A Burial at Sea

CHAPTER EIGHT

An urgent hand shook him from it.

“Mr. Lenox!” a man’s voice said. “Mr. Lenox! Come, wake up!”

It wasn’t McEwan, Lenox knew even in that bewildered state of half wakefulness that follows a startle from rest. But who then?

A yellow light that had seemed to be emanating dimly from the floor of the cabin rose, and as he came into self-possession Lenox saw that it was a lantern. It illuminated the face of the ship’s captain.

“Mr. Martin?” said Lenox in surprise.

Martin spoke in his usual dry, imperturbable voice, but there was a tremor beneath it that Lenox hadn’t yet heard. “I would ask you to come to my mess, Mr. Lenox. Please, be quick about it if you will.”

“What time is it?”

“Running on four in the morning. It’s through the last door in the wardroom and along a corridor. Hurry, if you please. I’ll leave you this lantern.”

“Is it Teddy? My nephew, rather, Edmund?”

“No, no, he’s well. He’ll be asleep in the gun room now.”

There had been enough middle-of-the-night visitors in Lenox’s past life that he was quick to get ready. He threw on a shirt and braced himself with a splash of water to the face, taken from the small pool left in his washstand. McEwan, in his hammock, slumbered on apace—or seemed to at any rate—and Lenox just managed to squeeze past his bulk and through to the darkened wardroom.

By contrast the captain’s spacious and well-appointed mess was a blaze of light, with lanterns on their chains swinging from the beam over the dining table. There were two men besides Martin seated at the far end of the table. One was Tradescant, the surgeon, who had a vinegary look on his face. The other was the slender Billings, Martin’s first lieutenant.

“There you are,” said Martin. “Please, come sit. Take a glass of brandy.”

“I thank you, no,” said Lenox.

“You had better,” said Billings, and Lenox saw that his face looked haunted.

“If you prefer it, then.”

“There you are.” Billings, who seemed relieved to have some duty, poured Lenox a crystal tumbler full of brandy and slid it down the table to where he was sitting.

“Plainly something has occurred, gentlemen,” Lenox said, his drink untouched, hands folded before him. “What is it?”

“You were a detective once?” said Martin.

“Once.”

“I mean to say that you retain the … the faculties of an amateur detective.”

“An intermittently professional one, in fact. But they are corroded by disuse, I assure you. Why do you ask? Mr. Tradescant, I can see the various spots of blood on your cuff—they are fresh, not darkened by washing—I presume you do not wear your nightshirt to see your patients. You have roused me from sleep—from all this I conclude that somebody has been wounded unexpectedly. It only remains to ask whether the person is dead or not.”

There was a long pause.

“They are,” said Martin at last. “He is.”

“Who?”

“Lieutenant Halifax.”

After his short speech the onetime detective had felt in control of this tense congregation, but this name knocked the wind out of him. His only friend aboard the Lucy, really. And a good man— kindly hearted—gentle. A gentleman in the old sense of the word. A thought strayed across Lenox’s mind: he hadn’t had time to fish, Halifax, on this last voyage of his life. What a pity. Now he took a sip of that brandy before speaking.

“When did it happen?”

Billings answered. “His body was discovered on the quarterdeck fifteen minutes ago.”

“Discovered!” said Lenox. “Surely it would be impossible to shift a body around—to kill someone—without others knowing about it, on a ship this small? Why, there are two hundred and twenty men aboard the Lucy!”

Martin gave him a dry glance, as if to indicate that this piece of information was already in his possession, but said nothing.

It was Billings who spoke again. “It’s the dead of night. Very few men are on deck, and those that are would have been on the poop or about the main deck. He could have been brought from below, I suppose.”

“Leave the conclusions out,” said Martin. “Mr. Lenox, I’m afraid we must call upon your skills.”

Rather than acknowledging this request, Lenox said, “Mr. Tradescant, you attempted to resuscitate him, I take it?”

“I did, after a fashion. That is to say I checked his pulse, though a dunce in medical college could have spotted from fifty yards off there wouldn’t be one, and then checked his breath.”

Impatiently, Martin said, “Mr. Lenox, we have agreed that you should look into this. I feel certain that whoever did it will come forward—before morning, I would lay odds—but on the off chance that they don’t…”

“Did Mr. Halifax have any disagreements with the sailors?”

“Mr. Billings, perhaps you can answer that.”

“On the contrary, though he had only been here for several months he seemed quite popular. Occasionally they’ll take advantage of someone—someone—well, Faxxie wasn’t soft, exactly, but he wasn’t the martinet that some lieutenants might be. He had a reputation as a very capable gentleman at sea, though, which the men seemed to understand and value. I would have called him beloved, in fact. Certainly more than Carrow or I.”

“That squares with what I observed,” said Martin.

“Then there’s nobody likely to have borne him ill will?”

“Not for more than a passing moment. No.”

Lenox pondered this. “And of course,” he said, half to himself, “if someone bore a grudge why not kill him in Plymouth?”

“What can that mean?” asked Martin sharply

“On shore they would have had six weeks to do the job. The ship is in effect a closed room. Impossible to flee, should you be discovered. It’s peculiar, I’ll say that. Did you take many new men on board for this voyage? Someone who might be violent?”

“Only two.”

“Two! Is that all? Out of two hundred odd?”

“Yes. A new lieutenant, our fifth, Lee, and a new forecastleman, Hardy. Both, I can assure you, came with unimpeachable references.”

“I thought there was tremendous turnover on a ship of this sort.”

“In others, perhaps, but there is no war on at the moment,” said Martin, “which means there are more men than places, and the Lucy is a remarkably steady sailor. And then, I have something of a reputation for taking prizes.”

This made sense: to take a prize, an enemy ship, meant that everyone on board got in various proportions some reward of the prize money. It was an incentive to courage, and indeed an incentive to sail with the navy. A good prize for a common sailor might have meant enough money to buy a small cottage or open a public house, while for a captain it would be enough money to buy a splendid estate on a hundred acres in the countryside.

Lenox forced himself to focus.

“Who found the body?”

“Carrow. He was on duty.”

With a lurch in his stomach Lenox remembered that Teddy would have been, too. “Were there any witnesses?”

“From what Carrow says, no. There was a loud thump on the quarterdeck, which might have been the murder itself, and he went to look at what had caused it after several moments. The quarterdeck would have been hidden