S. Parris - Treachery

‘Whereas I am a foreigner and a Catholic, as far as everyone here is concerned,’ I say, finishing the thought for him.

Drake holds his hands out, as if to show he is helpless to deny it. ‘Pettifer would use that against you. No jury in the county would consider a case against him, I can promise you that now.’

‘Then what?’ I look from him to Sidney, waiting for one of them to make a suggestion. To have found the killer — to have directly caused a boy’s death in pursuit of him — only to watch him slip effortlessly out from every accusation, would be a bitter defeat. ‘Will you take him on the voyage, Sir Francis, suspecting him to be a murderer?’

‘There is something I wish you to see, Bruno. Come and look.’ He beckons us over to the table where he has a number of papers spread out. He picks up a sheet and hands it to me.

I skim the contents briefly. It is a short letter addressed to Captain Drake, dated some months ago, executed in a neat, sloping hand; the writer is putting his arguments for a greater degree of responsibility on the voyage, with a commensurate fee, on account of his wide experience of the Spanish coastline and ports, and in acknowledgement of his unofficial role as ship’s physician. He also asks for a better berth. Though the letter is written in English, it is signed by Jonas Solon. I look up from the paper and stare at Drake, bewildered. His jaw is clenched tight.

‘I don’t understand — so Jonas could write after all?’ I falter.

‘No. He asked someone to write this for him. He thought I would be more inclined to consider his request if he made it formally, in a letter, like an educated man.’ He pauses to master whatever emotion this memory of Jonas has stirred in him. ‘I had forgotten all about it, until I was reminded. Bruno — Ambrose Pettifer wrote it for him. That’s what he wanted to tell me.’

I look down, half expecting the floor to give way beneath me. A long silence follows. I cannot think what to say — my only thought is of the apology I will have to make to Pettifer, and how it will stick in my throat.

‘This letter was among my correspondence,’ Drake says. ‘I had to dig it out when Ambrose mentioned it. But what interests me is this. Look — here is the forged confession letter, supposedly from Jonas. I have been comparing them while I waited for you. The hand is quite similar in places, do you not think? It looks as if whoever wrote the confession letter had tried to imitate the writing in this letter here’ — he points to the paper in my hand — ‘not realising it was not written by Jonas himself.’

‘Which means someone would have had to find it among your papers,’ I say, slowly, almost to myself. Someone with access to Drake’s private letters.

‘But,’ Sidney jumps in, ‘surely it could be a double bluff? Pettifer could claim someone tried to copy his hand, whereas in fact he wrote both-’

‘Philip,’ I say, with quiet despair, ‘it means that Pettifer already knew Jonas was illiterate. He would not have written the confession letter.’

‘He could still have killed Dunne, just as you described it,’ Sidney says, trying to sound encouraging. ‘The blackmail makes that plausible.’

‘Perhaps,’ Drake says, again, in that slow, thoughtful way that clearly means he disagrees. ‘But something about this confession letter sits uncomfortably with me, and I cannot quite put my finger on it.’

‘Whereas the writer has put his fingers all over it,’ Sidney says, examining the paper. ‘He is not a neat draughtsman, whoever he is trying to imitate. Look here, at the left margin, where the words are smudged and blotched all the way down. I recall a chap at Oxford who did the same — he wrote with his left hand, and would not learn with his right, so that every time he copied a line he would blot the first part as he went along. His tutor refused to read it, so he-’

‘Give me that.’ I snatch the letter from his hand, tilting it to the light. Sidney is right; I have failed to see what was in front of me all along. Drake is staring at the paper; he too has begun to understand.

‘No. No — it is not possible. But why?’ He raises his eyes to me. ‘I have had him under my nose all this time. I can hardly-’

‘ Who? ’ Sidney says, turning from me to Drake, aggrieved at being left in the dark. ‘What have you found?’

‘Gilbert Crosse is left-handed,’ I say, tapping the letter. ‘The first time we met him he offered me the wrong hand to shake and corrected himself. I thought he was having a joke at the expense of a foreigner — we laughed about it, remember?’

‘Gilbert? You think he wrote this? Then — he killed Dunne?’ Sidney stares at me, disbelief etched in the lines on his forehead. ‘Why?’

‘Because Dunne knew what he was up to,’ I say. ‘And was making him pay for it.’

‘And what was he up to?’

I glance at Drake. ‘That time I saw Gilbert at church — the man who had been sitting beside him slipped out halfway through the service. He was wearing riding clothes. I would bet that Gilbert’s very public show of piety has provided him with a useful meeting place that no one suspected.’

‘Passing secret letters, you mean?’ Sidney’s eyes grow wide. Drake presses his fingers to his temples. ‘To whom?’

‘Jonas as good as told me, though I didn’t realise it at the time,’ I say. ‘He said, “if anyone is spying on this ship, it is not me”. I just supposed he meant it as a figure of speech, to emphasise his innocence. But I think he suspected that there really was a spy. And think how keen Gilbert was to point our suspicions towards Jonas from the beginning.’

‘Gilbert has been acting as my clerk since the first days of planning this voyage.’ Drake speaks quietly, still holding his head as if it hurts him to speak. ‘He has seen all the navigational charts — he knows each nautical mile of our proposed route and has every coordinate plotted in his logs. What do you imagine the Spanish would pay for that information? It would lead our entire fleet directly into a trap.’

‘Robert Dunne must have guessed at it somehow,’ I say.

‘Instead of warning me, he used the knowledge to try and squeeze some money out of Gilbert — guessing he could afford it with Spanish gold in his purse.’ Drake bunches his hands into fists by his sides and his jaw tightens.

‘But we now know that Dunne was planning to poison you somewhere along the way — his loyalty no longer lay with the voyage. He was more interested in what he could gain from threatening Gilbert in the short term.’

‘That doesn’t explain Gilbert’s betrayal.’ Sidney looks incredulous. ‘Why would he spy for the Spanish? Risk the safety of the whole fleet, when he was travelling with it? It can’t just be the money, surely?’

‘Only Gilbert can answer that,’ Drake says, his voice thick with sorrow, or anger, or both. I look at him.

‘We must find him. He said he was going to church, did he not? Quick — if we get there in time, we may even catch him passing a letter to his contact. We could take them both at once, and have evidence in our hands.’ I am halfway to the door, a hand on my knife, when Drake speaks.

‘Wait, Bruno. Gilbert is not at church. He meant to go, but I had forgotten I promised Dom Antonio a tour of the Elizabeth Bonaventure — he has been pestering me to look around since he arrived. He was keen to see the charts of our voyage — I sent a message asking Gilbert to look after him aboard since I was coming ashore to see my wife and check on Lady Arden.’

‘Well, if Gilbert is still on board, what are we waiting for?’ Sidney says. ‘He can’t go anywhere. Let us hurry back to the ship and arrest him.’