The Duke's Agent (29 page)

‘Here's Captain Adams back,' he announced. ‘He's mustering some lads in the yard. There's a bit of bother between the Three Pots and the Swan – he'd appreciate some help, if you're free.'

Will Roberts was at his side. ‘Trouble at the Swan? Mr Jarrett – I must go,' he pleaded. ‘I swear on my life I'll come back and face the magistrates but I must see my Mary safe, sir. She's got no one but me.'

Miss Lonsdale added her voice. ‘Let him go, Mr Jarrett. I'll vouch for Will's character. I know you can trust him to return.'

He met the force of her conviction, acknowledging it by a half-smile. With a gesture of his hand he let the boy go.

‘I'll keep an eye on him,' Duffin said. Jarrett watched the increasingly familiar shape of the poacher swing off at a smart pace out of the yard and down the hill.

‘Hurry on, lad,' he heard him urge as Will raced out after him. ‘Things were getting a touch hot last I saw.'

The yard had filled with people. Captain Adams, supported
by a couple of grim-faced burghers, was drawing up a company of six militia men in red coats. There was the ordered confusion of assembling men and gun-barrels and powder being checked. An excited boy dashed up.

‘Captain Adams's compliments, sir. He says there is a riot started down in the river quarter and he asks whether Captain Jarrett would be so good as to lend him his assistance, sir.'

Exchanging a grin with a remarkably cheerful looking Captain Adams who stood some thirty feet away from him across the yard, Jarrett replied, ‘My compliments to Captain Adams. Tell him I shall join him directly.' As the boy raced off he added, ‘And saddle my horse!'

He felt a touch on his sleeve and turned to Miss Lonsdale at his side.

‘You do not believe Will killed her?' she asked. The grey eyes were startlingly passionate in such a refined face.

‘No, Miss Lonsdale, I do not.'

‘So you will not permit the magistrates to charge him with her death?'

‘I promise,' he replied soberly, ‘to do my utmost to persuade Colonel Ison that Sally Grundy fell to her death by accident.' He laid his gloved hand over hers a moment. His sincerity appeared to satisfy her.

‘Thank you.'

‘Your horse, Mr Jarrett.' The stableboy had brought Walcheren. He swung up on to the bay's back.

‘Could you do something for me, Miss Henrietta?'

Her first name had just slipped out. For a still moment he waited for her to recoil, but the dove-grey eyes held his gaze.

‘I am ready to do anything I can to assist you in this matter, Mr Jarrett.'

‘I am grateful, Miss Lonsdale. Will you ask Lady Catherine whether Sir Thomas has a copy of
Volpone
, an old play
by Ben Jonson? I believe Sir Thomas is a collector of rare volumes.'

‘The play Lady Yarbrook was rehearsing, Mr Jarrett?' Henrietta was puzzled. ‘What interest could there be in that?'

He smiled. She was a quick-witted woman, but there was no time to elaborate. Captain Adams called over to him. The party of militia were setting off at a jog-trot down the hill. Jarrett gathered up his reins and kicked Walcheren on.

‘Borrow me a copy, if you can, Miss Henrietta,' he called back over the melee. ‘I shall explain at our next meeting.'

Walcheren led the way down the steep hillside. High buildings closed in overhead and the big bay stepped into a triangle of deep shadow. The swift transition from light to shade momentarily blinded Jarrett. Hairs rose at the back of his neck as he found himself in another place. Here was that immediate stillness into which sounds drop like coins; every sense straining to decipher distant noises channelled down alleyways and reflected over rooftops. His body tensed with that half-sick, half-exhilarated feeling, the anticipation of ambush. Behind him, Captain Adams slowed his men to a cautious pace. Jarrett's eyes adjusted and he caught movement beyond a stall protruding across the mouth of a courtyard. A walnut-faced crone was putting up her shutters. She was bent and slow but determined. She huffed and puffed and muttered to herself as she fixed her defences into place.

‘You get to your work!' she scolded, turning her back. ‘Racketing about on a Tuesday! Eeee! Lazy, no-good buggers.'

The old witch dispelled the tension. His memory was playing tricks on him. Up ahead erupted the sounds of heavy shoes pounding on packed earth. A couple of young louts issued out of an opening, bodies as dense as young calves and features pinned up in an irreverent grin of excitement. They saw the rider and the red coats behind him and skipped back to dodge down a ginnel. Jarrett had the vivid sense of arriving after an action. He picked up the pace, curious to see what evidence it had left by its passing.

Two streets came together at the river bridge. It seemed as if the whole human life of the quarter had gathered there. Skiffs and barges huddled at viewing points on the river. Spectators crowded about doorways and leant out of windows. Scanning the scene, it occurred to Jarrett, as it had before, that physical type does not necessarily distinguish a fighting man. Some of the burliest bargees floated in mid-river, encouraging or deprecating from the safety of their craft, while on shore wiry little scrappers threw punches and gouged and kicked as indomitable as bantam cocks. Here and there knots of girls concentrated on a particular contest, glee distorting their faces with something vicious and primitive. Down at the river edge an old man was batting a broom furiously at two golden-haired urchins who rolled in the mud fighting like rats.

This was not an ill-natured skirmish. No knives, just hard heads, fists and feet, with the occasional assistance of moveable objects picked up in passing – a bottle, a stick, a window shutter. Assessing the action with a professional eye, Jarrett judged it largely leaderless. This was a display of the conquering instinct of man, that same spirit on which kings build the armies with which they pursue their interests. Armies, however, employ a vast machinery of training and discipline to bind men into some sort of order and direct their violence. The brawl on the bridge was chaotic.

The mere sight of the clump of red coats drained the heart from the fight. Its seething centre began to diffuse. Captain Adams lined up his little party of soldiers to block the street down which they had come. As the tide of the press of bodies ebbed down the other street that ran parallel to the river, Jarrett urged Walcheren on to the stone pavement of the bridge. Beside him, Duffin shouldered his way against the flow of the crowd.

‘These lads aren't in a mind to give real trouble,' he observed comfortably, heaving a red-faced little man out
of his path. The drunk staggered against the parapet of the bridge and reached towards the rider to drag him off his mount. The rider's boot sent him reeling back with a smart kick to the chest.

‘I agree,' Jarrett replied retrieving his stirrup. ‘Something's amiss here.'

He was not sure that Duffin heard him. The poacher was moving with a brisk rhythm, clearing a little semi-circle before him by dint of roaring and the occasional sharp jab of a large fist.

‘This is lively,' he called back. ‘Haven't seen as good a barney as this since that time Old Pointer thought to lose Lumpin' Jack his licence by wrecking the docks.'

Jarrett was hardly listening. Where was Raistrick? The timing of this outburst in the river quarter worried him.

A distant figure caught his eye on the other side of the bridge – something about the shape and the way it moved. He was almost certain he recognised his erstwhile informant, the miner of the churchyard. He stood up in his stirrups, straining to get a better view. A man was thrown violently against him. Walcheren fretted against the reins, stamping his front feet. At the edge of his vision he saw Duffin square up to a quick lad with a compact body. The poacher easily broke the left-handed jab, but his opponent followed it with a swift hammer right that caught the older man on the side of his grizzled head. Duffin rocked and began to fall. Jarrett's attention was rudely claimed by a tall man with lashless eyes who clawed up at him, striving to get a grip on his coat. He jabbed him hard in the forehead with an elbow and shoved him away.

He strained up again, searching over the sea of heads for that one distant figure. No sight of him. Duffin was up, hunched and growling like a bear. His opponent lowered his own head and tried again. Moving with more speed than might be expected from a man of his years, Duffin blocked
the feint in passing and kicked the weight-bearing leg from under the youth, just as his right fist was picking up speed. With a grunt of surprise the lad toppled past him into the arms of Will Roberts. The young giant swung him up and over the parapet. The splash from his fall nearly reached the bridge. Duffin and Will gazed over the wall.

‘He'll do,' Duffin said after a moment. Below, a boatman was pulling a bedraggled figure from the water.

They passed the crest of the bridge and the dense pack of human flesh eased. Jarrett's keen eyes quartered the crowd, examining every movement and shape. The hope that had flared with his brief glimpse of the miner dissolved into barely caged frustration. He had an acute sense that he was falling behind in this race. They found themselves at the door of the Swan. Leaving Walcheren in the charge of an honest-looking old man who stood apart from the fray, Jarrett followed Duffin into the inn. As they crossed the threshold the purpose of the riot became clear. The flags of the narrow passage were awash with aromatic liquid. A vast vat of beer had been emptied and rolled, blocking the doorway into the yard. They heaved it aside to reveal a cat crushed beneath its iron hoops, slimy coils of intestine bellying out from the wet fur. Duffin kicked the foul mess aside.

A figure staggered out of the sun towards them. It was the sergeant, one eye opaque and rimmed with blood. The skin of his head puffed out, blue and mottled; brown rivulets of blood marked trails from his nostrils. His voice issued vitriol from a mouth of broken teeth.

‘You're a nothing, Will Roberts – you're a worm, a puling, crawling, little man. Where have you been hiding?'

Will stood his ground. ‘Where's Mary?' he demanded.

There was a crash and across the yard a man leapt from an attic window on to the low roof of an outbuilding. Jarrett caught an impression of basalt eyes glittering in a grimy face. The figure scrabbled over the river wall and was gone. A
muffled explosion, smoke billowed and red tongues of flame began to slither in the recesses of the window. Tolley threw himself at his son-in-law.

‘You come with me,' he snarled. ‘They'll not burn me out.'

He fastened on to the youth's shirt and tried to haul him into the inn. The dead weight of Will's six-foot frame defeated his battered strength.

‘You leave me be,' Roberts spat out.

Swearing terrible oaths the sergeant pushed him aside. ‘They'll not burn me out.' He repeated the words like a bitter prayer as he clawed his way up the stairs. The yard resonated with the snap of glass giving way before heat and in the depths of the building the fire roared. Jarrett moved as if to follow the man up the stairs but Roberts barred his way. The handsome face was fixed with a new determination.

‘Leave him be. Let his fate have him.'

Across the bar room there was a window cut into the thick wall overlooking the river. Jarrett caught the movement of a head. It bobbed as if its owner dragged his feet or rocked on unsteady legs. He pushed past Will, leaving Duffin standing amazed. Outside, he ran up towards the bridge. A steep stone staircase dropped beside the riverside wall of the Swan. Narrow and ancient, it curved down to the secretive shadows under the bridge. He leant over the parapet straining to see into the well below. He could hear the sounds of a man hurrying down the steps. The hidden presence dragged against the stone in passing as if in panic or injured. Jarrett reached the first curve of the stair. He saw a back view foreshortened. A long coat like many travelling men wore. The outline of the shoulders was a possible match. Turn, man, turn!

Down below him the man was almost at the landing. A boat waited under the shadow of the arch. The figure paused and turned, his face raised awkwardly. It was a mask,
marred as if the maker had thought to begin again, one side all livid and swollen about a gash that ran from eye socket to chin. It was the miner of the churchyard. Jarrett opened his mouth to shout. As he heard his own voice he knew it to be useless. The man's eyes recorded something that could not be reversed. For a moment he stood on the quay and they looked at one another, then the connection broke. The miner turned away and stepped into the boat.

A larger craft drew up at the landing disgorging a party of brawny men carrying buckets. Faces determined, they piled up the narrow staircase. The first one shouted to Jarrett, who blocked their path.

‘Get away, man! That fire needs tending or it'll spread.'

Reluctantly Jarrett backed up the steps. People were everywhere, blocking him, jostling him as he fought his way from side to side of the bridge. The river was dotted with boats but he could not make out his man. The miner had disappeared.

Jarrett sensed an urgent figure bearing down on him from behind. He turned a split second before Duffin grabbed his arm.

‘Reckon you've lost your chance to have a word about them books of yorn. They've found the Tallyman.'

*

The Tallyman lay in a few inches of stinking water, his huge frame stretched out like the waxen effigy of a Viking. Dirty skeins of yellow hair floated on either side of the brutal, pock-marked face, an unwholesome weed on the surface of the oily water. A passer-by on his way to the Three Pots had stopped to relieve himself in the dry sluice of Bedford's Mill and found him there. Now Captain Adams stood up on the road in urgent discussion with a couple of vestrymen, while the red coats kept the crowd at bay.

‘Well, it's clear what did him,' Duffin remarked. A broad slash had severed the throat nearly to the spine.

Jarrett touched the clammy skin. ‘He's not been dead long.'

For a moment he was sealed in a humming sense of an ending. So the chase finished here. All the days he had spent pursuing this malignant, ghostly Tallyman – perhaps it was only fitting that when at last he looked upon the infamous features he should find the bogeyman nothing but the dumb shell of a corpse. He lifted the body experimentally as if he hoped life might still linger. The weight of death impressed its finality on him. Had the miner killed this man in revenge for the marks on his face? The notion had a neat symmetry to it.

The Tallyman wore a blue coat, torn at the left shoulder seam, the front creased and stiff with blood. Duffin fingered its texture. ‘You see what I see?' he asked.

‘Your whore said she'd seen him wearing a new brown coat.'

‘Aye.'

‘And I have seen this coat before, two nights back in the possession of another man. I suppose there would be a lot of blood – a man's throat being cut like that.' Jarrett grimaced. ‘But this garment looks as if it's been used to swab up a floor of blood.' Grasping the filthy hair he lifted the head forward, and picked back the coat collar. Underneath the coarse shirt was saturated with blood. It stuck to the waxy skin of the neck, but the wool cloth on the inner side of the coat collar, where the hair had protected it from the outer mud, was merely smudged.

‘This is not the coat he died in, Duffin,' he said.

If the miner had killed this bully, why change his coat? To mark him as the murderer of the crofter? The miner's character was not so subtle. That touch had to belong to another. There was a splash of colour. Like a sudden clap of thunder that underlines the lightning as it fades, Raistrick stood framed against a patch of sky up on the road above the ditch, watching him.

Captain Adams called out. Colonel Ison had arrived and behind him Constable Bone stood with his hand on the shoulder of a boy. Raistrick swung himself down into the drain. He moved jauntily as if he had been recently refreshed. He greeted the agent with a carved smile and a bow.

‘Mr Jarrett.'

Behind him, the Colonel followed more cautiously. Producing a copy of the Brough murder bill from his pocket, the Chairman of the Bench examined the corpse at a distance, checking off details as if from a list.

‘Tear at the left shoulder seam. Yellow hair, braided and worn in a tail behind in the custom of sailors – this would appear to be your man, Mr Jarrett. Constable! Bring the boy.'

The boy of the murdered crofter, the witness fetched from Stainmoor, was barely eight or nine years old, with a head too big for his thin body. Next to him the gory corpse of the Tallyman was like some slain monster of fable. Jarrett moved to interpose himself.

‘For God's sake, sir, he is but a child,' he protested.

The Colonel lifted his eyebrows at such tender sensibility. He did not even bother to make a show of speaking privately.

‘These peasants are raised in a hard school, Mr Jarrett. It does no good to coddle them. Now, lad, there is nothing to fear. This man has gone to account for his sins. Is this the fellow you saw the night Crofter Gates died?'

Constable Bone patted the boy, as if to encourage him, his face pursed up in disapproval. Ruben Gates's son stared at his father's murderer with primitive curiosity. ‘'Tis him,' he said and spat.