An Honourable Murderer (20 page)

I've grown wary of notes left for me to find. It's happened to me before. They are always tantalizing and generally an invitation to walk into trouble. So was this one, most likely, an invitation to trouble. But it was signed, or at least initialled, by someone I knew.

J.S. Jonathan Snell.

It said:
I cannot say more now. Come to the Three Cranes yard at nine. J.S.

Would you walk into trouble, if invited? Or would you crumple up the note and throw it to the corner of the room and do your best to forget you'd ever found it?

So how was it that for the second time on an August evening I found myself making my way towards Three Cranes Lane shortly before nine o'clock? Stupidity, perhaps? Foolhardiness? The need to get to the bottom of this strange business?

The second time was very much like the first time. The sky was clear and high and showing more than the first touches of darkness. The tavern with the sign depicting the three long-necked birds stood at the corner of the lane. It was quiet as the grave. A sharp draught still funnelled off the river. And here I was standing at the gate of the Snells' yard.

As before, it was unlocked. As before, the contents of the yard were neatly arranged. Piles of timber, the shrouded windlass, the two carts sitting side by side. I walked up the yard and pulled open one of the double doors. Everything about the ground-floor space looked and smelled the same. Everything except for a red chest or trunk placed slightly to one side of the entrance. I recognized it as the item of stage furniture which Ned Armitage had been painting on my first visit to the Snells'. It was intended for Worcester's Men, he'd said. They were playing at the old Curtain playhouse in Shoreditch. The purpose of the trunk, I recalled, was for a player to hide himself inside. It had probably been painted red so as to draw the eyes of the audience. Red for danger and display.

It was growing dark in the workshop. I called out, not expecting a response, and none came. The place felt unoccupied. I reached out a careful hand towards the trunk, as if the paint might still be wet. It was dry. There was a handle on the lid. The trunk was surely empty, so why did I need to open it? But I did need to open it. I pulled at the handle and levered up the lid. Peered into the interior. Shadows suddenly seemed to swoop down from the gallery above. There was a buzzing in my ears.

Curled up inside the trunk was a body. It was on its side, with its knees drawn up towards the chin and its arms wrapped round the shins, as if clasping itself to itself for a final comfort.

I reeled back. The trunk squatted there in the growing darkness, its lid gaping like a monstrous mouth. I had a choice. I could have walked – or rather run – away from the workshop. Could have pretended that I'd never visited this place. Or I could report the discovery to the headborough and let the authorities take charge. There was no doubt about which would be the responsible course of action.

I was for running away, though.

But first I had to make sure of something.

This was the second time, after all, that I'd encountered a corpse in the Snells' workshop.

I moved towards the trunk once more and nerved myself to make a proper inspection of its contents. It was hard to see much. The head of the body was shrouded in darkness in a corner of the chest. I bent forward and prodded at the curled shape. It was surprisingly springy. The position of the body, with its arms locked round its legs and its head twisted into a corner, would have been impossible for a living person to maintain for long. But this wasn't a living person. It wasn't a dead person either.

The body in the trunk was that figure – half scarecrow, half mannequin – which I had first glimpsed over by the wall of the workshop. A glance showed that it no longer sat on the pile of tarpaulins. Instead someone had placed it in the trunk. The Snells must use it to experiment with the various devices and mechanisms constructed in their workshop. In fact it could take the place of a person in most situations. If you wanted to test the dimensions of a trunk you would fold up your mannequin and stuff him inside it. Unlike a player, he couldn't complain or answer back or demand a pay rise. You could even leave him shut up overnight and he would not reproach you for it in the morning.

I'd been deceived not only by the fading light but by the fact that, when I'd first glimpsed the mannequin against the wall, he wasn't wearing clothes. He was bare, made of coarse linen on the outside and most likely stuffed with rags or horsehair on the inside, probably with internal weights of wood or metal to give him the necessary heft. He lacked the features for a face. Now I could see that he had been dressed in a top and leggings even though the detail of them was invisible to me.

“What have you got to say for yourself, old man?” I said to him. “You gave me quite a fright, thank you.”

Then I laughed slightly and coughed as if to cover up my words, and moved away. In truth, I think I was a little frightened that the figure nestling inside the trunk was going to unbend itself and sit up.

I was standing in the centre of the ground floor underneath the well which extended to the roof. I wondered where young Jonathan Snell was. It must have gone nine o'clock by now. As if in answer, a bell rang out from a nearby church to signal that it had only just reached nine. Odd, that much more than a handful of minutes seemed to have passed since I'd entered the workshop. I would give Snell a few moments more to show himself.

Instinct told me to leave now, though. No one was here, no one was going to come here. It was eerie, this darkening work-space. To my right were the steps leading to the upper floor and next to them the steep wooden slide. Ropes and cables dangled overhead.

Instinct told me to leave but I ignored it. I moved forward and stumbled against something. I looked down. At first I took what I saw for a further trick of the eyes or the product of an overworked brain. For there was another figure down here, a different one. It was lying on its back at the foot of the slide. Not a real body, surely. I bent down to examine it. In the first case, what I had taken for a corpse inside the trunk turned out to be false. Couldn't this figure too be an artefact?

But it was real. The dead man's outflung hand was still warm and waxy to the touch. You cannot simulate that. I did not want to feel any further although I held my own hand in the region of his face to detect any wisp of breath. Nothing. There was just enough light remaining to pick out the red doublet. The outline of a solid, plump shape was discernible in the gloom. His head was twisted to one side as if he couldn't bear to look at what had been done to him. This was John Ratchett.

I climbed the stairs until I reached the gallery. The trapdoor which gave access to the slide was hanging open and I skirted it warily. It was larger and more sophisticated than the trapdoor in the Globe stage (which you simply pulled up and down by hand). As far as I could see this one was opened by tugging on an upright metal lever set to one side. Doing this must release a catch. In the old days when barrels had been stored on the upper floor they would have been shifted to this point and then rolled down the slide. Now it had happened to a man. If you were standing, unawares, on the trapdoor and someone pulled the lever to release the catch . . . Was that what had happened? It must have been. Ratchett was not long dead but when he'd been in the workshop the light would still have been good. He could hardly have tumbled through the open trap accidentally. I visualized an anonymous hand tugging on the lever and Ratchett dropping through the hole, his head and limbs striking the slide in a tangle, his body hitting the ground with fatal force as Sir Philip Blake's had done.

And then the last light from outside disappeared and I was left by myself in the dark. I groped my way back downstairs. Quiet as a ghost, I skirted the body, retraced my steps out of the workshop and through the yard where I stumbled against an outcrop of cut timber. And so once more back into Three Cranes Lane. I shut the gate quietly behind me.

My way home – that is, back to my lodgings with Mrs Buckle in Thames Street – lay to my right. Instead I turned left down towards the river.

It was a warm night. A few dusty stars were starting to appear. I wanted something clean and fresh, or as clean and fresh as the summer air from the river could provide.

I sat down on the wharf, looking at the fireflies that were watermen. For a long time I gazed at the movement of the lights on the water, my mind a blank. The movement of the boats, which during the daytime appears random, is transformed after nightfall to a kind of dance. This dance was comforting to me at the moment. Over my right shoulder crouched the three cranes which gave this spot its name, together with the stone house known as the Vintry.

It is not always wise to linger about the banks of the Thames after nightfall – and indeed I had recently been attacked on the opposite bank (and been ‘rescued' by the late John Ratchett in an incident which I still did not completely understand). But this was the north side of the Thames. It should be less dangerous. In any case, after discovering a body which I had initially taken for real and then another body which I'd at first hoped was false, I felt careless of consequences. If someone wanted to sneak up on me and deprive me of the meagre contents of my purse, then let them do it. My predicament would not be significantly worsened.

But when the cooler air from the river started to clear my head, I understood that I was not thinking straight. Far from getting worse, my predicament was, in one aspect at least, getting better.

John Ratchett was dead. There was no doubt about it. The man who had been in the pay of the French ambassador was dead. The man who had paid me with French gold was dead. The man who had tricked me into supplying him with information was dead.

And so Nicholas Revill was freed of an obligation, wasn't he?

Here my instinctive good sense in slipping away from the scene of the crime like a guilty man became apparent. It was because I might well have been that guilty man in the eyes of the world. No doubt there were plenty of people who'd have an interest in seeing John Ratchett dead or at least out of the way. If he toiled in the twilight world of spies and intelligencers then he must have many enemies. I was one of them. It couldn't be denied that Ratchett's death was convenient for me. I could no longer be ‘persuaded' or threatened by him to spy on activities connected with Ben Jonson's masque.

It was possible that he had lied about being in the pay of the ambassador La Boderie, just as he'd allowed me to believe that he was employed by the Privy Council. Maybe he'd worked only for himself. But he was still a dangerous man and – although I owed him a small debt for having come to my aid on the Southwark side of the water – I couldn't be too sorry that he was gone. However, if anyone was searching for a person with a likely motive for wanting Ratchett dead and gone, then I possessed one of the likeliest. So, it was sensible to have left the Snells' workshop without alerting anyone to Ratchett's death.

There were several mysteries here. What had the man with the red doublet been doing in Three Cranes Lane? Sniffing around, presumably, smelling about in corners. Good dog, good intelligencer. Had he been summoned to a meeting in the workshop like me, or had he gone there of his own accord? The biggest question, of course, concerned the identity of the individual who had pulled the lever while Ratchett was standing on the trapdoor. Individual? Perhaps there had been more than one of them.

I got up from where I'd been sitting at the edge of Three Cranes wharf and paced around in the mild August night. From the river came the occasional splashing of oars, the subdued cries of the watermen. Sound travels better at night, especially across water, but the watermen are also less clamorous. I paced around the wharf and thought.

There was an improvised quality to this killing, it seemed to me. Whoever had committed the crime had employed the nearest means to hand, the most convenient method. A trapdoor, a lever. That argued against planning and premeditation. It suggested that Ratchett had turned up at the workshop, sniffing around. That he'd been discovered and got rid of on the spur of the moment. But why had the body been left lying at the foot of the slide? He was not long dead. I couldn't understand why whoever had done it had not also disposed of Ratchett's remains.

The fact that the murder had occurred at the Snells' pointed the finger at someone who worked there. The familiarity with the surroundings, the improvised use of the trapdoor. Unless of course Ratchett's body had been deliberately left in the Snells' so as to throw suspicion on them. But that, in turn, argued premeditation, which I had more or less ruled out.

The only individuals I was acquainted with were the father and son who had charge of the business, and Ned Armitage. Oh, and there was also that lank-haired fellow Tom Turner. There were others employed in the workshop as well, but I did not know their names or their faces.

I instinctively rejected the idea that Jonathan Snell the younger might be a murderer. He had an open, ingenuous quality. He had plainly wanted to tell me something during the practice in the Somerset House audience chamber and, frustrated in this, left the note in my pocket arranging a meeting in the Three Cranes workshop. It wasn't likely he would have done that if he was planning to carry out a murder – unless (a little voice whispered) he intended to dispose of me as well. But I could not square the image of the friendly, bespectacled young man with that of a cunning killer. And, if he was not what he seemed but a cunning killer after all, then why hadn't he waited in the workshop for my arrival?

Another possibility occurred as I paced around on the cobblestones of the wharf in little circles that echoed the circles of tangled reasoning in my head. This possibility was that the note hadn't been written by Jonathan Snell at all but by his father, who shared the same initials, or by someone else altogether. In that case, the purpose of the note could only have been to entice me into a trap. But, also in that case, the same objection applied. Why hadn't the writer of the note waited around to deal with me as he had already dealt with John Ratchett?