Island of Bones caw-3

by Imogen Robertson

  Felix made a harsh noise in his throat, somewhere between a gasp and a laugh. ‘You are being humorous, dear uncle.’

  Crowther set the fourth arrow next to the third, and plucked another from the quiver. ‘I never make jokes, Felix. And if I were to do so, I should make better ones.’

  Felix stepped forward to the billiard table as Crowther continued. He leaned on it in an attempt to appear at ease, but as Crowther glanced up he could see the young man’s fingers were shaking.

  ‘May I ask then why you think this necessary?’

  ‘I wish to spare Mrs Westerman the task. You knew Mr Hurst — indeed, as far as we are aware you are the only person here who did know him. Did you owe him a great deal of money?’ He looked up again, but Felix did not reply. ‘Is that why your mother dragged you across Europe to visit poor out-of-the-way Mrs Briggs whom she neither likes nor respects? And where there is one creditor, I have no doubt there are others.’ Again he gently placed the arrow down and picked up the next, bringing the point close to his light blue eyes and turning it slowly. ‘It must have been a considerable amount, for Mr Hurst to pursue you so far.’ He paused and looked more closely at the arrow’s tip, then laid it down. ‘Only dirt.’

  ‘Do you enjoy seeing members of your family hanged?’

  Crowther lifted another arrow. ‘Have you ever seen a man hanged, Felix? From close to, I mean, not from the distant seats where it is reduced to a puppet show.’ Felix did not move. ‘I have, on those occasions when I was sent to claim the body for dissection. A horrible death: a foul sound, how the breath struggles in the throat against the rope, the jerking of the legs, the eyes distended. . Most soil themselves. No, I take no pleasure in seeing any man hanged.’

  ‘I did not kill Hurst. You are right, I did owe him money still. But he had debts and enemies of his own.’

  Crowther turned to him. ‘If you did kill him, may I suggest you flee at once? You may have lived a life protected from the consequences of your actions up to this point, but I am afraid, Felix, our crimes catch up with us in the end, one way or another.’ He thought of his father, of himself, then he set down the last arrow. ‘No trace that I can see. Though that proves nothing.’ He tried to read his nephew’s expression, humiliation and fear badly masked. ‘If I remember correctly, you claim to be quite a shot. Perhaps as you are in such need of money, I should be careful when I am out walking.’

  He stepped towards Felix, then waited for him to move aside and give him passage out of the room.

  ‘Perhaps you should.’ The skin around his lips was white. Crowther smiled slightly and raised his eyebrows and Felix moved aside. Crowther walked past him but, as his hand touched the door, Felix spoke again.

  ‘I did not kill him. I have been foolish, but I am not a murderer.’

  Crowther turned back towards him. ‘You remind me so much of Lucius Adair, Felix,’ he said, and with no further explanation, left the room.

  Agnes woke suddenly in the darkness and cried out, then looked about her, waiting for her heart to slow. Her hands were bound in front and her fingers were cramped and uncomfortable, but she could still grapple for the bottle at her side, and she got the neck of it to her lips without spilling any. She drank, then rested her aching head against the damp earth behind her. There was something different in the air. The indecipherable darkness that had met her at her last time of waking had given way a little and there was a scent of something other than earth. She began to shuffle forward and got to her knees. Yes, there. She had been sleeping in the blanket in some kind of deep alcove in the wall. Some old passing place of the workers perhaps, and as she crept out of it she began to see forms around her, or shadows of forms. Her eyes strained to make sense of it. She felt forward towards the place the air seemed a little brighter, keeping her shoulder to the wall.

  There was a sudden sharp turn which almost made her stumble — and there was light. It was a weak, hazy sort of light, but it seeped around the edge of the tunnel, like a silver lining on a thundercloud. She managed to get up onto her feet and shuffled towards it. Maybe they had only wanted to keep her out of the way for a day. She knew what sort of place this was now. A child had been lost in one of the ancient mines when she was an infant, and after that the townspeople had arranged for all the tunnels to be boarded up. Her own father had blocked up many of them. She must be behind one of those barriers. They had carried her through, then, no doubt, just propped it up again, knowing she’d free herself when she came to. Maybe they hadn’t even been beating on Casper after all. With the dark and the rain, how could she be sure? It had been nothing, a lark gone a bit far. As she got nearer to the light she felt a laugh bubble up inside her, and she was ready to shake her head at Swithun and box his ears and tell him all was forgiven. She reached the barrier and kicked at a likely-looking space near the base, expecting it to fall back and show her the sky and the hills and all the light. It did not move. She kicked harder, then again and again. It would not give. The laugh left her.

  ‘Damn you, let me out!’ she yelled at the wood. Then something caught her eye and she looked up to where the boards rested against the joists that framed the entrance to the mine. It was the end of a nail, clean and sharp. There were others. Fresh, rust-free. She dropped to her knees, trying to fight back down the panic that rose in her, but she could not. The rope cut into the flesh of her wrists. She remembered something from those first hours of pain and half-understood darkness. The sound of hammers. She wrapped her arms around her knees and tried to stop herself trembling.

  The bell rang so brightly as Harriet and Crowther entered that the clerk, high and hunched on a stool by a desk in the shadows, almost fell from his perch and dropped his pen across his page. Crowther waited for him to recover himself as he looked about the room. It had not changed in its essentials since he visited it last some thirty years before. A dark wood floor, panelled walls and a smell of ink and dust in the air. It was here he had made the arrangements for the disposal of the estate and maintenance of his sister. Throughout his subsequent travels on the continent he had felt no need to change his representation, and it was through this office that he had heard of his sister’s marriage, the birth of her son and her separation. The oak panelling had absorbed it all.

  There were a number of etchings hung about the walls, discreet and inoffensive as the firm which had handled his affairs for so long. Under them, along one wall was a long ottoman, upholstered in green leather, where a client might wait for the portals of the law to be opened to him. It was an impressive office for a solicitor in such a small and out-of-the-way place. Crowther supposed that the dealings with Silverside over the years had enriched it considerably, and his own fortune, ignored by himself, probably gave them business enough to employ a boy and an upholsterer.

  The clerk had managed to recover his pen and his composure, and made a little bobbing bow. He was probably still well under twenty, and had the air of a boy caught out playing in his father’s office.

  ‘Mr Crowther, my lord? I am Dent, sir. Would you be wishing to see Mr Mark Leathes, sir? Let me just slip in and say you are here, and he will be with you directly.’ The youth paused and flushed, feeling perhaps he had mismanaged his speech. Then, deciding too much in way of respectful address was better than too little, he added an extra ‘sir’, looking at his shoes.

  Crowther recognised the name. At some point the signatures that appeared on his business correspondence had changed from Thomas Leathes to Mark Leathes. He had been a little sorry that the old gentleman was not handling his concerns any longer and had turned away from his knives long enough to write and express his thanks for many years of service before putting the matter from his mind. His affairs continued to be managed efficiently, and the new Mr Leathes did not trouble him with too much correspondence.

  Crowther agreed that he and Mrs Westerman would be glad of a moment of Mr Leathes’ time, and the lad was about to escape into the inner offices, when he turned and with another blush asked i
f either himself or Mrs Westerman were in need of any refreshment. Harriet smiled at him, and Crowther was surprised, as he often was, at how wide and open her smile could be. He wondered if her frank good humour was as genuine as it had been when he first met her. Perhaps. Just as he remained in his fifties the awkward, bookish boy he had once been, perhaps she too was still at her core the open-hearted, if wilful girl who had first made her husband love her by listening to his tales of adventure on the seas with that same delighted grin.

  ‘We have no need of anything at the moment, Mr Dent,’ she said, then as the boy slipped into the shadows, she turned from the engravings, saying, ‘Would it not be a delight, Crowther, to arrive in the offices of a lawyer and find his walls decorated with great oils of the Muses decked out in pink drapery?’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Diverting perhaps, though I would not wish to trust such a lawyer with my business.’

  She laughed softly, continuing to admire, or at least scrutinise, an engraving of The Royal Courts of London. ‘Because of the extravagance of the oils, or their subject?’

  ‘Both. Though I am glad to see these here, and they are not typical of a lawyer’s office, I think.’

  She crossed to look at the engravings by which Crowther stood. They seemed to be technical drawings of various machines. Harriet saw in them a confusion of gears and wheels. They were pleasant enough compositions, but she could understand little of them.

  ‘The gentleman here has regularly invested my money in a number of manufacturing schemes in the northern counties. From their accounts he seems to have done so wisely. Indeed, I sometimes fear my money has managed to do more to grow the stock of knowledge and expertise in this country than I have done myself.’

  ‘Are you fearfully rich, Crowther?’

  ‘Fearfully. Quite rich enough to make murdering me for my money seem a risk worth taking.’

  Harriet recalled what she had been told of Crowther’s interview with Felix that morning and grimaced. She would never succeed in puzzling out Crowther’s character. The thought of his nephew trying to murder him for his fortune seemed to have rather amused him.

  The young Dent slid back into the room and behind his desk again, and Crowther noticed him glance at Harriet as he did so. He had taken the opportunity to smooth his hair. He was followed out in a very few moments by his master, a gentleman of roughly Harriet’s age with a long face and bags under his eyes, very respectably turned out and with an air of intelligent good humour. He was glad to welcome them and led them back into his own office with the minimum of chatter. Harriet wondered if he had learned enough of Crowther through their business correspondence to know this was by far the best way to deal with him.

  He showed them into an office with a large window on one side that overlooked a neat flower-garden behind the house. Harriet had noticed on entering the offices of professional men in general, that if their rooms offered such a view they usually set their desks so they had their back to it, as if underlining their own seriousness with their refusal to enjoy such frippery things as the open air. Mr Leathes, however, had set up his desk the other way, at right angles to the window, so that, as he worked on his papers he might look up from time to time and watch the seasons change. Harriet was ready to like him for that, but before she could take her seat she was distracted by a fluttering in the garden, and going to the glass, saw that part of the little lawn was taken up with an aviary. She tilted her head to listen and realised that the air which struggled warmly through the open window was freshened with birdsong.

  Mr Leathes noticed her attention and joined her at the window. ‘My canaries. An inclination I inherited from my father. Even we lawyers must have something cheerful about us, Mrs Westerman.’

  ‘You do not think it cruel to shut away these creatures, Mr Leathes?’

  He shook his head. ‘It is a good-sized aviary, designed for their convenience. My little daughter told me once that she thought the wrens and sparrows all hoped when they died they would be transported into my aviary as if to heaven. There they are safe from buzzards, well-fed, and I have even means to warm the air in the winter.’

  ‘You sound as if you envy them a little yourself,’ she said, putting her hand to the glass.

  ‘Perhaps I do,’ he replied, returning to his chair, ‘on days where there is unpleasant business to be done, and unpleasant things to say. I hope today will not be such a one.’ Harriet was in the midst of framing a gentle smile for him, when she was surprised to hear him continue: ‘But I fear it must be.’

  ‘Indeed, Mr Leathes?’ Crowther said. ‘Are you about to tell me the new factories are all burned up and I am a pauper?’

  The man shook his head. ‘No, my lord. You continue to do very well. It would take a great many fires to consume your fortune, and should any such event occur, I would not wait until you happened to visit me to tell you of it.’ The birds in the garden piped and whistled as he spoke, and Harriet found herself thinking of children at play. ‘I was in the process of writing you a note when Dent came in to tell me you were here. I wished to speak to you about your nephew.’

  ‘What of him?’ said Crowther calmly, and Harriet watched Leathes’ eyes flick up to his client then back down to the tooled leather of his desk.

  ‘He came to see me some days ago — why, I am afraid I could not quite be sure. It was an awkward sort of interview, but I gained the impression he wished to learn the extent of your fortune and his own expectations.’

  ‘And how did you answer him?’

  ‘That I could be of no assistance to him, naturally, and if he wanted any information on the subject he should apply to you directly.’

  The two men watched each other carefully for a moment, then appearing satisfied, Crowther nodded. ‘I apologise on my nephew’s behalf if the interview was uncomfortable, Mr Leathes.’

  The lawyer smiled. ‘My impression was it was a great deal more uncomfortable for Mr von Bolsenheim. I fear he finds himself at the end of his resources. He asked me in passing as he left if I knew a reputable place, not in the immediate area, where he might get a fair price for his watch. He seemed rather distracted. I was considering suggesting to you it might be wise to make some proper enquiry into the extent of his debts, and perhaps settle some amount on him for the promise of future good behaviour.’

  Crowther sighed, crossed his legs and sat back in his chair.

  ‘Not today, Mr Leathes. Though I shall consider what you say. Some years ago, Mr Briggs found a strongbox at Silverside, and brought it to you, believing it was the property of my father.’

  Mr Leathes looked a little wary. ‘Indeed. I wrote to you regarding it.’

  ‘And I requested that you force the lock, ascertain if there was anything significant contained within and destroy the contents if there was not.’

  The canaries chirrupped in the heat. Mr Leathes turned towards the window and leaned back a little in his chair. ‘I believe the phrase you employed, sir, was “dispose of the materials”.’

  ‘Was it indeed?’ Crowther continued to observe Mr Leathes from under his half-closed eyes. ‘And how did you choose to interpret that phrase?’

  Harriet was glad to see that the scrutiny did not appear to discomfort Mr Leathes. Instead, he reached into his pocket and produced a small brass key with which he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk, and bent to retrieve something from it. Then, with an effort, he placed a small iron strongbox on his desk-top.

  It was perhaps twenty inches in length, and rectangular, bound with metal bands and riveted. It looked to Harriet like the relic of a much earlier age. They examined it together a moment before Mr Leathes chose to answer Crowther’s question.

  ‘I am not sure if you recall, my lord, the circumstances of its discovery. Mr Briggs found during his last renovations of your father’s office in Silverside a concealed hiding-place behind the panelling and this within it. He at once had it brought to me, and I wrote to you for instruction.’

  ‘A safe bo
x within a hiding-place? What could require such security?’ Harriet asked. The box was very dirty and there were marks around the hinges.

  Mr Leathes sighed. ‘I cannot say, madam. The lock on this box had already been forced, though I did not discover that until I had received Lord Keswick’s note and tried to open it.’ If he noticed the slight tic in Crowther’s face when he used his title, he gave no sign of it. ‘We lawyers must develop at times an ability to read blindly. I opened the box, and although I saw there were no bonds or papers material to the estate within, I did not feel easy about destroying the box or the contents. I chose instead to interpret your phrase according to my own conscience and stored it in our archives.’

  Crowther gave no sign of either annoyance or gratitude, but raised one eyebrow.

  ‘In your archives, Mr Leathes? Yet now when we arrive at your office without warning, we find that you have the box with you. You will forgive me for remarking that this seems rather convenient.’

  It seemed Mr Leathes was beginning now to find his seat a little uncomfortable. He shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. ‘I said we lawyers read blindly, but perhaps I might have gained some impression of the contents, and when I heard you were coming to investigate the discovery of the skeleton on the Island of Bones. .’ He tailed off.

  Harriet smiled to herself. ‘You had the box brought to you. And Felix’s visit provided you with the necessary pretext to ask Crowther here,’ she said. ‘On his coming to you, you thought no doubt to introduce the subject of the strongbox. But we have pre-empted you.’

  Mr Leathes looked a little sheepish and he held up his hands. ‘You have discovered me, Mrs Westerman.’

  Crowther lifted the lid, saying briskly, ‘You have done very well, I think, Mr Leathes, to be so nice in your interpretation.’ The solicitor closed his eyes and breathed out slowly through his mouth as Crowther put his hand into the box and pulled out a single sheet, much yellowed with age. He unfolded it and then handed it to Harriet. ‘Mrs Westerman, would you be so kind. Your eyes are so much sharper than mine.’