Ian McGuire - The North Water

“I’ll need my wages from you,” Sumner says.

“Aye, aye, of course you will. I’ll get them now, and when you’re settled in at the Pilgrim’s, I’ll have Stevens send you round a pint of good brandy and a nice plump whore to ease you back into the ways of civilized living.”

After Sumner is gone, Baxter sits at his desk and ponders. His tongue, pink at the edges and yellow down the middle, flickers around inside his mouth, as if each of his ideas has a distinctive flavor and he is tasting each one in turn. Eventually, after nearly half an hour of thinking, he stands up, looks around the room quickly as if to check everything is in its place, then walks to the door and opens it. Out on the shadowed landing, instead of descending to the ground floor as he normally would, he climbs the narrow uncarpeted staircase up to the attic. When he reaches the top, he knocks once and enters. The room he steps into is small and steeply pitched; there is a circular window in the gable end and a dusty skylight cut into one side of the roof. The floorboards are splintery and unpolished and the walls lack plaster. There is a wooden chair and a metal camp bed for furniture, some empty brandy bottles on the floor, and a thunder pot brimming with dark brown piss and curled fragments of floating turd. Baxter, stooping and covering his nose, walks to the bed and shakes awake the man who is lying on it. The man grumbles and gasps, farts lengthily, then turns over and slowly shows an eyeball.

“So tell me,” he says.

“It won’t do, Henry,” Baxter answers. “He knows too much, and what he doesn’t know he can piece together easy enough. It was all I could do to stop him running off to the fucking magistrate.”

Drax swings his feet onto the rugless floor and pushes himself up into a sitting position. He yawns and scratches himself.

“He don’t know about the sinking,” he says. “He can’t know that.”

“He may not know, but he suspects. He knows it wasn’t right. Why turn the ship north when every other fucker’s sailing south?”

“He said that?”

“He did.”

Drax reaches under the bed, finds a nearly empty brandy bottle, and drinks it off.

“And what does he say about me?”

“He swears he’ll search until he finds you. He says he’ll hire a man if need be.”

“What man?”

“In Canada. To find out what became of you, to track your movements since.”

Drax licks his lips and shakes his head.

“He won’t find me,” he says.

“He won’t stop looking. He swore to it on his mother’s grave. I told him you were most likely dead by now, but he wouldn’t believe me. A man like Henry Drax doesn’t just die, he says, he must be killed.”

“ Killed ? He’s just a fucking surgeon.”

“He was in the army though, remember. The siege of Delhi. He’s got some vinegar in him, I’d say.”

Drax peers into the empty bottle and sniffs. His skin is puce and his eyes are sunk down into his face. Baxter wipes off the chair seat with his handkerchief and gingerly sits down.

“And where is he now?” Drax says.

“I’ve got him a room in the Pilgrim’s Arms. I’ll send a whore up to keep him occupied, but we need to do this tonight, Henry. We can’t delay. If he gets to the magistrate in the morning, there’s no telling what trouble he’ll cause for us.”

“I been drinking all day,” he says. “Get that lazy fucker Stevens to do it for you.”

“I can’t trust Stevens with a task like this one, Henry. All our fortune is riding on it, don’t you see that? If Sumner blabs, there’ll be no more money coming to either of us. They’ll hang you up by the neck and throw me into jail.”

“What the fuck do you pay him for?”

“Stevens is a good man, but he doesn’t have your experience nor your coolness under pressure. You’ve had a drop or two of brandy, but that makes no odds. If you do it right, there won’t be any struggle.”

“It can’t be in the Pilgrim’s though,” he says. “Too many people about.”

“We’ll lure him out then. That’s easily done. I’ll send Stevens over with a message. You wait for them somewhere else. Wherever you want it to be.”

“Down by the river. The old timber yard on Trippett Street, past the foundry.”

Baxter nods and smiles.

“There aren’t too many men like you out there, Henry,” he says. “There’s plenty who will talk but precious few who will pull the trigger when required.”

Drax blinks twice. His mouth drops open, and his thick tongue swells and stretches like some eyeless creature newly birthed.

“I’ll be needing a bigger share,” he says.

Baxter sniffs and picks a tangling piece of cobweb from off the thigh of his pin-striped pants.

“Five hundred guineas is what we agreed on,” he says. “It’s more than I offered Cavendish. You know it is.”

“But this is extras, int it?” Drax says. “Above and beyond.”

Baxter thinks for a moment, then nods and gets to his feet.

“Five and a half then,” he says.

“I like the sound of six better, Jacob.”

Baxter makes to speak but doesn’t. He looks at Drax, then checks his pocket watch.

“Six then,” he says. “But six is the fucking end of it.”

Drax nods complacently, then picks up his feet and lies back down on the greasy and pungent camp bed.

“Six is the end of it,” he echoes, “and if you could send that cunt Stevens up with another bottle of brandy, and get him to empty out this pisspot while he’s at it, I’d be monstrous fucking grateful, I’m sure.”

Baxter descends to the first-floor landing. He waits there a moment and then calls down to Stevens, who is sitting in the hallway with his bowler on his knees reading the Hull and East Riding Intelligencer . They go into the study together and Baxter gestures for him to close the door.

“You have the revolver I gave you,” Baxter says, “and you have the bullets also?”

Stevens nods. Baxter asks to see the gun, and Stevens takes it from his pocket and places it on the desk between them. Baxter looks it over, then gives it back.

“I have a task for you tonight,” he says. “You listen carefully now.”

Stevens nods again. Baxter notes with pleasure his docility, his doggish eagerness to please. If only, Baxter thinks, they were all like that.

“At midnight you go to Patrick Sumner’s room in the Pilgrim’s Arms, and you tell him I need to see him urgently at my house. Tell him I have important news about the Volunteer and it can’t wait until the morning. He doesn’t know the town, and he doesn’t know where my house is neither, so he’ll follow wherever you lead him. Lead him towards the river. Go up Trippett, past the foundry, until you reach the old timber yard. If he asks what you’re doing, tell him it is a shortcut — it makes no difference whether he believes you or not, just get him inside somehow. Henry Drax will be waiting in the yard. He’ll shoot Sumner, and after he shoots Sumner you’ll shoot him. You understand me?”

“I don’t need Drax there,” he says. “I can shoot the surgeon myself.”

“That’s not to the purpose. I need Drax to shoot Sumner and you to shoot Drax. After you’ve shot him you put this revolver in Sumner’s hand, empty out his pockets and Drax’s too, and then you make yourself fucking scarce.”

“The constable at the dock will hear something for sure,” Stevens says.

“True enough, and no doubt he’ll come running and blowing hard on his whistle. When he gets to the yard he’ll find two dead men each holding the gun that killed the other one. There are no witnesses anywhere, no other signs or indications. The peelers will scratch their heads awhile, then take the bodies to the morgue and wait for them to be claimed, but no one will claim them. And what will happen next?”