The man, tall and bald with a broken nose, regarded me suspiciously, but seemed a little reassured by my shabby clothes. ‘You ain’t from these parts,’ he said by way of answer.
‘No. I’m from the West Country. Somerset,’ I said impatiently. ‘Well, do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Know of any boatmen who work all night?’
‘All right! All right! Keep your breeches on. Why do you want to know?’
I breathed deeply. I had forgotten how wary these people were of ‘foreigners’. ‘I might have need of one, that’s all.’
Suddenly, my companion grinned and tapped the side of his nose. ‘Oho! Like that, eh?’ What exactly he thought I was up to, I had no idea, but it was obviously something nefarious. ‘Well, good luck to you, friend. There is one fellow who’ll row you across river at any hour you like. Jeremiah Tucker’s his name. But he’ll charge you double rates if it’s after curfew.’
I nodded. ‘Fair enough. He’s taking a risk. Where do I find him?’
The bald-headed man scanned the foreshore, where a number of boats were lined up at the water’s edge. He waved a large hand at one of them. ‘That’s his, over there. The one with the blue canopy.’ A faint frown puckered his forehead. ‘He’s late this morning. It ain’t like Jeremiah to oversleep.’
‘Maybe he had a client last night,’ I suggested.
‘Aye, p’r’aps he did. But it don’t usually make him late for work the following morning.’
‘So, where do I find him?’ I asked again.
Once more suspicion gleamed in the slightly protuberant eyes. Then he shrugged. ‘I suppose if you ask around enough, someone’ll tell you, so it might as well be me. You don’t mean him any harm, do you?’
‘Not the least in the world. I just want to ask him a question.’
‘We-ell. .’ The boatman considered me for a moment longer before deciding in my favour. ‘You don’t look like anyone in the pay of the law.’ I abstained from pointing out that if I were indeed a lawman, I shouldn’t be strutting around in my best Sunday-go-to-church clothes. But there! He had the brawn. What did he want with brains? He went on, ‘Jerry Tucker lives a couple o’ streets back from here, near a tavern called the Rattlebones. Just ask for him. Most people hereabouts know who he is.’
I thanked the man profusely and watched him descend the steps, to where a queue of folk had already formed alongside his own boat, before turning away from the wharf. Another enquiry, two minutes later, of a baker, plying his early morning trade, elicited the fact that the Rattlebones was just round the nearest corner.
‘But you won’t get much service there this morning. There were a nasty murder there last night.’
‘Oh?’
The baker nodded. ‘Will Tanner, one of our locals, were stabbed to death in a quarrel. God knows what it were about, but the little bastard what did it got clean away in spite o’ the hue and cry.’
The story reminded me of Reynold Makepeace, and the baker and I spent ten minutes or so deploring the lawlessness of the London and Southwark streets. But time was pressing and I had to return to Baynard’s Castle before I was missed. I asked for Jeremiah Tucker and was told the fifth house from the Rattlebones on the left.
I turned the corner, walked past the tavern, giving it a curious glance as I did so, counted five houses along, and was just in time to catch a plump woman, erupting from the cottage like a bat out of hell and screaming at the top of her voice, in my arms.
‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ I asked.
She continued screaming. I shook her hard, but to no avail. Other people were emerging from their houses, attracted by the noise. Afraid that they would get the wrong impression, I slapped her, putting the full force of my right arm behind the blow.
‘What’s the matter?’ I yelled again.
She made a gobbling sound.
A man stepped forward from the little crowd that had now gathered around us, and clapped the plump woman on the shoulder. ‘Marjorie, tell us what’s the matter,’ he urged. He looked at me. ‘Is this fellow molesting you?’
The woman shook her head vigorously while I uttered a furiously indignant denial. Sweet Virgin! Was I beginning to look like a man desperate enough to force my attentions on middle-aged goodwives?
‘What is it, then?’ the man persisted, while the rest nodded encouragement.
The plump woman gave another despairing moan. Tired of this, I pushed her gently into the arms of her friends and strode into the cottage with a determination that belied my growing fear — almost a certainty — of what I was going to find. My presentiment was all too soon proved correct. A man whom I presumed to be Jeremiah Tucker was stretched out on the beaten-earth floor, face upwards, his throat neatly cut from ear to ear — a good, clean stroke with which I had seen slaughtermen in my native Somerset kill cattle. It was Humphrey Culpepper all over again.
My breath caught in my throat. A vision of that terrible wall painting in the north cloister of St Paul’s entered my head: The Dance of Death, the Danse Macabre of the French, the grinning skeletons dragging away their victims one by one. . With an effort, I pulled myself together. I must get out of here and quickly. I had defied the duke’s orders only to find myself in another imbroglio in which I seemed destined to play a leading part.
I leaned down and quickly touched the unfortunate Jeremiah Tucker’s face and hands He was stiff and cold. This murder had taken place some time ago, but once again I had been making enquiries about the dead man. I glanced around. The one-roomed cottage was small and, in general, ill maintained, but the shutters of the single window opened silently on recently oiled hinges. My luck was in and I was out — both legs over the sill — of that window and running along the backs of the houses into the next street, plunging deeper into the maze of narrow alleyways until I was far enough away to risk descending to the foreshore, where I signalled to a cruising boatman looking for a fare. A short time later — although it seemed like an eternity — I was back within the walls of Baynard’s Castle, sitting on the edge of my bed in my tiny room, desperately trying to control the trembling of my limbs.
Once I was more myself, I stretched out on my bed, linked my hands behind my head and tried to make sense of what was going on.
There had to be a connection between the deaths of Humphrey Culpepper and Jeremiah Tucker. The coincidence of two men having their throats cut within a day or so of each other was nothing extraordinary in a city like London, or indeed in any city, but the chances of them both being despatched in an identical manner — so neatly and with such precision — were far greater. The odds against that happening were impossibly short. Furthermore, both victims were linked — although they did not know it — with Baynard’s Castle, for if Jeremiah Tucker was not the boatman who had dropped off the mysterious visitor at the castle’s water-stairs in the early hours of the morning, then I’d never trust my instincts again.
According to my bald-headed friend, Tucker was a boatman willing to flout authority and work during the hours of night, carrying, no doubt, many thieves and robbers across from Southwark to London to ply their trade under cover of darkness, and then to ferry them home again. And yet the fact that Bald Head had only mentioned one man didn’t mean to say that there weren’t others. .
I drew a deep breath, swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat upright, telling myself not to be a fool or to be seduced into following false trails. The fact that the one man mentioned was now dead — and dead in exactly the same circumstances as Humphrey Culpepper — spoke for itself. He had to be the man whose progress I had watched back across the river some six or seven hours earlier. Someone had been waiting for his return to the Southwark side, followed him home, knocked and been admitted. Why? The most probable answer to that question was that he was supposed to be the payer, the man who had brought the money now that the mission had been successfully accomplished. But instead of bringing silver, he had brought merely a knife, and when the boatman’s back was turned, had seized him and cut his throat, swiftly, cleanly, so that the poor man had known only a momentary fear before he died. That, at least, was something.