I spent the rest of the day wandering the streets in and around the Public Dock. First I returned to the hook where Tad’s body had been found, and walked from there to the warehouses where Nathaniel kept watch. It was about two hundred yards, I judged, turning back to gauge the distance. A long way to come for a smoke at that time of night.
Unlike the Private Dock, many of the warehouses down here were in a sorry state of repair. Some looked to have been abandoned altogether. As Child had said, there were many quiet places where Tad might have been tortured and killed. I managed to get inside a couple of them, through holes in the rotting wood or crumbling masonry, but found only flocks of pigeons, empty shipping crates, and a musty stench of dust and decay. In one I found a beggarly family sitting around a fire. At least a dozen dirty children blinked at me through the smoke. Their mother stumbled towards me, eyes mazy with drink. ‘Thruppence for a fuck?’ I beat a hasty retreat.
If you were going to hide Captain Vaughan in Deptford, I thought, it would be somewhere like this. When Monday had disappeared after buying opium that night, it had been near here. And Tad had been looking for Vaughan, just as I was. He’d bought opium on his first visit to Deptford, when he’d spoken to Vaughan initially, perhaps to grease the wheels of their interaction. Then on his final visit, he’d bought opium again.
I went through it all chronologically, plotting each step. Tad had come to town that last time to collect the contracts stolen by Daniel Waterman – or Brabazon if you believed Nathaniel Grimshaw. He’d been intending to head directly back to London, taking Cinnamon with him. Yet something had changed his mind, something important enough to risk his life for. Looking around at the mouldering warehouses, the peeling paint, the empty windows, I wondered if he’d found Evan Vaughan.
*
Scipio came to my room just after nine as we’d arranged. ‘Did anyone see you?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
I had bought a bottle of wine, and we drank it sitting on the floor, away from the windows.
‘I didn’t find out much,’ he said. ‘Frank Drake likes to throw his weight around. Most in town give him a wide berth. He likes the usual things: women, beer, dice. Splashes a lot of gold around too. He has a house down here on the Green in Deptford Strand. A nice place for a third officer.’
‘Where’s he getting his money?’
‘No place legal, I would think. I’m told he goes fairly often to the city. He’s fond of the playhouse apparently. Comedies. He was in London the night that second African was killed.’
‘So were the rest of them. Did anyone say anything about a place Drake owns near the river? A shed or a warehouse? Another house?’
‘No. Why do you ask?’
‘The killer would have needed somewhere near the dock for the torture. I took a look down there today – there’s a lot of likely places, but it would take days to check them all. Wherever it is, I think Captain Vaughan might be there too. I think someone concealed him there – or he concealed himself – to keep him away from Archer. John Monday knows where, I think. I saw him buying opium in the Red House, and I don’t think it was for himself. The others might know too. I think Archer found out where Vaughan was, and when he went there, someone killed him. Perhaps none of them know which one of them it was – except the killer. It could even be Vaughan himself.’
‘Do you really think Monday could have killed him? The Bible has firm opinions about murder, as I recall.’
I remembered Monday whip in hand. ‘Perhaps he saw it not as murder, but as just punishment.’
‘And himself as judge and executioner?’ Scipio frowned. ‘The torture I understand, but why use the brand? It led you to the ship and its officers.’
I sighed, for I had pondered this myself. ‘Perhaps we are looking for rationality where there is none. Or rather, the motive may be rational, but the killing he enjoys. He may have wanted to leave his mark. Slaving seems to do dark things to men’s souls.’ I remembered Vaughan’s book, that silent, anguished scream.
He looked interested. ‘You think our killer is mad?’
‘I think he may not be entirely sane. To do what he does, how can he be?’
He was silent a moment. ‘When I first arrived in Dominica, I wanted more than anything to escape my new existence. I saw how men who disobeyed were punished, and those who did not were rewarded. I chose the latter course – a master’s nigger, as Jamaica Mary put it so eloquently last night. When I turned sixteen, I was made an overseer. I wielded the whip, I tied men to posts, I tortured them.’
I studied his tense, lined face. ‘You escaped slavery the only way you could. No one can blame you for that.’
‘Those men I flogged and tortured – they blamed me. But that is beside the point, I mean only to say that an act can be both appalling and rational.’
‘If there is any rationality in branding a man before you cut his throat,’ I said, ‘I struggle to find it. Have you ever read Spinoza?’
‘Let us presume not,’ Scipio said.
‘He believed emotion to be the enemy of the rational mind. Most people rarely pause to consider the effect of their emotions upon their decisions. They think they act rationally, but they do not. At the extremes, emotion may master a man entirely. His reasoning not only becomes irrational, but dangerous. I met men in America like that, scarred from battle on the inside. They’d found a taste for killing, lost touch with that part of themselves that corrects the basest desires. They looked quite sane, but I fear they were perfectly mad.’
Scipio frowned. ‘Can’t emotions lead us to better ways of thinking? What of love, for instance? Or honour?’
‘Spinoza didn’t think so. He never married, never had children. He placed intellectual love before all else.’
‘It seems a bleak existence.’
‘I concur.’
Something about the way I said this seemed to give him pause. ‘You are married, Captain Corsham?’
‘For nearly four years.’
‘Children?’
‘A boy, Gabriel. He’s not quite two.’
A faraway look had entered his eyes. ‘Childhood was my happiest time. I belonged to a tribe of fishermen, deep in the African interior. We liked to dance. I remember my brother spinning and spinning. A lot of laughter.’
‘Do you ever think about going back?’
‘Where would I go? My village was destroyed. My family are dead. I would be as much an oddity in Africa now as I am here.’
‘Your brother died too?’
‘Yes, we were captured together. I was eight and he was nine. We were taken to the slave fort at Whydah, where from the windows of our cell we could see the Guineamen anchored out at sea. Adebayo thought they were giant fish, waiting to swallow us up. He dashed his brains out on the wall, rather than face his terror.’
‘I’m sorry.’
His face creased with pain. ‘It gets harder to remember the time before. Sometimes I wonder if my memories are real, or if I have written them myself. When I have children of my own, perhaps I will remember it better.’
‘A fine ambition.’ I raised my glass. ‘First you need to find the right woman.’
‘So I do.’ He stared into his wine. ‘A hearth, a home. The warmth of a woman. Heaven indeed.’
‘To some heaven. To some hell.’ I was thinking of the Mondays’ marriage. Perhaps my own.
‘Not if it is God’s plan.’ He gave me a bleak, empty smile. ‘As for hell I’ve been there, and it’s called the Middle Passage.’
We had become distracted from what Scipio had learned about Frank Drake, and I was about to turn our conversation back to him, when a frenzied shout rang out below. ‘Fire in the stables! Fire in the yard!’
I ran to the window, and saw the yard was filled with flames and thick black smoke. Zephyrus. In two strides I was at the door.
Downstairs, the place was in chaos. No one wanted to be caught in a tavern blaze. I forced my way through a press of men fighting to get to the door. When I emerged into the yard, I was brought up short by the sight that greeted me there.
A large circle had been made from logs, saturated in whale oil – the air thick with its rancid, fishy odour. The logs blazed merrily away, and the horses, smelling the smoke, were kicking and whinnying in their stalls. Less merry was the thing in the centre of the circle. I shielded my face from the blaze and the smoke, trying to confirm what I knew I’d seen. The severed head of Jago, Nathaniel Grimshaw’s dog.
Nathaniel dashed into the yard and gave a hoarse cry. He ran towards the fire, and fearing he would harm himself, I caught him. He writhed in my arms, and I wrestled against his strength. His face was yellow in the flames, and he was sobbing. ‘Bloody bastards. I’ll kill them all.’ He noticed Scipio, who had followed me out. ‘Was it you, blackbird? I’ll cut your balls off, shitten fuckster.’
Scipio was staring at the flames in horror. He turned at Nathaniel’s words. ‘What are you talking about? I had nothing to do with this.’
I wanted to speak up for him. He hadn’t left my side in the last half hour, but I couldn’t do so without revealing our association.
‘Liar,’ Nathaniel said. ‘I’ll find you, blackbird. One day when you least expect it. By the end you’ll be praying for the hangman’s rope.’
With a great wrench, he broke free from my grip, sinking to his knees. The groan he gave was one of utmost despair.