James Blaylock: The Ebb Tide

“To the lads in a pub there in Poulton-le-Sands, over a pint, you know. Natural sort of thing, if you see what I mean, passing the time. Except there turned out to be two men sitting nearby, listening hard. One of them asked to see it, but Uncle Fred made up an excuse for not having it with him, although he did, right there in the pocket of his coat. He didn’t like the look of either of them, and didn’t know them, although he could describe them right enough. The one was a tall, scowly sort of fellow, swarthy, Fred told me. Unpleasant. A murderer’s face, Fred called it. The other had dead white hair, and a face that looked as if it had been carved out of ice. There was something wrong with this second man that you couldn’t quite name — Dr. Fell comes to mind. It was the tall man who did the talking.”

St. Ives gave us a glance at this juncture. The detail of the white hair and the unnamable malevolence suggested that our man was indeed Ingacio Narbondo, now known as Dr. Frosticos, or sometimes Frost, St. Ives’s longtime nemesis and the last man on earth I wanted anything to do with. He had gone out of our lives some time back — out of the world, I had hoped. His interest in the map would be as avid as that of St. Ives, although he would be considerably more ruthless in its pursuit.

“I take it that you saw these same men again?” Hasbro asked.

“Just the tall one,” Merton said. “The first time was there in Manchester. Fred saw him on the street and pointed him out to me. He was loitering in a doorway and smoking a pipe. That could have been a coincidence, of course, or perhaps another tall man with similar features. We were on the other side of the street, you see, and it was evening. But then I saw him again, shortly after I was back in London, and no mistake this time. He followed me to the shop, and he wasn’t clever at it either. Bold is the word for it.”

“You’re certain he followed you?” St. Ives asked.

“Yes,” Merton said. “The second sighting there in Manchester might have been coincidence, but the third time always smells of a plot.”

“And the white haired man?” I asked him.

“No. Only the tall one. The catalogue hadn’t been distributed yet, but he asked straightaway to buy the map, said that he’d heard it had fallen into my hands. No preamble, no beating about the bush. ‘I want the Morecambe Sands map,’ he said.”

“And you told him to bugger off,” Tubby said.

“Not in so many words,” Merton said, pouring himself another glass of brandy. He swirled it in the light, looking shrewdly at us. “I played the fool, you see. Denied knowing anything about it. He accused me of lying, and I told him to get out. Then two days later there he was again, but with a copy of the new catalogue, Lord knows where he’d gotten his hands on it, which he laid on the counter along with the required sum, accurate to the penny. I told him I’d already sold it. He called me a liar, which of course was accurate, and walked out without being asked. I hoped that was the end of it.”

“But he sent his simian cohort back in tonight and bloody well took it,” Tubby said.

“Ah! Ha ha! He believes he took it!” Merton said, brightening up, but then shut his eyes and held his forehead with the pain of laughing, and it took him a moment to get going again. St. Ives had a keen look on his face.

“Now, here’s the long and the short of it,” Merton continued, looking around again, his voice dropping. He tipped us a wink. “I hoped I’d seen the end of the gentleman, you see, and yet I’m a careful man. I set to work and devised a false map on a piece of the same sort of paper — but quite a different part of the Bay and with the landmarks changed. Correct in all other ways. I doctored the ink so that it ran, as if the paper had been soaked in seawater, but not so much that the map couldn’t be made out. Then I colored it up with dyes made of algae and tobacco and garden soil, and I slipped it into the box under the counter, where I keep small money to make change for the customers. Our man searched for it, as you can see, throwing things around the floor. Then he spotted the box, helped himself to the money, and found the map. Of course I played my part. ‘Take the money,’ I said to him, ‘but for God’s sake leave the other! It’s of no value to you.’” Merton sat back in his chair now, smiling like a schoolboy, very satisfied with himself, but then his face fell.

“His response was to hit me with a length of lead pipe. Quick as a snake. Perfectly unnecessary. I hadn’t so much as twitched.”

“The stinking pig,” Tubby said, and of course we all voiced our agreement, but what I wanted to know was, what about the map, the real map? Merton had it safe as a baby, it turned out — rolled up, tied neatly with a bit of string, and thrust into the open mouth of a stuffed armadillo in the window. No thief, he informed us, would think to look for valuables inside an armadillo.

Merton leered at us for a moment, making us wait, and then said, “Fancy having a squint at it?” He was enjoying himself immensely now. He was resilient, I’ll say that for him, but perhaps too enamored of his own cleverness, which the ancients warns us against. Still, he had done what he could to help St. Ives, and had nearly had his skull crushed into the bargain. He was a good man, and no doubt about it, and his ruse de la guerre seemed to have worked. He helped himself to a third glass of brandy, which he drank off with a sort of congratulatory relish before fetching the map out of the maw of the preposterous scaled creature nearby. He handed it to St. Ives, who slipped off the string and unrolled it delicately. After a moment he looked up at Hasbro and I and nodded. “It’s as we thought,” he said.

Just then the door swung open and Finn Conrad came in carrying meat pies and bottled ale, and, it turned out, most of St. Ives’s money. St. Ives slipped the map into his coat while Finn set down his burden, handed back the bulk of the coins, and advised the Professor (begging his pardon for saying so) not to be quite so liberal with people he didn’t know, not in London, leastways, although it mightn’t be a problem in the smaller towns, where people were more honest, on the whole.

My appetite had fled when I saw Merton bleeding on the floor, but it returned now in spades, and that apparently went double for Tubby, who crushed half a pie into his mouth like an alligator eating a goat, and then settled back into his chair for some serious consumption, the rest of us not far behind him. Tomorrow morning, St. Ives told us, we would take a look into the Goat and Cabbage, if Finn would be so kind as to show us the way. Finn said that nothing would give him more pleasure, and then pointed out that someone should guard the shop tonight in Merton’s absence, and much to Merton’s credit he said that he would be quite happy if Finn would make up the settee in the workroom, and sleep with one eye open and one hand on the shillelagh in case the rogues returned.

“Out the back door and over the wall at the first sound of trouble, that’s my advice,” I told him, and Hasbro echoed the sentiment.

St. Ives was doubtful about leaving the boy alone in the shop at all, now that he knew something more of the men who possessed the false map.

“The stolen item,” St. Ives said to Merton,” “you say it’s a… satisfactory specimen?”

“Oh, much better than satisfactory, I should say,” Merton said, grinning. “ Considerably better. Not that I claim to know anything about the art of…reproduction.” He had been going to say “forgery,” but there was no reason to utter the word with the lad standing by. Reproduction said rather too much, it seemed to me at the time. Certainly there was no profit, and perhaps some danger, in Finn’s knowing things he didn’t need to know. St. Ives, sensibly, brought the conversation to a close.