The Luminaries

of Lauderback’s jaw as the other man chewed. In the end he chose the more protracted route. ‘Up and through.’
    ‘Oh well,’ Lauderback said, swallowing. ‘These things can’t be helped, I suppose. Not in the shipping business. But you’ll let me know the moment it gets here—won’t you?’
    ‘Ay—of course. Yes. I will.’
    ‘I shall look forward to it,’ said Lauderback. He hesitated. ‘I say—Tom—there’s another thing. You must understand that what I’ve told you this morning—’
    ‘Strictest confidence,’ Balfour blurted out. ‘Won’t tell a soul.’
    ‘With my campaign at the point of—’
    ‘No need for that.’ Balfour shook his head. ‘No need to say it. Mum’s the word.’
    ‘Good man.’ Lauderback pushed his chair back and slapped his knees with both hands. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Poor Jock, and poor Augustus. I have been unutterably rude.’
    ‘Yes—poor Jock, poor Augustus, yes,’ said Balfour, motioning with his hand that Lauderback was free to leave—but Lauderback, humming now through his teeth, was already reaching for his coat.
    Thomas Balfour’s heart was beating very fast. He was unused to the awful compression that comes after a lie, when it dawns upon the liar that the lie he has uttered is one to which he is now bound; that he must now keep lying, and compound smaller lies upon the first, and be shuttered in lonely contemplation of his own mistake. Balfour would wear his falsehood as a fetter, until the shipping crate was found. He needed to do it quickly—and without Lauderback’s knowledge, let alone his help.
    ‘Mr. Lauderback,’ he said, ‘I think you ought to go and play the politician for a while. Go shake some hands, you know. Throw the dice. Play some bowls. Spend a night at the theatre. Leave all this aside.’
    ‘What about you?’
    ‘I’ll go down the wharf and ask a round of questions. What Carver’s up to, where he’s gone.’
    A shadow of alarm passed over Lauderback’s face. ‘Thought you said he’d gone to Canton. Isn’t that what you said? Tea-trading?’
    ‘But we ought to make sure,’ Balfour said. ‘We ought to be ready.’ He was thinking about the missing shipping crate, and the new possibility that Francis Carver might have stolen it. (But what need had Carver of avenging himself
twice
upon Alistair Lauderback—when the first blackmail had come off without a hitch?)
    ‘Discreetly,’ said Lauderback. ‘Discreetly—when you ask your questions.’
    ‘Nothing to it,’ said Balfour. ‘The fellows know me down on Gibson Quay, and you remember I’ve done a fair patch of shipping with
Godspeed
. Anyway: better me than you.’
    ‘Yes—better,’ said Lauderback. ‘Yes. All right. You do that, then.’ He nodded.
    In fact this was the very kind of delegation to which AlistairLauderback was accustomed, as a man of means. It was not strange to him that Balfour should devote his Saturday to straightening out another man’s affairs. He did not pause to wonder whether Balfour could be risking his own reputation, by associating himself with a story of cuckoldry, blackmail, murder, and revenge, and nor did he spare a thought for how Balfour might be recompensed. He felt only relief. An invisible order had been restored: the same kind of order that ensured his boiled egg was ready every morning, and the dishes cleared away. He plumped the knot of his necktie with his fingers, and rose from the table as a man refreshed.
    Lightly Balfour said, ‘And you ought to steer clear of Lydia Wells, I think. Just because—’
    ‘Of course, of course, of course,’ said Lauderback. He picked up his gloves with his left hand, and reached to shake Balfour’s hand with his right. ‘We’ll get the bastard, won’t we?’
    Suddenly Balfour realised that Lauderback knew exactly the nature of the twinkle by which Frank Carver had him tied. He could not have explained how he arrived at this sudden realisation —but all at once, he knew.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, shaking Lauderback’s hand very firmly. ‘We’ll get the bastard, by and bye.’

MARS IN SAGITTARIUS
    In which Cowell Devlin makes a poor first impression; Te Rau Tauwhare offers information at a price; Charlie Frost is suspicious; and we learn the crime of which Francis Carver was convicted, years ago
.
    When a restless spirit is commissioned, under influence, to solve a riddle for another man, his energies are, at first, readily and faithfully applied. But Thomas Balfour’s