‘Mrs. Shepard, I presume.’
‘Yes.’
‘I wonder if I might have a word with your husband. Is he available?’
‘No,’ said Margaret Shepard, for the second time that day. ‘He’s gone down to the Courthouse on business.’
‘What a shame. Might I wait for him?’
‘You’d do better to make an appointment,’ she said.
‘I take it that he is not likely to return.’
‘He often spends his nights at Seaview,’ she said. ‘And sometimes he plays billiards in town.’
‘I see.’
Sook Yongsheng did not know Alistair Lauderback’s voice, but he could tell from the tone and volume that the man speaking was someone of some authority.
‘Forgive me for disturbing you,’ Lauderback went on. ‘Perhaps you might do me the favour of telling your husband that I came by.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You do know who I am, don’t you?’
‘You’re Mr. Lauderback,’ she whispered.
‘Very good. Tell him that I should like to discuss a mutual acquaintance. Francis Carver is the man’s name.’
‘I’ll tell him.’
That man will be dead before the morning, thought Sook Yongsheng.
The door closed again; the bedroom darkened.
Cowell Devlin made room for Anna Wetherell in the corner of the Police Camp gaol-house, thinking, as he did so, that she made for a much more wretched picture than she had two months prior, following her attempt upon her own life. She was not feverish, as she had been then, and she did not mumble in her sleep, or lash about—but she seemed all the sorrier, for sleeping so peacefully, clad in her black mourning gown. She was so thin. Devlin manacled her with great regret, and as loosely as he was able. He asked Mrs. Shepard to bring a blanket to place beneath her head. This instruction was silently obeyed.
‘What’s the meaning of it?’ he said to Gascoigne, as he folded the blanket over his knee. ‘I saw Anna only this morning. I escorted her to the Courthouse myself! Did she go straight to Pritchard’s, and buy a phial of the stuff?’
‘Pritchard’s is closed,’ Gascoigne said. ‘It’s been closed all afternoon.’
Devlin slipped his palm beneath Anna’s head, and slid the folded blanket beneath. ‘Well then, where did she get her hands on a phial of laudanum, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Perhaps she’d had it all along.’
‘No,’ said Devlin. ‘When she left the Wayfarer’s Fortune this morning she wasn’t carrying a reticule or wallet of any kind. She didn’t even have any money on her person, as far as I’m aware. Someone must have given it to her. But why?’
Gascoigne wanted very much to know why Cowell Devlin had gone to the Wayfarer’s Fortune that morning, and what had happened there; as he was thinking of a polite way to ask, however, there came the rattle and clop of a trap approaching, and then Pritchard’s voice:
‘Hello in there! It’s Jo Pritchard, with Emery Staines!’
Devlin’s face was almost comical in its astonishment. Gascoigne had already rushed outside by the time he got to his feet; the chaplain hurried after him, and saw, in the courtyard, Joseph Pritchard, climbing down from the driver’s seat of a trap, and leading the horses to be tethered at the gaol-house post. On the seat of the trap Te Rau Tauwhare was sitting with both arms around a white-faced, sunken-eyed boy. Devlin stared at the boy. This was Emery Staines—this limp, inconsequential thing? The boy was much younger than he had envisaged. Why, he was but one-and-twenty—perhaps even younger. He was barely older than a child.
‘Tauwhare found him hiding out in Crosbie’s cottage,’ Pritchard said shortly. ‘He’s very sick, as you can see. Give us a hand getting him down.’
‘You’re not taking him to gaol!’ Devlin said.
‘Of course not,’ Pritchard said. ‘He’s going to the hospital. He needs to see Dr. Gillies at once.’
‘Don’t,’ said Gascoigne.
‘What?’ said Pritchard.
‘He won’t last an hour if you take him there,’ Gascoigne said.
‘Well, we can’t exactly take him back to his own rooms,’ said Pritchard.
‘Get him a hotel, then. Get him a room somewhere. Anywhere’s better than the hospital.’
‘Give us a hand,’ Pritchard said again. ‘And someone send for Dr. Gillies, while we’re at it. He’ll have the last word.’
They helped Emery Staines down from the trap.
‘Mr. Staines,’ said Pritchard. ‘Do you know where you are?’
‘Anna Magdalena,’ he mumbled. ‘Where’s Anna?’
‘Anna’s right here,’ said Cowell Devlin. ‘She’s right inside.’
His eyes opened. ‘I want to see her.’
‘He’s not talking sense,’ said Pritchard. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’
‘I want to see Anna,’ said the boy, suddenly lucid. ‘Where is she? I want to see her.’
‘He seems coherent to me,’ said Gascoigne.
‘Bring him inside,’ said Devlin. ‘Just until the doctor gets here. Come on: it’s what he wants. Bring him into the gaol.’
THE GREATER MALEFIC
In which Sook Yongsheng overhears the beginning of a conversation.
Ah Sook crouched in the allotment behind the Crown Hotel, his back against the timber of the building, his knees bent, the Kerr Patent revolver cradled loosely in both his hands. He looked like an altogether different man from the one who had purchased the pistol that morning. Margaret Shepard had cut off his pigtail, shadowed his chin and throat with blacking, and thickened his eyebrows with the same; she had found a threadbare jacket for him, and a shirt of gaol-issue twill, and a red kerchief to tie about his neck. With the brim of his hat turned down, and the collar of his jacket turned up, he did not look Chinese in the slightest. Walking the three-hundred-yard distance from the Police Camp to the Crown, he had not attracted the least bit of attention from anyone at all; now, crouched in the allotment, he was all but invisible in the darkness.
Inside the hotel two people were talking: a man and a woman. Their voices came down to him quite clearly through the gap between the window shutter and the frame.
‘Looks like it’ll come off,’ the man was saying. ‘Protected and indemnified.’
‘You still sound uneasy,’ said the woman.
‘Yes.’
‘What are you doubting? The money’s in your hand, almost!’
‘You know I don’t trust a fellow without connexions. I couldn’t dig up anything on this Gascoigne at all. He arrived in Hokitika some time before Christmas. Landed himself a job at the Courthouse without any fuss. Lives alone. No friends to speak of. You say he’s nothing but a dandy. I say: how do I know that Lauderback hasn’t set him up?’
‘He does have one connexion. He brought a friend along to the opening of the Wayfarer’s Fortune, I recall. An aristocratic type.’
‘What does he go by? The friend.’
‘Walter Moody was his name.’
‘He can’t be Adrian Moody’s son?’
‘That was my first thought, too. He did speak with a Scottish lilt.’
‘Well, there you have it: they must be related.’
There was the clink of glasses.
‘I saw him just before I left Dunedin,’ the man went on. ‘Adrian, I mean. Tight as all get-up.’