Pritchard scowled: he had not wanted to use her name. He turned his head away and watched the raindrops swell and gather under the lip of the sash window.
In the brief pause before he resumed speaking, Nilssen was startled by the thought that perhaps the chemist loved her: Anna Wetherell, the whore. He tested the possibility in his mind, enjoying it. The girl was uncommonly striking—she moved with a weary, murderous languor, like a disaffected swan—but she was rather more volatile in her tempers than Nilssen liked in a girl, and her beauty (in fact Nilssen would not call her beautiful; he reserved that word for virgins and angelic forms) was too knowing for his taste. She was also an opium eater, a habit that showed in her features as a constant blur, and in her manner as a fathomless exhaustion—this compulsion was unbecoming enough, and now she was a would-be suicide, besides. Yes, Nilssen thought: she was just the kind of girl for whom Pritchard would fall. They would meet in darkness; their encounters would be feverish and doomed.
Here the commission merchant missed his mark. Nilssen’s guesses were always of the self-confirming sort: he tended to favour whichever proofs best pleased his sense of principle, and equally, to hold fast to whichever principles best lent themselves to proof. He talked often of virtue, and so gave the impression of a most encouraging and optimistic temper, but his faith in virtue was indentured to a less adaptable master than optimism. The benefit of the doubt, to take the common phrase, was a haphazard gift, and Nilssen was too proud of his intellect to surrender the power of hypothesis. In his mind a protective glaze had been applied to the crystal forms of high abstraction: he loved to regard them, and to wonder at their shine, but he had never thought to take them down from their carved and oaken mantel, so to speak, and feel them, supple in his hands. He had concluded that Pritchard was in love simply because it was pleasant to deliberate the point, examine the specimen, and then return to the beliefs he had possessed all along: that Pritchard was a queer fish; that Anna was a lost cause; and that one ought never undertake to love a whore.
‘Yes, well,’ Pritchard was saying, ‘they’re furious about it, you know. The yellow chap who operates the den at Kaniere—Ah Sook is his name—he went to Tom Balfour, after the whore took ill—very upset, you understand. He told Tom he wanted to look over my shipping records, check the last case that had come in on my account.’
‘Why not just come to you direct?’ Nilssen asked.
Pritchard shrugged. ‘Thought I was up to something, I suppose,’ he said.
‘He thought you poisoned her—on purpose?’
‘Yes.’ Pritchard looked away again.
‘Well, and what did Tom say?’ Nilssen said, to prompt him.
‘He showed Ah Sook my records. Proved I’m clean.’
‘Your record’s clean?’
‘Yes,’ Pritchard said shortly.
Nilssen saw that he had caused his guest offence, and felt an ugly flash of pleasure. He was beginning to resent the implication that they would be equally implicated as conspirators, if (or when) the possible murder of Emery Staines came to light: it seemed to him that Pritchard was considerably more embroiled in this mess than he was. Nilssen had nothing to do with opium, and wanted nothing to do with it. The drug was a poison, a scourge, and it made a fool of men.
‘Listen,’ Pritchard said, placing his finger on the desktop, ‘you need to get this Quee chap to talk with you. I’d do it myself if I could—I’ve tried the den, but Sook won’t have a bar of me. Quee’s all right. He’s decent. Ask him about the pile—whether it’s his gold, and if it is, why it turned up on Wells’s estate. You can go this afternoon.’
It rankled Nilssen to be ordered about in this way. ‘I don’t see why you can’t talk to Quee yourself, if your beef is with the other fellow.’
‘I’m under the hammer. Call it laying low.’
Nilssen called it something rather different in his mind. Aloud he said, ‘What on earth would induce a johnny chink to speak to me?’—taking refuge, finally, in petulance. He pushed the yellow bill away from him.
‘At least you’re neutral,’ Pritchard said. ‘You’ve given none of them cause to judge you one way or another—have you?’
‘The celestials?’ Nilssen sucked on his pipe; the leaf was almost ash. ‘No.’
‘You say it with an
As he was speaking, there came a knock at the door: it was the clerk, bearing the message that George Shepard was in the outer office and waiting to be received.
‘George Shepard—the gaoler?’ Nilssen said, with some trepidation, and a swift glance at Pritchard. ‘Did he say why?’
‘Matter of profit, he said, mutual gains,’ the clerk replied. ‘Shall I fetch him in?’
‘I’ll take my leave,’ Pritchard said, standing immediately. ‘So you’ll find him—the fellow Quee? Say you will.’
‘All the way to Kaniere?’ Nilssen said, remembering his luncheon, and the barmaid at the Nonpareil.
‘It’s only an hour’s walk,’ Pritchard said. ‘But make sure you get the right fellow: the one you’re after is a shortish chap, very thin, clean-shaven; you’ll know his cottage by the chimney that issues from the forge. I’ll wait your message,’—and he was gone.
Nilssen’s office seemed much too small to accommodate the massive, rigid bow that George Shepard made upon his entrance. The commission merchant felt himself shrink back a little in his chair, and to compensate for this he leaped up, thrust out his hand, and cried,
‘Mr. Shepard—yes, yes, please. I haven’t yet had the pleasure of receiving your business, sir—but I do hope that I can be of service—in the nearest future—if I may. Do sit down.’
‘I know you, of course,’ Shepard replied, taking the chair that was offered him. Seeing that Nilssen’s pipe was lit, he reached in his pocket for his own. Nilssen passed his tobacco pouch and lucifers across the desk, and there was a short pause as Shepard filled and tamped his bowl and struck a match. His pipe was shallow, made of briar, with a smart collar of amber set between the bit and the stem. He puffed several times until he was satisfied the leaf was lit, and then sat back in his chair with a calculated glance first to his left and then to his right, as if he wished to square himself with the planes of the room.
‘By reputation,’ he added, being the kind of man who always finished an utterance once he had set his thought in motion. He breathed out a mouthful. ‘That fellow just leaving,’ he said. ‘His name again?’
‘Jo Pritchard is his name, sir—Joseph. Runs the drug hall on Collingwood-street.’
‘Of course.’
Shepard paused, forming his business in his mind. The pale light of the day, falling slantwise across Nilssen’s desk, froze the eddies of pipe-smoke that hung about his head—fixing each coiling thread upon the air, as mineral quartz preserves a twisting vein of gold, and proffers it. Nilssen waited. He was thinking:
George Shepard’s appointment as governor of the Hokitika Gaol had been met with little opposition from the men who lived and dug within the bounds of his jurisdiction. Shepard was a cold, formidable character, slow moving in a way that seemed constantly to emphasise the breadth of his shoulders and the weight of his arms; when he walked, it was with long, deliberate strides, and when he spoke (which was seldom) he intoned in a rich and august bass. His manner was humourless and not at all likeable, but severity counted as a virtue for a man of his profession, and it was to his credit, the voters agreed, that no charge of bias or prejudice had ever been laid at his door.
If Shepard was the subject of idle rumour, it was of the conjectural sort, and nearly always concerned his private relations with his wife. Their marriage was to all appearances conducted in absolute silence, with a grim determination on his part, and a fearful inhibition on hers. The woman referred to her own self as Mrs. George, and this only in a whisper; she wore the bewildered, panicked aspect of a tortured animal, who sees a cage where there is none, and cowers at every sudden thing. Mrs. George rarely ventured beyond the gaol-house door except, on rare occasions of civic display, to trip red-faced down Revell-street in Governor Shepard’s wake. They had been at Hokitika four months before anyone discovered that she did in fact possess a Christian name—Margaret—though
