A Murderous Affair, page 9
‘Well, you can start by giving me some information.’
‘Oh, how’s that?’
‘The dinner in the house two nights ago. Were you on river duty?’
‘Always on duty is Matthew, Master John. What of it?’
‘There was a Portuguese gentleman here that night. Do you remember him?’
‘The stranger with the hooknose do you mean? Portingale was he?’ Matthew sniffed disapprovingly. ‘Yes I remember him. And heard he recently tried swimmin’ his way home an’ all.’
I nodded grimly: ‘That’s the one. Apparently, that night he left from here with three or four others. Do you know where they went to?’
‘Highly Master, I can’t say I do, seeing as I didn’t row them myself. They was a-taken off in a hired boat.’
‘Was there anything out of the ordinary that you noticed?’ I didn’t have much faith in Matthew remembering anything but, after furrowing his brow for a moment, he surprised me.
‘Well, now you comes to mention it, young Master, there was some disagreement, if memory serves.’
‘Disagreement? What about?’
‘I can’t rightly say – only that it was between the foreign gentleman, him as had the hooknose, and some other party. A heated exchange it was, in the garden, before getting’ aboard. The other three gentlemen were waiting on the steps. That’s how I remember. There was an embarrassing moment, while the fine gentlemen all stood around pretendin’ not to notice.’
‘You didn’t hear what the argument was about? Any snippets at all?’
‘None Master. Them were out of earshot up in the garden and the likes of me an’t paid to listen to private parlances, howsoever amusin’ it might prove.’ He cocked his head to one side and stroked his grey stubble for a moment. ‘If you asked me to lay a bet, and I only say if mind, I’d wager it was about a woman.’
‘A woman?’
‘You’ve got it – pretty thing that’ll break your heart and empty your purse – not necessarily in that order. Ever encountered such a wonder?’
‘I met one once who ripped out hearts and kept them in a purse she’d already emptied. What makes you say such a creature was the cause of the argument?’ My tone suggested that the last thing I trusted was his old-man’s intuition, but Matthew surprised me further.
‘Only someat one of the other gentlemen said before they all laughed.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘Someat about the foreign gentleman being free with other men’s wives. That’s all I heard. The foreigner come down the steps soon after and the others pretended like they hadn’t heard nothing.’
‘Do you know who any of them were?’
‘Only one of them, it were the poet.’
‘Who Drummond? I can’t imagine that molly knowing much about women, let alone about other men’s wives,’ I said, with a knowing grin at Matthew, which he returned in kind. ‘What did the man the Portingale was arguing with look like?’
‘Highly Master, I never saw him – it were pitch black here that night. Word came that they were leavin’ and a-wanting a boat so I came down here and called for one. The argument took place near the house.’
‘What happened to the man?’
‘I don’t know. I assumed he returned to the house. Like I said, the foreigner came down and they all departed.’
‘So Don Alphonse and Drummond were two in the boat, and a third must have been this Simon Turney. I wonder who the fourth man was.’
‘Why don’t you ask Drummond who it were?’
‘That line of enquiry has been expressly forbidden by my brother. If I ask Drummond, it’ll get straight back to Robert that I’ve disobeyed his order. We’ll have to find out some other way. Do you know where they went?’
‘Downriver for certain but more than that … ’ Matthew shrugged forlornly.
‘Would you recognise their pilot again?’
‘Doubtful Master, every face looks the same on the river, especially at this time of year.’
‘We need to find him if we can. Another thing, the Portuguese had a black servant. Do you recall ever seeing him at all? Our official job now is to go and find him and bring him back here.’
‘A savage?’ Matthew exclaimed using the same term of endearment as my brother. ‘I can’t say as I have Master. I think I’d have remembered someone like that.’
‘They might be savages to you Matthew but I’ve read sailor’s accounts that say when the first boats arrived in Guinea they found neatly laid out towns and villages, a healthy population, and even political systems in place. Just remember that the next time you’re picking your way through the plague, shit and beggar ridden streets of our fine city.’
Matthew merely looked surprised at my comment: ‘You shouldn’t believe everythin’ you read, Master? I heard some of them have two heads and four legs, and that they eat one another for breakfast.’
‘You shouldn’t believe everything you hear on the river.’
‘Why, young master, I believe I overheard that said in this house.’
I shook my head with mock despair at that last remark and bade Matthew start rowing.
Out on the river I felt my spirits lifting. As we coursed into the traffic, I could see, through the occasional gaps between the great houses along the bank, new buildings being erected on the opposite side of the strand, where only a few weeks ago green fields had stretched into the distance. Amongst the new great houses being erected by the rich, there would also be new tenement accommodation built to soak up some of the ever-burgeoning population of the city that had been increasingly spilling over the city walls. The outskirts of the city were fast becoming home for all kinds of immigrants – some fleeing poverty in the countryside, others persecution abroad.
It was happening within the walls too. Comfortable, well-worn wooden framed town houses, and their gardens, were being raised and replaced with cramped, steep-roofed houses – all with a cellar, a shop, two more floors and a garret – the whole thing thrown up in a trice to release the newcomers of their coinage as quickly as possible. I chuckled inwardly at the thought of my brother’s view being obscured by these brash new buildings, which would soon be the nesting place for a whole host of undesirables. This thought, combined with the crisp, clear weather that greeted us on the Thames, served to raise my spirits even further, as we jostled with the wherries and barges on the wide, viscous river.
As the daybreak crept slowly over the horizon, I mulled over my task. It had become clear the previous evening that Walsingham and my brother were far from in agreement on how to tackle the questions of who killed Don Alphonse and why. I was, effectively, working for two masters with two different objectives – and two competing outcomes.
The biggest conundrum I had been struggling with overnight was how involved, if at all, my brother was in the murder? At the very least, Robert’s reluctance to reveal the names of his dinner guests, combined with an indecorous haste to pin the crime on Cassangoe, served only to make him look guilty of hiding something – a fact that hadn’t gone unnoticed by Walsingham.
But the thought of my brother’s involvement in murder jarred in the mind like a bone in the throat. Both his staunch Protestantism and sense of aristocratic honour were at odds with that view. However much I disliked him at times, I couldn’t see him as a murderer. More likely he was simply protecting one of his guests who he suspected might be, and Matthew’s evidence of a quarrel after the dinner added fuel to that particular fire. Yes, I thought, my brother’s position could credibly be put down to a combination of loyalty to a friend and obstinacy in his dealings with Walsingham, whose involvement he clearly resented.
Whatever the truth, I knew that I had to be careful about uncovering any evidence that contradicted Cassangoe’s guilt and would thus embarrass my brother. At the same time, if all I came up with was the same weak reasoning as my brother – ergo savage equates to murderer – Walsingham was hardly likely to be satisfied. I had a very tricky path to negotiate.
I paused momentarily in my thoughts to shoo away a belligerent swan, with two nicks marked in a V-shape on its beak, which was taking exception to Matthew’s course. The mark denoted one of the Vintner swans, which appeared to think, like all of its brethren, that it owned the river. The momentary distraction dealt with, I got back to thinking.
Loyalty to Walsingham or loyalty to my brother? I confess I felt little of it to either of them – it was more a question of who was the more dangerous to disappoint. My brother provided a roof over my head, and an existence of sorts, but he had hardly gone out of his way to instil feelings of loyalty and kinship. He simply took these attributes for granted. A life with my brother’s patronage offered no possibility of advancement and a permanent role somewhere below the dogs in the general pecking order. Walsingham, on the other hand, represented a myriad of opportunities. It was well known that he was at the centre of a spider’s web that spread over the whole of Europe and able men of all backgrounds had risen to height in his organisation. Impressing him was one thing though, failing him another entirely. It could mean creating a powerful enemy, especially if he felt I was obstructing his suspicions of my brother.
I didn’t like the situation one bit.
* * *
Soon I was walking through the bristling streets of Billingsgate, looking for Don Alphonse de Sousa’s port office. The cold weather hadn’t dampened activity in the port, which was full of pinnaces, galleons and every sized ship in between, all gorging their wares onto the London markets.
Matthew had stayed with the boat under instructions to find the waterman that had rowed Don Alphonse and his companions down river two nights previously. We had agreed he would berth at Three Cranes Wharf because it was a popular alighting points for boats going to and from Southwark, as well as those going East and West along the river, and was therefore deemed as good a place as any to start looking for someone who plied their trade as a wherryman. Still, the chances of finding the man were extremely remote – there were thousands of watermen working on the short stretch of the Thames from the Strand to the Tower, it would be as likely as finding a virgin in a Shoreditch playhouse. Not to mention the fact that, despite his assurances, I wasn’t totally convinced Matthew would recognise him.
After some serious thought on the matter, I had also asked Matthew to glean any information he could about Simon Turney, and from where he was sailing. Although my brother had expressly forbidden me to approach his friend and guest, not to mention making it as difficult as possible, Walsingham had wanted me to pursue this line of enquiry. It was the first of a number of such contradictions that I realised I was going to have to deal with, if I was to satisfy two masters. I consoled myself with the thought that Turney had probably set-sail with the morning tide and my brother would never know I had considered talking to him.
Finding Don Alphonse’s port headquarters didn’t prove as easy as I’d hoped. London Pool, as Billingsgate was affectionately known, was a huge port and hundreds of merchants had their offices and warehouses on the scores of wharfs and quays that surrounded it. After an hour’s worth of fruitless enquiring, someone told me that I wanted Lion’s Quay. I was pointed to a hitherto undiscovered stretch of quay, where the frenzied activity of the main docks had subsided. A sign of a lion, badly drawn and with flecking paint, told me I had found my destination.
Chapter 9
‘There is no sin but ignorance.’
(Christopher Marlowe)
Lion’s Quay consisted of a terrace of low-slung warehouses on one side of a rickety dock, a stretch of fetid water on the other. There were one or two ragged barks, but they hardly filled the harbour, which was wide enough, and must have once been a docking point, for large mercantile vessels.
Beyond the stretch of foul-smelling water, the back walls of the central Billingsgate docks rose claustrophobically, throwing shadows across the harbour. A few doors were open and one or two people were working on the jetty but there was no sense of urgency in the day’s work. Even the snow had refused to settle here as though the rotting timbers of the jetty were somehow deemed unworthy. At the far end, ships could be seen passing on the main stretch of the river, whose surface glittered in the low winter sunlight. None stopped at Lion’s Quay; it felt unloved and ignored.
I walked carefully along the greasy, gnarled timbers of the jetty, peering closely at the writing on each of the buildings in turn. None of them appeared to be what I was looking for until I came to the last one. It was a solidly constructed timber shack, which looked in better condition than most of the run-down warehouses I had passed till now. Large black letters painted above the door announced:
A.DE.S. – MERCHANTS SHYPPING TRADE
My instincts told me immediately that I was to be out of luck – the building had an eerie stillness about it. I tried the door but it wouldn’t budge. There seemed little point in knocking but I did so anyway, careful not to attract too much attention from the few stragglers along the quay. Even so, the hollow emptiness of the warehouse echoed loudly along the pier. There were grubby linen windows, set with thick iron bars, to either side of the door but peering through the grime only revealed the backs of shutters that were firmly locked on the inside. Stepping to the edge of the pier, I surveyed the low, sloping roof. There was a tubular metal chimney, where I would have expected to see smoke emerging on such a cold day, had the building been inhabited.
At the river’s edge the pier ended abruptly and it occurred to me that place would be an ideal location to commit a murder – secluded and quiet, with the only inhabitants seeming intent on minding their own business. Was this the murder scene – there was nothing to suggest it, apart from the desolate nature of the spot. It was a relatively short distance from here to Cuckold’s Point – a body could make it in under an hour given the right tidal conditions. Certainly a good working hypothesis, although it didn’t account for the battering the body had received.
I looked dejectedly into the sandy-brown water and thought of all the things I didn’t know concerning Don Alphonse. The waters of the Thames lapped hard against the legs of the wooden pier, as though trying desperately to undermine them. I had reached a dead end – both literally and metaphorically.
I stood there gloomily pondering my next move, when I noticed a thin trail of smoke coming from the adjacent warehouse in the line. It was a much shabbier version of the same design, with the same uniform door and windows and the same thin metal pipe sticking out of its roof. There was also writing above the door but this time it announced, somewhat more prosaically and in much older paint:
‘H. SMYTH & SONNES – HYDDES and SKINNES. FINE WINNES.’
It seemed an improbable combination.
The warehouse door was slightly ajar and I knocked briskly before pulling it open and stepping through. The interior was smoky, and smelt of a mixture of coke and what I took to be animal skins. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the room – through the gloom, I could just about make out all manner of crates and boxes but otherwise it appeared to be empty. The smoke started to make my eyes water and I was about to step out again, when a voice spoke to me from one corner.
‘And what can I do for you young man?’ Startled, I peered into the darkness. ‘If it’s hides you’re wanting then I’m afraid the next shipment isn’t due until next week. Or the week after. There’s never any telling these days. If, on the other hand it’s fine wines you seek, then you are about twenty years too late.’ During the course of this abstruse statement, I had gradually made out the figure of man huddled over a desk in one corner, working to the light of a low-burning candle. He had a black hood over his head out of which sprouted a bushy grey beard. I could just about see that he held a quill in one hand and was making notes in a thick leather-bound ledger that lay on the table in front of him. Behind him the fireplace smoked, rather than blazed, making it look as though his cloak was smouldering. I moved closer towards him, taking care not to trip over the debris that lay about the floor.
‘Excuse me interrupting your labour, sir, I came to the warehouse of Master De Sousa.’ I said, wafting smoke from my eyes before adding helpfully, ‘Your neighbour.’
He put his quill down slowly and raised his eyes towards me, then fixed me with a playful, mischievous look. ‘Would that be Don Alphonse de Sousa? Scourge of Spanish shipping and English husbands? The libertine of Lion’s Quay? He may well be known to me, young master, he may well indeed.’ His voice was slightly nasal, as though he had a cold, though it was more likely his nose was bunged up with smoke. ‘And what business might you have with the Don, Master…?’
‘Lovat, sir.’
‘Come closer, Master Lovat. Let old Hercules have a look at you.’ He beckoned me forward with bony fingers and then stretched out his hand to be shaken ‘Hercules Smyth at your service.’ I gingerly held his fragile, mottled hand, whilst the diminutive Hercules surveyed me up and down. He wasn’t slow to tell me what impression I gave.
‘Now you don’t look the jilted husband type – altogether too young and innocent-looking, if you’ll forgive my saying so. So it can’t be revenge you’re after. Expensive hand me down clothing, coupled with an air of superiority – a gentleman fallen on hard times, perhaps? Old Hercules has seen plenty of those in his lifetimes. No, I’ve got it – a disinherited son? You have that touch of mordancy about you. Only a touch mind. Are you hoping the benevolent Don Alphonse will whisk you off to foreign parts where you can recoup your fortune?’ I smiled at the old man’s summing up.
‘Alas, no fortune lost to recoup, and no desire to be a mariner either.’ I studied the old man’s twinkling grey eyes on either side of his thin, red nose and wondered just how well he knew Don Alphonse.
