He held his brother’s desperate gaze. “What happened?”
“I was in a tavern—the Crown and Anchor,” David began.
“When?” Solomon asked.
David blinked, as though distracted from whatever images were filling his head. “Last night. It wasn’t late, but I’d been there for a while. Don’t know why—dismal kind of a place, but I know people who drink there. Only they weren’t around last night.”
He had been lonely, Solomon surmised. A feeling he knew well enough. “Go on.”
“I saw this fellow I knew. Couldn’t recall his name orhowI knew him, but he was…out of place, somehow. So eventually I couldn’t stand it, and when he was alone, I went up to him and asked him his name and where we’d met before. He told me to—er…take myself off, in no uncertain terms. In fact, he was loud and offensive.”
“What did you do?” Solomon asked with foreboding.
David’s lips quirked. “I took myself off.”
“Without a quarrel?”
“Oh yes. I’m the stranger here.”
And in the Crown and Anchor—a somewhat dangerous den of iniquity—a stranger who quarreled with one man quarreled with the entire public house.
“I had another drink and tried to think of something else, but then I began to remember, as if I were seeing it all over again.”
“Seeing what?” Solomon prompted him.
“How he died the first time, on the deck of a ship. Years ago. He was different, then, well dressed, with a big, gold watch on a chain. Not the ship’s captain but the owner of the cargo—and maybe the ship, too, I don’t know. Some rich merchant, anyway. And he caught this poor sailor pilfering his spices. Furious, he was, hit the sailor hard with a club. But the sailor wouldn’t lie down. He turned on the merchant and fought back, seized the club off him and beat him to death with it.”
“Did no one intervene?” Constance asked, appalled.
“Not at first. It was nighttime. There must have been someone on watch—maybe the thieving sailor, I don’t know. Maybe me. The details are hazy. But the noise of the fight certainly brought people running, including the captain, who had the sailor disarmed. Too late. The merchant was dead, and the thieving sailor locked up.”
“And you believe this merchant was the man you thought you recognized last night?” Solomon asked.
David nodded. “It made me uneasy. So I stopped watching him, had another pint, and decided to leave. Only when I got outside…”
Solomon and Constance both gazed at him as he stared off into nothing, then swallowed hard.
“When I got outside,” David said, “there he was again. Lying on his back with blood on his chest. He was dead. Again. I know, ’cause I knelt beside him, felt for breath or a pulse. Nothing. I tried to think who to tell, but I’d already been seen. A shout went up of ‘Murder!’ I ran for it. Some people seemed to be chasing someone else. Others ran after me for a bit—at least one of them was a policeman, but I kept running.”
“I can see why,” Constance said slowly. “You were the stranger, the dead man had insulted you, and you were seen kneeling over the body. Justice isn’t always fair. But your story doesn’t make any sense. How could this dead man be the same as the man you saw killed on the deck of a ship years ago?”
“And even more to the point,” Solomon added, “what makes you say you killed him, when you found him outside the Crown and Anchor already dead?”
David’s eyes were haunted, anguished. “Because I think I killed him the first time, too.”
Solomon leaned back in his chair, staring at the stranger who was his brother. “You thinkyouwere the thieving sailor? Why? You described it to us as though you had watched events unfold before your eyes.”
“That’s how it plays in my memory. Like on a stage. Butwhywas I watching if I didn’t intervene? If I didn’t try to stop the fight or even bring help?”
“Maybe you did,” Constance said. “Maybeyoubrought the captain on deck.”
David shook his head, almost violently. “That’s not how I see it.”
“But with the best will in the world,” Solomon said, “your memory is not reliable.”
David licked his lips as though they were dry again. “Myheadis not reliable,” he said. “I see things, imagine things, and then I’m sure of none of it.”
“What things?” Solomon asked.
