River's Edge Page 5
Mother Laswell had donned a flowing purple robe with a wash of stars across the bodice. She stood beneath the starry sky with her hand upraised, looking like a figure in an illustration. She waved the crowd silent and began to speak in a powerful voice.
“Moments ago you saw with your own eyes a collection of poisoned animals—a mere trifle compared to the thousands that have passed away down the River Medway to the sea. Now you behold before you a replica of the Majestic Paper Mill, which expels its filthy poisons into the River, unhindered by law or common decency.” She paused to let this resonate, and then said, “This model was assembled to nearly exact proportions according to figures given to me by a lovely girl named Daisy Dumpel, who worked at the mill and was made sick by it. Yesterday Daisy was found murdered. Who murdered her? I can tell you that the man accused of the crime was found hanged in his cell this very morning—out of remorse, the newspapers tell us. Perhaps it’s the truth. Or perhaps it is part of a greater lie. Perhaps an innocent man and an innocent girl have been murdered by men who would sell their souls to gain the world!”
St. Ives hadn’t heard about the hanging, and it struck him as odd—too convenient by half—a girl murdered and her alleged murderer very quickly dead into the bargain, the case fortuitously solved, or at least disposed of. Mother Laswell’s perhaps it’s the truth was evidently laced with irony, and well it might be. He wondered whether Mother herself was treading on thin ice, however, shouting out her suspicions to the world. She was in the right, of course, generally speaking. He would admit that readily. But her Society was made up of more persons than herself, and she presumed to speak for them all, bolstered by what she considered the unassailable rightness of her position.
She held up her hands now, quieting the crowd, who were engaged in a cacophony of discussions, some of them drunken discussions, to be sure. She nodded to Kraken, who struck a Lucifer match on his shoe sole and set ignited the wax-filled rushes. “Burn it!” Mother Laswell commanded, and Kraken set fire to the banner, which burst into bright flame. The two of them strode off to the nearest table as the flames ignited the bunting, the fire diminishing somewhat as it crept down to the buildings themselves, but then spreading quickly across the pasteboard slates of the rooftops. St. Ives wondered what the banner and bunting had been soaked in to make it burn so—paraffin, perhaps.
The walls of the mill flared up and collapsed inward, the flames leaping. One by one the other buildings followed suit, until all were in varying stages of collapse. People began to cheer and applaud, many of them holding their glasses up in a general toast. St. Ives saw that the photographer was hastily stowing his gear into his wagon with the help of a boy who appeared to be ten or twelve years old, and very soon the two of them hauled the wagon across the green, apparently in a hurry to get out ahead of the rest of the crowd. After a time the fires flickered out, leaving the night dark despite the lantern light. The beauty of the starry sky and of the dark wood behind the meadow contrasted sharply with the ugly smell of the burning.
Chapter 10
The Right Side of Things
THE HOUSE WAS quiet, the children down for the night, or pretending to be, on cots in the sleeping gallery. They had wanted to sleep in the barn with the elephant and the owls and bats—Larkin had been going to teach them how to kill rats with a throwing stick—but Alice and Gilbert had agreed that the summer solstice was a rat holiday in Kent and that the rats should be given a reprieve.
“It’s odd that the world is a private place within the confines of the bed curtains,” Alice said. “It’s very like being in a tent in the forest, isn’t it? Or cast away upon an island. One supposes that one can say or do almost anything without anyone overhearing or taking notice.”
“Funny you should say such a thing,” St. Ives said. “I was contemplating on islands just yesterday—how we lived upon one in a sense—an enchanted island, especially in this season of the year.” They lay looking up at the candle-lit canopy—a tapestry figured with the night sky seen through leaves and boughs, the corners of the sky fixed to the tall bedposts. The warm night breeze shifted the window curtains, which, along with the bed curtains on that side, were drawn aside to give them a view.
Both of them had been reading, but St. Ives put down his book now, and said, “I have mild misgivings about this affair of Mother Laswell’s. Her anger is well founded, of course, but she made use of very heavy artillery, so to speak. And as for the London crowd, they kept the reporter intrigued, but I cannot see how they were an asset to her cause. She asked for no contributions, after all. I can tell you that Gilbert came away looking unnerved.”
“An asset to our cause, in fact,” Alice said. “Yours and mine. All of ours.” She gestured with a copy of Murphy’s Fishing Catalogue, which she was in the habit of perusing with something like greed. “Mother believes that the cause must be made public. Surely your doubts are not meant to suggest that I abandon her? Men talk a great deal about honor, but honor is a commodity that women value as well, you know.”
“Yes, of course, but perhaps you can convince her that it’s in her best interests to…”
“Mother is convinced that the newspaper account of poor Daisy’s murder is false, and so her own best interests are of no particular importance to her, which should come as a surprise to neither of us.”
“Still, the burning of the mill was moderately shocking, given that it was the Majestic Paper Mill down to its particulars. The photographer took photos of it, of course, and the wandering reporter scribbled notes. When the business is made public, as you say, it will look very much like a threat.”
“Mother will insist that the burning was merely symbolic, which of course it was.”
St. Ives looked out through the window curtains at the night sky. A white bird flew into view and then out again, a barn owl no doubt. “I’ve found that a person can be in the right but be made to look wrong. The newspapers have made a study of it.”
“And yet that has never stopped you from putting yourself on the right side of things when it was safer to walk away.”
He had no answer to this, or to any of it, and sat looking at the dancing candle flame now. After a few moments Alice went back to her catalogue.
“Do you know what gives me pause?” he asked, interrupting her reading once again.
“I do not,” she said, “unless it’s a newt. You regularly pause over newts.”
“I’m quite serious. It was alleged that the murderer possessed one hundred pounds in an envelope that he had taken from the girl Daisy, and that the money was given to her by the Majestic Paper Mill for reasons that aren’t at all clear. Robbery is the implied motive for the murder, or at least one of the motives. But surely no girl in Daisy’s position would reveal to a man she’s only recently met that she has one hundred pounds about her person.”
“It’s said that she left the Chequers in the man’s company willingly enough, so she must have trusted him.”
“And yet, according to Dorothea Swinton at the Chequers, Daisy wrote the message to Mother Laswell not fifteen minutes before she was seen leaving the inn with the murderer, and Charles Townover, the mill owner, confirmed that Daisy had been going to leave for London on the morning train. Why this confusion?”
Alice shrugged. “Perhaps this man prevailed upon her to change her mind about going into London. Girls have been tricked and abused by men since the dawn of time.”
“But no one in the taproom saw the man’s face, because he was carrying Daisy’s trunk on his shoulder,” St. Ives said. “She apparently had no idea of leaving her room at the Chequers that night. Surely she would have told Mrs. Swinton if she had instead of insisting that she was to leave in the morning. If it was this Henry fellow who convinced her to leave with him, he accomplished the feat in record time. Something’s amiss. There are pieces to the puzzle that went into the river with the girl’s body.”
“I believe that entirely,” Alice said to him. “I wonder why was she given s
uch a grand sum at the mill?”
“Perhaps because they were intent upon buying her silence.”
They were both quiet for a time, having worn out the conversation with unanswerable questions. They blew out their respective candles, and in the darkness watched the drifting, moonlit clouds and the winking stars.
“But if they bought Daisy’s silence,” Alice asked after a time, “why would they have had her throttled and thrown into the river?”
“There you have me,” St. Ives said.
Chapter 11
The Investigation
THE RAILWAY PLATFORM looked out onto the River Medway through the trees. The river was low, with broad mudflats. St. Ives found the railway porter easily enough, a man he had said good-day to many times over the past couple of years, and he discovered now that the man’s name was Jeffries. Porters, he had long ago discovered, were founts of knowledge.
“I seen him right enough, sir,” Jeffries told him, “a small man with a top-hat like a stove pipe, meant to raise his stature I don’t doubt, and a small, worthless boy alongside, although all the same your man oughtn’t to have kicked the boy. It was me who hauled his hat trunk out to the road. It weren’t full of hats, but photographic equipage. Heavy, it was, not a proper hat trunk, but with a thick wooden bottom in it. A man in a wagon drove him and his goods away, and the boy with them. I can tell you the man’s name, if you like, for I saw it on his trunk.”
“I would like that very much, yes.”
“Manfred Pink, it was. An odd name, I thought, although there were some Pinks living around Hastings when I was a boy.”
“Did Pink come in on one of the London trains, then? There were a number of passengers from London stopping yesterday, if I’m not mistaken.”
“You make no mistake,” Jeffries told him. “They came down for the doings at Hereafter. But your man didn’t come down with the rest of the toffs. He came up from Tunbridge Wells in the morning, as I know because he told me himself. It was a Dockett’s hat trunk that he carried, very pricey. Mr. Dockett, the old man, was a friend of my Uncle Jennings, and many’s the time I sat in Dockett’s shop as a boy in Tunbridge Wells. Old man Dockett would give me leather scraps and brass fittings. The point is I told your man that a Dockett’s was a first-rate trunk, just to be civil, and he said he knew it well enough already, living in Tunbridge Wells as he did, nigh Dockett’s shop, and he hadn’t asked for my approval. That was your small man with the top-hat—a man who can’t speak civil and who kicks boys because they can’t afford to kick him back.”
A train came into the platform now with a whoosh of steam brakes and a loud screeching. The doors opened, and scattered passengers stepped off. St. Ives gave Jeffries a half crown and received a tip of the hat in response before Jeffries turned away to help a woman with a spray of feathers in her bonnet, taking up her bag and guiding her down the platform, warning her to take particular care.
St. Ives followed them, knowing exactly what he had come to find out, but wondering what it meant: a photographer from Tunbridge Wells, whom Mother Laswell hadn’t summoned, had descended upon the soirée apparently of his own accord. It was apparent that the London revelers had relished having their photographs taken, but there was no sign that they knew the man or that they had any expectations of him.
ST. IVES WAS shown into the entry hall at the Majestic Paper Mill by a girl wearing a paper hat and apron. She gave him a paper swan, curtsied indifferently, and went away. He stood with his hat and swan in his hand for a bare two minutes before Charles Townover came out to meet him, ushering him to a chair and taking another himself, a broad desk between them. The interior of the mill was as Gilbert had described it—clean and well lit. A great deal of money had been spent on amenities. Beyond a long bank of windows draped with muslin there were signs of activity—paper being made within the mill proper. If it weren’t for the unpleasant reek of chemicals and the sound of the machinery, it would almost have been a welcoming place, at least on this side of the glass.
“I come on behalf of my friend Gilbert Frobisher,” St. Ives said to Townover after the man had re-introduced himself, apparently having forgotten that he had met St. Ives in the past. “Regrettably, he’s been taken ill, and he won’t be able to meet with you and the other investors this afternoon.”
“That’s unfortunate, indeed,” Charles Townover said, giving St. Ives an appraising look. “And you’ve come up the river from Aylesford to inform me of this? You must have remarkably little to do. It would have saved you a mort of trouble if Frobisher had sent a message. You might have sent the message, for that matter.”
“I have business in Snodland, actually, so it was no trouble at all. Mr. Frobisher also asked that I relay his regret about the unfortunate incident of the murdered girl. She had made him a paper peacock, as I understand it.”
“We all regret the incident, sir, but the man who perpetrated the crime has hanged himself, and so some virtue has come of it.”
“He was associated with a union, then, the murderer? So I read in the Gazette.”
Townover stared at him, and it came to St. Ives that he might have overreached himself. “I mean to say that it’s a black mark against a union,” he said, “to send such a man to do its business.”
“A union’s business is a black mark upon itself,” Townover told him, “and it doesn’t surprise me a bit that its emissaries are blackguards. You would do me a favor to convey to Mr. Frobisher that the Majestic Paper Mill does not require the encouragement of a union. We think of ourselves as a family. Simply put, Daisy Dumpel was a member of that family, and this union man—disunion being more to the point—murdered a girl who was in my charge. The girls know that they can come to me with their troubles, just as they would go to their own fathers. This is the essence of my meeting this afternoon with the investors, or a part of it.”
St. Ives nodded agreeably, deciding to probe a little more deeply, even at the hazard of ending things: “Mr. Frobisher will be happy to hear it. He was pleasantly surprised at the largesse displayed by the mill to the Dumpel girl. One hundred pounds is quite a sum.”
“Yes, it is,” said Townover. “My point exactly. What sort of business brings you into Snodland, sir?”
“I grow hops. I like to keep in touch with local brewers. It adds an air of familiarity and good cheer to business dealings.”
“That would be Crosland, then? Hillhurst Crosland? The Crown Brewery?”
“The very man,” St. Ives lied. He actually sold his hops to the Anchor Brewery in Aylesford and had no dealings at all with the Crown Brewery.
“Then give him my best wishes. I’ve known him for some time. And convey those same wishes to Gilbert Frobisher. Tell him that I’m anxious to speak with him as soon as he’s well.”
Townover leaned back in his chair and folded his hands, the conversation apparently at an end. The door from the mill floor opened, and a tall, horse-faced man came out, saw them, and headed in their direction. St. Ives recognized him immediately, his tweed cap as well, from that night along the Eccles Brook, but he meant to deny anything the man might accuse him of.
“What is it, Davis?” Townover asked him, but Davis was staring at St. Ives with what was clearly a look of surprise on his face, although it faded quickly.
“Do we know each other?” St. Ives asked him.
“I thought we might, but I see I was mistaken. I’m sorry to interrupt.”
“Our conversation was at an end, Davis,” Townover said. And then to St. Ives, he said, “I have a business to attend to, sir. The door stands yonder. I regret that none of the girls are on hand to show you out, sir, so you’ll have to find your own way.”
WHEN THE DOOR was shut behind St. Ives, Charles Townover looked carefully at Davis as if taking his measure. “Did you in fact recognize that man?” he asked.
“No, sir. I did not. When I first saw him he looked something like a gent I knew in London, but when I came up to him I seen it wasn’t so.”
“I’m sure I don’t know, sir. I’ve come to say that Mary Shanks has puked blood into the vat, and that Jenks is pumping it out. The girl is gone to the infirmary.”
“I’ll pay her a visit. I want you to do me a service, however. Have a look out the window upstairs to ascertain whether Mr. St. Ives turns upriver toward the Wouldham Bridge or downriver toward Aylesford. If he’s bound for Snodland and means to cross the bridge, I want you to follow him on horseback. But tether the horse and take the ferry across to the wharf so that he doesn’t see you crossing the bridge behind him. Do not molest the man in any way. Do not so much as speak to him. He’s a friend of Gilbert Frobisher, who is potentially very valuable to us as an investor. I have no intention of causing Frobisher’s friends any grief, no matter how meddlesome they are. St. Ives says that he is bound for the Crown Brewery. If that turns out to be true, then return to the mill. If it is not true, then I want to know where he goes.”
“Yes, sir,” Davis said, and turned away toward the stairs.
“Davis! One more thing! If, as I suspect, he is not bound for the brewery, then allow yourself to be seen, but do not speak to the man. I merely want him to know that I have my eye on him.”
ST. IVES WAS certain that Davis had recognized him. Hasbro had remained in Aylesford in order to make that less likely, but the gaff had been blown, and there was no help for it now. Davis had no doubt informed Townover as soon as St. Ives was out of the building. It came to him that he would be clearly visible from the upper windows of the mill, and so decided that he would turn north toward the bridge at Wouldham if only to allay some of the old man’s suspicions. He would avoid being caught in an obvious lie, and he would look into the pub at the Malden Arms on his way back upriver, where the alleged murderer had been run to ground. The murder and hanging were not his affair, but his curiosity had been piqued.