Needless to say that Walter Moody’s countenance did not betray the subject of his thoughts. He had calibrated his expression precisely between grave bafflement and apology, as if to communicate that he was very sensible of the trouble he was causing, but he had no idea what that trouble might be, and as to how he should proceed, he was willing to take anyone’s direction but his own.
Outside, the wind changed direction, sending a damp gust down the chimney, so that the embers swelled scarlet and for a brief moment Moody could smell the salt of the sea. The movement in the hearth seemed to rouse the fat man nearest the fire. He levered himself from his armchair with a grunt of effort and shuffled off to join the others at the sideboard. When he had gone, Moody found himself alone before the fire with the man in the herringbone suit; the latter now leaned forward and spoke.
‘I should like to introduce myself, if you have no objection,’ he said, snapping open his silver cigarette case for the first time, and selecting a cigarette. He spoke with an accent identifiably French, and a manner that was clipped and courteous. ‘My name is Aubert Gascoigne. I hope that you will forgive that I know your name already.’
‘Well, as it happens,’ Moody said, with a little jolt of surprise, ‘I believe I also know yours.’
‘Then we are well met,’ said Aubert Gascoigne. He had been fishing for his matches; he paused now with his hand in his breast pocket, like a rakish colonel posing for a sketch. ‘But I am intrigued. How is it that you know me, Mr. Moody?’
‘I read your address this evening, in Friday’s edition of the West Coast Times—am I right? If I remember correctly, you penned an opinion on behalf of the Magistrate’s Court.’
Gascoigne smiled, and pulled out his matches. ‘Now I understand. I am yesterday’s news.’ He shook out a match, placed the side of his boot against his knee, and struck his light upon the sole.
‘Forgive me,’ Moody began, fearing that he had offended, but Gascoigne shook his head.
‘I am not insulted,’ he said when his cigarette was lit. ‘So. You arrive as a stranger in an unfamiliar town, and what is your first move? You find a day-old paper and read the courthouse bulletin. You learn the names of the lawbreakers, on the one hand, and the law enforcers, on the other. This is quite a strategy.’
‘There was no method in it,’ Moody said modestly.
Gascoigne’s name had appeared on the third page of the paper, beneath a short sermon, perhaps the length of a paragraph, on the iniquity of crime. The address was preceded by a list of all the arrests that had been made that month. (He could not recall any of those names, and in truth had only remembered Gascoigne’s because his former Latin master had been Gascoyen—the familiarity had drawn his eye.)
‘Perhaps not,’ Gascoigne returned, ‘but it has brought you to the very heart of our disquiet nonetheless: a subject that has been on every man’s lips for a fortnight.’
Moody frowned. ‘Petty criminals?’
‘One in particular.’
‘Shall I guess?’ Moody asked lightly, when the other did not go on.
Gascoigne shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. I am referring to the whore.’
Moody raised his eyebrows. He tried to recall the catalogue of arrests to his mind—yes, perhaps one of the listed names had been a woman’s. He wondered what every man in Hokitika had to say about a whore’s arrest. It took him a moment to find the words to form an appropriate answer, and to his surprise, Gascoigne laughed. ‘I am teasing you,’ he said. ‘You must not let me tease you. Her crime was not listed, of course, but if you read with a little imagination you will see it. Anna Wetherell is the name she gives.’
‘I am not sure I know how to read with imagination.’
Gascoigne laughed again, expelling a sharp breath of smoke. ‘But you are a barrister, are you not?’
‘By training only,’ Moody said stiffly. ‘I have not yet been called to the Bar.’
‘Well, here: there is always an overtone in the magistrate’s address,’ Gascoigne explained. ‘Gentlemen of Westland—there is your first clue. Crimes of shame and degradation—there is your second.’
‘I see,’ Moody said, though he did not. His gaze flickered over Gascoigne’s shoulder: the fat man had moved to the pair of Chinese men, and was scribbling something on the flyleaf of his pocketbook for them to read. ‘Perhaps the woman was wrongly indicted? Perhaps that is what captured everyone’s attention?’
‘Oh, she wasn’t gaoled for whoring,’ Gascoigne said. ‘The sergeants don’t care a straw about that! As long as a man is discreet enough, they are quite content to look the other way.’
Moody waited. There was an unsettling quality to the way that Gascoigne spoke: it was both guarded and confiding at once. Moody felt that he could not trust him. The clerk was perhaps in his middle thirties. His pale hair had begun to silver above his ears, and he wore a pale moustache, brushed sideways from a central part. His herringbone suit was tailored closely to his body.
‘Why,’ Gascoigne added after a moment, ‘the sergeant himself made a proposition of her, directly after the committal!’
‘The committal?’ Moody echoed, feeling foolish. He wished that the other man would speak a little less cryptically, and at greater length. He had a cultivated air (he made Thomas Balfour seem as blunt as a doorstop) but it was a cultivation somehow mourned. He spoke as a disappointed man, for whom perfection existed only as something remembered—and then regretted, because it was lost.
‘She was tried for trying to take her own life,’ Gascoigne said. ‘There’s a symmetry in that, do you not think? Tried for trying.’
Moody thought it inappropriate to agree, and in any case he did not care to pursue that line of thinking. He said, to change the subject,
‘And the master of my vessel—Mr. Carver? He is connected to this woman somehow, I presume?’
‘Oh yes, Carver’s connected,’ Gascoigne said. He looked at the cigarette in his hand, seemed suddenly disgusted with it, and threw it into the fire. ‘He killed his own child.’
Moody drew back in horror. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘They can’t prove it, of course,’ Gascoigne said darkly. ‘But the man’s a brute. You are quite right to want to avoid him.’
Moody stared at him, again at a loss for how to reply.
‘Every man has his currency,’ Gascoigne added after a moment. ‘Perhaps it’s gold; perhaps it’s women. Anna Wetherell, you see, was both.’
At this point the fat man returned, with his glass refreshed; he sat down, looked first to Gascoigne and then to Moody, and seemed to recognise, obscurely, a social obligation to introduce himself. He leaned forward and thrust out his hand. ‘Name’s Dick Mannering.’
‘It’s a pleasure,’ Moody said, in a rather automatic tone. He felt disoriented. He wished Gascoigne had not been interrupted quite at that moment, so he could have pressed him further on the subject of the whore. It was indelicate to attempt to revive the subject now; in any case Gascoigne had retreated back into his armchair, and his face had closed. He began turning his cigarette case over again in his hands.
‘Prince of Wales Opera House, that’s me,’ Mannering added, as he sat back.
‘Capital,’ said Moody.
‘Only show in town.’ Mannering rapped the arm of his chair with his knuckles, casting about for a way to proceed. Moody glanced at Gascoigne, but the clerk was staring sourly into his lap. It was clear that the fat man’s reappearance had severely displeased him; it was also clear that he saw no reason to conceal his displeasure from its object—whose face, Moody saw with embarrassment, had turned a very dark shade of red.