The Ebb Tide

hole. “Merton’s Rarities,” I said to the driver. “Hurry!” He hi-hoed at the horses and off they went, throwing us both sideways, Tubby pinning me heavily against the wall. “The point is,” I said, “if Bill drew such a map, and it’s come to light, then we’ve got to take up the scent, or we’ll lose it again.”

“The scent of what, Jack? That’s the salient point, you see.”

“A lost object. It was what you might call…a device,” I told him.

“Ah! A device. Just so. For spinning straw into gold, perhaps?”

One didn’t keep secrets from one’s allies, especially from a man like Tubby Frobisher, who did as he would be done by, so to speak. “You recall the so-called Yorkshire Dales Meteor?” I asked.

“Plowed up a meadow owned by a country parson, didn’t it? Burnt a hedgerow. There was some element of it that made it worth the attention of the press for a day or two. I seem to recall a ring of floating cattle roundabout a manure dump, although it might have been floating swine.”

“It was the murder of Parson Grimstead that attracted the press. They were more or less indifferent to the flaming object — not a meteor, I can assure you. The Parson found a strange device, you see, in his cattle enclosure, and he hid it in his barn. He suspected, probably correctly, that it wasn’t…of earthly origin.”

Tubby gave me a look, but he knew enough about St. Ives’s adventures over the years so that the look wasn’t utterly dubious. “The Parson sent word to St. Ives,” I said, “whom he had known man and boy, and St. Ives flogged up to Yorkshire to arrive the following morning, only to find the Parson dead on the ground inside the barn door. He was carrying a fowling piece, although he hadn’t apparently meant to go hunting, at least not for birds. There was no sign of the device. A local farmer had seen a wagon coming out of the Parson’s yew alley before dawn, driving away westward. It turned out that the device had been spirited away to the Carnforth Ironworks. According to a worker, a container of wood and iron had been built to house it, the interior of the container sealed with India rubber. As for the floating cattle, St. Ives found the report vitally interesting, but to my mind it simply encouraged the press to make light of a good man’s murder.”

“Spirited away?” Tubby said. “Built to house it? By whom?”

“You know by whom, or can guess.”

“Ignacio Narbondo? What does he call himself now? Frosticos, isn’t it?” He was silent for a moment. “We should have fed him to that herd of feral pigs when we had the chance. We’ll add that oversight to our list of regrets.”

Fleet Street was annoyingly crowded with evening strollers, and we crawled along now, the cabbie shouting imprecations, our pace quickening again as we rounded onto Upper Thames Street toward the Embankment. “The map, then?” Tubby asked. “You must have found this device and then — what? — lost it again?”

“Just so. What happened,” I told him, “was that we three took the device out of the Ironworks under the cover of night, St. Ives, old Bill, and myself. We were waylaid near Silverdale at low tide, and Bill set out across the sands alone with the wagon despite St. Ives’s reservations. He had the idea of fleeing into Cumbria, going to ground, and waiting for us to catch up. If the wagon became mired in the sands, he would draw a map of its exact location, although the odds of our recovering it were small. The virtue was that the device would be out of the hands of Frosticos, who would surely misuse it, whatever it was.”

“It had a use, then?”

“Apparently, or so St. Ives suspected. The long and the short of it is that Bill disappeared. We fear that he went down into the sands somewhere in the vicinity of Humphrey Head. Did he draw his map? We didn’t know. All these years we’ve assumed that the map, if there was one, sank along with the wagon and poor Bill.”

“And so ends the tale,” Tubby said. “Your device is lost, and two dead men to show for it.”

“One last, salient bit. Merton, you see, frequents the Bay, where he has family, and years ago St. Ives asked him to be on the lookout for anything remotely relevant to the case. Lost things turn up, you see, sometimes, along the shore, sometimes in dredgers’ nets. This is our first glimmer of hope.”

“Well,” Tubby said gloomily, “give me a kidney pie and a pint of plain over a glimmer of anything, especially if it’s buried in quicksand.” But Tubby was always a slave to his stomach, and there he was sitting beside me in the cab as we reined up in front of Merton’s, game as ever.

Merton’s Rarities, very near London Bridge, is part rare book shop, part curiosity shop, and a sort of museum of old maps and arcane paper goods, scientific debris, and collections of all sorts — insects, assembled skeletons, stuffed creatures from far and wide. Where Merton finds his wares I don’t know, although he does a brisk trade with sailors returning from distant lands. In his youth he worked in the stockroom at the British Museum, where he established a number of exotic contacts.

The shop was well lit despite the hour. Tubby and I hesitated only a moment in the entryway, spotting St. Ives and Hasbro bent over the body of poor Merton, who lay sprawled on the floor like a dead man. Roundabout the front counter there were maps and papers and books strewn about, drawers emptied. Someone had torn the place up, and brazenly, too. Merton’s forehead was bloody from a gash at the hairline, smeared by the now blood-stained sleeve of his lab coat. Hasbro was waving a vial of smelling salts beneath Merton’s nose, but apparently to no consequence, as St. Ives attempted to staunch the flow of blood.

“Back room. Wary now,” St. Ives told us without looking up, and Frobisher, no longer mindful of his kidney pie, plucked a shillelagh out of a hollow elephant leg nearby. He had the look of a man who was finally happy to do some useful work. I took out a leaded cane and followed him toward the rear of the shop, where we came to an arched door, beyond which there was a vestibule opening onto three large rooms: a book room, a storage room full of wooden casks and crates, and a workshop. The book room was apparently empty, although the storage room afforded a dozen hiding places. “Come on out!” I shouted, brandishing the cane at the shadow-filled room, but I was met with silence.

Then Tubby called out, “He’s bolted!” which didn’t altogether disappoint me. I found Tubby in the workshop, where a door stood open beyond a row of heavy wooden benches littered with half assembled skeletons. We looked out through the door, discovering a pleasant, walled garden with a paved central square surrounded by shrubbery. An iron, scrollwork table lay on the pavement, its feet pushed into the shrubbery along the wall, which the attacker had no doubt scaled, kicking the table backward when he boosted himself onto the copings.

We set the table up, which was very shaky, I might add, with a treacherously loose leg, and while Tubby held it steady, I climbed atop it and looked up and down the empty by-street, which dead-ended some distance up against a shuttered building. It lead away downwards towards the river, winding around in the direction, roughly speaking, of Billingsgate Market.

“Gone,” I said out loud. “No sight of him.” And I was just leaning on Tubby’s shoulder to climb back down when I saw a boy come out of an alley down across the way. He stood staring at me, as if trying to classify what species of creature I might turn out to be. To my utter surprise, he headed straight toward me, waving a hand in the air.

CHAPTER 2 What Happened to the Map

What’s this now?” I said, and Tubby, still holding steady, said, “Enlighten me,” with a good deal of irony, as if he was miffed that his only useful business was to anchor the table while I took in the view.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” the boy said, breathing heavily. “There was a man came over this wall. I seen him.”

“How long back?” I asked.

“Not ten minutes, sir. I followed him down toward the market, but lost sight of him. I thought at first he’d taken an oars downriver, but then I saw him duck into a gin shop, what they call the Goat and Cabbage.”

“Send the boy around to the front,” Frobisher said a little pettishly. “I’m not a damned pilaster.”

“Right,” I said, and was about to convey the suggestion when the lad took a mad run at the wall, sprang up, latched onto the copings, and heaved himself over, landing on his feet like a cat.