‘Yes, I expect you will, Albert.’
‘Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye. You’ll have to tell me all about the show. All right?’
‘Maybe we can go again,’ Albert said. ‘Only the ticket’s for tonight. But maybe we can go again.’
‘Yes,’ Nilssen said. ‘Next week, perhaps. After I recover.’
He waited until the disappointed subordinate had padded from the room, and closed the door quietly behind him. Then he unfolded Pritchard’s letter, and stepped towards the window, for a better light.
H.—Can confirm. But listen: something odd happened this afternoon at Anna’s. Pistols involved. Will explain in full in person. Event witnessed by A.G. courthouse clerk. Perhaps you should speak to him, if you’re playing the detective. Whatever Anna’s mixed up in, I’m sure that A.G. knows about it. Do you trust him? Can’t say that I do: well, the jury’s still out, as the saying goes. Destroy this letter!—J.S.P.
Thomas Balfour had returned, in the late afternoon, to the Palace Hotel, with the intention of finding Cowell Devlin—the chaplain who had overheard his conversation with Lauderback that morning. He wished to apologise for his earlier rudeness, but also (and rather more urgently) to ask the chaplain about his connexion to the vanished prospector, Emery Staines. He was sure that Devlin’s inquiry at the office of the West Coast Times was connected, somehow, to the Crosbie Wells affair.
Devlin was not at the Palace Hotel, however; the kitchen staff informed Balfour that he had left the dining room several hours before. He was not in his tent upon the beachfront, nor at the Police Camp gaol-house, nor in any of the churches; he was not in any of the stores or billiard-halls, and he was not on the quay. Balfour wandered about Hokitika for several hours, dejected, and was about to give up and go home when he spied Devlin at last. The chaplain was walking down Revell-street, his hat and coat quite saturated; walking next to him was another man, a good deal taller and larger than he. Balfour crossed the street. He was already raising his arm to flag the other down when he recognised Devlin’s companion: it was the Maori man with whom he had also spoken, earlier that day, and to whom he had also been rather unforgivably rude.
‘Hi there,’ he called. ‘Reverend Devlin. Would you believe it! The very man I was looking to find! Hello, Ted: I’m glad to see you again, too.’
Tauwhare did not offer a greeting; Devlin, however, smiled. ‘I see that you have found out my surname,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I still do not know yours.’
Balfour thrust out his hand. ‘Tom Balfour,’ he said, beaming, and they shook hands. ‘Yes: I went to see Ben Löwenthal, over at the Times, and we had some words about you. Matter of fact I’ve been trying to track you down these past few hours. To ask you something.’
‘Then our meeting is doubly fortuitous,’ said Devlin.
‘It’s a question about Emery Staines,’ Balfour said, interrupting him. ‘I hear you’ve been asking after him, you see. Wanting to know who placed that notice in the paper, advertising his return. Ben told me that you’d been by. I’m wanting to know why you’re asking after him—Staines, I mean—and what’s your connexion to the man.’
Cowell Devlin hesitated. The truth, of course, was that Emery Staines was one of the three names written upon the deed of gift that he had taken from the ash-drawer of Crosbie Wells’s range, the day after the hermit’s death. He had not showed that deed to anyone, however, and he had resolved not to do so, until he knew a little more about the people it concerned. Ought he to lie to Balfour? He did not like to utter falsehoods, but perhaps he could tell a partial truth. He bit his lip.
Balfour had perceived the chaplain’s hesitation, and had mistaken it for reproof. He put up his hands. ‘Hark at me,’ he exclaimed, ‘asking questions in the street—and in the weather—when we’re getting wetter all the time! Look here. How about we share a meal together? Something hot. There’s no sense in talking out of doors—not when there are warm hotels on either side of us, and good cheer to be had.’
Devlin glanced at Tauwhare, who, despite his dislike of Balfour, had brightened considerably at the prospect of a meal.
Balfour coughed, and then thumped his chest with his fist, wincing. ‘I wasn’t myself this morning—out of sorts; I wasn’t myself. I’m sorry for it—and I mean to make it up—to both of you. I’ll stand us all a plate of something, and we’ll have a drink together—as friends. Come: let a man say he’s sorry, when he asks.’
The threesome was soon established at a corner table at Maxwell’s. Balfour, who was always very happy to play the role of the munificent host, ordered three bowls of clear soup, a round of bread, a fat black pudding, a hard cheese, sardines in oil, hot buttered carrots, a pot of stewed oysters, and a demijohn of stout. He had the prescience to delay any talk of Crosbie Wells or Emery Staines until both his guests were sated with food and drink, and talked instead of whaling, a subject of which all three men had a most romantic conception, and much to share. When Benjamin Löwenthal found them some three-quarters of an hour later, they were a very merry party.
‘Ben!’ cried Balfour, when he saw Löwenthal approaching. ‘But what about your Sabbath?’
He had become, for the second time that day, rather drunk.
‘Ends at starlight,’ Löwenthal said shortly. To Tauwhare he said, ‘I believe that we have not yet been introduced. I am Benjamin Löwenthal; I publish the West Coast Times.’
‘Te Rau Tauwhare,’ the Maori man replied, and shook his hand very firmly.
‘He also goes by Ted,’ said Balfour. ‘Very good friend of Crosbie Wells.’
‘Were you?’ said Löwenthal to Tauwhare.
‘His finest friend,’ said Devlin.
‘Better than brothers,’ said Balfour.
‘Well, in that case,’ said Löwenthal, ‘my business concerns all three of you.’
Benjamin Löwenthal had no authority to widen the invitation to the Crown Hotel council to include Devlin and Tauwhare. But as we have observed already, Löwenthal could be very forbidding when his ethical code was affronted, and Charlie Frost had affronted him, that afternoon, by suggesting that the Crown assembly ought to be restricted to an exclusive few. Löwenthal felt the need to rectify what he perceived to have been Frost’s moral error, and he extended the invitation to Tauwhare and Devlin now as an obscure act of reproach.
‘Capital,’ Balfour said. ‘Pull up a chair.’
Löwenthal sat down, placed the palms of his hands together, and, in a low voice, explained the purpose of the meeting that evening—to which Balfour acquiesced immediately, Tauwhare gravely, and Cowell Devlin after a long, judicious pause. The chaplain was thinking about the deed of gift that he had taken from the hermit’s stove, currently stored in his Bible, between the Old Testament and the New. He resolved to bring his Bible with him to the council that evening, and to produce the deed, if the occasion moved him, and the timing was right.
There was smoke issuing from Gascoigne’s chimney, and upon Mannering’s knock, the door opened promptly, and Gascoigne peered out. He was holding a freshly lit cigarette, and had exchanged his formal jacket for shirtsleeves and a woollen vest.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘I have it on good information that you’re holding on to some money,’ Dick Mannering said. ‘That money’s mine, and I’ve come to collect it.’
Aubert Gascoigne looked at him, then put his cigarette to his lips, inhaled, and blew a stream of smoke over Mannering’s shoulder, into the rain. ‘Who is the source of your good information?’ he said mildly.
‘Miss Anna Wetherell, by way of Mr. Edgar Clinch,’ Mannering said.
Gascoigne leaned against the doorframe. ‘And how did Miss Anna Wetherell, by way of Mr. Edgar Clinch, imagine that you would act, upon receiving this good information?’