Nilssen had no great knowledge of the workings of a goldfield. He had only attempted to prospect for the colour once, and found it miserable work—lugging pails of water to and from the river to sluice the stones, slapping at the sandflies that crept up his jacket until he was mad enough to dance. Afterwards his back ached and his fingers stung and his feet stayed spongy and swollen for days. The pinch of grit he had taken home, knotted into the corner of his kerchief, was taxed and taxed and then weighed to the smallest fraction of an ounce—yielding, at last, five dirty shillings, an impossible disappointment, barely enough to cover the rental of his horse to and from the gorge. Nilssen did not try his luck again. He was by natural faculty and self-styling a Renaissance man, accustomed to showing immediate promise in whatever field to which he applied himself; if he did not master a trick on his first attempt, he gave up the trade. (He was not without humour about this practice: he often recounted his abortive episode in the Hokitika gorge, exaggerating the discomforts he had sustained in light-hearted deprecation of his own constitutional delicacy—but this was an interpretation that was reserved for him alone, and he became embarrassed if another man took on this same perspective, so to speak, or agreed with him.)
The theory that Joseph Pritchard had put to him was logical enough, up to a point. Somebody—more than one person, perhaps—must have known about the fortune hidden on Crosbie Wells’s estate. The fortune was too large, and the sale of his property too furtive and too swift, to deny that probability altogether. Furthermore, the phial of laudanum that had been discovered in close proximity to the man’s dead body suggested that somebody—perhaps the same somebody—had been present in the cottage either just prior to or just after the hermit’s death, presumably with some intention of harm. The phial was Pritchard’s, purchased from his emporium and bearing a label signed in his hand: its bearer must therefore have been a Hokitika man, travelling northward, not a stranger, travelling south. This ruled out the dignitaries who had first discovered Crosbie’s body, and had brought the news of his death to the town.
Privately Nilssen did believe that Pritchard was right to hold the purchaser of the estate, Edgar Clinch, in suspicion—and the banker, Frost, as well. He did not suspect them of having a part in Emery Staines’s murder, as Pritchard evidently did, but it seemed to him that Clinch must have acted on a tip of some kind, to buy Crosbie Wells’s cottage and land so hastily—and whatever that tip might have been, Charlie Frost must know about it. Nilssen could also accept that his own involvement, however innocently undertaken, must look decidedly fishy to an impartial outsider: he had been the one to discover the fortune, after all; he had recorded the glass phial of laudanum in his ledger along with everything else (he had been compiling a list of effects to be sold); and he stood to gain four hundred pounds out of the transaction.
Beyond these admissions, however (which, after all, were only admissions of doubt and probable impression), Nilssen was uncertain. Pritchard had reasoned that the disappearance of Emery Staines could not be coincidental, which was supposition; he had argued that the man had been murdered, which was guesswork; he had suggested that his body had been buried in Wells’s own grave, which was presumption; and he had proposed that the legal debacle over Wells’s estate had been planned in advance as a kind of eclipse, a decoy—this last, Nilssen thought, was downright fantasy. Pritchard could not account for the phial of laudanum; he could not produce a motivation, or a plausible suspect … and yet the commission merchant could not discount the man’s convictions altogether, however much he disliked the manner in which they were expressed.
Nilssen did not share the chemist’s rapt intoxication with the plumbing of the deep: the quest for truth did not possess him as it did his guest. Pritchard became very strange when speaking of his passions, the elixirs that he brewed and tasted under the low ceiling of his laboratory, the resins and powders that he bought and sold in clouded jars. There was something cold and hard about the man, Nilssen thought—diverting his own ill feeling, as he often did, into a principle of aesthetic distaste.
At last, and with the air of vexation that always passed over him whenever another man’s argument showed a deficiency in his own, Nilssen took his pipe from his mouth and said, ‘Well—perhaps Wells had a contact down at the Reserve. Killarney—or a Company man—’
‘No.’ Pritchard struck the desk with splayed fingers; he had been waiting for Nilssen to guess wrongly, and he had his counter-argument prepared. ‘This is a Chinaman’s work. I’d bet any money. The joss at Kawarau was always full of fellows without a permit—they shared the miner’s rights between them. No man can tell two of them apart, you see, and one name’s as good as another, when it comes from a foreign tongue. It’s all outside jobs in Chinatown. If this was a Company affair it would look—’
‘Cleaner?’ Nilssen sounded hopeful.
‘The opposite. When a fellow has to cover his prints—when he has to use the tradesman’s entrance, instead of coming in through the foyer as he’s known to do—that’s when he has to start making provisions, sacrifices. Do you see? A man on the inside has to contend with the pawns—with all the pieces of the system. But a man on the outside can deal with the Devil direct.’
It was expressions of this kind that Nilssen particularly disliked. He dropped his gaze again to the bill of sale.
‘Chinatown Forge,’ Pritchard said. ‘You mark my guess. One fellow does all the furnace work. His name is Quee.’
‘You’ll speak to him?’ said Nilssen, looking up.
‘Actually,’ said the chemist, ‘I was hoping that you would. I’m in a spot of bother with the Orientals at the moment.’
‘Dare I ask why?’
‘Oh—bad business is all. Trade secrets. Opium,’ Pritchard said. He turned his hand over and then let it fall into his lap.
Nilssen frowned. ‘You ship your opium from China?’
‘Good Lord, no,’ Pritchard said. ‘From Bengal.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘It’s more of a personal dispute. On account of the whore who nearly died.’
‘Anna,’ Nilssen said. ‘Anna Wetherell.’
Pritchard scowled: he had not wanted to use her name. He turned his head away and watched the raindrops swell and gather under the lip of the sash window.
In the brief pause before he resumed speaking, Nilssen was startled by the thought that perhaps the chemist loved her: Anna Wetherell, the whore. He tested the possibility in his mind, enjoying it. The girl was uncommonly striking—she moved with a weary, murderous languor, like a disaffected swan—but she was rather more volatile in her tempers than Nilssen liked in a girl, and her beauty (in fact Nilssen would not call her beautiful; he reserved that word for virgins and angelic forms) was too knowing for his taste. She was also an opium eater, a habit that showed in her features as a constant blur, and in her manner as a fathomless exhaustion—this compulsion was unbecoming enough, and now she was a would-be suicide, besides. Yes, Nilssen thought: she was just the kind of girl for whom Pritchard would fall. They would meet in darkness; their encounters would be feverish and doomed.
Here the commission merchant missed his mark. Nilssen’s guesses were always of the self-confirming sort: he tended to favour whichever proofs best pleased his sense of principle, and equally, to hold fast to whichever principles best lent themselves to proof. He talked often of virtue, and so gave the impression of a most encouraging and optimistic temper, but his faith in virtue was indentured to a less adaptable master than optimism. The benefit of the doubt, to take the common phrase, was a haphazard gift, and Nilssen was too proud of his intellect to surrender the power of hypothesis. In his mind a protective glaze had been applied to the crystal forms of high abstraction: he loved to regard them, and to wonder at their shine, but he had never thought to take them down from their carved and oaken mantel, so to speak, and feel them, supple in his hands. He had concluded that Pritchard was in love simply because it was pleasant to deliberate the point, examine the specimen, and then return to the beliefs he had possessed all along: that Pritchard was a queer fish; that Anna was a lost cause; and that one ought never undertake to love a whore.