'He shot at my brother,' said the Captain.
'We have his guns,' the Mate put in. 'We took them from his bag.'
'Adam was bringing you out of the house,' said the Captain. 'He didn't know whether you were dead or alive. He wanted to get you into the fresh air. This…' said the Captain, gesturing at the corpse,'… he loosed off a shot the moment my brother stepped out of the door of the house. He's at least two ribs broken. How he rowed out to me I've no idea…' He indicated the corpse again, saying, 'He was re-loading for a second shot. My brother walked up and hit him.'
'He hit him only once,' the Mate put in.
'And he doesn't know his own strength,' I said. 'Is that it?'
'He knew it,' said the Captain. 'It was this idiot that didn't.'
And he nodded in the direction of Tommy.
'He was alive when my brother brought him. He and… the two of them thought I'd know what to do.'
'And do you?' I said.
No reply.
Had it been Miss Rickerby's idea to send Tommy and me out to the boat? Had she been in any fit state to make that decision, having been poisoned by the gas? And ought I to count it a kindness that she had sent me out? I pictured her waiting on the harbour wall for her brother's return, and I thought of her and her brother as two children, whereas the Captain was definitely grown-up, or so they might think.
'Your brother made you a present of two sacks of potatoes,' I said. 'You must have been chuffed to bits.'
Again, no answer. I wondered whether it had been left to the Captain and the Mate to discover that I was a copper, or whether the two other Rickerbys had made the discovery for themselves. They had evidently put my suit-coat on me before rowing me out, and the warrant card had been in there.
'Your brother might argue self-defence, when taken in charge… i/what you say is true.'
'It's true,' said the Captain,'… and he will argue nothing.'
He raised the lantern again, making Tommy come into full view once more.
'Go in,' said the Mate.
I stepped into the locker, and the door clanged shut behind me.
Chapter Forty-One
As the smell of Tommy Nugent competed with the smell of paint I sat beside Tommy – there was no help for it, the locker being so small – and watched, over the course of perhaps an hour or so, a rectangle of light form around the hatchway, which was evidently imperfectly sealed. When the rising dawn made the outline completely clear I began to pound at the door with my boot heels, and must have carried on doing so for a clear five minutes.
My fury was directed partly at the door and partly at the Chief. I had been a fool in the Paradise guest house, but I blamed the Chief for Tommy's death. I ought to have been free to make an ass of myself alone. I had not wanted Tommy along and had made that perfectly clear, but the Chief had insisted, knowing very well that Tommy would go armed and that he was trigger happy. Why had the Chief done it? Simply to make mischief? He was pushing seventy but that particular flame never burned out in a man, as far as I could see. Had he sent Tommy to lay on a bit of adventure for a fellow shootist? Or had he wanted to make trouble for me because I'd told him I meant to take articles?
After a long interval of my pounding on the door the whole locker about me began to vibrate, and at first I thought this was my doing, but then the ship seemed to lift, Tommy fell softly against me, and my head was filled with the vibration of the engines. I pushed Tommy off, in an apologetic sort of way, marvelling that I might lately have been carted about in a sack with him; then the tree-house motion came back and I knew that we were moving. Beckton gas works had stirred itself for the day, and we were making for the jetty ready for the unloading of our cargo.
My particular fear, ever since the word 'Beckton' had crossed my mind, was that the Captain would put me off with the coal. Once dead I would be taken up by the mighty steel claw of a crane, swung into a wagon, and carried along the high-level line into one of the retort houses where I would be dropped and burned, becoming who knew how many cubic feet of gas, for the benefit of some ungrateful London householder. A better way of disposing of a body could scarcely be imagined.
It was not that the Captain was evil natured, but I believed him to be weak. This was why he had fled from his own father; it was why he'd heard me out, letting me tell the full tale as he tried to make up his mind what to do with me; it was why he'd showed me the body of Tommy Nugent, letting me see his dilemma in hopes of gaining my sympathy; in hopes I would understand better his reason for killing me. Then again his determination to keep his mentally defective brother out of the arms of the law perhaps went to his credit. The lad had suffered enough – Captain Rickerby might be thinking – at the hands of North Eastern Railway Company employees. Anyhow, he was judge and jury in my case, and I was quite sure it was a role he would have given anything to avoid taking on.
What would the weak man do? He would put a bullet in me and toss me in the hold ready for burning. But the accusing finger then began to point in my own direction. Who was I to charge anyone with weakness? I had lingered in the Paradise guest house half in hopes of fucking the landlady. My mind had been only partly on the case as a result; and why had I wanted to ride the lady? Because she was beautiful, yes. But also to get revenge on the wife, who had taken advantage of my own weakness to gain her own ends.
It came to this: I needed some fire in me; I needed to play a man's part; I needed a gun. I turned to Tommy and, in the light that came from the halo around the door, my eye wandered down from his broken head to his right shoulder, along his right arm and up to his right hand which rested on his kit bag. At first Tommy had had two bags, and where the other one had got to I had no notion. But I was sure that Captain Rickerby and the Mate had been through it with a fine toothed comb. They must have been through this one as well – only for some reason they'd left it in the locker. From one or both of the kit bags they'd removed Tommy's guns – that was the word the Mate had used: 'guns' in the plural. Accordingly there was no prospect of finding a gun in the bag. But it just so happened that when I opened it, I laid my hand directly upon the two- two pistol.
In fact, it was partly wrapped in a towel, but I hadn't had to fish for it. The Captain and the Mate must have been in a panic and no doubt a tearing hurry as they went through the bag. I put my hand into the lucky dip again and found nothing but clothes… only something somewhere rattled. I pulled out a cloth bag, and here were the two-two cartridges. The pistol seemed to me – as someone more familiar with revolvers – very primitive: hardly more than a length of pipe with handle, trigger and lever forming three short outgrowths. I pressed the lever; it was very accommodating and the gun broke. I stuffed a cartridge in the general direction of the barrel, and whether
I'd done it right or not I had no idea.
I found out less than a minute later when the door opened and the Captain, holding both his revolver and a coal black sack, appeared before me with the mighty mechanical hand of the Beckton gas works crane descending into the opened hold behind him.
I pulled the trigger; the gun flashed orange; the Captain fell back, and I was quite deafened. In that deafened state I took up the cloth bag, and re-loaded the gun. I stepped out of the locker and over the Captain, who still moved, and who might have been screaming. I saw the Mate, who held no gun and looked at me in a different way; alongside him stood – perhaps – the big man who had floored me. The claw of the crane was rising behind them, and Beckton gas works was far too close on the starboard side. I looked towards the foc's'le and saw two crewmen I did not know, had not seen before, but my surprise was nothing to theirs. I walked over to the port side with the shooter in my hand and there, running fast alongside, was a launch with a rough looking sailor at the wheel and an evident gent in a long, smart, official-looking great-coat standing very upright beside him.