The Luminaries

effects upon her body and her mind. Pritchard had never known her to lose consciousness so completely that she could not be revived for over twelve hours. He doubted that such a circumstance could have come about by accident. Well, if she truly had not intended to end her life—as she attested—then that left only two options: either she had been drugged by somebody else, used for some nefarious purpose, and then abandoned in the Christchurch-road, or (Pritchard gave a slow nod) she was bluffing. Yes. She had lied about the resin; she could easily be lying about the overdose, too. But for what purpose? Whom was she protecting? And to what end?

The Hokitika physician had confirmed that Anna had indeed partaken of a great deal of opium on the night of the 14th of January: his testament to this effect had been published in the West Coast Times on the day after Anna’s trial. Could Anna have managed to fool the physician, or to persuade him somehow to give a false diagnosis? Pritchard considered this. She had been in the gaol-house for over twelve hours, over which time she would have been prodded and poked by all manner of men, and witnessed by dozens of others, besides. She could hardly have fooled them all. True unconsciousness cannot be faked, Pritchard thought. Even a whore was not as good an actress as that.

All right: perhaps the drug had been poisoned after all. Pritchard turned his hands over, and studied the whorls on the pads of his fingers, each hand the mirror image of the other. When he pressed his fingertips together, they made a perfect doubled reflection, as when a man touches his forehead to a glass. He leaned forward to look at the whorls. He himself had certainly not altered the drug in any way, and he did not really suspect the Chinese man, Sook, of having done so either. Sook was fond of Anna. No, it was impossible that Sook might have sought to cause Anna harm. Well, that meant the drug must have been poisoned either before Pritchard bought it wholesale, or after Anna purchased her smaller portion from Ah Sook, to imbibe at home.

Pritchard’s source for opiates of all kinds was a man named Francis Carver. He considered Carver now. The man was a former convict, and had a poor reputation as a consequence; to Pritchard, however, he had always been courteous and fair, and Pritchard had no reason to think that Carver might wish him—or his business—any kind of active harm. As to whether Carver bore ill-will towards the Chinese, Pritchard had no idea —but he did not sell direct to the Chinese. He sold to Pritchard, and Pritchard alone.

Pritchard had first met Carver at a gambling house on Revell-street, some seven months ago. Pritchard was a keen gambler, and had been refreshing himself between games of craps, tallying his losses in his mind, when a scar-faced man sat down beside him. Pritchard inquired, as a pleasantry, whether the man was fond of cards, and what had brought him to Hokitika; soon they fell to talking. When in due course Pritchard named his own profession, Carver’s expression sharpened. Putting down his drink, he explained that he had a long-standing connexion with a former East Indiaman who controlled an opium poppy plantation in Bengal. If Pritchard was in need of opium, Carver could guarantee a product of unrivalled quality and limitless supply. At that time Pritchard had no stock of opium at all, save for some weak tinctures of laudanum he had purchased from a quack; without hesitation, therefore, he thanked Carver, shook his hand, and agreed to return the following morning to draw up the terms of their trade.

Since then Carver had supplied him with a total of three pounds of opium. He would not supply Pritchard with more than one pound at a time, for the reason (as he very frankly explained) that he liked to keep a very tight hold on his own supply, in order to prevent Pritchard from selling the drug wholesale to other sellers, and making an intermediary profit that way. (In selling opium to Ah Sook, Pritchard was of course doing exactly this—but Carver remained unaware of this auxiliary arrangement, for he was seldom in Hokitika, and Pritchard had not troubled himself to confess it.) The resin came wrapped in paper, pressed into a tin box not unlike a caddy for storing tea.

Pritchard picked up a clout from the laboratory bench and began to clean the dirt from beneath his fingernails—noticing, as he did so, that they were getting rather long.

Would Carver really have dared to poison the drug before he sold it wholesale to a drug emporium? Pritchard might have powdered the resin and turned it into laudanum; he might have sold it piecemeal to any number of clients; he might have used the drug himself. It was true that Carver had an unpleasant history with Anna; he had harmed her badly once before. But even if he wished to kill her by overdose, there was no guarantee that a portion of the poisoned opium would end up in Anna’s hands. Pritchard rolled a ball of dirt between his fingers. No: it was absurd to think that any man would devise a plot that comprised so many uncertainties. Carver might be a brute, but he was not a fool.

Having rejected that theory, the chemist now considered the second option: that the drug had been poisoned after Anna Wetherell was given a piece of it by Ah Sook to take at home. Perhaps someone had stolen into her rooms at the Gridiron, and poisoned it there. But again—why? Why bother to poison the opium at all? Why not kill the whore by more conventional means—by strangulation, or smothering, or battery?

Defeated, Pritchard turned his mind instead to the things he knew by instinct to be true. He knew that Anna Wetherell had not told the whole truth about the events of the 14th of January. He knew that someone had partaken of the drug recently from the pipe she had hidden in her room. He knew that she had ceased to take opium herself; by her eyes and her motions, he could not doubt that she was as dry as a bone. These certainties, in Pritchard’s eyes, could only point to one conclusion.

‘Hang it all,’ he whispered. ‘She’s lying—and on another man’s behalf.’

So the afternoon wore on.

In time Pritchard picked up his unfinished orders, and, for want of a more diverting occupation, began to work. He was not aware of the passing of the hours until a gentle knock at the laboratory door returned him to the present. He turned—noting, with a dim surprise, that the light had become very thin, and dusk was approaching— and saw Albert, Nilssen’s junior clerk, hovering in the doorway with his breath caught in his chest and an abashed look upon his face. He was carrying a note.

‘Oh—something from Nilssen,’ Pritchard said, coming forward. He had quite forgotten his conversation with Nilssen earlier that afternoon, and the request he had made of him—to find the goldsmith Quee, and to question him regarding the retorted gold that had been discovered on Crosbie Wells’s estate. He had forgotten about Crosbie Wells entirely—and his fortune, and his widow, and the vanished Mr. Staines. How silently the world revolved, when one was brooding, and alone.

Pritchard was fishing in his apron for a sixpence—but Albert, blushing furiously, stammered, ‘No, sir—’ and held up his palms, to show that the honour of having made the delivery was quite sufficient to sustain him.

In fact Albert was sure he had never had so exciting an afternoon in all his life. His employer, upon returning from Kaniere Chinatown some half hour previous, had been in such a state of agitation that he had almost torn the door from its hinges. He had penned the note that Albert was carrying now with all the passion of a symphonic composer in collusion with his muse. He had sealed it badly, dropped wax upon himself, cursed, and then thrust the folded, lumpy sheet at Albert, saying hoarsely, ‘Pritchard—to Pritchard—quick as you can.’ In the privacy of the chemist’s receiving room, just before he entered the laboratory, Albert had pinched the edges of the letter together to make the folded paper form a kind of tube, and by squinting down its length he had made out several words that seemed to him to smack of the gravest piracy. It thrilled him that his employer was up to no good.

‘Very well, then—thanks,’ Pritchard said, taking the letter. ‘Did he say a reply was needed?’

The boy said, ‘There’s not to be a reply, sir. But he said to stay and watch you burn it, after you’d read it through.’

Pritchard gave a snort of laughter. This was so like Nilssen: first he sulked, and then he complained of the messiness of it all, and then he dallied, and then he tried to remove all the burden of responsibility from himself— but as soon as he became a participant, as soon as he felt crucial, and impressive, then everything became a pantomime, a cloak-and-dagger show; he gloried in it.

Pritchard walked away a few paces (the boy looked disappointed), tore the seal with his fingers, and flattened the paper upon his laboratory desk. The letter read:

Jo—

Called on Quee, as per your request. You were right about the gold—his work—though he