Bolitho beckoned to Jury and heard Palliser say to Rhodes, “I might have sent you, but Mr Bolitho and Jury have newer uniforms and may bring less discredit on my ship!”
In next to no time they were being pulled across the water towards the shore. Bolitho had been at sea for a week, but it seemed longer, so great was the change in his surroundings.
Jury said, “Thank you for taking me, sir.”
Bolitho thought of Palliser’s parting shot. He could not resist a sarcastic jibe. And yet he had been the one to think of Spillane, the one to see what Stockdale was doing with the gun. A man of many faces, Bolitho thought.
He replied, “Don’t let the men wander about.”
He broke off as he saw Stockdale, half hidden by the boat’s oarsmen. Somehow he had found time to change into his checked shirt and white trousers and equip himself with a cutlass.
Stockdale pretended not to see his surprise.
Bolitho shook his head. “Forget what I said. I do not think you will have any trouble after all.”
What had the big man said? I’ll not leave you. Not now. Not never.
The boat’s coxswain watched narrowly and then thrust the tiller bar hard over.
“Toss yer oars!”
The boat came to a halt by some stone stairs and the bowman hooked on to a rusty chain.
Bolitho adjusted his sword-belt and looked up at the watching townspeople. They appeared very friendly. Yet a man had just been murdered a few yards away.
He said, “Fall in on the jetty.”
He climbed up the stairs and touched his hat to Colpoys’ pickets. The marines looked extremely cheerful, and despite their rigid attitudes in front of a ship’s officer, they smelled strongly of drink, and one of them had a flower protruding from his collar.
Bolitho took his bearings and strode towards the nearest street with as much confidence as he could muster. The sailors tramped behind him, exchanging winks and grins with women on balconies and in windows above the street.
Jury asked, “Who would want to kill poor Lockyer, sir?”
“Who indeed?”
Bolitho hesitated and then turned down a narrow alley where the roofs nodded towards each other as if to blot out the sky. There was a heady scent of flowers, and he heard someone playing a stringed instrument in one of the houses.
Bolitho checked his piece of paper and looked at an iron gate which opened on to a courtyard with a fountain in its centre. They had arrived.
He saw Jury staring round at the strangeness of everything, and remembered himself in similar circumstances.
He said quietly, “You come with me.” He raised his voice, “Stockdale, take charge out here. Nobody is to leave until I give the word, understood?”
Stockdale nodded grimly. He would probably batter any would-be troublemaker senseless.
A servant led them to a cool room above the courtyard where Dumaresq was drinking wine with an elderly man who had a pointed white beard and skin like finely tooled leather.
Dumaresq did not stand. “Yes, Mr Bolitho?” If he was startled by their unheralded arrival he hid it very well. “Trouble?”
Bolitho glanced at the old man but Dumaresq said curtly, “You are with friends here.”
Bolitho explained what had happened from the moment the clerk had left the ship with his bag.
Dumaresq said, “Sergeant Barmouth is nobody’s fool. If the bag had been there he would have found it.”
He turned and said something to the courtly gentleman with the beard, and the latter showed a brief flash of alarm before regaining his original composure.
Bolitho pricked up his ears. Dumaresq’s host might live in Madeira, but the captain was speaking in Spanish, unless he was much mistaken.
Dumaresq said, “Return to the ship, Mr Bolitho. My compliments to the first lieutenant and ask him to recall the surgeon and any other shore party immediately. I intend to weigh before nightfall.”
Bolitho closed his mind to the obvious difficulties, to say nothing of the risk of leaving harbour in the dark. He sensed the sudden urgency, the apprehension which Lockyer’s murder had brought amongst them.
He nodded to the elderly man and then said to Dumaresq, “A lovely house, sir.”
The old man smiled and bowed his head.
Bolitho strode down the stairs with Jury in his shadow, sharing every moment without knowing what was happening.
Bolitho wondered if the captain had noticed. That his host had understood exactly what he had said about his fine house. So if Dumaresq had spoken to him in Spanish it was so that neither he nor Jury should understand.
He decided it was one part of the mystery he would hold to himself.
That night, as promised, Dumaresq took his ship to sea. In light airs, and with all but her topsails and jib brailed up, Destiny steered slowly between other anchored vessels, guided by the ship’s cutter with a lantern close to the water like a firefly to show her the way.
By dawn, Madeira was just a purple hump on the horizon far astern, and Bolitho was not certain if the mystery still remained there in the alley where Lockyer had drawn his last breath.
3. Spanish gold
LIEUTENANT Charles Palliser closed the two outer screen doors of Dumaresq’s cabin and said, “All present, sir.”
In their various attitudes the Destiny’s lieutenants and senior warrant officers sat and watched Dumaresq expectantly. It was late afternoon, two days out of Madeira. The ship had a feeling of leisurely routine about her, as with a light north-easterly wind laying her on a starboard tack she cruised steadily into the Atlantic.
Dumaresq glanced up at the skylight as a shadow moved past it. Most likely the master’s mate of the watch.
“Shut that, too.”
Bolitho glanced at his companions, wondering if they were sharing his growing sense of curiosity.
This meeting had been inevitable, but Dumaresq had taken great pains to ensure it would come well after his ship had cleared the land.
Dumaresq waited for Palliser to sit down. Then he looked at each man in turn. From the marine officer, past the surgeon, the master and the purser, finally to his three lieutenants.
He said, “You all know about the death of my clerk. A reliable man, even if given to certain eccentricities. He will be hard to replace. However, his murder by some persons unknown means more than the loss of a companion. I have been under sealed orders, but the time is come to reveal some of the task we shall soon be facing. When two people know something it is no longer a secret. An even greater enemy in a small ship is rumour and what it can do to idle minds.”
Bolitho flinched as the wide, compelling eyes paused on him momentarily before passing to some other part of the cabin.
Dumaresq said, “Thirty years ago, before most of this ship’s company had drawn breath, one Commodore Anson took an expedition south around Cape Horn and into the Great South Sea. His purpose was to harry Spanish settlements for, as you should know, we were then at war with the Dons.” He nodded grimly. “Again.”
Bolitho thought of the courtly Spaniard in the house behind the harbour at Funchal, the secrecy, the missing bag for which a man had died.
Dumaresq continued, “One thing is certain. Commodore Anson may have been courageous, but his ideas of health and caring for his people were limited.” He looked at the rotund surgeon and allowed his features to soften. “Unlike us, maybe he had no proper doctors to advise him.”
There were several chuckles, and Bolitho guessed the remark had been made to put them more at their
