A Burial at Sea Page 7

  “I’ll leave you to it. I’ve got to start us sailing again,” Martin had said. He looked tired but showed no signs of slacking energy. “You can find me on deck if you like. Tell me, first, what you think happened.”

  “I don’t know,” said Lenox, and Martin, perhaps used to his directives being followed and his questions answered frankly and fully, looked unhappy with the answer.

  “We can’t have a murderer roaming freely aboard the ship.”

  “At the very least—if we cannot rout out this murderer—everyone will be far more aware and cautious now. This is not a large place for hiding.”

  “Nothing could be worse for the mood of the men, though,” said Martin. “Suspicion everywhere—rumors, arguments, accusations. Still, it’s a short voyage, bless the Lord.”

  Halifax’s cabin (also off of the wardroom) felt personal in a way Lenox’s didn’t yet, the result of many months’ habitation. It was tidy but crammed: notes and sketches pinned on the wall over his tiny desk, clothes hung up on the back of his chair and the bed’s short posts, fishing tackle in the corner. Lenox searched through this assortment of items methodically, but ultimately without recompense. There was no note lying about—or indeed in any pocket or drawer Lenox could find—inviting Halifax to a rendezvous during the middle watch. Nor was there any object that didn’t seem natural in its place. On the contrary, the cabin looked as if the lieutenant might walk into it at any moment and carry on living his life there.

  One detail, however: the porthole at the far end of the cabin was swung open, though it was ship’s policy to keep the portholes closed. It would have been the quickest way to jettison such a note, or indeed a murder weapon—a knife, say.

  After he had concluded his inspection of Halifax’s cabin, Lenox made his way down to the surgery. The corpse of the officer lay on the table at the center of the room still, rinsed clean of blood now, but Tradescant wasn’t there.

  Lenox found him on deck, smoking a small cigar and looking out over the water. The sun was up.

  “You finished examining the body, Mr. Tradescant?”

  “Yes, not five minutes since. I can show you what I found—come along.” The surgeon threw his cigar overboard, though the ship was now moving at a sufficient clip, with new sails set, that they didn’t hear the hiss of it being extinguished. “There was one interesting discovery I made.”

  Standing over Halifax’s body a few moments later, Tradescant described in clear language each wound the dead man had sustained.

  “These here are not very precise,” he said, pointing to the incisions along Halifax’s torso, “and the wounds that killed him—these, around his heart—are not very deep or strong. I suspect he died of blood loss rather than a deadly blow to his heart, in fact. His artery was nicked here.”

  “What conclusion can you draw about the murder weapon, then?”

  “I have the murder weapon.”

  Lenox paused, dumbstruck, for a moment. “You’ve—how have you got it?” The wild thought that Tradescant might be the murderer crossed his mind, and he even stepped backward slightly.

  This produced a bark of laughter from the surgeon. “It wasn’t I, Mr. Lenox. Here it is.”

  Tradescant went into the pocket of his vest and produced a gleaming silver pocketknife. He held it out and Lenox took it.

  It was about five inches long, on the larger side for these sorts of knives, and had three blades of different lengths that folded out and locked into place. There was also a fourth implement that folded out of the knife: a minute compass on the end of a metal rod.

  “Useful for a man at sea, that,” said Tradescant. “Specially made, perhaps.”

  “Are you certain this is the weapon? How did you find it?”

  He gestured toward the body on the table. “You asked me to check that Lieutenant Halifax’s organs were intact. They were, but this was tucked underneath the stomach, hidden from immediate view but not at all tricky to find.”

  “It couldn’t have been this clean.”

  “Oh, no. I washed it. I wanted to see if it had any distinctive markings.”

  “And you feel that this matches his cuts?”

  “There’s very little doubt in my mind. As I say, the wounds are too ragged in the one case and shallow in the other to have been the result of anything as precise as a scalpel or as big as a kitchen knife. A pocketknife such as this fits the bill.”

  “Sterling silver,” murmured Lenox.

  Tradescant nodded. “Well beyond the reach of any common bluejacket, I would have thought.”

  “Easily thieved, however.”

  “Perhaps, yes.”

  “Wouldn’t the blade have folded back into the knife if you attempted to stab someone with it?”

  “As you’ll observe, if I may show you—the blade locks out into place, and only pressing this button allows it to be folded back in.”

  “Ah, I see. Well done, Mr. Tradescant. May I ask, to change the subject only for a moment—did you look at his back? Halifax’s?”

  “I didn’t, no. Why? Surely the wounds are frontal?”

  “If he fell from a good height to the quarterdeck, as I believe, there might have been bruising on the back.”

  Tradescant nodded. “Yes, and in fact I did find a bloody cut on the back of his head. That might have been inflicted by the fall. Here—help me turn the body onto its side, so we may see.”

  They performed this operation with what delicacy they could manage, and as Lenox had suspected found great red welts on Halifax’s back.

  “These swellings would still have appeared postmortem?” Lenox asked as they laid the body back down flat.

  “Immediately postmortem, yes, it’s certainly possible. I would be inclined to accept your theory.”

  It was a relief to have confirmation of at least one fact.

  “Did the body tell you anything else?”

  “Not in particular. He was a healthy man. As you predicted, there were blue fibers in the wounds around his heart—the shirt must have been removed or at a minimum unbuttoned before the incisions in the abdomen were made.”

  “Any wounds on the hands?”

  Tradescant frowned. “I don’t know, why?”

  Lenox lifted one of Halifax’s hands. It was easy to forget how valuable his friend Thomas McConnell’s medical expertise had been when Lenox was working as a detective every day. “From his hands we may observe whether he defended himself.”

  “I see.”

  “But both hands appear to be unhurt. It must mean that Halifax wouldn’t have expected to be stabbed—or that it came quickly.”

  “Yes,” said Tradescant. “Sensible.”

  “I suppose that covers the facts, then,” said Lenox. “Thank you, Mr. Tradescant.”

  “I’m for bed, then, even though I spy daylight. It’s been a long night.”

  Suddenly Lenox felt overwhelmingly tired. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll go on deck to tell Martin we’re going to steal some sleep. There’s nothing we could do now that can’t be achieved in four hours’ time.”

  “Or ten hours, if I have my way,” said Tradescant.

  They both looked down at the body of Halifax then, and a strange moment of frustration and dazed bafflement seemed to pass among the three of them. How had they ended up this way, two of them alive, one dead, when not twenty hours before they had been on land, and not twelve hours before they had been dining together?

  It had all happened so fast. And poor Halifax! Lenox thought of the fishing again. He would have to try out the dead man’s fishing pole one day soon. A minor—and insufficient—tribute to what might have been a real friendship, had they both made it through the journey together.

  As he lay in bed fifteen minutes later, Lenox’s mind muddled through the facts—the medal, the knife, the incisions on Halifax’s torso—but without any constructive result. It was merely a whirl of thoughts. Fruitless.

  He also thought of the comfortable green baize benches in Parliame
nt, the cups of tea and hot wine rushed in by young secretaries when discussion went late into the night, his comfortable office in Westminster … and of course he thought of Jane, of leaving Parliament for home and finding her there, waiting for him long after she ought to have been in bed. Had he softened? Or merely changed? He was past forty now, definitely middle-aged. It had been three years since he had regularly taken cases. He had a child on the way. The exhilaration of late nights in the Seven Dials, chasing down some gin-soaked murderer, of being in on the hunt as a forger fled to Surrey, of those old cases, was now some years in the past. Did they belong to a different part of his life? Of himself?

  Could he still do this?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The naval day began properly at noon.

  Of course in the forenoon there was sailing to be done, an officer on watch, and men up among the rigging and down on deck doing their work. (In particular the forenoon was when the entire deck, regardless of its cleanliness, was soaked, cleaned, and beaten dry in preparation for the day.) It was in the forenoon as well that the midshipmen received their instruction.

  But it was at noon when the officers took a sighting of the sun to help establish their position, the captain there to hear it. Immediately afterward all the men were piped for dinner. This was the main meal of the day: the purser’s mate issued the men salted beef, dried peas, and beer or grog depending on the ship’s stores. They ate where they had slept the watch before, in what they called their mess—the narrow area between two great guns that they shared with seven other men. This day there was a steady hum of gossip; they had been ordered to appear in full uniform on deck after dinner, something usually reserved for Sundays, when church was rigged.

  Lenox woke up a bit before noon. When he called for McEwan, the assistant, with a note of genuine sympathy in his voice, said, “Which you must be starving, sir. Would eggs in toast do you?”

  “And tea, if you please.”

  “And tea, of course, and you’ll be needing biscuits, and I think I saw some marmalade, and…”

  Lenox was still tired—and his mind still racing—but the strong, dark tea refreshed him. Better still, McEwan could cook. The eggs, cracked into an oval hole in the middle of two pieces of toast, cooked until brown on either side, and served with the cut-out ovals toasted on the side, were wonderfully flavorsome.

  “Chickens laid ’em this morning,” said McEwan when Lenox complimented the breakfast. “We call it a spit in the ocean.”

  “What other animals do you keep on board?”

  “Why, I don’t rightly know, sir, leastways on this voyage.” McEwan chewed an edge of toast himself, ruminating. “Though I imagine there’s a goat, sir, and a mess of chickens, and it might be as there’s a lamb.”

  As was customary among men with the means to do so, Lenox had brought his own provisions on board: hams, cheeses, wine, biscuits, and whatever else Jane had thought he might need. They were stowed in locked hampers outside his cabin, where McEwan had taken to lovingly stroking them every time he passed.

  Lenox took a second cup of tea, reading from a copy of The Voyage of the Beagle he had brought on board. When he heard the men being piped to dinner he went to his cabin and, with a smile, took an orange Jane had packed for him. This he ate while leaning over the rail of the quarterdeck, thinking of Halifax and Halifax’s murderer, tossing the rind over the side but savoring the fruit both for its taste and the person it recalled to mind.

  Soon all the officers and all the men—everyone afloat on the Lucy, from McEwan to Martin—stood on deck, all dressed ceremonially. A drummer played a short burst of formal rhythm and then the captain spoke.

  He had come to Lenox only a moment before the drummer began.

  “Is there anything you can tell me? Anything to draw out the murderer? Anything I should omit?”

  “I wouldn’t mention the murder weapon.” Lenox had told Martin about the pocketknife that morning, just before he had gone to sleep. “You might mention that we have a strong suspicion of whom the murderer is—it would make us seem as if we have the situation in hand.”

  “Which we don’t,” the captain said flatly.

  “It might also induce a confession.”

  In the end Martin followed this advice. His voice booming over the brisk sounds of the water and the wind, the sails, he said, “For three years now I have been proud to call the Lucy my command. I say with complete confidence that there is no finer ship in Her Majesty’s navy. She is a taut ship; a fast one; a friendly one; a dangerous one. She can outsail and outmaneuver anyone in the ocean, and though she has fewer guns than most she can outshoot many of them, too. That’s down to her crew.

  “Perhaps that is why I am doubly downcast at what occurred during the middle watch last night. You may as well know what many of you will have heard in differing accounts: Lieutenant Thomas Halifax was murdered. And, after a fashion, was the Lucy. She cannot be the same ship now.”

  It was clever, thought Lenox, to appeal to their pride in the ship they sailed. But futile, too, he expected. Whoever murdered Halifax had too cool a head to succumb to such manipulation.

  “I ask the man who committed this foul deed to step forward now,” Martin said. He took a deep breath. “If he does so, his family and friends on land will think he died during a storm. There is no need for such a stain to extend to a wife or a son. The name can remain good. I don’t think you could reckon a fairer bargain than that.”

  The men evidently agreed. A murmur of assent rippled through the multitude, and they all turned their heads back and forth and round to see if anyone would rise.

  But nobody did, and Martin, nodding as if it was only in confirmation of his expectation, said, “Very well. I see this murderer—one of you—is every bit as cowardly as I anticipated he would be. Let it fall on your own head, then. Stand in three lines now, bare-chested, and Mr. Lenox, Mr. Tradescant, and I will inspect you all. The midshipmen shall divide the groups by mess, that no man may go unaccounted for.”

  The surgeon, the captain, and the member of Parliament briefly huddled and agreed to send anyone with a suspicious wound into the surgery. This was Lenox’s thought, one last gambit to encourage guilt: the suspects would be standing over Halifax’s body.

  “Consider particularly the forearms and the faces,” he added before they split into groups.

  Privately he wondered whether they should be making a similar examination of the officers. It was a point to raise to Martin later.

  If the sailors had thought Lenox was bad luck previously, this murder was, it seemed, all the verification they required. Each man he inspected gave him a dirtier look than the last.

  He noticed Evers—the man who had told McEwan Lenox was an albatross—standing back several places in line. When their eyes met Evers spat into his cap and turned away.

  McEwan himself was in Lenox’s grouping. His hands, arms, face, and chest were all free of suspicious markings, and he somberly nodded to Lenox when dismissed. As he left he appeared to pluck a small parcel from his own cap (pockets were forbidden in the navy, by tradition if not written rule) that looked suspiciously biscuit-shaped.

  In the end nine sailors assembled in the surgery, not counting the patient who slumbered peacefully on, deep in coma, in the corner of the room.

  Halifax’s body was beginning to decay; Tradescant uncovered it as the sailors filed into the room. Each crossed himself when he saw it.

  The review was thorough but inconclusive. The first man they interviewed had a great scrape across his right forearm, but claimed—and in the captain’s opinion it seemed probable—that a rush of rope from a slack sail had given him the burn. Two or three more had such shipboard injuries. Evers had a great welt on his chest, which he said came from a drunken stumble down the streets of Plymouth.

  “What did you land on?” Lenox asked.

  “Dunno. Sir. I woke up with it.”

  “It looks fresh.”

  “It’s only from yeste
rday.”

  Two more men had injuries that looked older than eight hours. In the end Martin, Tradescant, and Lenox dismissed the men; Lenox marked two in his mind for continued observation, but felt relatively sure that he had ended up down another blind alley.

  “Back to work for me, then,” said Martin.

  “Have you slept?” asked Lenox.

  “Tonight. You’ll continue to look into this?”

  “Yes.”

  Lenox took to the quarterdeck. In the early afternoon the sky was hot and brilliant, cloudless.

  Idly he examined the pocketknife Halifax had been killed with, as if it might unfold not just three knives and a compass, but, more useful than any of these, some kind of answer to this puzzle.

  Suddenly he spotted something he hadn’t seen before.

  Along the broad side of the smallest knife was a faint inscription. He had believed Tradescant’s statement as true, that the pocketknife had been unmarked, but then these words were all but faded from wear and would have been easy to miss in the wrong light. The white sun helped Lenox read them now.

  For my son, Aloysius Billings, they said, July 1861.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  So the knife that had killed Halifax belonged to the first lieutenant of the Lucy.

  Lenox retracted the blade into its groove and considered what he ought to do. After several unhurried moments of reflection, he went down to the wardroom and sought out McEwan.

  “Which of these is Lieutenant Billings’s cabin?” he asked.

  “The one three to the left of yours, sir.”

  “What is his servant’s name?”

  “Mr. Butterworth, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  Lenox counted three doors and knocked on the third. There were footsteps within it and Butterworth came to the door, a jaundiced man, too tall to be aboard a ship. Even answering the knock he was stooped over, nearly brushing the beams of the ceiling with his head.

  “Sir?”

  “Is Lieutenant Billings within?”