Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [361]
Tompkins rubbed a hand over his mouth; he seemed to be debating the wisdom of telling me or not. I picked up the brandy bottle and set it by his elbow.
“Why, I’m much obliged, Missus Fraser! You’re a true Christian, missus, and so I shall tell anyone who asks!”
“Skip the testimonials,” I said dryly. “Just tell me what you know about the Customs officer.”
He filled the cup and drained it, sipping slowly. Then, with a sigh of satisfaction, he set it down and licked his lips.
“It wasn’t none of the smugglers done him in, missus. It was his own mate.”
“What!” I jerked back, startled, but he nodded, blinking his good eye in token of sincerity.
“That’s right, missus. There was two of ’em, wasn’t there? Well, the one of them had his instructions, didn’t he?”
The instructions had been to wait until whatever smugglers escaped the ambush on the beach had reached the road, whereupon the Customs officer was to drop a noose over his partner’s head in the dark and strangle him swiftly, then string him up and leave him, as evidence of the smugglers’ murderous wrath.
“But why?” I said, bewildered and horrified. “What was the point of doing that?”
“Do you not see?” Tompkins looked surprised, as though the logic of the situation should be obvious. “We’d failed to get the evidence from the printshop that would have proved the case of sedition against Fraser, and with the shop burnt to the ground, no possibility of another chance. Nor had we ever caught Fraser red-handed with the goods himself, only some of the small fish who worked for him. One of the other agents thought he’d a clue where the stuff was kept, but something happened to him—perhaps Fraser caught him or bought him off, for he disappeared one day in November, and wasn’t heard of again, nor the hiding place for the contraband, neither.”
“I see.” I swallowed, thinking of the man who had accosted me on the stairs of the brothel. What had become of that cask of crème de menthe? “But—”
“Well, I’m telling you, missus, just you wait.” Tompkins raised a monitory hand. “So—here’s Sir Percival, knowing as he’s got a rare case, with a man’s not only one of the biggest smugglers on the Firth, and the author of some of the most first-rate seditious material it’s been my privilege to see, but is also a pardoned Jacobite traitor, whose name will make the trial a sensation from one end of the kingdom to the other. The only trouble being”—he shrugged—“as there’s no evidence.”
It began to make a hideous sort of sense, as Tompkins explained the plan. The murder of a Customs officer killed in pursuit of duty would not only make any smuggler arrested for the crime subject to a capital charge, but was the sort of heinous crime that would cause a major public outcry. The matter-of-fact acceptance that smugglers enjoyed from the populace would not protect them in a matter of such callous villainy.
“Your Sir Percival has got the makings of a really first-class son of a bitch,” I observed. Tompkins nodded meditatively, blinking into his cup.
“Well, you’ve the right of it there, missus, I’ll not say you’re wrong.”
“And the Customs officer who was killed—I suppose he was just a convenience?”
Tompkins sniggered, with a fine spray of brandy. His one eye seemed to be having some trouble focusing.
“Oh, very convenient, Missus, more ways than one. Don’t you grieve none on his account. There was a good many folk glad enough to see Tom Oakie swing—and not the least of ’em, Sir Percival.”
“I see.” I finished fastening the bandage about his calf. It was getting late; I would have to get back to the sickbay soon.
“I’d better call someone to take you to your hammock,” I said, taking the nearly empty bottle from his unresisting hand. “You should rest your leg for at least three days; tell your officer I said you can’t go aloft until I’ve taken out the stitches.”
“I’ll do that, missus, and I thank you for your kindness to a poor unfortunate