service. I seen him come over the wall out back. ‘What’s this now?’ I asked myself. Why would a man come over a wall when there’s a door out front unless he’s up to no good?”

“Quite right,” Tubby said.

“He didn’t see me,” Finn said, “because I didn’t want him to. He headed straightaway toward the river with me following after him, and went into a gin shop in what they call Peach Alley.”

“The Goat and Cabbage,” I said helpfully,

“That’s the one. I took a look inside, nonchalant like, but I didn’t see him. Maybe he’s gone on through, I thought. There’s a lot of what you might call
passages
down along there by the river. I waited for a bit, thinking he might come out from where he’d gone, but then a man came in and told me to clear out.”

“Can you take us there in the morning?” St. Ives asked, and Finn said that he could, and then assured us that he could find very nearly anyplace a second time if he put his mind to it, just as easy as the first time. He had lived hereabouts long enough to know the riverside, he said, although he was presently without an address and was looking forward to summer and to less of this wind.

St. Ives asked him if he could find us a bite of supper, and sent him off with a handful of coins, considerably more money than was necessary, enough to tempt him if he were a rascally young hypocrite and not who he seemed to be, and in any event to get him out of the way while we reconnoitered.

“He’ll be back right enough,” Tubby said. “He’s a game one. You should have seen him scale the garden wall, speaking of apes.”

I could see that Merton was in a state, glancing fearfully about him as if at any moment his assailant might return to finish him off, but he calmed himself with an effort, and for the next quarter of an hour he laid out the facts as he knew them, and we pitched in with comments when we were able. Merton, it turns out, had been given the map by his uncle Fred, a sand pilot on Morecambe Bay who lives in the area of Grange-over-Sands. Fred takes excursions across the sands at low tide, Merton told us, out into the cockle beds off Poulton-le-Sands, or back and forth from Silverdale to Humphrey Head if the moon is right. Uncle Fred—a legend thereabouts—had been mired in quicksand, caught up by the incoming tide, run afoul of smugglers, and suffered all manner of perils and had lived to tell the tale. He wasn’t one of the Queen’s Guides, mind you, but that’s what made him useful to certain people, especially that class of dredger who fished the quicksand by night.

Fred had found the map—it was as simple as that—near the top of the Bay. It was corked up in a bottle that had suffered some leakage. It looked curious to him, and he kept the map as a souvenir, putting it into a drawer and after a time forgetting about it. Then one day two weeks past he sorted out the drawer and found it again, and when Merton and he ran into each other at their Aunt Sue’s house in Manchester, he gave it to Merton as a curiosity. Merton put it straight into the catalogue without a second thought, although he’d been cagey with the description, in case there was more to the business than met the eye. Then he sent up to Chingford-by-the-Tower to alert St. Ives.

“More
what
than met the eye?” Tubby asked, in his usual impatient way.

“The thing is,” Merton said, “Uncle Fred talked the map around, you see, after he found it again in the drawer.”

“Talked it around to
whom
?” asked St. Ives, looking at him narrowly.

“To the lads in a pub there in Poulton-le-Sands, over a pint, you know. Natural sort of thing, if you see what I mean, passing the time. Except there turned out to be two men sitting nearby, listening hard. One of them asked to see it, but Uncle Fred made up an excuse for not having it with him, although he did, right there in the pocket of his coat. He didn’t like the look of either of them, and didn’t know them, although he could describe them right enough. The one was a tall, scowly sort of fellow, swarthy, Fred told me. Unpleasant. A murderer’s face, Fred called it. The other had dead white hair, and a face that looked as if it had been carved out of ice. There was something wrong with this second man that you couldn’t quite name—Dr. Fell comes to mind. It was the tall man who did the talking.”

St. Ives gave us a glance at this juncture. The detail of the white hair and the unnamable malevolence suggested that our man was indeed Ingacio Narbondo, now known as Dr. Frosticos, or sometimes Frost, St. Ives’s longtime nemesis and the last man on earth I wanted anything to do with. He had gone out of our lives some time back—out of the world, I had hoped. His interest in the map would be as avid as that of St. Ives, although he would be considerably more ruthless in its pursuit.

“I take it that you saw these same men again?” Hasbro asked.

“Just the tall one,” Merton said. “The first time was there in Manchester. Fred saw him on the street and pointed him out to me. He was loitering in a doorway and smoking a pipe. That could have been a coincidence, of course, or perhaps another tall man with similar features. We were on the other side of the street, you see, and it was evening. But then I saw him again, shortly after I was back in London, and no mistake this time. He followed me to the shop, and he wasn’t clever at it either. Bold is the word for it.”

“You’re certain he followed you?” St. Ives asked.

“Yes,” Merton said. “The second sighting there in Manchester might have been coincidence, but the third time always smells of a plot.”

“And the white haired man?” I asked him.

“No. Only the tall one. The catalogue hadn’t been distributed yet, but he asked straightaway to buy the map, said that he’d heard it had fallen into my hands. No preamble, no beating about the bush. ‘I want the Morecambe Sands map,’ he said.”

“And you told him to bugger off,” Tubby said.

“Not in so many words,” Merton said, pouring himself another glass of brandy. He swirled it in the light, looking shrewdly at us. “I played the fool, you see. Denied knowing anything about it. He accused me of lying, and I told him to get out. Then two days later there he was again, but with a copy of the new catalogue, Lord knows where he’d gotten his hands on it, which he laid on the counter along with the required sum, accurate to the penny. I told him I’d already sold it. He called me a liar, which of course was accurate, and walked out without being asked. I hoped that was the end of it.”

“But he sent his simian cohort back in tonight and bloody well took it,” Tubby said.

“Ah! Ha ha! He
believes
he took it!” Merton said, brightening up, but then shut his eyes and held his forehead with the pain of laughing, and it took him a moment to get going again. St. Ives had a keen look on his face.

“Now, here’s the long and the short of it,” Merton continued, looking around again, his voice dropping. He tipped us a wink. “I
hoped
I’d seen the end of the gentleman, you see, and yet I’m a careful man. I set to work and devised a false map on a piece of the same sort of paper—but quite a different part of the Bay and with the landmarks changed. Correct in all other ways. I doctored the ink so that it ran, as if the paper had been soaked in seawater, but not so much that the map couldn’t be made out. Then I colored it up with dyes made of algae and tobacco and garden soil, and I slipped it into the box under the counter, where I keep small money to make change for the customers. Our man searched for it, as you can see, throwing things around the floor. Then he spotted the box, helped himself to the money, and found the map. Of course I played my part. ‘Take the money,’ I said to him, ‘but for God’s sake leave the other! It’s of no value to you.’” Merton sat back in his chair now, smiling like a schoolboy, very satisfied with himself, but then his face fell.