Where Shadows Dance

“Never spent a night, poor man. Why, he’d only just docked that very morning. Took a room and ate a meat pie in the public room, he did, then went off for a good long while. If I recall, he said something about needing to see someone in the West End, but I could be wrong.”

“He never came back?”

“Oh, no; he did.” She ran the towel over the ancient dark wood of the bar. “Came back and had his dinner. But then he went off again, and that was the last anyone saw of him.”

“No idea where he went?”

“Well, he did come and ask how to get to the St. Helena tea gardens. It’s a lovely place, you know, with a brass band and dancing most every evening in summer.”

“Where is it?”

She nodded downriver. “You follow the Halfpenny Hatch there, through the market gardens, to Deptford Road. ’Tisn’t the best area to go walking through after dark, mind, seeing as how the top of Turndley’s Lane is known as something of a resort for footpads. That’s what we thought, when we realized he didn’t ever come back —that he’d run afoul of footpads.”

“You notified the constables?”

“The next day, yes. They checked along the pathway and all around St. Helena but never found a trace of him. No one at the tea gardens remembered seeing him, so we reckoned something must’ve happened to him before he got there.”

“Tell me, what did Mr. Kincaid look like?”

“Hmm ...” She paused, her face screwed up with thought. “He was in his thirties, I’d say. Hair the color of a haystack. Didn’t notice his eyes, I’m afraid. He was a nice lad, to be sure, but it was hard when you were talking to him to notice anything but his teeth.”

“His teeth?”

“Aye, poor lad. Could’ve eaten an apple through a picket fence, as the saying goes.”

Sebastian drained his ale. “What ship did you say he came in on?”

“The Baltimore Mary. She was at the Greenland Dock.” She gave him a considering look. “Going down there now, are you?”

“Yes. Why?”

She nodded toward the window, where the westering sun was casting long shadows across the road. “Best hurry, then. You don’t want to be anywhere around there when it starts getting dark.”

Chapter 26

Sebastian drove through long stretches of biscuit factories and anchor forges close built with sail lofts and tumbledown cottages. At the outskirts of the Greenland Dock, he left the curricle with Tom in the shade of a big brick storehouse on a quiet, cobbled lane and pushed on afoot through throngs of workmen in leather aprons and merchant seamen stinking of gin and old sweat.

The Surrey Docks were a jumble of harbors, canals, and timber ponds lined with warehouses and granaries and immense piles of timber or “deal wood.” The vast whaling fleets of the previous century were almost gone now, their place taken by ships bearing timber from Scandinavia and the Baltic or wheat and cotton from North America. The air was thick with the stench of tar and dead fish and the raw sewage that scummed the water.

Sebastian had a double-barreled pistol in the pocket of his driving coat, primed and ready, and a knife in his boot. But he had every intention of heeding the landlady’s warning to be gone from the waterfront before nightfall.

An army of quayside workers swarmed the docks, lightermen and deal porters and the unskilled laborers who assembled every morning at area pubs like the King’s Arms or the Green Man, where foremen selected their day’s crews. A few carefully worded questions and the discreet distribution of largesse eventually brought him to a decrepit old wharf near the canal, where a big-boned, black-bearded Irishman named Patrick O’Brian was supervising the unloading of a cargo of Russian hemp from a sloop.

“Aye, we worked the Baltimore Mary, all right,” he said, hands on his hips, eyes narrowed against the glare of the water as he watched his lads toiling on the ship’s deck.

“She was from the United States?” asked Sebastian.

“That’s right. Carryin’ a load o’ wheat.”

“Landed last Saturday?”

O?Brian sucked on the plug of tobacco distending his cheek and grunted.

Sebastian stared out over the grease-skimmed waters of the basin, with its hundreds of crowded hulls, their bare masts stark against the blue sky. “Yet she sailed again on Tuesday? How is that possible?”

“Never seen anythin’ like it, meself. Paid a premium, they did, to get that cargo off in a rush.” He winked. “And ye can be sure the captain greased the palms o’ the attendin’ revenue officers, to get it through customs that fast.”

“Why the hurry?”

“That I couldn’t tell ye.” He shot a mouthful of brown tobacco juice into the water. “I have meself a theory, though.”

He paused to stare at Sebastian expectantly.

Sebastian obligingly passed him a coin. “And?”

“Normally, ye see, a ship’s captain will unload. Then he’ll go to the Virginia and Maryland Coffee House on Threadneedle Street, or maybe to the Antwerp Tavern. That’s where all the traders go, lookin’ to consign a cargo to some captain fittin’ out fer the return voyage.”

“But the captain of the Baltimore Mary didn’t do that?”

“Nah. He unloaded his ship, took on a few supplies, then sailed out o’ here with naught but ballast. Heard tell he was headin’ for Copenhagen, plannin’ to pick up a cargo and do his refittin’ there. But I couldn’t say for certain.”

“Now, why would he do that?”

O’Brian laid a finger alongside his nose and grinned. “Only reason I can figure is that he had a powerful reason to get out o’ London. Fast.”

Sebastian studied the dock man’s craggy, sun-darkened face. “What was this captain’s name?”

“Pugh, I believe. Ian Pugh.”

“Had you ever worked with him before?”

“A few times.”

Sebastian handed over another coin. “So your theory is—?”

O?Brian glanced in both directions and dropped his voice. “There was this passenger aboard the Baltimore Mary, one Ezekiel Kincaid. He had quite a row with the captain, he did, just after they docked. And then, the next day, what do we hear but that Kincaid has turned up missin’ and ain’t never been found.”

“So you’re suggesting—what? That Captain Pugh murdered Ezekiel Kincaid?”

“Not sayin’ he did; not sayin’ he didn’t. I’m just sayin’, it makes you wonder.” He looked at Sebastian expectantly. “Well, don’t it? Don’t it?”

Sebastian walked through darkening, empty streets echoing with the clashes of shutters as apprentices closed up their masters’ shops. The evening breeze blowing off the water brought with it a welcome coolness but did little to alleviate the area’s foul stench. He wondered if it was possible that the murderer he sought was indeed some American sea captain, at that moment organizing the refitting and loading of his ship in Copenhagen.

Possible? Yes. Except, what possible connection could exist between the unknown Captain Pugh and Alexander Ross? And how then to explain the intruder Sebastian had encountered at St. James’s Street?

He was still pondering the possibilities when he turned into the quiet cobbled lane and saw his curricle standing empty before the looming warehouse, the chestnuts tossing their heads and sidling nervously. Two men loitered near the open doorway of the warehouse; rough men in black neck cloths, scruffy brown coats, and greasy