There was disgust in Colter’s negative grunt. “The closest I got was a wink on his wedding day — like a man who just had a long-odds winner at Ascot.”
“This would be expensive, Mr. Colter. There’s time involved in the travel as well as the investigation. And what if I find evidence that your brother died of natural causes?”
“In that case I will pay you two hundred pounds.”
Pine whistled softly. “You’re that anxious to prove it was murder? What makes you think I won’t fake some evidence for eight hundred pounds?”
“Because I checked thoroughly into your background before I asked you to come here, Mr. Pine. Your little investigations business comes highly recommended. Compared to such a reputation, the money is a paltry sum. Besides, I would not take kindly to being fleeced.”
He picked up a pencil from his desk and snapped it between thumb, forefinger, and middle finger, then turned in his chair and threw the pieces out the window.
“Thirty pounds a day,” Alex said. “Mogging about in the jungle is unhealthy — fever, tigers, and all that.”
Colter nodded reluctantly, then extended his hand across the desk. Surprise was evident in his lifted eyebrows when he felt the strength in the detective’s grip.
He summoned an ascetic-looking clerk in striped pants from the outer office and issued instructions in a low voice.
He turned to Pine. “I would like you to leave by the end of the week. Humes here will give you a draft on my bank for three hundred pounds, also an address in Singapore where you will be able to draw more money as needed. But I will expect reports regularly.”
“No.” Pine’s voice was flat, unarguable. “No reports until my work is finished. I’m going to be too busy to write letters home like a boy away at boarding school.”
Jason Colter came out from behind his desk. “I urge you to be discreet.”
Pine ran a hand through a thatch of hair the color of a rusty bucket.
“It has been my experience,” he said, “that blabbering about one’s business does little to further it.”
Papers, packing, and transportation arrangements took little time for Pine, since the packing was all he did himself. The rest was handled with her usual quiet efficiency by Jennifer Hemming in his Chelsea office beneath his living quarters.
“Oh, dear, Mr. Pine,” she said when he told her of the trip, “you’ll be gone so long.” She bent her grey head quickly over a desk drawer so he would not see the moisture glistening behind the silver-framed glasses, but the mothering in her voice was inescapable.
“Maybe not so long, Miss Hemming. I think this Colter fellow is angling in a pond that has no fish. And I’m hanged if I know why.”
She smiled up at him. “Oh, but you will find out.”
What could be better than having Jennifer Hemming as office factotum, proxy mother for the one he never knew? Nothing, aside from a wife.
Before he left on Friday, he rode many vehicles and stretched his long legs over what seemed to be half the streets of London. He spent some of the three hundred pounds’ advance money in pubs whose clientele preferred its darker recesses to the sunshine outside. He bought uncounted rounds of ale and stuffed pound notes into pockets of scruffy jackets, all the while adding information to his leatherbound pocket notebook. Some facts he learned in better restaurants from business acquaintances whose Regent Street clothes and distinguished looks were scarcely in keeping with the type of information they disclosed.
Now he knew why Jason Colter wanted proof that Marie Colter had murdered her husband. With that information, he would be able to blackmail her to extract vital favors from her father, favors that could ultimately lead to a virtual monopoly of England’s rubber-importing business. What had burned in those hungry little eyes was not a zeal for justice, but greed.
Pine was not surprised. Sometimes he did not like the flavor of his work, and this was one of the times. But if he backed off it would leave a void that Colter more than likely would fill with someone who might not share Pine’s scruples about manufactured evidence. And besides, the pay was good.
On the morning of his departure he stopped at a bookstall near Fleet Street where he bought a thick packet of old boys’ papers. He stood at the rail clutching the package beneath his arm as the Sutton Victor edged away from its berth below High Bridge and slipped into the stream for the crossing to Le Havre and on to Singapore. He could think of nothing more pleasant or diverting on the long hours of the voyage than to revisit the pages that had put so much ginger into his youth. He looked forward to a reunion with Pluck, Chums, The Boy’s Own Paper, and The Bull’s-Eye. Indeed, it was reading the exploits of Sexton Blake that had lured him into a career in detection.
During the nearly two-day passage of the Suez, Pine sat on deck in the shade of an awning, alternately reading and watching the passing ships slide by, steel fish cleaving the desert that stretched away on both sides. He mixed little with the other passengers, spending some time rereading his notes. Folded into the notebook were two letters, both obtained from Mrs. Jason Colter. That had been a coup, but it would remain so only as long as she kept silent about it.
“Oh, I hope I am doing the right thing,” she had said when he visited her in London the day before he left. “If you don’t mention these letters to Jason, he won’t know. He knows I received them, but he never expressed the slightest interest in their contents. And in view of his intense feelings about his brother, I never said much other than to pass along the gossip Marie wrote.”
“Did you know your brother-in-law’s wife well?”
“Not terribly. I saw her several times just before the wedding, but almost immediately she and Kevin went to Holland to visit Nikolaas and Beatrice Berchem — her parents. But I like her. She is a lovely girl.”
She hesitated before going on, apparently satisfied that as long as she was surrendering the letters, and inasmuch as the conversation was to remain confidential, expression of her own intuitions could do no harm.
“I never liked Kevin, Mr. Pine. He had a charm and attractiveness that I can see would have overwhelmed poor Marie. But it seemed to me a veneer over something hard and cruel.”
Again she paused. “I don’t know why I’m saying this to a stranger, but I think hardness is the strongest bond Kevin and my husband had. Jason is the same way.”
“And I gather it was on that visit to the Berchems that Kevin Colter was appointed plantation manager.”
“Yes, the two of them left for Singapore without coming back here.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Colter, for letting me take these letters and for speaking freely. I’m sure you see it’s best that neither of us mention any of this to your husband.”
Mrs. Colter touched his sleeve.
“You couldn’t possibly think that Marie—” Her face was pale. “If I thought you would think such a thing I never—” Pine could see the trembling in her throat.
“Please, don’t torture yourself. It’s far from my mind, especially since I suspect it’s the one thought your husband cherishes.”
Singapore hadn’t changed much since Alex’s last time there four years before when an admiralty case had taken him through the city on his way to the naval base at Seletar near Johore Bahru. It came to him as he was paying the ricksha driver in front of the King’s Arms Hotel that that was in 1908, at about the same time Kevin and Marie Colter were on their way to Sumatra. Perhaps they had stopped here in this very hotel.
The manager of the Singapore office of Benskoten Rubber, Anders Van der Neer, was cool at first, then deferential, then confiding and friendly. Pine thought that if he stayed another ten minutes the man would become positively obsequious.