Keeping Bad Company (11 page)

‘I told him it was no use trying to keep it from you,' he said.

‘Quite right.'

‘We had to make sure of it. See how far out you could get when the tide was right.'

He assumed I knew more than I did, and I had no intention of disillusioning him. The picture was becoming much clearer. Amos and my brother had been wading like mudlarks in the mud of the Thames. Whatever they were planning depended on the state of the tide. That surely meant a boat. What could Tom be doing with a boat that I wasn't supposed to know about? I was sure it had something to do with Mr Griffiths's instructions in the will: ‘I direct him as my executor to see that my body is disposed of according to Hindu rites by the sacred mother Ganges.' Then the postscript: ‘Or as near to that as he can contrive.'
Tom, conscientious as I'd expect, was determined to do what he could to carry out his friend's wishes. He was planning to ship his body back out to India. At a guess, a vessel about to sail for India would be somewhere downriver near the docks and Tom was planning to have the body rowed out to it. How it was to be arranged, given the heat and the length of the voyage, was a puzzle. I had a hazy memory that the body of Lord Nelson had been brought home from Trafalgar preserved in a cask of brandy. Was Tom planning something on those lines? Probably nothing illegal about it, once the body had been released by the coroner, but macabre enough to justify some secrecy.

‘Whereabouts?' I said.

‘Just down from Westminster Bridge, south side.'

Amos, hangdog, thought I knew so much anyway that details didn't matter.

‘After dark, I suppose?'

‘Just after.'

I left without plaguing him any further. I knew enough.

I watched the sun setting from Westminster Bridge. On a fine evening, there were enough people strolling to make me inconspicuous. The south side of the river in the dark would be another matter. A warren of ramshackle streets and warehouses lined the muddy river bank, with a few wooden wharves sticking out into the mud. Not many respectable people went there after dark, and no women except those who were a long way from respectable, or so poor that they had to raise families in the half-rotten houses that were on their way to sliding back into river mud. I wished very much that Tabby was with me. I hadn't realized how much I'd come to depend on her tough, resourceful company at times like this. Still, I was determined not to miss what Tom was doing. It was part of the business of getting to know this young man who'd been my little brother. His loyalty to his friend was admirable. More than that, the imagination and defiance of convention in carrying out his wishes recalled the younger, reckless Tom. I wanted his plan to go well. The tide puzzled me, though. It was well out, the river somewhere near its lowest, with long expanses of mud sloping down to the water. Not the right conditions for loading a body into a rowing boat. Could Tom and Amos have got the tides wrong?

The sun went down. The strollers wandered back across the bridge to the north bank. I'd be conspicuous now if I stayed, so I went to the south side of the bridge and waited, leaning against the stone parapet. A few men called out remarks, but no worse. As the dusk came down, I was all but invisible. The traffic on the bridge was much thinner now, mostly carriages going from south to north, a few carts creaking in the opposite direction. The light was almost gone when the twin gleam of a pair of candle lamps appeared from the north side of the bridge, along with the sound of eight hooves going at a brisk walk. The driver of the carriage was wearing a dark coat and black top hat, but was unmistakeably Amos. He was looking straight ahead and didn't see me. The carriage blinds were down. Once they were past, I fell in behind the carriage. I had to walk fast at first to keep up, but once they turned towards the river the streets were hardly wider than the carriage and heaped with rubbish. At one point Amos had to scramble down to move a pile of broken boxes. I kept well back and heard him say to somebody in the carriage – Tom presumably – that it was all right, he could manage. The carriage rolled on and came to a halt beside a warehouse. A jetty of old black timbers stuck out, with an iron ladder at the far end, leading down to the mud.

It was dark. It shouldn't have been possible to see the iron ladder, but there was light wavering on its rungs. Out on the mud, more lights, small and various. People were out there with candle lanterns and oil lamps, half a dozen of them. They moved around, throwing shifting silhouettes. At first I thought they must be the local mudlarks, scavenging the mud for anything valuable, and might be an obstacle to what Tom was planning. Then I heard Tom's voice, calling softly to somebody, probably whoever was holding the lamp at the bottom of the ladder. He was out of the carriage now and only its bulk separated us. I moved back against the warehouse and watched. The men on the mud were building something, low down near the waterline. A wooden platform, rough planks showing white against the mud. A gangway of single planks led out to it from the bottom of the steps. Amos got down from the carriage and whistled up a boy from the mud to hold the horses.

‘Ready?' Tom said.

He held the carriage door open. Amos ducked his head and shoulders inside and straightened up with a white-wrapped bundle across his shoulders. Mr Griffiths had not been a large man and the weight was nothing to Amos. Tom unhitched one of the candle lamps from the carriage and lit the way for Amos to walk with his bundle to the top of the ladder. They disappeared down. Then Amos, still carrying the bundle, appeared again down on the shore, walking steadily along the line of planks, Tom following. I was more and more puzzled. No boat, precious little water. Did they intend to wait on the makeshift platform until the tide came up? It looked as if they did, because they'd built a kind of rough catafalque of logs and driftwood as a temporary resting place for the body. Then, as the shifting silhouettes formed a circle round the platform, shining their lanterns on it, I understood and gasped. Tom was being even more faithful to his instructions than I'd realized.

Since nobody was looking in my direction I went to the jetty then carefully down the ladder, skirt and petticoats bunching up distractingly, and went halfway along the pathway of planks so that I had a good view of what was happening. Amos laid the bundle carefully down on the catafalque. Tom produced a book and read something aloud by candlelight. The only words I caught were in a foreign language so I assumed it was part of the Hindu rite. Then all the men rumbled out the Lord's Prayer. Tom was leaving nothing to chance. With a scrape of flint, somebody lit a torch and the sharp whiff of tar drowned out the mud smell. The torch flowered into a bright orange flame. One of the men was pouring something over Mr Griffiths's body. It was probably raw spirit, because the moment Tom put the torch to the pile of timber, the whole thing flared up. Almost instantly, the body was the dark centre of a tent of flame. After burning fiercely for a while, the flames wavered. The smell of burning flesh hung in the air. I held my breath, trying not to breathe it in, but it was no good. A breeze came up from the river and the flames flared again. The dark centre had crumbled to a shell. I was coughing. Crying too, and not just because of coughing. It had come to me suddenly that Tom had been away in India when our father died, so hadn't been there to observe his funeral rites. I thought that in doing all this for Mr Griffiths, who perhaps had come to be a kind of father to him, he was performing a duty that he'd missed then.

The plank I was standing on quivered on its base of mud. Somebody was walking softly along the planks behind me, coming from the jetty. I turned and saw a figure all in white, standing out against the darkness. It was a man, in loose trousers and tunic. I couldn't make out much of his features except that he wore a turban as white and neat as a bandage. He was walking quickly and so purposefully that I went to step aside for him, until I realized that would land me knee-deep in mud. Without hesitating he nodded to me and solved the problem by stepping on to the mud himself. Now he was knee-deep, but he kept on walking towards the group standing by the pyre, more slowly but unperturbed. Tom turned and saw him and seemed startled. The man in white said something that I couldn't hear. If it was an explanation, Tom must have accepted it because the man moved closer to the fire. The flames were dying down now, but it must still have been hot where he was standing. His unmoving silhouette gave no more sign of discomfort than when he'd been wading in mud. He spoke in a rising and falling rhythm, facing outward to the pyre and the dark river so I couldn't hear the words. I doubt if I'd have understood them in any case. Then everything went quiet and we all stood looking at the sinking flames with a small glowing core in the centre, where the body had been.

Small rippling sounds in the channels flowing through the mud showed that the tide had turned and the river was beginning to rise again. The man in white turned and came walking back. As he passed me, he was looking towards the shore. I watched as he climbed easily up the iron ladder and, on an impulse, turned to follow. When I got to the jetty there was no sign of him. If he'd walked away up the street, he'd be screened by Tom's carriage beside the warehouse. I squeezed past the carriage and found myself looking at the back of another one, at the top of the short street. The man was a few steps away from it. As I watched, a door of the second carriage was opened from the inside and the man in white got in. It started to move, but slowly because it had to turn a sharp corner. When it came sideways on to me I had a glimpse through the window and saw the man in white. There were other people in there with him, in darker clothes, two of them I thought. Before I could see more, a hand in a white glove pulled down the blind over the window. It wasn't the man's hand. He hadn't been wearing gloves. This was a long glove, a woman's, and the hand inside it was small and slim.

I watched as the carriage rolled slowly away.

‘They'll be needing a farrier,' a voice said from behind me.

I turned.

‘Amos Legge. What are you doing here?'

‘Saw you following the Indian and thought I'd better keep an eye on what was happening.'

‘Are they with your party?'

‘No. Never seen the man before. Your brother hadn't either.'

‘There was a woman too, in the coach. Probably more than one. Who are they and how did they know?'

‘Goodness knows. Your brother wasn't exactly sending out invitations.'

‘Not even to me.'

‘He thought you wouldn't approve.'

I thought Tom still didn't know me very well. The carriage had disappeared into the darkness. If Tabby had been with me, I could have got her to do her trick of clinging to the back of it and tracing it to a destination.

‘We'd better go back,' I said.

Amos went first down the ladder and helped me on to the planks. This time I went all the way to where the men were standing, around the glowing ashes of the fire. The river had come up quickly while Amos and I had been away and was creeping towards the edge of the makeshift platform.

‘What are you doing here?' Tom said.

‘Paying my respects, like you are.'

For once he didn't argue. Just perceptibly, the platform was being to move up and down under our feet from the rising water. One of the men, speaking with a strong Cockney accent, said we'd better get back. Amos went first, then Tom and I. As the gang of men retreated, they brought the planks that had made up the pathway with them and piled them at the top of the ladder. I think Tom must have paid them for their night's work because I heard coins clinking, then they disappeared into a dark alleyway by the warehouse. Out by the river, the funeral platform was almost afloat now, the glowing heart of the fire rocking on the swell. I stood beside Tom on the jetty until it was afloat entirely. Slowly, it began to move upriver on the tide. By the time it came to Westminster Bridge the fire would be nothing but red embers, much smaller than the glow from a steamboat's fire. When the tide turned in the morning, the river would carry the grey ashes that remained of Mr Griffiths out to the estuary and beyond. Not Mother Ganges, but Father Thames.
Or as near to that as he can contrive.

‘You did well,' I said to Tom.

He nodded.

When we couldn't see the red glow any more we turned and went back to the carriage. At first there was no sign of Amos, then the glow of the candle lamp came from the end of the street, with him behind it. Tom didn't object when Amos held the door open for me to get into the carriage. After all, he could hardly leave me stranded on the river bank. The inside of the carriage was full of smells, old leather from the seats, the faint sickly smell of human corruption mostly masked by spices and, I thought, jasmine or tuberoses. Tom glanced at me but I decided not to tell him I'd seen too much to be squeamish. When he'd seen us settled, Amos gave a tip to the boy who'd been holding the horses all this time and we drove back to the bridge and across to the north side. We stopped in Adam's Mews and Tom escorted me to the bottom of the stairs, still subdued and quiet. Amos stayed on the driver's seat and called out cheerfully that he'd see me in the morning.

Mrs Martley had gone to bed early, leaving cold cuts on the table for my supper. I stirred up the fire and made tea, ate a little. The ceremony by the river, especially the sudden appearance of the Indian gentleman, had changed something inside my brain. I thought I'd been looking at the question of Griffiths's death from the wrong direction entirely, as if the answer lay somewhere between the Palace of Westminster and the City of London. Wrong. Whatever had caused the killing of Mr Griffiths – and I was certain that he had been killed – came from five thousand miles and many months away in Calcutta and I couldn't see how I could even get a foothold on understanding it.

‘J
ust appeared out of nowhere, like the genie in a pantomime,' Amos said.