A Burial at Sea

CHAPTER TWELVE

Halifax’s cabin was a good deal smaller than Lenox’s. The detective—for the last few hours had made him such a creature again, which he knew because he felt that peculiar vibrant alertness in his mind that this work had always galvanized in him—visited it alone.

“I’ll leave you to it. I’ve got to start us sailing again,” Martin had said. He looked tired but showed no signs of slacking energy. “You can find me on deck if you like. Tell me, first, what you think happened.”

“I don’t know,” said Lenox, and Martin, perhaps used to his directives being followed and his questions answered frankly and fully, looked unhappy with the answer.

“We can’t have a murderer roaming freely aboard the ship.”

“At the very least—if we cannot rout out this murderer—everyone will be far more aware and cautious now. This is not a large place for hiding.”

“Nothing could be worse for the mood of the men, though,” said Martin. “Suspicion everywhere—rumors, arguments, accusations. Still, it’s a short voyage, bless the Lord.”

Halifax’s cabin (also off of the wardroom) felt personal in a way Lenox’s didn’t yet, the result of many months’ habitation. It was tidy but crammed: notes and sketches pinned on the wall over his tiny desk, clothes hung up on the back of his chair and the bed’s short posts, fishing tackle in the corner. Lenox searched through this assortment of items methodically, but ultimately without recompense. There was no note lying about—or indeed in any pocket or drawer Lenox could find—inviting Halifax to a rendezvous during the middle watch. Nor was there any object that didn’t seem natural in its place. On the contrary, the cabin looked as if the lieutenant might walk into it at any moment and carry on living his life there.

One detail, however: the porthole at the far end of the cabin was swung open, though it was ship’s policy to keep the portholes closed. It would have been the quickest way to jettison such a note, or indeed a murder weapon—a knife, say.

After he had concluded his inspection of Halifax’s cabin, Lenox made his way down to the surgery. The corpse of the officer lay on the table at the center of the room still, rinsed clean of blood now, but Tradescant wasn’t there.

Lenox found him on deck, smoking a small cigar and looking out over the water. The sun was up.

“You finished examining the body, Mr. Tradescant?”

“Yes, not five minutes since. I can show you what I found—come along.” The surgeon threw his cigar overboard, though the ship was now moving at a sufficient clip, with new sails set, that they didn’t hear the hiss of it being extinguished. “There was one interesting discovery I made.”

Standing over Halifax’s body a few moments later, Tradescant described in clear language each wound the dead man had sustained.

“These here are not very precise,” he said, pointing to the incisions along Halifax’s torso, “and the wounds that killed him—these, around his heart—are not very deep or strong. I suspect he died of blood loss rather than a deadly blow to his heart, in fact. His artery was nicked here.”

“What conclusion can you draw about the murder weapon, then?”

“I have the murder weapon.”

Lenox paused, dumbstruck, for a moment. “You’ve—how have you got it?” The wild thought that Tradescant might be the murderer crossed his mind, and he even stepped backward slightly.

This produced a bark of laughter from the surgeon. “It wasn’t I, Mr. Lenox. Here it is.”

Tradescant went into the pocket of his vest and produced a gleaming silver pocketknife. He held it out and Lenox took it.

It was about five inches long, on the larger side for these sorts of knives, and had three blades of different lengths that folded out and locked into place. There was also a fourth implement that folded out of the knife: a minute compass on the end of a metal rod.

“Useful for a man at sea, that,” said Tradescant. “Specially made, perhaps.”

“Are you certain this is the weapon? How did you find it?”

He gestured toward the body on the table. “You asked me to check that Lieutenant Halifax’s organs were intact. They were, but this was tucked underneath the stomach, hidden from immediate view but not at all tricky to find.”

“It couldn’t have been this clean.”

“Oh, no. I washed it. I wanted to see if it had any distinctive markings.”

“And you feel that this matches his cuts?”

“There’s very little doubt in my mind. As I say, the wounds are too ragged in the one case and shallow in the other to have been the result of anything as precise as a scalpel or as big as a kitchen knife. A pocketknife such as this fits the bill.”

“Sterling silver,” murmured Lenox.

Tradescant nodded. “Well beyond the reach of any common bluejacket, I would have thought.”

“Easily thieved, however.”

“Perhaps, yes.”

“Wouldn’t the blade have folded back into the knife if you attempted to stab someone with it?”

“As you’ll observe, if I may show you—the blade locks out into place, and only pressing this button allows it to be folded back in.”

“Ah, I see. Well done, Mr. Tradescant. May I ask, to change the subject only for a moment—did you look at his back? Halifax’s?”

“I didn’t, no. Why? Surely the wounds are frontal?”

“If he fell from a good height to the quarterdeck, as I believe, there might have been bruising on the back.”

Tradescant nodded. “Yes, and in fact I did find a bloody cut on the back of his head. That might have been inflicted by the fall. Here—help me turn the body onto its side, so we may see.”

They performed this operation with what delicacy they could manage, and as Lenox had suspected found great red welts on Halifax’s back.

“These swellings would still have appeared postmortem?” Lenox asked as they laid the body back down flat.

“Immediately postmortem, yes, it’s certainly possible. I would be inclined to accept your theory.”

It was a relief to have confirmation of at least one fact.

“Did the body tell you anything else?”

“Not in particular. He was a healthy man. As you predicted, there were blue fibers in the wounds around his heart—the shirt must have been removed or at a minimum unbuttoned before the incisions in the abdomen were made.”

“Any wounds on the hands?”

Tradescant frowned. “I don’t know, why?”

Lenox lifted one of Halifax’s hands. It was easy to forget how valuable his friend Thomas McConnell’s medical expertise had been when Lenox was working as a detective every day. “From his hands we may observe whether he defended himself.”

“I see.”

“But both hands appear to be unhurt. It must mean that Halifax wouldn’t have expected to be stabbed—or that it came quickly.”

“Yes,” said Tradescant. “Sensible.”

“I suppose that covers the facts, then,” said Lenox. “Thank you, Mr. Tradescant.”

“I’m for bed, then, even though I spy daylight. It’s been a long night.”

Suddenly Lenox felt overwhelmingly tired. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll go on deck to tell Martin we’re going to steal some sleep. There’s nothing we could do now that can’t be achieved in four hours’ time.”

“Or ten hours, if I have my way,” said Tradescant.

They both looked down at the body of Halifax then, and a strange moment of frustration and dazed bafflement seemed to pass among the three of them. How had they ended up this way, two of them alive, one dead, when not twenty hours before they had been on land, and not twelve hours before they had been dining together?

It had all happened so fast. And poor Halifax! Lenox thought of the fishing again. He would have to try out the dead man’s fishing pole one day soon. A minor—and insufficient—tribute to what might have been a real friendship, had they both made it through the journey together.

As he lay in bed fifteen minutes later, Lenox’s mind muddled through the facts—the medal, the knife, the incisions on Halifax’s torso—but without any constructive result. It was merely a whirl of thoughts. Fruitless.

He also thought of the comfortable green baize benches in Parliament, the cups of tea and hot wine rushed in by young secretaries when discussion went late into the night, his comfortable office in Westminster … and of course he thought of Jane, of leaving Parliament for home and finding her there, waiting for him long after she ought to have been in bed. Had he softened? Or merely changed? He was past forty now, definitely middle-aged. It had been three years since he had regularly taken cases. He had a child on the way. The exhilaration of late nights in the Seven Dials, chasing down some gin-soaked murderer, of being in on the hunt as a forger fled to Surrey, of those old cases, was now some years in the past. Did they belong to a different part of his life? Of himself?

Could he still do this?