Page 88 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

I turned to find Harcourt standing exactly where he had been, the revolver still raised and his finger still on the trigger. He looked down at his coat, blooming red, with the expression of a man who had been handed a card he did not expect.

The revolver slipped from his hand and struck the deck. He went down against the black launch’s rail, slowly, in stages, and sat there.

Forty feet off our quarter, on the fore deck of a Thames Division launch that had come up out of the smoke of the reach without any of us marking it, Chief Inspector Graves stood at the rail with his arm out, the pistol still level, and his face perfectly white.

“Police!” somebody was roaring, and then a great many of them were roaring it. “Throw them down! Throw them down and stand where you are!”

It ended the way those things end, which is to say all at once and stupidly. Revolvers hit the planks. Hands went up all along the deck. Somebody forward began explaining that he was only the engineer, at length, to nobody.

Constables came over both rails and across a plank they ran out between the hulls. A young one got down beside Harcourt and put a folded handkerchief against his coat.

I crossed to him and went down on one knee on the wet boards. I had seen enough to know the look of a man with a quarter of an hour left, and he had a good deal less than that. There was a red edge on every breath he took. He had not put his hand to the wound, which told me he understood his position better than the boy with the handkerchief did.

He was looking at Rosalynd who had come up behind me. She did not come closer but simply looked at him with her ruined hands held against her and gave him nothing at all.

“You were the only one,” he said again.

“I never wished to be.”

Something crossed his face that might, in another man, have been affection.

I asked him the only question I had left. I put it to him plainly, because there was no time for anything else. “What is your name?”

He turned his head half an inch and looked at me, and there was a great deal in it. Amusement, chiefly. The amusement of a man who had been asked for the one thing he still owned.

He held my eyes and did not answer.

That is how he did it, in the end. Not with a speech. He lay against the rail of his own launch with a policeman kneeling over him and a duke asking him his name. He did not say a word. He simply kept his mouth shut and let the whole of it go into the river with him.

It took him another minute or two.

I stayed where I was until it was finished. So did Rosalynd. Neither of us said anything further.

And the constable went on pressing the handkerchief even after there was no point to it.

Chapter

Thirty-Three

A Price Paid

When the last pistol went down onto the boards there was nothing left to hear but the river, going along the side of a broken launch in Bugsby’s Reach the way it had gone along it all afternoon and would go along it all night.

For some while I did not move at all.

Steele had both arms round me, holding me as if he would never let me go. I did not ask him to let me go. I simply put my forehead against his shoulder and shut my eyes.

“I told myself the whole way down the river that you would come,” I said. “I did not believe a word of it. And you came anyway.”

His arms tightened. “I was very nearly too late.”

“You were not.”

“Two minutes, Rosalynd.”

“You were not too late. You were exactly on time,” I said into his coat, and that was the end of that argument.

The world went on around us in the way the world does. Somebody was calling for a surgeon. Somebody else was taking names from men sitting on the deck with their hands on their heads. Lines went across. Another Thames Division launch came alongside. Constables went back and forth over the wreckage, and somewhere behind me a sergeant was demanding to know who had put a boat through the rail.