The Ebb Tide (the adventures of langdon st. ives) Read online

  “Finn Conrad, at your gentlemen’s service,” he said, holding out his hand, which I shook heartily enough. I immediately liked the look of the boy, who reminded me a little of myself at that age, but with considerably more gumption.

  “Jack Owlesby,” I told him. “And this is Mr. Frobisher. They called him Pilaster Frobisher out in India, where he spent a great deal of time in the sun. If you’d just lead the way inside, Mr. Frobisher.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, young comet,” Tubby said to the boy, bowing in his portly way and shaking the offered hand before heading in through the open door “I’m speaking to an acrobat, I don’t doubt?”

  “Duffy’s Circus, sir, born and bred. But I ran away two years back, after my old mother died, and I’ve been living hereabouts since, making my living in what way I can. Are these your whacking sticks?” he asked, gesturing, and we said that they were. He collected the leaded cane and shillelagh where they lay atop the workbench, surveyed the bones and skeletons as if they were pretty much what he expected to find under the circumstances, and went on into Merton’s like an old hand.

  Merton wasn’t dead, thank God, but was sitting in a chair now, in that comfortable little browsing parlor he’s got at the front of the shop. He held a glass of brandy and wore a bandage round his forehead. St. Ives and Hasbro sat opposite, and Tubby and I took the two remaining chairs. Through the window I could see London Bridge. Upriver lay the Pool, the masts of the shipping just visible, and faint on the air you could hear bells and whistles and other sorts of nautical noise. “I saw his face clearly,” Merton was saying to St. Ives. “It was a broad face, nose like a fig and small eyes. Not a dwarf, mind you, but a small man. Apelike is the word for him. Quite horrible in appearance.”

  “In a brown coat,” young Finn said, “begging your pardon, sir, and a watch cap. That’s the very man I was telling these gentlemen about.”

  “What have we here?” St. Ives asked.

  “Finn Conway, sir, at your service. I seen him come over the wall out back. ‘What’s this now?’ I asked myself. Why would a man come over a wall when there’s a door out front unless he’s up to no good?”

  “Quite right,” Tubby said.

  “He didn’t see me,” Finn said, “because I didn’t want him to. He headed straightaway toward the river with me following after him, and went into a gin shop in what they call Peach Alley.”

  “The Goat and Cabbage,” I said helpfully,

  “That’s the one. I took a look inside, nonchalant like, but I didn’t see him. Maybe he’s gone on through, I thought. There’s a lot of what you might call passages down along there by the river. I waited for a bit, thinking he might come out from where he’d gone, but then a man came in and told me to clear out.”

  “Can you take us there in the morning?” St. Ives asked, and Finn said that he could, and then assured us that he could find very nearly anyplace a second time if he put his mind to it, just as easy as the first time. He had lived hereabouts long enough to know the riverside, he said, although he was presently without an address and was looking forward to summer and to less of this wind.

  St. Ives asked him if he could find us a bite of supper, and sent him off with a handful of coins, considerably more money than was necessary, enough to tempt him if he were a rascally young hypocrite and not who he seemed to be, and in any event to get him out of the way while we reconnoitered.

  “He’ll be back right enough,” Tubby said. “He’s a game one. You should have seen him scale the garden wall, speaking of apes.”

  I could see that Merton was in a state, glancing fearfully about him as if at any moment his assailant might return to finish him off, but he calmed himself with an effort, and for the next quarter of an hour he laid out the facts as he knew them, and we pitched in with comments when we were able. Merton, it turns out, had been given the map by his uncle Fred, a sand pilot on Morecambe Bay who lives in the area of Grange-over-Sands. Fred takes excursions across the sands at low tide, Merton told us, out into the cockle beds off Poulton-le-Sands, or back and forth from Silverdale to Humphrey Head if the moon is right. Uncle Fred — a legend thereabouts — had been mired in quicksand, caught up by the incoming tide, run afoul of smugglers, and suffered all manner of perils and had lived to tell the tale. He wasn’t one of the Queen’s Guides, mind you, but that’s what made him useful to certain people, especially that class of dredger who fished the quicksand by night.

  Fred had found the map — it was as simple as that — near the top of the Bay. It was corked up in a bottle that had suffered some leakage. It looked curious to him, and he kept the map as a souvenir, putting it into a drawer and after a time forgetting about it. Then one day two weeks past he sorted out the drawer and found it again, and when Merton and he ran into each other at their Aunt Sue’s house in Manchester, he gave it to Merton as a curiosity. Merton put it straight into the catalogue without a second thought, although he’d been cagey with the description, in case there was more to the business than met the eye. Then he sent up to Chingford-by-the-Tower to alert St. Ives.

  “More what than met the eye?” Tubby asked, in his usual impatient way.

  “The thing is,” Merton said, “Uncle Fred talked the map around, you see, after he found it again in the drawer.”

  “Talked it around to whom?” asked St. Ives, looking at him narrowly.

  “To the lads in a pub there in Poulton-le-Sands, over a pint, you know. Natural sort of thing, if you see what I mean, passing the time. Except there turned out to be two men sitting nearby, listening hard. One of them asked to see it, but Uncle Fred made up an excuse for not having it with him, although he did, right there in the pocket of his coat. He didn’t like the look of either of them, and didn’t know them, although he could describe them right enough. The one was a tall, scowly sort of fellow, swarthy, Fred told me. Unpleasant. A murderer’s face, Fred called it. The other had dead white hair, and a face that looked as if it had been carved out of ice. There was something wrong with this second man that you couldn’t quite name — Dr. Fell comes to mind. It was the tall man who did the talking.”

  St. Ives gave us a glance at this juncture. The detail of the white hair and the unnamable malevolence suggested that our man was indeed Ingacio Narbondo, now known as Dr. Frosticos, or sometimes Frost, St. Ives’s longtime nemesis and the last man on earth I wanted anything to do with. He had gone out of our lives some time back — out of the world, I had hoped. His interest in the map would be as avid as that of St. Ives, although he would be considerably more ruthless in its pursuit.

  “I take it that you saw these same men again?” Hasbro asked.

  “Just the tall one,” Merton said. “The first time was there in Manchester. Fred saw him on the street and pointed him out to me. He was loitering in a doorway and smoking a pipe. That could have been a coincidence, of course, or perhaps another tall man with similar features. We were on the other side of the street, you see, and it was evening. But then I saw him again, shortly after I was back in London, and no mistake this time. He followed me to the shop, and he wasn’t clever at it either. Bold is the word for it.”

  “You’re certain he followed you?” St. Ives asked.

  “Yes,” Merton said. “The second sighting there in Manchester might have been coincidence, but the third time always smells of a plot.”

  “And the white haired man?” I asked him.

  “No. Only the tall one. The catalogue hadn’t been distributed yet, but he asked straightaway to buy the map, said that he’d heard it had fallen into my hands. No preamble, no beating about the bush. ‘I want the Morecambe Sands map,’ he said.”

  “And you told him to bugger off,” Tubby said.

  “Not in so many words,” Merton said, pouring himself another glass of brandy. He swirled it in the light, looking shrewdly at us. “I played the fool, you see. Denied knowing anything about it. He accused me of lying, and I told him to get out. Then two days later there he was again, but
with a copy of the new catalogue, Lord knows where he’d gotten his hands on it, which he laid on the counter along with the required sum, accurate to the penny. I told him I’d already sold it. He called me a liar, which of course was accurate, and walked out without being asked. I hoped that was the end of it.”

  “But he sent his simian cohort back in tonight and bloody well took it,” Tubby said.

  “Ah! Ha ha! He believes he took it!” Merton said, brightening up, but then shut his eyes and held his forehead with the pain of laughing, and it took him a moment to get going again. St. Ives had a keen look on his face.

  “Now, here’s the long and the short of it,” Merton continued, looking around again, his voice dropping. He tipped us a wink. “I hoped I’d seen the end of the gentleman, you see, and yet I’m a careful man. I set to work and devised a false map on a piece of the same sort of paper — but quite a different part of the Bay and with the landmarks changed. Correct in all other ways. I doctored the ink so that it ran, as if the paper had been soaked in seawater, but not so much that the map couldn’t be made out. Then I colored it up with dyes made of algae and tobacco and garden soil, and I slipped it into the box under the counter, where I keep small money to make change for the customers. Our man searched for it, as you can see, throwing things around the floor. Then he spotted the box, helped himself to the money, and found the map. Of course I played my part. ‘Take the money,’ I said to him, ‘but for God’s sake leave the other! It’s of no value to you.’” Merton sat back in his chair now, smiling like a schoolboy, very satisfied with himself, but then his face fell.

  “His response was to hit me with a length of lead pipe. Quick as a snake. Perfectly unnecessary. I hadn’t so much as twitched.”

  “The stinking pig,” Tubby said, and of course we all voiced our agreement, but what I wanted to know was, what about the map, the real map? Merton had it safe as a baby, it turned out — rolled up, tied neatly with a bit of string, and thrust into the open mouth of a stuffed armadillo in the window. No thief, he informed us, would think to look for valuables inside an armadillo.

  Merton leered at us for a moment, making us wait, and then said, “Fancy having a squint at it?” He was enjoying himself immensely now. He was resilient, I’ll say that for him, but perhaps too enamored of his own cleverness, which the ancients warns us against. Still, he had done what he could to help St. Ives, and had nearly had his skull crushed into the bargain. He was a good man, and no doubt about it, and his ruse de la guerre seemed to have worked. He helped himself to a third glass of brandy, which he drank off with a sort of congratulatory relish before fetching the map out of the maw of the preposterous scaled creature nearby. He handed it to St. Ives, who slipped off the string and unrolled it delicately. After a moment he looked up at Hasbro and I and nodded. “It’s as we thought,” he said.

  Just then the door swung open and Finn Conrad came in carrying meat pies and bottled ale, and, it turned out, most of St. Ives’s money. St. Ives slipped the map into his coat while Finn set down his burden, handed back the bulk of the coins, and advised the Professor (begging his pardon for saying so) not to be quite so liberal with people he didn’t know, not in London, leastways, although it mightn’t be a problem in the smaller towns, where people were more honest, on the whole.

  My appetite had fled when I saw Merton bleeding on the floor, but it returned now in spades, and that apparently went double for Tubby, who crushed half a pie into his mouth like an alligator eating a goat, and then settled back into his chair for some serious consumption, the rest of us not far behind him. Tomorrow morning, St. Ives told us, we would take a look into the Goat and Cabbage, if Finn would be so kind as to show us the way. Finn said that nothing would give him more pleasure, and then pointed out that someone should guard the shop tonight in Merton’s absence, and much to Merton’s credit he said that he would be quite happy if Finn would make up the settee in the workroom, and sleep with one eye open and one hand on the shillelagh in case the rogues returned.

  “Out the back door and over the wall at the first sound of trouble, that’s my advice,” I told him, and Hasbro echoed the sentiment.

  St. Ives was doubtful about leaving the boy alone in the shop at all, now that he knew something more of the men who possessed the false map.

  “The stolen item,” St. Ives said to Merton,” “you say it’s a…satisfactory specimen?”

  “Oh, much better than satisfactory, I should say,” Merton said, grinning. “Considerably better. Not that I claim to know anything about the art of…reproduction.” He had been going to say “forgery,” but there was no reason to utter the word with the lad standing by. Reproduction said rather too much, it seemed to me at the time. Certainly there was no profit, and perhaps some danger, in Finn’s knowing things he didn’t need to know. St. Ives, sensibly, brought the conversation to a close.

  And so we locked young Finn safely into the shop and went out into the evening to see Merton home, where we delivered him safely to Mrs. Merton, he having fully recovered his spirits, and with an extra measure into the bargain. Mrs. Merton gasped to see the bloody bandage on her husband’s head, but Merton was markedly indifferent to it. “Happy to be of service,” he said to St. Ives, saluting. “I’ll do my part!” We assured him that he already had and left him smiling gloriously on the doorstep.

  In the morning Finn was already up and working when St. Ives, Hasbro, and I returned. Tubby had domestic duties and hadn’t come along, which turned out to be to our advantage, given what happened later, although I’m getting ahead of myself. Finn had shelved the fallen books, made an orderly stack of the papers, swept the place out, and was soaking the blood out of Merton’s lab coat, which, he said, wanted cold water and not hot so as not to “set the stain,” which was something else he had learned during his years in the circus, where he had put in his time in the laundry. “All shipshape,” he told us.

  We breakfasted along Thames Street on kippers and eggs and beans, and then set out with Finn walking far on ahead, which was Hasbro’s idea. No one would associate the boy with us, you see, when we were in the neighborhood of the Goat and Cabbage, and I was reminded once again that there might be some danger in our undertaking. To tell you the truth, it had begun to seem more like a holiday to me.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Goat and Cabbage

  Lower Thames Street from the Pool to the Tower is busy night and day, with cargo coming off the ships and going onto them, and shops open, and fishmongers hauling carts and pushing hand barrows of whiting and oysters and plaice and whelks toward Billingsgate Market, which smelled of brine and seaweed and, of course, fish. All manner of trade goods and all manner of people crept up and down, jostling in and out of coffeehouses and shops, intent on doing business or on getting in the way of other people doing theirs. I was knocked sideways by a grimacing man with an unlikely large and wet bag of oysters over his shoulder, and knocked back again by a donkey hauling a cart of herring barrels, but nobody meant any harm and it struck me as rather agreeable than otherwise to be out and about on a busy spring morning, last night’s blustery cold having given up and gone back to whence it came.

  In all that seething crowd we lost sight of Finn, but then saw him again, lounging against a store front, eating something out of his hand, giving the last of it to a mongrel dog and setting out again without so much as a look in our direction, the dog at his heels. Half a block farther along, I smelled a waft of pipe tobacco, Sobranie again. The tobacco isn’t all that rare, but it naturally put me in mind of the tall workman in Lambert Court last night. Then I thought of the small man who had been with him earlier in the evening, and then of Merton’s description of his apelike assailant and of the tall man from the pub in Poulton-le-Sands, and suddenly, like a bonk on the conk, it didn’t feel like a holiday any longer as the truth rushed in upon me. The two men in Lambert Court yesterday evening weren’t the navvies they had appeared to be. One had evidently stayed behind to keep an eye on us, and th
e other had gone down to the embankment to beat poor Merton over the head with a pipe. Hasbro’s untimely entrance must have complicated things for them, and yet they had managed to remain one step ahead of us.

  Abruptly I wished I had taken along the leaded cane, and I looked around, trying to catch sight of the pipe smoker while I was revealing all this to St. Ives, who narrowed his eyes and nodded at me. But I saw no one who might be our man, or our men. Soon we drew abreast of a narrow alley that angled away toward the river. Finn was just then buying a bag of hot chestnuts from a man with a kettle on wheels, and he nodded discreetly up the alley, where there hung a weather-battered sign depicting the head of a goat wearing a cabbage leaf cap.

  There was nothing for it but to push through the door into the fug of the gin shop, which was busy enough for that hour of the morning. A man was singing “Pretty Mary Tumblehome” in a voice like a broken cartwheel, and there was a good deal of low talk, which staggered just a little when walked in. It evened out again when we three trespassers had navigated the tavern and found calmer water in a corridor beyond.

  There were a couple of straw pallets along the near wall of the first room off the corridor, and a chamber pot, and boxes of destitute old junk that you might see for sale in a two penny stall in Monmouth Street. Against the far wall stood a heavy oaken wardrobe with a broad, high door, considerably scarred and black with age — nothing that interested us in the least. We jibbed without a word, angling back out into the dark corridor, sailing past other dead-end rooms and none the wiser for any of it. Evidently we had come on a fool’s errand.

  “They’ll no doubt find us soon enough,” St. Ives said, shrugging, and he turned back down the corridor with us following, anxious to gain the street — or at least I was. But Hasbro stopped outside the room with the wooden wardrobe, cocking his head as if listening to something.