The Poisoned Island (8 page)

“The fame of the
Solander
may bring its own complications,” Harriott says, choosing his words as carefully as he is able. “But the ship is in the river, and a member of its crew
has died in circumstances which raise some suspicion. I have given personal assurances that the vessel will be properly watched. We are perfectly entitled to investigate. I want the
Solander
’s captain spoken to, and not by Markland. That will make matters even more infernally difficult.”

“Yes, sir.” Horton seems strangely delighted, as if eager to get on board the
Solander
. How much does he know of Banks’s involvement in the melancholy transactions of the previous Christmas? For a moment, Harriott ponders pulling Horton away from the current case, for his own good. But it is only a moment. Horton is his best man, by far. Harriott will always choose immediate duty over distant sympathy.

“I have some information here on the captain.” He hands Horton the letter from Aaron Graham. “His name is Hopkins. He came here yesterday to make his introductions.”

“And perhaps I should ask what kind of investigation this is, sir?”

Neither says anything for a moment, and Harriott deliberately turns his chair back to look out at the river. He sometimes feels vaguely and irritatingly angered by Horton’s ability to ask the single question which exposes all the hiding places in which information might be concealed. For this is indeed the question. What exactly are they investigating? And how official are they to be?

Horton has more than any other man opened Harriott’s eyes to the need for a different type of policing in London. When Harriott and his fellow magistrate Patrick Colquhoun had proposed the River Police Office almost twenty years previously, they had done so with the express intention of paying men—constables—to go on board ships and observe. This had been the basis of English policing for centuries:
men watching other men both to prevent crime but also to witness it should it occur. Watchmen, in other words.

In the matter of the Ratcliffe Highway murders six months before, Horton had quietly and diligently pursued a different method. The crimes had happened. The killer or killers were unknown. What was needed was an investigation, and that strange word had spawned others: evidence, detection, theory, proof. Those words had seemed to the diffident magistrates of Shadwell at best incongruous and at worst downright sinister; when Harriott had confronted them with Horton’s ideas, they’d reacted with anger and a refusal to cooperate. But it had been Horton who’d identified the killer, and Horton who’d finally confronted him. The Shadwell magistrates had relied on witnesses and statements; had relied, in other words, on the watching of others. This had led them into a swamp of lies and dead ends. Horton had pursued clues and evidence and proofs. He had uncovered the truth—or, at least, part of the truth. Horton does not know in what murky depths the real facts of the Ratcliffe Highway case dwell. His magistrate does.

John Harriott is a man who has thrived, throughout his life, on innovations. He is himself an inventor, both of mechanisms such as the Police Office and of machines; he has patents for a ship’s pump and for an engine for raising weights and working mills. So, in the six months since the Ratcliffe Highway case, John Harriott has been secretly funding his own clandestine project, an Investigative Unit, within the River Police Office. At the moment, the Unit consists of only one man: Charles Horton. But Horton has already broken three different but overlapping smuggling rings, has apprehended a group of Essex river pirates, and has tracked down and captured a strange Portuguese waterman who had
taken to knocking out his passengers halfway across the river, robbing them, and then leaving them, tied up and gagged, at the door of the Police Office with an apologetic note.

With these successes John Harriott has regained enormous credit with the Home Office, and has also recaptured his enthusiasm for the work of policing. This enthusiasm had been waning as a combination of increasing years and decreasing responsibility had dragged a cloak of torpor over the old man’s previous energies. All that changed with the Ratcliffe Highway case, and the old excitement is growing within him again for this new episode. Sir Joseph Banks is at the very center of London social and political life. Like many self-made men, Harriott is both repelled and enthralled by nobility and privilege. Investigating the
Solander
will require him to limp through gilded salons once again.

Horton’s question, then, is simply this: is this to be an
official
investigation, or are they to pursue it in secret? Harriott decides, for now, not to answer.

“We will proceed discreetly. Go and see this ship, in the name of the River Police, Horton. I will have some conversations of my own.”

Horton sends a note out to the
Solander
to request a visit with the captain, and soon receives a note back to say Hopkins is currently at Kew, but is expected back in the early afternoon. He spends the intervening hours in Sam Ransome’s room, watching a physician appointed by the coroner as he makes an examination of the body. Like Horton and Abigail before him, the doctor’s eyes return time and again to the dead man’s face and that extraordinary grin, which expresses gleeful delight at the departure of Sam Ransome from this vale of tears. As the physician finishes, Horton asks him for his judgment.

“It can wait until the inquest,” says the physician, but he is in a hurry to leave the room and that terrible smile, and he sees that Horton is prepared to make an argument over the matter. “Oh, very well. He was strangled. The bruising on the neck makes that obvious.”

“And his expression? Could he smile like that while being strangled?”

The physician looks downcast.

“It is possible. But I only say that because it must have happened. I have never seen the like of it before.”

Horton lets the physician leave, casts one more look around the meager room, and then leaves it for the last time.

By now it is time to visit the
Solander
. Horton is taken to the ship by a private wherry, avoiding the little fleet of Police Office boats. Harriott may have fudged the status of this investigation, but he was perfectly clear about the need for discretion.

The ship is just downstream of the Police Office, at the point where the river bends south around the Isle of Dogs. The
Solander
is over towards the Surrey side of the river. Horton’s boat must navigate round two large ships which are waiting to get into the London Dock. Both are fully laden and low in the water and are being readied for towing into the dock, their sails down and their movement sluggish and stupid. Men shout at each other across the water, from ship to ship and boat to boat and barge to lighter to wherry, the constant argument and violent debate on a river made narrow and even solid by the sheer weight of shipping upon it.

The waterman takes the wherry over towards the far side of the shore. Horton looks back behind him to Wapping, seeing the top of the building in which he and his wife live peeping over the roof of the warehouses on either side of the Police Office. He is tired, having slept little, his arms tight around his wife as she slept. Abigail had been quiet when they returned from Sam Ransome’s room, and had only nodded to his repeated questions about her well-being. He had marveled at her calmness in the presence of Ransome’s body, but then remembered her time as a nurse, and reminded himself that the cheerful bearing of his precise wife hid a coriaceous toughness. She had gone to sleep immediately, encased in
the arms of her husband, who had counted her breaths and measured their depth in a doomed attempt to calculate her state of mind. The old weight of responsibility had tugged him down, though not into sleep.

From the river, the
Solander
isn’t easy to spot in among the vessels moored at the chains off Rotherhithe, but Horton has already identified her from Harriott’s office window and has no trouble finding her. She is a plain-looking collier but she is also, thanks to the pioneering example of Cook, the very model for a sensible, careful round-the-world vessel. There is very little to distinguish her from other similar colliers in the river, some of which are now stocking up on gravel as ballast for their return journeys to the northeast. She is buff-bowed, her front rising almost square from the water. Her sails have been stowed in readiness for a long stay, and there is little activity up among the rigging of her three masts. She is a little less than a hundred feet long, by Horton’s reckoning, and perhaps twenty-five feet across the beam. A pinnace is tied up at her side. If you did not know what she was, there would be no earthly reason to be interested in her, apart from one oddity: a square-shaped superstructure on her quarterdeck, which looks to Horton’s eyes like a big shed, and which immediately disturbs the expected lines of the ship, lines which every London river dweller has become intimate with over the centuries. That shedlike structure makes the
Solander
look a little eccentric, like a single gentleman appearing at a party with a small monkey on his shoulder.

Horton calls up to the ship while the waterman comes alongside, and a face appears at the gunwale.

“River Police!” he shouts. “Permission to come aboard and talk to Captain Hopkins!”

The face nods and disappears. After a few minutes, the
face reappears and motions for him to come aboard. He tells the waterman to wait for him, and climbs up onto the ship.

Halfway up, his nostrils begin quivering with the shocking aroma which pours out like liquid from the
Solander
. Stepping on board is like stepping through a curtain of smell. Before, the smells of the riverside commerce: oil, salt, tar, and the pervasive, solid stench of the river. After, a
green
gas which seems to swirl through the air, dropping pollen and spores and vegetable matter, such that the
Solander
reminds Horton of a lady’s bouquet held to her bosom against the smoke-and-ale smell of a public saloon.

The hold of the ship is open, and looking down into it Horton has an impression of flying over a compact, impossible jungle garden. Greens and browns predominate but here and there is an outrageous splash of color, as if whatever dwells below is captivated by the weak London summer sun. Horton breathes in several times, inhaling the pungent wash, and remembering half-forgotten voyages. Beaches and rocks and palm trees on Caribbean shores.

He looks up from the hold, aware of a man watching him, silently but carefully. He does not speak until Horton looks at him, as if to allow the new arrival to take in the view.

“I chose not to disturb you,” says the man. “You had the air of a man experiencing a kind of epiphany.”

His voice is educated, with a strong hint of Welsh about it. He certainly looks Welsh: short, stout, solid, with a dark barrel-chested melancholy.

“I thank you for that,” says Horton. “It is not every day one gets to gaze down into a tropical paradise within the confines of London.”

“No indeed,” says the other man. “And now I would ask your business on board my ship, sir.”

“I take it that you are Captain Hopkins?”

“I am.”

“Sir, I am Charles Horton, a constable from the River Police Office.”

“Indeed? I met with your magistrate only yesterday. I was surprised by his interest in my ship even then. A personal visit surprises me even more, constable.”

“I am here about one of your crew members. A Samuel Ransome.”

The captain scowls at the mention of the name.

“If we’re going to talk about Ransome, we’re not going to do it on deck. Come to my cabin.”

They walk back to the rear of the ship. The
Solander
is quietly busy and sprucely clean. About a dozen crewmen are in view, most of them occupied in transporting the remaining flora in the hold onto the deck and preparing it for loading onto two barges which lie alongside. The containers for the flora are mostly half barrels of various sizes. All the men are tanned and healthy looking, and a number of them look towards Horton as he walks with the captain, clocking the interloper and filing the intelligence away. They note Horton’s ease on deck, and take him for a seaman. They also note the suddenness of his arrival, as if he’d popped into existence at the lip of the hold just in time for the captain, and they warn each other that here is a man upon whom a sharp eye needs to be kept.

An incongruous young man whom Horton takes for a clergyman nods as they pass and then stares, without embarrassment. He is holding a small book he has been reading while walking on the deck. He is dressed like a country vicar from the previous century. His skin is as brown as that of the crew, his nose broad and his hair as dark as his breeches.
Horton almost stops, expecting to be introduced to the young man by Hopkins, but the captain does not even look at the clerical stranger, whose eyes follow the two men up to the quarterdeck with an oddly desperate intensity.

The quarterdeck is dominated by the strange shedlike structure Horton saw from the river. There are glass windows all round its walls, and looking inside Horton sees even more plants within. The shed is a hothouse, and the flora within quiver and sweat with an alien energy. Hopkins sees him looking through the window.