The Ghost of Waterloo (35 page)

It was a large party that came to table. Mine host of the Barley Mow had taken over the taproom and brought together half a dozen tables to seat the dozen and more diners. Dunne had told him to spare no reasonable expense: Government House would be paying the reckoning. He had not yet told Darling.

That elevated personage, and Captain Rossi, Mr Marsden, the Macarthurs and other important people, were seated prominently, but the Patterer scattered others where he wanted them. He made sure he had certain guests in pride of place beside him – Munito and his master, with Miss Susannah Hathaway to his right.

Servants began to bring in an array of dishes prepared for the occasion by a gentleman who had cooked for the King when he was Prince Regent. He had left Prinny’s household to come to Australia after an unfortunate episode in the royal kitchen involving a sous-chef, a live goat and goose grease. ‘Still,’ Rossi pronounced, ‘he cooks like an angel.’ Goat Island inhabitants were safe from this luncheon menu: the animal, demeaned as ‘Norfolk Island mutton’, was regarded as being fit only for convicts. The colony’s first lean years had faded. The poor now ate better than they would have done in Britain, the better off were exactly that, while the rich could pick and choose.

The Barley Mow diners, from all walks of life, picked and chose from five courses, with a dozen dishes, including chicken consommé, saffron rice, eggplants bursting with forcemeat, roast duck, kangaroo in curry, and artichokes vinaigrette. After a dish of cockney bream, as infantile schnapper were known, poached in white wine, came baked ‘old man’ schnapper.

There were fruits of the day (no peaches yet from Bungaree’s northside orchard – and, Dunne noted, no oranges!), tarts and cheeses. The assembly drank Mr Squire’s amber ale, porter, light whites from the Cape, claret, muscatel and brandy. No rum. In honour of his canine companion, the Patterer drank one bumper of a popular concoction of gin, porter, sugar and nutmeg called ‘dog’s nose’. The real dog’s nose was, by now, happily snuffling at the latest delivery of duck dropped down to him.

Dunne rang his empty wine glass. As the company quietened, he motioned the hovering servant to refill it and any others similarly depleted. He then dismissed the man from the room, making sure that he went but the bottles remained. The guests would all need a drink, or many more, he was sure. Regrettably, the fly-boy had to go too.

‘So,’ he announced pleasantly, as if they were simply a party of old friends celebrating – perhaps an anniversary of some stripe. ‘One duty of mine now is to reveal the mastermind behind our great bank robbery. We have, of course, most of the underlings, and there are high hopes for the loot.

‘First, however, I must deal with four recent murders linked with the robbery. John Creighton, who was shot to death at Cockle Bay, had been one of the vault-breakers. He was killed simply because he was wrongly thought to have extracted from the spoils something of immense value – indeed, the true target at the bank. Ironically, as he died he did take another great treasure, from around the neck of his killer. If he had not done that, the whole plot would probably not have unravelled. But, more of that later.’

Dunne took a sip of wine. ‘The castrato, Signor Bello, was killed because he saw someone at the theatre who should not have been there – or anywhere, for that matter!’ He ignored the frowns at his last remark and went on: ‘The killer saw me with Bello and feared I would learn the singer’s secret.

‘Obadiah Dawks was a journalist who drank too much and played one silly game too many. It was with me and it drew him to his death. For he knew the answer to the mystery of why a chest of silver plate and 2000 sovereigns played no part in the thieves’ haul. Oddly, the reason wasn’t worth dying for, as I will in due course explain. Only when he subsequently learnt of something else that had been stolen, but was unreported, did he sign his own death warrant.

‘Poor Josiah Bagley, poisoned at the marketplace, was always on the verge of remembering something vital he had overheard ten years earlier. He never did remember it, but it was his murder that spurred me to decipher his clue.

‘Now,’ said the Patterer, marshalling his thoughts. ‘How were they killed? Creighton, of course, was simply shot. Bello posed a more difficult case: stabbed, and not by his own hand, in a locked room. Later, a dog that had been in the brickfields soiled my clothes with red ochre on his paws. Something similar had happened to me at the death scene, where I brushed against the door of Bello’s chamber.

‘So too had the murderer, putting onto the door ochre clay stains that he had picked up from a new delivery of bricks in the alley outside. If I could see my marks, why couldn’t he notice his? Simply because his coat was already bright red! A soldier had been seen near the murder room. This was the killer, who had posed as a guard on the brick delivery cart’s convict crew. He wore a uniform stolen from the theatre costumes for
The Recruiting Officer
. He carried a musket from a cache at John Shan’s market garden. Who would question his presence? Even armed.

‘He approached the singer’s room, tricked the man into coming up close to the door – and stabbed his seventeen-inch bayonet through the keyhole, into the victim’s stomach. Then he simply left the scene, just another of the 1325 redcoats in the settlement.

‘Bagley? He was fed strychnine, again because the killer knew of his links with me. This is true of all the other unfortunates, save Creighton.

‘That means someone was close to me, watching. A spy. A traitor. He’s dead now, but he was a killer, too, of Dawks.

‘The journalist was lured to St Phillip’s church and beaten savagely around the head with the lectern’s metal eagle. To throw us off the scent, poor, dead Dawks was left hanging from the bell rope, an apparent suicide.

‘So that now leaves one killer, one active mastermind.’

Half-a-dozen voices competed. ‘Who?’

Miss Susannah Hathaway had been toying with a pin nervously teased from her hair. As the Patterer replied, you could hear it drop.

‘Why,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘a person who robbed the bank, has plotted a revolution and is a ghost of Napoleon Bonaparte…

‘And he’s here in this room.’

Chapter Forty-nine

Reverend Samuel Marsden … A bully in the pulpit.

After the first outbursts, no one needed to say any more, ‘But he’s dead, isn’t he?’ or, ‘Are you mad, sir?’ They all now listened in silence, entranced, as Nicodemus Dunne wove his spell.

‘Our crimes, robbery, rebellion and murder, all have their roots in an event that occurred ten years ago.

‘Napoleon Bonaparte did not die on St Helena on 5 May 1821. He had escaped three years earlier. His place as a prisoner on the island had been taken by a desperate criminal on the run there. This man faked suicide by leaving his clothing at the edge of a cliff high over the water and taking on the Emperor’s identity, straightaway retiring incommunicado to his bedchamber. There would be no suspicions at first. Bonaparte often did this.

‘Meanwhile, the real prisoner was smuggled onto a ship that was about to leave. He was concealed in a luggage crate with some water and airholes. I know that this is possible.’ He looked across at the Flying Pieman but did not elaborate: his friend had tried to smuggle a lover to Van Diemen’s Land in such a manner and she had been horribly lost in a shipwreck.

He picked up his thread: ‘This method of escape may never have been exposed if an accomplice at the time had not, arrogantly, been unable to resist a chance to taunt the island’s gaoler, Sir Hudson Lowe. On the dock, this person made a deliberate misquotation of a Shakespearean passage, implying that they were making “an honourable retreat with bag and baggage”. That’s exactly how the prisoner was retreating, honourably or not.

‘Josiah Bagley, of course, was a soldier on the dock. He never quite recognised the reversal of words. I just happened to. The ship upon which Bonaparte stowed away on that 18 March 1818 was the
Winchelsea
—’

Dominic Keynes interrupted: ‘Why wasn’t a hue and cry raised, even after the ship had sailed?’

‘No one dared,’ replied the Patterer. ‘Too many people would have been punished; in the case of Sir Hudson, maybe with a death sentence. This was, after all, the second escape. Elba had been embarrassing enough; if revealed, this would make Britain the laughing stock of the world. The restored royal party in France would not want it known either. So his captors told no one.’

‘Even if this is true,’ protested Major Thomas Mitchell, ‘why would he – how could he – come here?’

Dunne shook his head. ‘After Waterloo, he was a marked man in Europe and other countries he had ravaged and humiliated. There he would have been tried and executed, perhaps out of hand. Britain? Well, he even wrote to the Prince Regent, saying he would “retire” to the countryside. And he failed in an attempt to flee to the Americas.

‘So, distance from danger, maybe merely the sheer accident of a ship’s passage, could have been enough to beach him at Botany Bay.’

‘What would he have wanted?’ asked William King.

‘Oh, perhaps simply a quiet life – until his old ambitions resurfaced and he planned to stir up a resentful populace and again play God.’

Now Dunne could tell them all of the smuggled guns, the ‘convict’ invasion and how the teeth of the plot had been drawn by the sinking of the
Three Bees
. ‘That is where, originally, the bank robbery came into the picture. For guns, and gunners, you need money. And you need local help, for whom greed and need may easily overcome loyalty.

‘So, first,’ said the Patterer, ‘consider the robbery. As usual, the ancients, this time Cicero, had it to rights – “
Cui bono
?”: “To whose profit?”

‘To answer, we must examine what was stolen – and what was
not
stolen. It first occurred to me that perhaps there had been, in the complete sense, no robbery at all.’

He turned to the bank manager, Mr Thomas McVitie. ‘Would it not be in the interests of the bank to disguise its recent less-than-stellar performance under the cover of the apparent theft of assets that did not exist? For example, the tally of banknotes stolen has varied widely, day by day. What was it exactly – 14000 pounds or 17000? More? Less? Much of the coinage was literally small change, although some of the silver may have served an odd purpose. More of that later.

‘The strangest thing was that the thieves, it seems, left the most negotiable booty – 2000 sovereigns, already neatly boxed, and a chest of silver plate.

‘Let’s say it was a straightforward theft. If, as one arrested man deposes, the paper money was meant to pay the front-line thieves and the gold and plate was not wanted, what then was in it for the organiser, the ringleader?

‘You have needed money, Mr McVitie, lots of it. You have had to seek postponement of instalments payable on land you have bought.’ The banker was ashen, but Dunne smiled. ‘Rest easy, sir, others have aroused greater suspicion. For example, there is bold Captain Macarthur. He recently held me hostage’ – Dunne ignored the confused noise – ‘and tormented and threatened violence for my taking too much interest in the robbery.’ He did not add ‘and too much interest in his wife’ but simply continued. ‘This was in the ransacked vault, to which, as a bank director, doubtless he always had access. The Reverend Marsden helped him, by the by.

‘Could he have arranged the robbery of his own bank? He is rich, but always greedy for more. And you recall that I have said all the plots intersect? Well, he is certainly a good friend to the French, even when they have come here as spies. In 1825, he feted Hyacinthe de Bougainville, and a year later Jules d’Urville brought olive trees – olive branches? – to him from France. We know now that the French Ministry of the Navy ordered Bougainville to note secretly “the fortifications of targets” here, and that he remarked that the colony, “far away from England, could so easily be snatched away before a rescue could be mounted”.

‘D’Urville had instructions to seek a place suitable for the deportation of criminals – a familiar ring? – and anchorages for large warships. We were at peace, naturally!’

The Patterer gave his audience a moment and drew breath. ‘I think the revolutionary plot just thwarted was laid by someone here during the visit in 1826, with d’Urville, or another officer.

‘So, Mr Macarthur, did you conspire with the French? Rob your own bank? The answer to each question is no. But even if you had, your legal defence would surely be successful – “
Furiosus furore solum punitur
”…“The madness of the insane is punishment enough”.’

He ignored the crimson-faced ‘Exclusive’ and focused on Mrs Macarthur, with whom he had no argument. ‘He is, for once, innocent. But crazed. Take him home, madam. Keep him home.’

She nodded; perhaps, in part, as thanks for the small mercy of discretion.

‘And Mr Marsden. You wear a bee badge: a code in our crime. In your case, I find it a harmless relic of your early failed endeavours as a genuine apiarist.’