The Poisoned Island (5 page)

The small room contains a single but decent-sized bed, a misbegotten armchair, and a fireplace which is little more than a void in the damp wall. A fire has been recently lit, Horton sees, and a kettle sits on the floor in front of the hearth. Above the fireplace is a horrendous seascape of a ship coming to grief in a storm, and the single window looks out onto the street beyond, or rather would look out if it had ever been cleaned.

There are two figures already in the room. One, a rather fat man, lies on the bed, unmoving. The other is a middle-aged woman in a careworn dress, wearing a filthy bonnet which would make a perfect companion piece to that worn by the landlady downstairs. The woman sits in one of the two chairs, her eyes to the ceiling, clutching a dirty handkerchief to her face while she sobs into the air above her. The scene is like something from a Drury Lane melodrama, staged and artificial.

So loud is the noise the woman is generating, so engrossed is she in her grief, that she does not hear the Hortons enter. But there is nothing to hide behind in this little room and their movement soon distracts her. The wailing ends abruptly like a switched-off faucet, much to Horton’s relief, and she stares at him, and then Abigail, wide-eyed and scared.

“ ’Oo,”
she says,
“are YOU?”
If anything the question is louder than the caterwauling which preceded it.

“Madam,” he says. “You must calm yourself. My name
is Charles Horton, and I am an officer of the Thames River Police. We heard your screams from the street, and came in here to see if you need assistance. The noise is causing some disturbance.”

She leaps up at that and runs to the window to look into the street, rubbing it with the damp handkerchief to get a better view, and smearing her tears and snot over the lumpy glass. She yelps at what she sees down there, and Horton wonders if he sees a flavor of delight in her expression. She makes as if to open the window but then thinks better of it and turns back to him. The handkerchief is back at her breast. Abigail moves towards the figure on the bed.

“Oh, Lor’, sir. Oh, Lor’. Did all those people out there ’ear me ’ollerin’ and ravin’?”

“Madam, I believe they did. Now, is this man—”

His glance towards the bed sets her off again, even louder than before. She collapses into the chair, with no little dramatic flair. There is an audience now, both in the room and out in the street. “Dead, sir! Dead! I found him like this just now! Dead as them burnt-out logs in the fireplace!”

She follows this with a long, painful moan which is just loud enough to penetrate the window to the crowd outside. Then she collapses back into quiet sobs. She looks exhausted by her performance.

Abigail is leaning over the man, her face white. She has taken a small mirror from the side table and is holding it over the man’s mouth. Horton marvels at her forensic calm but is distressed to witness the slight shake in her fingers. He steps to the bed and gently moves Abigail’s fingers away, taking the little mirror from her. She puts her hands behind her back, and stares at him with a kind of awe in her face.

The man is laid out as if for a coffin, his hands clasped
over his stomach. Horton marks him for a sailor instantly, and one recently returned from sea. The face, even in death, is deeply tanned and lined, though his thick, dark hair and smooth ears speak of a rather young man. The tan extends down to the open shirt, but even so the bruises which circle the man’s neck are vivid. He has been strangled. He is dressed as a sailor, too—rough, heavy trousers, an ancient-looking white shirt which has been opened almost to the navel, and a thick, pockmarked leather waistcoat. Without thinking, Horton glances back at the door and there, hanging from a rusty nail, is the inevitable sailor’s peacoat. Like Abigail, he holds the mirror over the man’s mouth, and then turns it to look. It is clear. He places a hand over the man’s chest. It is still.

Beside the bed is a sea chest, the final evidence of the man’s profession. Horton kneels down to inspect it. He has seen these chests all over Wapping, filled with the entirety of itinerant men’s lives. They sleep with these chests at their feet or beneath their hammocks while at sea, and on land guard them with more care than a prized wife or cherished dog. Next to the chest, on the floor, is a wooden cup, which he picks up. It still has a slight warmth to it, and there is the residue of something like tea at the cup’s bottom. Horton looks into the sea chest, which has obviously been ransacked. A small canvas bag sits within a pile of old clothes. Horton pulls it out; it is full of coins.

“My God, Charles,” whispers Abigail. “His
face
.”

“Yes.”

The face is confounding. The man is smiling. He must have been smiling even while he was strangled.

“ ’Oo did you say you were?” asks the tatty woman in the chair. She sounds suspicious and perhaps a little annoyed at Horton’s peremptory tone and manner. She may also be exercised
by the presence of another woman in the room. More than anything, thinks Horton, she is bothered by the attention he and Abigail are paying to the dead body. He wonders if this woman is capable of feeling any emotion for more than a minute or two.

“Horton. I work for the River Police Office.”

“What, for that old rogue Harriott? The man as what stole bread from the mouths of honest river folk?”

The statement places her age more precisely. For her still to be arguing the debates of the late 1790s makes her between thirty and forty.

“You say you found him like this?”

She nods, with some hauteur.

“When?”

“I come in ten minutes ago.”

“Who is he?”

“His name’s Ransome. Samuel Ransome.”

“And you are?”

“ ’Annah. ’Annah Crabtree.”

“And how did you know this Ransome?”

She blushes, almost coquettishly, and looks down at her blotchy décolletage and then up at Abigail. Her manner has changed again. Gone is the inflamed matriarch, replaced by a naive little innocent.

“We was in love, sir. He proposed to me before he set off on his travels.”

Her eyes are becoming watery again and the hands look dangerously close to springing into a new pose. Horton hurries to move things along.

“When did you last see him?”

“ ’Oo, Samuel?”

“Yes, madam, Samuel. When did you see him last?”

“Afore ’e left. I’ve been waitin’ for ’im to get back. I ’eard from a woman in a shop over by the Prospect that Sam’s ship ’ad come in, and ’im nowhere to be seen! I was proper annoyed, I was, ’im gone for months and me with nothin’ to do but wait until ’e showed ’is face again. Soon as I ’eard the ship ’ad arrived I came over ’ere to give ’im a piece of me mind, but ’e was . . . ’e was . . .”

Her chest is heaving again, like a Whitby collier cresting a wave. Horton jumps in to stop the onslaught.

“He was like this when you found him?”

“Like what?”

“Lying on the bed, like this?”

“Well, I ’ardly moved ’im, did I? Weak woman like me?”

She sounds petulant again now, and Horton thinks that perhaps he has located her genuine register.

“And you got here ten minutes ago, you say?”

“That’s right. Give or take a bit.”

“He was a sailor?”

Her eyes widened.

“ ’Ow did you know that?”

“So he was?”

“Yes.”

“Recently returned from sea?”

“Did you know him, or somethin’?”

“You just said he proposed to you when he set off on his travels.”

She says nothing, looks a little irritated.

“Where was he sailing from?”

“He’s been round the world, he has. Proper adventurin’ voyage. He’s a proper British ’ero, is Sam.” This more to Abigail than to him. Horton realizes he will get little more information out of this woman. And in any case, he has little
right to pursue an investigation into this matter, even if there is anything to pursue. Jurisdiction is an issue here, as it so very often is. The river is his official realm, not the shabby streets which sit behind it, and not even the gleaming warehouses and wharves of the new Dock. The Shadwell magistrates will claim this crime as within their jurisdiction, and the last thing magistrate John Harriott needs is another clashing row over who is responsible for what. The lines of policing in the metropolis are both new and ancient, and are everywhere profoundly blurred. A man of Harriott’s impatient character inevitably has the imprint of other men’s toes on the soles of his shoes. It is one of the many things Charles Horton strongly admires about his magistrate.

So, a matter for Shadwell, almost certainly. But there is much here to interest the inquisitive. The ransacked sea chest, still with money within. The cup. And the man’s face in death. Why does he smile like that? How could he smile while being strangled?

But these are questions for the coroner, not a waterman-constable. He turns back to the actress in the chair.

“Madam, one more thing before I go and retrieve some men so this sad affair can be looked into. His ship, please. Its name, and where it came in from.”

She sniffs and wipes her nose on the appalling handkerchief, reminding him that she is also holding a letter.

“The
Solander
. Under Captain ’opkins. She’s moored in the river off Rotherhithe, sir.”

The name of the ship puts all his previous considerations in a new light. A crewman from the most celebrated ship currently in London, dead on the first night of its return, in Wapping. He knows that Harriott has a particular interest in the
Solander
. He knows, too, that the old magistrate will not be
able to refrain from involving himself in an investigation into this latest death. He can imagine him bellowing even now: “Jurisdiction be
damned
. . .”

So, the coroner must be called, and he rather thinks he will tell his own magistrate of his discovery before he informs Shadwell. But the oddness of this death, so soon on the man’s return to London, strikes him with some force, such that he cannot stop himself asking a final question, even while Abigail’s pale face urges him to get her out of this awful room.

“Did you disturb Sam’s sea chest, madam?” he asks. Hannah Crabtree looks at him, then down at the chest, and she lets out a new shriek, this time one full of anger and outrage.

“Why, look! Sam’s been bleedin’ well robbed!”

The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture. . . .

Thomas Jefferson,
Memorandum of Services
to my Country
, 1800

The young prince waited on the beach for his brother. He was becoming anxious. His brother was still not in sight, and the appearance of great white pieces of cloth unfurling along the branches and trunks of the great vessel in the harbor was a clear sign that it would be leaving soon.

Perhaps the British intended to kidnap his brother? It had happened before, the prince knew. His father, the chief of this part of the island, told stories of how the British captain Cook had kidnapped a great prince of the island when he first came to Tahiti, and had later kidnapped a chief and a princess on the sacred island of Ra’aitea. This, said his father, would have angered the great god Oro beyond all reckoning, for it was on Ra’aitea that Oro had been born of the god Ta’aroa, and it was on Ra’aitea that the most sacred of all the
marae
had been built, at Taputapuatea. The prince’s father was a devout man, with his own
marae
and priests, but he did not have the respect of his sons, particularly the eldest, that
same brother who was now on the British ship. The eldest son had proclaimed loudly and often that custom declared that he should be the chief, that his father was only a regent and that the chiefdom had passed down the family line the moment he was born. The younger prince understood little of these arguments, but there was something in his father’s eyes, and in his reluctance to discipline his eldest son, that suggested the chief believed the boy had a point.

Whatever the stories his father told him, the young prince found the idea of British perfidy puzzling, because so many of the islanders—including his own brother—spoke longingly of going on board a British ship and traveling far, far away from these islands. Even at the age of eight the prince had some of the same dreams, but only because he wished so much to emulate his older brother. The idea of actually climbing on board one of those wooden giants was as otherworldly to the prince as were the odd lectures of the British missionaries, who traveled the island and tried, in their broken version of the island language, to tell the stories of their own god. The prince understood almost nothing of these stories. His young head floundered on the missionaries’ assertion that there was only one god, who ruled over everything that was. The impossibility of this yawned in the prince’s mind and had, on one occasion, actually spawned nightmares. On that occasion the story of the One God had been told to him by the young man who lived with the missionaries, the one who had an English father and an island mother. Many of the children had been told by their mothers that this man was not to be trusted, that the English blood in his veins had made him mad, that his father had been an evil man who had betrayed his chief. Most of the children didn’t listen to these tales, and had actually spent many happy afternoons taunting the young man for
his dark European clothes and puzzlingly pale face. But the young prince’s imagination was a wild thing and the tales of the women had lodged within it, such that when he had come across the strange half-breed boy on the beach, and when the boy had begun preaching to him with a vibrating zeal and passion which set his eyes alight, the prince had become so terrified that he’d run away to the arms of his mother and had kept his whole family awake several nights with his shrieks.