The Luminaries

last word.’

They helped Emery Staines down from the trap.

‘Mr. Staines,’ said Pritchard. ‘Do you know where you are?’

‘Anna Magdalena,’ he mumbled. ‘Where’s Anna?’

‘Anna’s right here,’ said Cowell Devlin. ‘She’s right inside.’

His eyes opened. ‘I want to see her.’

‘He’s not talking sense,’ said Pritchard. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’

‘I want to see Anna,’ said the boy, suddenly lucid. ‘Where is she? I want to see her.’

‘He seems coherent to me,’ said Gascoigne.

‘Bring him inside,’ said Devlin. ‘Just until the doctor gets here. Come on: it’s what he wants. Bring him into the gaol.’

THE GREATER MALEFIC

In which Sook Yongsheng overhears the beginning of a conversation.

Ah Sook crouched in the allotment behind the Crown Hotel, his back against the timber of the building, his knees bent, the Kerr Patent revolver cradled loosely in both his hands. He looked like an altogether different man from the one who had purchased the pistol that morning. Margaret Shepard had cut off his pigtail, shadowed his chin and throat with blacking, and thickened his eyebrows with the same; she had found a threadbare jacket for him, and a shirt of gaol-issue twill, and a red kerchief to tie about his neck. With the brim of his hat turned down, and the collar of his jacket turned up, he did not look Chinese in the slightest. Walking the three-hundred-yard distance from the Police Camp to the Crown, he had not attracted the least bit of attention from anyone at all; now, crouched in the allotment, he was all but invisible in the darkness.

Inside the hotel two people were talking: a man and a woman. Their voices came down to him quite clearly through the gap between the window shutter and the frame.

‘Looks like it’ll come off,’ the man was saying. ‘Protected and indemnified.’

‘You still sound uneasy,’ said the woman.

‘Yes.’

‘What are you doubting? The money’s in your hand, almost!’

‘You know I don’t trust a fellow without connexions. I couldn’t dig up anything on this Gascoigne at all. He arrived in Hokitika some time before Christmas. Landed himself a job at the Courthouse without any fuss. Lives alone. No friends to speak of. You say he’s nothing but a dandy. I say: how do I know that Lauderback hasn’t set him up?’

‘He does have one connexion. He brought a friend along to the opening of the Wayfarer’s Fortune, I recall. An aristocratic type.’

‘What does he go by? The friend.’

‘Walter Moody was his name.’

‘He can’t be Adrian Moody’s son?’

‘That was my first thought, too. He did speak with a Scottish lilt.’

‘Well, there you have it: they must be related.’

There was the clink of glasses.

‘I saw him just before I left Dunedin,’ the man went on. ‘Adrian, I mean. Tight as all get-up.’

‘And out for blood, no doubt,’ said the woman.

‘I don’t like a man beyond his own control.’

‘No,’ the woman agreed, ‘and Moody is of the worst variety—the kind of man who loves to be offended, so that he can vent his temper—for he knows not how to vent it, otherwise. He’s a decent man when he’s sober.’

‘But anyway,’ the man said, ‘if this chap Gascoigne is in thick with one of the Moody family, he ought to do us fine. His advice ought to be fine.’

‘The family resemblance is excessively slight. The mother’s features must have been strong.’

The man laughed. ‘You’re never short of an opinion, Greenway. An opinion is one thing you’ve always got on hand.’

There was another pause, and then the woman said, ‘He came over on Godspeed, in fact.’

‘Moody?’

‘Yes.’

‘No. He can’t have.’

‘Francis! Don’t contradict me. He told me himself, that evening.’

‘No,’ the man said. ‘There was no one with the name of Moody. There were only eight of them, and I looked the paper over. I would have remembered that name.’

‘Perhaps you overlooked it,’ said the woman. ‘You know I hate to be contradicted. Let’s not disagree.’

‘How would I overlook the name Moody? Why, that’s like overlooking Hanover, or—or Plantagenet.’

The woman laughed. ‘I would hardly compare Adrian Moody to a royal line!’

Ah Sook heard the squeak of a chair, and the shifting of weight over floorboards. ‘I only mean I’d have recognised it. Would you pass over the name Carver?’

The woman made a noise in her throat. ‘He most definitely said that he’d come over on Godspeed,’ she said. ‘I remember it vividly. We exchanged some words on the subject.’

‘Something’s not right,’ the man said.

‘Well, have you got the passenger list? Surely you’ve a copy of the Times—from when the ship came in. Why don’t you check it?’

‘Yes. You’re right. Hang a bit; I’ll go and look in the smoking room. They keep a stack of old broadsheets on the secretary.’

The door opened and closed.

The lamp in the next room came on, illuminating one corner of the allotment in a glow of muted yellow. Carver was in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel—and away from Lydia Wells at last. Ah Sook raised himself up slightly. He saw through the window that Carver had his back to the door, and was shuffling through the papers on the secretary. As far as he could see, there was nobody else in the room. In the bedroom, Lydia Wells began to hum a little ditty to herself.

Ah Sook got to his feet. Holding the Kerr Patent against his thigh, and moving as softly as he was able in his digger’s boots, he crept around the back of the house to the tradesman’s door. He turned into the alley—and froze.

‘Drop your arms.’

Standing on the far side of the alley, his face in shadow, a long-handled pistol in his hand, was the gaol’s governor, George Shepard. Ah Sook did not move. His eyes went to Shepard’s pistol, and then back to Shepard’s face.

‘Drop it,’ Shepard said. ‘I will shoot you. Drop the piece now.’

Still Ah Sook said nothing; still he did not move.

‘You will kneel down and place your revolver on the ground,’ Shepard said. ‘You will do that now, or you will die. Kneel.’

Ah Sook sank to his knees, but he did not release the Kerr Patent. His finger tightened on the hammer.

‘I will shoot you dead before you have time to cock and aim,’ Shepard said. ‘Make no mistake about it. Drop your arms.’