By seven-thirty Moody was striding eastward along Gibson Quay, dressed in a grey slouch hat, yellow moleskin trousers, leather knee-boots, and a dark woollen coat over a shirt of grey serge. He now donned this costume six days out of seven, much to the amusement of Gascoigne, who had asked him more than once why he had chosen to leave off the piratical red sash, which might have finished off the ensemble very nicely.
Moody had staked a claim close enough to Hokitika to permit his continued board at the Crown Hotel. This arrangement cut into his weekly earnings rather severely, but he preferred it to sleeping in a tent beneath the open sky, something he had attempted only once, to his great discomfort. It took him an hour and twenty minutes to walk to his claim from Hokitika; before the clock struck nine every morning, therefore, he was at his cradle at the creekside, hauling pails of water, whistling, and shovelling sand.
Moody was not, truth be told, a terribly skilful prospector: he was hoping for nuggets rather than panning for dust. Too often the ore-bearing gravel slipped through the netting at the bottom of the cradle, only to be washed away; sometimes he emptied his cradle twice over without finding any flakes at all. He was making what the diggers called ‘pay dirt’, meaning that the sum total of his weekly income was more or less equal to the sum total of his weekly expenditure, but it was a holding pattern he could not sustain. He knew that he ought to heed popular advice, and go mates with another man, or with a party. The chance of striking rich was doubled in a partnership, and the chances multiplied still further in a party of five, or seven, or nine. But his pride would not permit it. He persevered alone, visualising, every hour, the nugget with which he would buy his future life. His dreams at night began to glister, and he began to see flashes of light in the most unlikely places, such that he had to look again, and blink, or close his eyes.
Stepping across the small creek that formed the northern boundary of his claim, Moody was surprised to see the pale silhouette of a tent through the scrub, and beside it, the remains of a fire. He came up short. The Hokitika diggers typically spent their weekends in town, not returning to the field until mid-morning on Monday at the very earliest. Why had this digger not joined his fellows? And what was he doing on another man’s patch of land?
‘Hello there,’ Moody called, meaning to rouse the tent’s inhabitant. ‘Hello.’
At once there came a grunt, and a flurry of motion inside the tent. ‘Sorry,’ someone said. ‘Very sorry—very sorry—’
A Chinese face appeared at the opening, blurred with sleep.
‘No trouble,’ he said. ‘Very sorry.’
‘Mr. Sook?’ said Moody.
Ah Sook squinted up at him.
‘I’m Walter Moody,’ Moody said, placing his hand over his heart. ‘Do you—ah—do you remember me?’
‘Yes, yes.’ Ah Sook knuckled his eyes with his fist.
‘I’m so glad,’ said Moody. ‘This is my claim, you see: from this creek here to those yellow pegs on the southern side.’
‘Very sorry,’ Ah Sook said. ‘No harm done.’
‘No: of course,’ Moody said. ‘In any case, Ah Sook, I’m pleased to see you. Your absence from Kaniere has been noted by a great many people. Myself included. I am very pleased to see you—very pleased, not angry at all. We feared that something had happened to you.’
‘No trouble,’ the hatter said. ‘Tent only. No trouble.’ He disappeared from sight.
‘I can see you’re not causing trouble,’ Moody said. ‘It’s all right, Mr. Sook: I’m not worried about you making camp! I’m not worried about that at all.’
Ah Sook clambered out of the tent, pulling his tunic down as he did so. ‘I will go,’ he said. ‘Five minutes.’ He held up five fingers.
‘It’s all right,’ Moody said. ‘You can sleep here if you like; it’s of no consequence to me.’
‘Last night only,’ said Ah Sook.
‘Yes; but if you want to tent here tonight also, I don’t mind a bit,’ said Moody. His manner was alternating between bluff cheer and clumsy condescension, as it might if he were speaking to someone else’s child.
‘Not tonight,’ said Ah Sook. He began to strike his tent. Hauling the canvas fly, still wet with dew, from the rope over which it had been draped, he revealed the flattened square of earth where he had spent the night: the woollen blanket, twisted, and pressed flat with the tangled imprint of his body; a pot, filled with sand; his leather purse; a panning dish; a string bag containing tea and flour and several wrinkled potatoes; a standard-issue swag. Moody, casting his eye over this meagre inventory, was oddly touched.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘but where have you been, Mr. Sook, this month past? It’s been a full month since the séance—and no one’s heard a word from you!’
‘Digging,’ said Ah Sook, flattening the canvas fly across his chest.
‘You vanished so soon after the séance,’ Moody continued, ‘we rather thought you’d gone the same way as poor old Mr. Staines! No one could make heads or tails of it, you disappearing like that.’
Ah Sook had been folding the fly into quarters; now he paused. ‘Mr. Staines come back?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Moody said. ‘He’s still missing.’
‘And Francis Carver?’
‘Carver’s still in Hokitika.’
Ah Sook nodded. ‘At the Palace Hotel.’
‘Well, in actual fact, no,’ said Moody, pleased to be given an opportunity to conspire. ‘He’s begun sleeping at the Crown Hotel. In secret. Nobody knows he’s staying there: he’s kept up the pretence that he’s staying at the Palace, and he still pays rent to the Palace proprietor—and keeps his rooms, just as before. But he sleeps every night at the Crown. He arrives well after nightfall, and leaves very early. I only know because I rent the room above.’
Ah Sook had fixed him with a penetrating look. ‘Where?’
‘Carver’s room? Or mine?’
‘Carver.’
‘He sleeps in the room next to the kitchen, on the ground floor,’ said Moody. ‘It faces east. Very near the smoking room—where you and I first met.’
‘A humble room,’ said Ah Sook.
‘Very humble,’ Moody agreed, ‘but he’s got a vantage down the length of the Kaniere-road. He’s keeping watch, you see. He’s watching out for you.’
Walter Moody knew virtually nothing about Ah Sook’s history with Francis Carver, for Ah Sook had not had the opportunity, at the Crown Hotel, to narrate the tale in any detail, and had not been seen since, save for his appearance at the Wayfarer’s Fortune one month ago. Moody wished very much to know the full particulars, but despite his best efforts of surveillance and inquiry—he had become an adept at turning idle conversation, discreetly, to provocative themes—his understanding had not developed beyond what he had learned in the smoking room of the Crown, which was that the history concerned opium, murder, and a declaration of revenge. Ah Quee was the only man to whom Ah Sook had narrated the tale in full, and he did not, alas, possess language enough to share it with any English-speaking man.
‘Every night, at the Crown Hotel?’ said Ah Sook. ‘Tonight?’
‘Yes, he’ll be there tonight,’ said Moody. ‘Though not until well after dark, as I’ve told you.’
‘Not the Palace.’
‘No, not the Palace,’ said Moody. ‘He changed hotels.’
‘Yes,’ said Ah Sook gravely. ‘I understand.’ He went to loose the knot of his guy-rope from the fork of a tree.
‘Who was he?’ said Moody. ‘The murdered man.’
‘My father,’ said Ah Sook.
‘Your father,’ said Moody. After a moment, he said, ‘How was he killed? I mean—forgive me, but—what happened?’
‘A long time ago,’ said Ah Sook. ‘Before the war.’