The Ink Stain Page 10

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Duchamp.

  The boy nodded.

  ‘Well, better let us in then.’ Duchamp brushed past him into a cramped entrance room.

  It took Monsarrat a moment or two to adjust to the dimness, once the outer door had shut with a click that gave him an involuntary chill. The room was small with narrow windows. On top of a wooden desk a register lay open, a pen and plain clay inkpot next to it, looked over by a plain-faced clock.

  Duchamp flicked through the register casually. ‘I’d appreciate it if you could fetch Mr Crowdy.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. Mr Crowdy is not here today. A messenger came, said he was ill.’

  ‘So he left you here alone to deal with the protesters.’

  ‘Not alone, sir. There are a few other wardens about.’

  Although, thought Monsarrat, not the only one I want to talk to.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll start with you, then,’ said Duchamp. ‘Your name?’

  ‘Chancel, sir.’

  ‘Did you know Mr Hallward?’

  ‘Everyone knew of him, sir. I brought him meals once or twice. Always very polite, he was. Grateful for food, even though he was …’

  ‘He was what?’ asked Duchamp.

  ‘Even though it was no better than what the other prisoners got,’ said Chancel quickly.

  ‘Really? I understood Hallward was not above paying for a few little prison luxuries.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, sir.’

  ‘And how did he occupy his time?’ asked Monsarrat.

  ‘Like most of them,’ Chancel said. ‘Staring at the wall. Keening. Singing, from time to time. Doesn’t matter if they’re debtors or bushrangers from country roads or pickpockets from town – they all do the same.’

  ‘I see. No writing, then?’

  Chancel paused. ‘Not a good place for writing,’ he said eventually. ‘Too much moaning.’

  ‘I see.’

  Duchamp looked from Monsarrat to Chancel and back again. Perhaps, thought Monsarrat, he was trying to assess how much damage Monsarrat could do, how much he could discover without Duchamp’s supervision. The risk, he must have decided, was low. ‘Well, thank you, Chancel,’ he said. ‘Please show this gentleman to the prison yard. Monsarrat, I’ll send the coach back for you – my guard too, just in case that crowd hasn’t dispersed.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ said Chancel. But Duchamp had left by the time he finished his sentence.

  Chancel looked after him for a moment, then turned back to Monsarrat. ‘Would you add your name to the log, sir?’ he asked, nodding to the ledger under the clock. ‘I would like to make a quick round before I show you the yard – doesn’t do to leave them alone for too long. I’ll be back shortly.’

  Monsarrat took the pen, signed his name, copied the time the clock showed. As well as visitors, the register recorded other information, all crammed into the one book and organised by nothing except the date. New inmates. Dead inmates. Punishments. The arrival of the gaol cart – the one which was to have taken Hallward to trial on the day he died. This morning, it had arrived at ten o’clock. Yesterday too, and the day before that.

  Who had been here the day Hallward was killed, he wondered? He flipped back to the date. No one signed in or out. No new prisoners. But the prison cart had arrived half an hour early, at half past nine.

  It was early the day before, too. And for two days after, before resuming its habit of arriving promptly at ten.

  Was that, he thought, what Mrs Mulrooney might call a wrinkle?

  Chancel’s head appeared around the door frame. ‘Ready, sir?’

  Monsarrat closed the book quickly, as though he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t. You are investigating on behalf of the Crown, he told himself. You have every right to look at a gaol register.

  ‘Tell me, Chancel,’ he said. ‘Is the prison cart often irregular in the time it arrives?’

  Chancel shrugged. ‘From time to time sir, just like anyone. Begging your pardon but we really should get you out into the yard. I can’t leave them alone too long or there might not be a gaol left to guard.’

  Chapter 10

  Cullen wiped the crumbs from his mouth and smiled at Hannah.

  That face, she thought, had spent time under Irish rain as well as colonial sun. It had probably been doing so for about the same amount of time as Hannah’s own. It was guarded, but not pinched or cruel; handsome in its craggy way.

  Cullen had taken care to spread some old newsprint over Hallward’s desk, catching any crumbs. In a place where cupboard doors had been wrenched off their hinges and broken window glass lurked in the corners, such a gesture might have seemed futile to others, but Hannah saw it as a brave last stand against encroaching chaos.

  ‘Why do you stay here?’ she said. ‘Why not leave this place to crumble, now no one has a use for it?’

  ‘It is all that’s left of Henry Hallward, and without him there’d be nothing left of me,’ Cullen said, wiping his mouth.

  ‘What did he save you from?’

  ‘Road gang. Before my ticket came through. We’d come out from the barracks, on our way to repair some road or other. He was passing by, and he said, without a word of a lie, “Good morning, gentlemen.”’

  ‘I imagine those on a road gang aren’t used to that kind of greeting.’

  ‘Most of ’em assumed he was talking to the overseer. They knew, by that point, to keep their eyes down. But I always thought if you’re looking at the ground you might as well be in it, so I said good morning back. He smiled and tipped his hat to me. It was worth being hit by the overseer later.’

  Hannah nodded. There were two types of convicts who survived the road gangs. The ones who gave up their humanity and became brutes, and the ones who held on to the belief that they were more than animals, even when all evidence suggested otherwise.

  ‘I hope the beating was worth it,’ she said.

  ‘The acknowledgement that you are still a soul, still worthy of a good morning? Worth ten beatings. Then he came and found me, in the convict barracks. Said he needed a convict special, for lifting and fetching and carrying and so on. When he found out I had my letters, that he could dictate stories to me, he was delighted. I came here with him that afternoon. And I don’t mind if you report on this conversation to Colonel Duchamp.’

  ‘If he wanted something with you, surely he’d have sent soldiers rather than shortbread.’

  ‘I don’t know how the man thinks,’ said Cullen. ‘But I’m inclined to believe you’re not in league with him.’

  ‘I’m in league with the fellow who visited you yesterday. Mr Monsarrat.’

  ‘Who’s trying to wrap Mr Hallward’s death up in a neat little bow.’

  ‘Who’s trying to find out what happened. And who noticed your little friend yesterday. Why is the boy taking such pains not to be seen?’

  ‘You’d have to ask him.’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  Cullen shook his head. ‘He’s long gone, missus. Won’t be back until tomorrow at least.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘That’s not for me to say.’

  Hannah was convinced that talking to the boy was important. It would have to wait, though – Cullen wasn’t about to rush out and get him.

  ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if you could tell me something else. I keep hearing mention of some soldiers. Some sort of story that got Mr Hallward into trouble. Do you know anything about it?’

  ‘Ah, now that,’ said Cullen, ‘I can help you with.’ He fetched a paper from the rack and laid it on the desk, pulled Hallward’s chair out and gestured for Hannah to sit.

  ‘I’ve rarely seen him so angry,’ Cullen said. ‘And he was a man given to bursts of rage. Some of them directed at me, and for no good reason.

  ‘I brought him the mail that morning as normal. There had been a lad at the door, with a note. Folded up, nothing on the outside – nothing unusual, Mr Hallward had informers all over the town, one or t
he other of them would send him snippets of gossip almost every day. When he read this, though, well!’

  ‘It set him off?’ asked Hannah.

  ‘He jumped up, pushed his chair over and grabbed me by the neckerchief. Frightened me, I’ll be honest. I thought someone had accused me of something.’

  ‘And had they?’

  ‘As it turns out no, thanks be to God. He yelled then. “He’s dead, Cullen! Killed by the King himself, or his profane excuse for a representative.” He was always referring to the governor like that, you see, missus. I always made a mental note – no one was as good at insults as he was.’

  ‘But who had died?’

  ‘A soldier. A Private Hogg.’

  ‘And murdered by the governor?’

  ‘Mr Hallward liked to exaggerate. But truly, missus, he might as well have been. This place. It makes animals of us. Soldiers, convicts. Doesn’t matter. They drain our souls, then feel justified in destroying our bodies.’

  He turned to Hannah, blinked a few times. ‘Private Hogg and his friend, Private Johnson. Word was they were sick of seeing convicts succeed. People who had come here not to serve their country but to pay for their crime. But neither of those lads were able to leave the army. So they stole a cloak. Their thinking was, get themselves arrested, do their time, and then they’d be at liberty to make their fortune.’

  ‘Seems an odd way to go about it,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Best way to get the army to release them,’ said Cullen. ‘Some convicts, well, they’ve become rich beyond what a private soldier could ever expect. And they have liberty to go into trade, to increase their wealth, while all a soldier can expect is to be paid whatever His Majesty thinks he’s worth until he dies or is no longer up for the job. It would amaze you, missus, the wealth of some of those who came here as convicts.’

  ‘I’m sure it would. You think they were justified in their theft?’

  ‘I can understand it,’ said Cullen.

  ‘But why did one of them end up dead?’

  ‘Well, as Mr Hallward said, it was the governor. He viewed the deliberate commission of a crime by a soldier as treason and was determined to stamp it out. Hogg and Johnson were unfortunate enough to commit their crime shortly after Darling arrived. Hogg – he wasn’t well at the time. It would have been fine if he’d just been put on a road gang somewhere, but the governor changed their punishment – he had heavy chains specially made for them. They stumbled around under the blazing sun on the road gang. And for Hogg, it was just too much. He didn’t last a week.’

  ‘Did the governor relent?’

  ‘Him? No, he made Johnson wear Hogg’s chains as well as his own. Only rescinded the order last week. I would like to think Mr Hallward had a hand in that.’

  ‘And that’s why he was in gaol, your Mr Hallward?’

  ‘One of the stories got him arrested, yes. He said the governor’s actions were illegal. The governor was a murderer. I think if he hadn’t been arrested, he would have been disappointed. The constables came the morning this was published. Mr Hallward just stood up and went with them, without even asking their business. They didn’t try to restrain him. They’d all done that dance before.’

  Cullen tapped the paper he had laid in front of Hannah earlier.

  It was a copy of the Sydney Chronicle, with a long story underneath the headline ‘The Governor’s Tyranny’. The first paragraph read: ‘It is a sad duty of this journal to inform the residents of this colony that they live not as subjects of the King, but as serfs of a dictator.’

  ‘Did Gerald Mobbs criticise the governor?’ asked Hannah.

  Cullen went back to the pigeon holes, extracted a newspaper and silently handed it to Hannah. This one bore the masthead of the Colonial Flyer. Mobbs had written:

  None of us wishes death on anyone, and the death of Private Hogg is a great pity. But those whose shrill voices are raised in cries of ‘murder’ should instead be thanking the governor. For it is he who, in making this difficult choice, has ensured no other young men will follow a similar path, and one which might end in their grave.

  Those who thunder that the governor’s actions were illegal know better – a crime was committed, and it was punished to the fullest extent. There are many in this colony who would understand nothing less.

  Hannah was tempted to shred the paper with its sanctimonious defence of torture. Instead she handed it back to Cullen. ‘And do you think the governor’s a murderer?’

  ‘I’ve lived under the British yoke. I expect them to treat me like cattle. But when they do that to their own soldiers, how much worse will they do to us?’

  Hannah felt a fullness behind her eyes. ‘Oh, they are capable of far worse,’ she said. ‘I have seen it. In Enniscorthy, on Vinegar Hill. At the front door of my father’s house.’

  Cullen looked at her and slowly nodded. ‘Erin go bragh.’

  ‘Erin go bragh,’ she repeated quietly.

  He patted her hand. ‘Come along then, missus. I shouldn’t keep you all to myself.’

  Monsarrat had seen yards like this before. He had seen people flogged in them, and hanged in them. He had a macabre habit of checking the flagstones for stains, and then talking himself out of believing they were some poor soul’s blood.

  This yard, though, was a little different. It had the usual stains, high walls and oppressive air. It had two exits: the small door he had just walked through, which for some prisoners led to eternity; and a larger wooden gate, through which a cart could be brought to deliver fresh inmates, or take those already in residence to the judgement of the court. But it also had an audience: the blank windows of several surrounding houses had an excellent view over some parts of the yard.

  ‘Chancel!’ he called out.

  Judging by the speed of the boy’s appearance, he had been waiting just out of sight.

  ‘Where was Hallward killed, exactly?’ Monsarrat asked.

  ‘Somewhere in this yard, sir.’

  ‘He was being loaded into the prison cart,’ said Monsarrat. ‘Where is it normally when receiving a prisoner?’

  ‘Generally right in the middle of the yard, sir.’

  ‘And Hallward would have been facing … where?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, sir. I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Yes, yes, we’ve established that. But in the normal run of things.’

  ‘The cart would be brought in through that gate there,’ said Chancel, pointing across the yard. ‘So he would have walked up to it – well – this way.’

  Chancel took a few steps towards the gate, and stopped.

  ‘No one found any musket balls, anything of that nature?’ asked Monsarrat. ‘It would help us determine what weapon the killer used.’

  ‘No, sir. Whatever killed him probably left the yard in his head.’

  ‘Thank you, Chancel. Oh, the prisoners have recently been afforded the luxury of a clean cell. So I hear, anyway.’

  ‘Well, we did have the place cleaned. It happens, from time to time.’

  ‘And can you remember the last time it happened?’

  Chancel was silent.

  Monsarrat sighed. ‘Very well. Thank you.’

  Chancel nodded, scampered off.

  Monsarrat paced towards the spot on which Chancel had been standing and looked down. He found himself on top of a large red-brown stain, the ebbing life of Henry Hallward consumed by the porous stone. He stepped back as if bitten.

  As much to avoid looking down again as for any other reason, he looked up and found himself staring straight into the dark windows of a row of shuttered attics.

  ‘Never see anyone there,’ the woman said. ‘And I’m observant.’

  The armchair Monsarrat had passed on the way into the house was testament to that. Well upholstered, like its owner, but leaking stuffing. The chair, once a deep red, was also faded from its placement in the sun near a window, from where its occupant could see the comings and goings on the street.

  Monsarrat had nearl
y missed this house and its curious occupant. He had lost track of time, having resumed staring at the stain on the stones, wondering how deeply it seeped between the grains of compressed sand, when Chancel had come into the yard.

  ‘If you’ve all you need, sir?’ he asked, glancing nervously to the gaol door and no doubt thinking of the inmates behind it.

  ‘Yes. I think so. I may call on you again, Chancel, as the investigation unfolds.’

  ‘Yes, sir. With the colonel’s permission, of course.’

  ‘Chancel, the colonel brought me here. I think you can assume I have his permission.’

  Mrs Selwyn must have seen Monsarrat leaving the gaol, because as soon as he was on the pavement, she was out on her front step, waving to him. As he approached, she called out, ‘Do you know anything?’

  Monsarrat had a convict’s instinctive dislike of the overly curious. Still, when it came to an investigation, the curtain twitcher was a very useful species. This one had told Monsarrat about everyone in the surrounding houses. He’d heard more than he’d ever wanted to know about Mary Lennon’s well-deserved gout and Harold Smith’s fondness for drink.

  There was only one house that so far Mrs Selwyn had failed to enlighten Monsarrat about: the tallest one visible from the gaol yard. One with an attic.

  ‘Odd,’ he said, ‘that it should just be sitting empty.’

  ‘Not as odd as all that,’ she said. ‘It belongs to a man who has a property in the west. He’s not always in Sydney and doesn’t often stay here when he is.’

  Monsarrat was on his third cup of tea, and the distillation suffered greatly by comparison to Mrs Mulrooney’s brews.

  Mrs Selwyn leaned forward, putting a hand over his. ‘Although – one hears things. A squeaking hinge, a creak. Ghosts, probably – you do see the occasional shape moving about in there, shadows on the drapes late at night. I don’t sleep as well as I once did, not since Mr Selwyn died.’ The pressure of her hand on his increased as she leaned further forward. ‘I’m a widow.’