Lauderback’s foolish smile returned. He began stabbing with his finger at a crumb.
‘But who told you that?’ Balfour added, when the other did not speak.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lauderback.
‘Carver mentioned something—when he signed the papers?’
‘Maybe that was it.’
‘Well! If you say so … but to look at them, I’d never have believed it,’ Balfour said. ‘One so tall and striking, the other such a wastrel—such a runt—!’
Lauderback quivered; his hand made a compulsive movement on the table, as if to reach and grasp. ‘Crosbie Wells was a wastrel?’
Balfour waved his hand. ‘You saw him dead.’
‘But only dead—never living,’ said Lauderback. ‘Strange thing: you can’t tell what a fellow really looks like, you know, without animation. Without his soul.’
‘Oh,’ Balfour said. He contemplated that idea.
‘A dead man looks created,’ Lauderback continued. ‘As a sculpture looks created. It makes you marvel at the work of the design; makes you think of the designer. The skin is smooth. Fine. Like wax, like marble—but not like either: it doesn’t hold the light, as a wax figure does, and it doesn’t reflect it, like stone. Has a matte finish, as a painter would say. No shine.’ Suddenly Lauderback seemed very embarrassed. He rounded off by demanding, rather rudely, ‘Have you ever seen a man fresh dead?’
Balfour tried to make light of it (‘Dangerous question to ask—on a goldfield—’) but the politician was waiting for an answer, and at length he had to concede that he had not.
‘Shouldn’t have said “seen”,’ Lauderback added, to himself. ‘Should have said “bore witness”.’
Augustus Smith said, ‘Jock put his hand on the fellow’s neck—didn’t you, Jock?’
‘Ay,’ said Jock.
‘When we first came in,’ said Augustus.
‘Meant to rouse him,’ said Jock. ‘Didn’t know that he had already passed. He might have been sleeping. But here’s the thing: his collar was damp. With sweat, you see—it hadn’t yet dried on him. We figured he couldn’t have been more than half an hour dead.’
He would have said more, but Lauderback made a sharp movement with his chin, to silence him.
‘Can’t figure it out,’ Balfour said. ‘Signed his name Wells!’
‘We must be thinking of different men,’ said Lauderback.
‘Carver has a scar on his cheek, right here. White in colour. Shaped like—like a sickle.’
Lauderback pursed his lips, then shook his head. ‘I don’t recall a scar.’
‘But he was dark-haired? Thick-set? Brutish, you might say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can’t figure it out,’ Balfour said again. ‘Why would a man change his name? And brothers! Frank Carver—and Crosbie Wells!’
Lauderback’s mouth was working beneath his moustache, as if he was chewing on his lip. In quite a different voice he said, ‘You knew him?’
‘Crosbie Wells? Not a bit,’ said Balfour. He settled back in his chair, pleased to be asked a direct question. ‘He was building a sawmill, way out in the Arahura—well, you saw the cottage; you’ve been there. He’d done his shipping through me—equipment and so forth—so I knew him to look at him. Rest his soul. Had a Maori fellow for a mate. They were in on the mill together.’
‘Did he strike you—as a kind of a man?’
‘As what kind of a man?’
‘Any kind.’ Lauderback’s hand twitched again. Flushing, he amended his question: ‘I mean to say: how did he strike you?’
‘No complaints,’ Balfour said. ‘Kept his business to his business, you know. From his talk I’d call him London-born.’ He paused, and then leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘Course, they’re saying all sorts about him, now that he’s gone.’
Again Lauderback did not respond. He was being very strange, Balfour thought; the man was tongue-tied, even red-faced. It was as if he wanted Balfour both to answer some very specific question and to cease talking altogether. The two aides seemed to have lost interest—Jock was pushing a piece of liver around his plate, and Augustus’s head was turned away; he was watching the rain beat at the window.
Out of the corner of his eye, Balfour considered them. The two men were as satellites to Lauderback. They slept on bolsters in his room, accompanied him everywhere, and seemed at all times to speak and act in plural, as if they shared a single identity between them, as well as a name. Until that morning Balfour had thought them pleasant chaps, convivial and quick-witted; he had thought their devotion to Lauderback a fine thing, though their constant presence had occasionally worn his nerves rather thin. But now? He looked from one to the other, and realised that he wasn’t sure.
Lauderback had hardly spoken a word to Balfour about the final chapter of his journey over the Alps, two weeks prior. Most of what Balfour knew about the night of his arrival had come from the West Coast Times, which had published an abridged version of the account Lauderback had given, in writing, to the law. Lauderback was not suspected of having played any part in the deaths, one attempted, the other actuaclass="underline" the coroner’s report removed any doubt that Crosbie Wells had died of purely natural causes, and the physician was able to prove that the opium by which Anna Wetherell had nearly perished was her own. But Balfour wondered, now, whether the paper’s account had been the truth.
He watched Jock Smith push his piece of liver back and forth. It was very strange that Lauderback seemed, all of a sudden, so intensely curious about the living character of Crosbie Wells; it was even stranger to think that Crosbie Wells, who had been mild, and common, and lacking in any kind of influence, should enjoy a familial connexion—or any kind of connexion!—to the notorious Francis Carver. Balfour could not believe it. And then there was the matter of the whore in the road. Was that event just a coincidence, or did it connect somehow to Crosbie Wells’s untimely passing? Why had Lauderback been so reluctant to speak of either encounter—reluctant, that is, until now?
He said, partly to rekindle the conversation, and partly to keep his imagination from drifting to make unfounded accusations of his friend, ‘So you sold the barque to Carver—only you thought his name was Wells—and he told you, by the bye, that he had a brother Crosbie, squirrelled away.’
‘I can’t remember now,’ Lauderback said. ‘It was nearly a year ago. Long gone.’
‘But then you come across the same man’s brother—fresh dead—a year later!’ Balfour said. ‘On the other side of the Alps, no less … in a place you’ve never set foot before! There’s queer odds on that, wouldn’t you say?’
Lauderback said, rather loftily, ‘Only a weak mind puts faith in coincidence’—for it was his habit, when under pressure, to assume a condescending air.
Balfour ignored this maxim. ‘Alias Carver?’ he mused. ‘Or alias Wells?’ But he was watching the politician as he spoke.
‘Shall I fill us another pitcher, Mr. L?’ said Augustus Smith.
Lauderback rapped the table. ‘Yes: fill us another. Good.’
‘Godspeed weighed anchor around two weeks back,’ said Balfour. ‘She goes back and forth from Canton, does she not—tea-trading? So I expect we won’t be seeing Carver around these parts for a while.’
‘Let’s drop the subject,’ Lauderback said. ‘I made a mistake with the names. I must have made a mistake with the names. It doesn’t signify.’
‘Hang tight,’ said Balfour. A new thought had struck him.
‘What?’ said Lauderback.
‘It might signify. Given that the sale of his estate has been appealed. It might signify to the widow, if Crosbie Wells had a brother tucked away.’