The Murder of Mary Russell (34 page)

“Only later, after his death, did I learn that he had not
gone
to Australia, he had been transported there: a young banker convicted of using a client's money to repay a debt of honour, who was caught with his hand in the proverbial till before he could make good the funds. The revelation was something of a shock, certainly for my friend, but in the end it only confirmed my judgment of Trevor as an essentially prosaic individual, who was driven to the uncharacteristic hurly-burly of life in the gold field and who, once the episode was over, happily slipped back into his natural state.

“Nothing I learned then, either from the man himself or in the written account he left for his son, suggested that the money on which their estate rested was anything but honestly achieved. Well, honest apart from the crime that had banished him in the first place. The only thing that might have caught my attention was the brevity of his description concerning the life he and Beddoes led in Australia. Something along the lines of, ‘We prospered, we travelled, we came back as rich colonials to England, where we bought country estates. For more than twenty years we have led peaceful and useful lives, and hoped that our past was forever buried…' However, I had noted when I met him that his hands betrayed a great deal of heavy digging in his past, and that too supported his claim of a time in the gold fields.”

“ ‘Claim'?” I asked.

He paused for a moment of meditative smoke-raising, then said, “It is a striking thing, Russell, how seldom one hears an original thought from a lifelong criminal. I suppose few of them have much leisure for reflection. However inadvertently, Mr Bishop has presented me with one, namely: what if those two men's fortunes originally left England in the possession of Jack Prendergast?”

“That's a lot of guinea coins to be bobbing around a sinking ship.”

“Some two tons of gold,” he agreed serenely. “Hence my session with the financial gentleman, to find a less-substantial alternative. The problem being that although gold may be melted down, traded for goods, or sold outright, other forms of transaction have traditionally been less anonymous. Until, that is, the Bank of England began to issue its modern printed notes, which say merely ‘pay the bearer on demand' rather than requiring a cashier to write the name of the person to whom it was issued.”

“And when did that anonymity begin?”

“In 1853. Precisely one year before clever Jack Prendergast defrauded his London merchants of a quarter million pounds.”

“A suggestive coincidence.” I sat with my drink, picturing the smoking wreckage of the
Gloria Scott:
bodies, spars, tangled lines and canvas…and over it all, a snow-flurry of bank notes, beckoning to the survivors? Hardly. “What denominations were those early notes?”

“They went up to £1,000, but in fact, any sum greater than a five would have attracted scrutiny. They all had serial numbers, of course, but if one intended to spend them outside of England, the smaller notes would have been relatively safe to use.”

“Five-pound notes would mean fifty thousand pieces of paper to conceal. But in fifties, it could have fit into a Gladstone bag.”

“A valise would not float on the surface for more than a few minutes,” he objected.

“What if it were kept in a water-tight box—or, concealed in a hogshead! A barrel would float long enough for the ship's boat to row back—”

“Hoping for provisions, and finding money in the process,” Holmes cut in.

“They could have divided the notes when they reached Sydney—oh, and James Hudson was one of the active mutineers, wasn't he? He'd stayed on board when the others were put off? They could well have refused to share the takings with him. Or gave him just enough to buy his silence.”

Holmes nodded slowly. “When Trevor died, he left an estate that had been cleaned by twenty years of virtuous English life. Beddoes was a different kind of man—more Prendergast than Trevor. His crime was forgery, a far cry from Trevor's idiotic but essentially innocent attempt to patch together a mistake. Forgery requires malice aforethought.”

I thought about a phrase I had seen in one of those letters, suggesting that James Hudson had learned something of great importance from “Trevor.”

“Then again, what if it
wasn't
barrels of bank notes, and Trevor had nothing to do with it? What if Beddoes and Prendergast were—well, not partners, I guess, since he threw Beddoes off the ship, but say they had a kind of friendship? In Dr Watson's account, Prendergast goes around telling his fellow convicts that there's about to be a mutiny and encouraging them to join him. If he'd then told Beddoes what his treasure was—that thing he was holding ‘between his finger and thumb'—and Beddoes told Trevor…Could James Hudson have learned about it from him all those years later?”

“After I confronted Beddoes in the autumn of 1879,” Holmes mused, “he fled for America. For the sake of argument, say that Prendergast filled an anonymous trunk with notes or diamonds—anything compact—and left it in a London bank. Beddoes knew about it, and how to obtain access to it. When he came back from Australia, he retrieved some whenever he needed it. Then out of the blue, Hudson came to threaten him, with me on his heels. Beddoes did not dare travel to London for the rest of the trunk's contents. He might well have intended to return, once England cooled off for him, but the man died in a railway accident, some eighteen months later.”

“Leaving a quarter million pounds sitting in some bank since 1855?”

“Since 1879, at least. By now, its value could be in the millions—or, it could be a stack of paper worth precisely nothing. The Bishop, however, is convinced both of its existence and its worth. He was an impressionable lad when Prendergast was arrested, and heard about the fraud—all of London was talking about it, not just the criminals. For seventy years, the man has lived with the itch of all that money lying in the dark, waiting for him to find it—
him,
where his father could not.”

I looked over at his tone of voice. “Why are you smiling?”

“Because it would make for a nice irony if it turned out that all the time, James Hudson had a key piece of information that would have given the old man all that money.”

“Did James Hudson and The Bishop know each other?”

“One might say that.”

I waited. Then: “Is this part of the story you're not going to tell me?”

“A part that I shall no doubt tell you someday, but not tonight.”

“All right, then let me ask this: did your financial man have any suggestions for how to render a fortune impervious to the waves?”

“In theory, there are several ways. I have set the investigative machinery in motion. However, it will take quite a while for answers to begin trickling in.”

Holmes liked neither a slowly developing case nor one that relied on the efforts of others. As if to push away that distasteful thought, he nodded at the stack of letters I had left on the low table between our chairs. “Now,” he said, “tell me what you and Billy found in Samuel Hudson's room.”

“No diamonds, thousand-pound notes, or passbook with lots of zeroes, I'm afraid, but yes: his room was not without interest.”

T
he earliest letter in Samuel Hudson's box was written on board the
Gloria Scott
and posted, according to the second of its three post-scripts, in Gibraltar.

It had taken me several minutes to absorb the meaning of that. One might think that I, of all people, would be a touch jaded when it came to revelations about supposedly fictional events, but this felt rather like coming across a racy note in Chaucerian English dashed off by the Wife of Bath or finding oneself in conversation with David Copperfield.

In any event, James Hudson's letter it was. Between his salutation and his final affectionate signature, much of the already shaky shipboard handwriting had been rendered even more illegible by stains, the wear of frequent unfolding, and some holes in the paper. (These latter were explained by the first post-script: it was sent wrapped around a doll the sailor had crafted for his yet-to-be-born child—our own Mrs Hudson!) Added to the general passage of years and the letter's considerable length, this first one took me a long time to work through.

As a detailed record of a sailor's life aboard a decrepit old boat taking thirty-eight felons to Australia, the letter was surely without parallel. Unfortunately, this sailor's life lacked somewhat when it came to drama, being heavily concerned with how much progress they made each day, what watches he had kept, and which of his fellow sailors had taken ill, broken bones, or lost a finger in the rigging. Oh, yes: and the number of maggots in his dinner.

The letter did mention Jack Prendergast, a freakishly tall and marvellously self-assured gentleman convict, but mention was all.

The second letter in Samuel Hudson's possession was by the same hand, dated three months later, on a table that remained stable during the writing. It had not been wrapped around a hand-made dolly, nor had it been read to pieces like the first.

In it lay James Hudson's version of the
Gloria Scott
sinking: how Jack Prendergast's co-conspirator, disguised as a chaplain, bought the assistance of key officers and sailors; the prisoners' violent and bloodthirsty rampage the minute they escaped their bonds; the revulsion and protest of some of the crew; the boat carrying them being loosed with little more than a chart and a barrel of water; then a short time later, the explosion, sending a plume of black smoke high into the air.

One surviving sailor, burnt and half-conscious, rescued from a floating spar.

“He white-washes the story for his wife,” I told Holmes, “beginning to end. He doesn't mention that
sailors
took part in the mutiny. He implies that he was one of the objectors who were put off the ship, and leaves her to assume that the sailor they pulled from the water was another man.”

Holmes made a small sound. I looked a question at him; he took a minute to reply. “James Hudson was…He was the second dead person I ever laid eyes on. I was eighteen. And although I knew I had to perform an examination on the body, it took me some time to work up the courage. He had old burn scars: a long one, on his back along the shoulder, and a smaller one across the palm of his right hand.”

“And this episode of Hudson's death makes for a part of the apparently very long story that you are going to tell me, sooner or later?”

“It does.”

I went on. “That's the last letter for years, at least among those in Samuel Hudson's box. There's one that lacks an envelope, and the letter itself only has ‘Your Sister's birthday' instead of the date—but Hudson then mentions that the previous day was a Sunday. I looked in the Almanac: if Mrs Hudson's birthday is the ninth of May, that day was a Monday in 1864 and 1870, then not again until 1881.”

“Hudson's wife did not die until 1866,” Holmes said. “So, yes: 1870.”

“That's what I thought. All the letters but the first two are written to Hudson's daughter Alicia—he calls her Allie—although two other hands also write on the pages. The first is…I feel odd referring to her as ‘Mrs Hudson.' ”

“Her name was Clarissa.”

“Very well,
Clarissa's
hand, with a somewhat, er, idiosyncratic spelling. Those notes are usually at the bottom of her father's letters—comments, greetings, bits of news. The other hand on the pages seems to belong to Alicia herself. Those are all notes in the margins, correcting something he has said or, more often, expressing some bitter thought about how Clarissa is having all the fun. Most of these remarks are brief, but in a few places they spill over to the back of the page, which Hudson sometimes leaves blank. The notes were done over a long period of time, and go from a child's scrawl to the writing of a grown woman, and even what I'd have said an old woman. She must have re-read the letters countless times over the years, re-living the past and, more often than not, nursing her grudges.

“The other characteristic worth mentioning is that Hudson occasionally wrote his letters while drunk. It's easy to see the difference, not only in his hand control but in the meandering quality of his thought. I mention this because there are two places where he seems to have written something indiscreet, and either blacked out the lines himself, or had Clarissa censor him. Judging by the context, the missing lines appear to give details of illegal acts.”

I raised my eyes, but Holmes did not respond. So: another item to add to my growing list of questions.

“Well, if necessary, we can look at the blacked-out portions in the laboratory. Then there's another long gap in the letters, until 1877. Hudson and Clarissa are in London, although it appears they had not told Alicia that they were going, since much of his letter takes the form of an apology for their deception and an attempt at cajoling her into forgiveness by describing in great detail a trunk of clothing being shipped to Sydney. He also points the finger of blame squarely at Clarissa, telling Alicia that it was Clarrie who insisted that they should leave Alicia behind until they had established themselves in London. At the end, Hudson makes reference to Alicia's friendship with Raymond McKenna. No doubt her future husband.

“This particular letter is almost illegible under Alicia's furious emendations—the pen nib breaks through the paper in two or three spots. Mostly she's angry about how Clarrie always got the pretty dresses, always got to do things, always was the one to travel with their father. And those notes are by no means confined to schoolgirl handwriting: in the corners, in tight little writing, she added a few gloating remarks along the lines of, ‘And little good did it do her' and ‘She got her just desserts.' She clearly never let go of what she saw as her father's betrayal, even after she was married.

“The next letter is from seven months later on—Hudson must have written it on receipt of Alicia's reply to his apology letter. Clipper ships took three or four months to go from Sydney to London, isn't that right?”

“A hundred days was a good time.”

“That would be about right, then. Her reply must have been vicious, since this one amounts to four pages of protest that no, he didn't love Clarissa the best, that Alicia was his darling girl, that he couldn't wait to see her again. She must also have told him that she and McKenna were to be married—not asked his permission, simply informed him. He spends a maudlin few paragraphs reminiscing about her childhood, although it doesn't sound like a very happy period for any of the three, and tells her clearly that he thinks she's too young to marry. But he doesn't forbid her, and he doesn't say that he wants her to come to London. He doesn't even say that he'll come to Sydney for the wedding.

“All of which she annotates in her marginalia.

“There are just two letters after that, Holmes. They say—no, they're by far the shortest in the lot, although the second one seems to have been written while he was a bit drunk, so the writing is even more chaotic than usual. Here, take the magnifying glass—you'll need it.”