Charlotte’s look was scornful. ‘You think women are not capable of intelligence work?’
‘So you two are not, er…’
‘No.’ She smiled at Laura. ‘We get on very well as colleagues. As anything else – ’ She rolled her eyes.
‘So what exactly happened this evening?’ Jared asked. ‘I rather think we had better start by explaining exactly who we are and what we have been doing.’
It took half an hour, even with Jared’s concise summary. The Hoggets – Theo could not help thinking of them still as a couple – listened intently.
‘Right. Well, the first thing to say is that Jerry Harris, the landlord of the Mermaid, is working with us,’ Hogget said. ‘That’s not to say that he’s nothing to do with smuggling and I’d be obliged if the local magistrate would turn a blind eye to that.’
When Perry nodded Charlotte picked up the explanation. ‘His elder brother Bill used to be the landlord but he was killed in ’08 and Jerry inherited. He’d just been discharged from the Navy – you wouldn’t realise it unless he’s tired or has to move fast, but his right leg was broken badly and he wears a brace on it.’
‘He hadn’t been here long when he began to get suspicious about Bill’s death,’ Hogget continued, taking over as though he and his partner were used to reporting this way. ‘At first it was thought to be an accident, that he’d fallen from the ladder down to the cellar and hit his head on the stone floor. But as the locals began to trust Jerry they started to talk. Someone had been threatening Bill and he’d started carrying a cudgel and a knife all the time. But he wouldn’t say what it was.’
‘He asked me about it,’ Will said. ‘I had conducted the funeral and I had seen the body. Jerry Harris wanted to know if I noticed anything strange about it.
‘I told him I’d thought it odd that he was lying where he was. The back of his head took the force of the blow and he was lying on his back, but I couldn’t work out how he had fallen from the ladder and landed just there and I told Harris that to warn him to check how safe the ladder was.’
‘Jerry seems to be stolid but he’s an intelligent man and he began to pick up whispers about men passing through Blakeney, asking unusual questions about destinations,’ Hogget said. ‘Men who were not heard of again. He’s a loyal Britisher, is Jerry, a real Navy stalwart and if someone was working with the French, giving them information, then he wasn’t going to stand for it on his territory. He started to probe and thinks that it all started in about ’05, the year my father died.’
‘And Reverend Gilpin,’ Laura added.
‘Yes. Anyway, he wrote to his old captain and he, trusting Jerry’s nose for trouble – he’d been a rock-solid coxswain – got in touch with the Admiralty and they talked to the Home Office and we were sent,’ Charlotte said. ‘James had been involved with intelligence work before his wife became so ill – ciphers and so forth – and, of course, he’s a local man. Jerry was letting us know whenever he came across someone asking about a passage across the Channel. He was giving them the names of men he knew had been going across – but we’ve no way of telling which are honest and which aren’t.’
‘So when it happens he sends for you, you follow the man and hope to protect him and, at the same time, identify who is attacking them,’ Flynn said. ‘You’ve concluded, as we did, that the murders are happening on land?’
‘Yes. And we suspect that a certain number of men are getting through because, we think, they do not appear to be carrying gold and because whoever is behind this wants to foster a legitimate network of boatmen who will do the crossing – otherwise there is no-one for agents to be recommended to. So far everyone we’ve followed has got away safely.’
‘How many men are we talking about?’ Laura asked.
‘Not many, a dozen, fifteen, a year perhaps by this route that we know of. We just haven’t been lucky yet in identifying anyone who was then attacked and we could be missing men who were asking in other taverns, of course. But with even a handful of men the sums involved can be considerable and the gold is life-blood to agents in place in France or groups planning insurrection.’
‘So who is it? And how are we going to find them?’ Perry asked, passing the decanter round.
‘That’s a good question.’ Hogget shifted in the high-backed chair and winced as his bandaged head brushed against the cushions. ‘I think I’d like to start with a look at those church papers your amiable Rector was so keen to get his hands on.’
‘We’ve looked at them,’ Perry protested. ‘All we found was the old Rector’s smuggling accounts.’
‘How good are you at recognising codes and cyphers, Lord Manners?’ Charlotte asked. ‘Because James is an expert.’
‘Right.’ Perry got up and tugged the bell pull. ‘You had best spend the night, don’t you think?’
Chapter Nineteen
Laura spread honey on her breakfast toast and considered her feelings. There was definitely pleasure at the presence of the Hoggets, as she had to think of them. They were allies in the effort to solve the mystery and, in Charlotte, she thought she had found a friend.
Then there was the ache of loving Theo, always there, always waiting in ambush to smudge black misery across the moment. Was it better or worse to know that he felt the same way about her? Possibly worse, she concluded. If it had been hopelessly one-sided then she would have had to live with it. But now she knew if only he had not made that proposal just before coming to Norfolk they could have been blissfully happy together.
No-one dies of love, she told herself. Shakespeare had said so. Was it Love’s Labour’s Lost or As You Like It? ‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love,’ she murmured.
‘I’m sorry, did you say something?’ Charlotte looked up from a pile of notes from Will’s box. She had them stacked beside her plate and was eating eggs with her fork in one hand while she flicked over the sheets with the other.
‘Just muttering Shakespeare to myself,’ Laura said, finding a smile from somewhere.
What Aunt Swinburn would say if she could see the breakfast parlour that morning she shuddered to think. James Hogget and Charlotte were scanning piles of dirty old papers, shedding dust, dead spiders and flakes of paper on the damask cloth. Charlotte was still in men’s clothes – I must ask her where she gets them so beautifully tailored to fit her
– and Hogget had a rakish bandage around his head and the beginnings of a black eye. Flynn had dragged Pitkin to the table with him.