The Luminaries

his own tastes. This attitude was affectionately reinforced by his friends, who thought him vivacious and amusing, and scorned by his detractors, who thought him affected and self-absorbed—but these latter voices were subdued in Nilssen’s ears, and he spent no effort to better make them out.
    Harald Nilssen was famous in Hokitika for the high style of his dress. That afternoon he was wearing a knee-length frock coat with silk-faced lapels of a charcoal hue, a dark red vest, a grey bow tie, and cashmere striped morning trousers. His silk hat, which was hanging on a hatstand behind his desk, was of the same charcoal hue as his coat; beneath it was propped a silver-tipped stick with a curved handle. To complete this costume (for so he perceived of hisdaily dress: as a costume that could be completed, to effect) he smoked a pipe, a fat calabash with a bitten-down stem—though his affection for the instrument had less to do with the pleasures of the habit than for the opportunity for emphasis it provided. He often held it in his teeth unlit, and spoke out of the corner of his mouth like a comic player delivering an aside—a comparison which suited him, for if Nilssen was vain of the impressions he created, it was because he knew that he created them very well. Today, however, the mahogany bowl was warm, and he was pulling on the stem with considerable agitation. The hour of his luncheon was past, but he was not thinking of his stomach, and nor of the ruddy-cheeked barmaid at the Nonpareil, who called him Harry and always saved the choicest edges of the piecrust for his plate. He was frowning down at a yellow bill upon his desktop, and he was not alone.
    At length he pulled his pipe from his teeth and lifted his eyes to meet the gaze of the man sitting opposite him. He said, in a low voice, ‘I’ve done no wrong. I’ve done nothing below the law.’
    He spoke with only a very slight Norwegian accent: thirty years in Bath had made him all but British in his inflexions.
    ‘It’s who stands to profit,’ said Joseph Pritchard. ‘That’s what a justice will be looking for. Seems you made a very tidy profit by this man’s death.’
    ‘By the legal sale of his estate! Which I took on
after
he was already in the ground!’
    ‘In the ground—but warm, I think.’
    ‘Crosbie Wells drank himself to death,’ said Nilssen. ‘There was no cause for an inquest, nothing untoward. He was a drunk and a hermit, and when I received these papers I believed his estate would be small. I had no idea about the ’bounder.’
    ‘You’re saying this was just a lucky piece of business.’
    ‘I’m saying I’ve done nothing below the law.’
    ‘But
someone
has,’ Pritchard said. ‘
Someone
is behind this. Who knew about the ’bounder? Who waited till Crosbie Wells was six feet deep, then sold off his land so quiet and so quick, without ever going to auction—who put the papers in? And who planted my laudanum under his cot?’
    ‘You say
planted
—’
    ‘It was planted,’ Pritchard said. ‘I’ll take my oath on that. I never sold that man a dram. I know my faces, Harald. I never sold a single dram to Crosbie Wells.’
    ‘Well then, there you are! You can prove that! Show your records, and receipts—’
    ‘We have to look beyond our own part in this design!’ Pritchard said. When he spoke vehemently he did not raise his voice, but lowered it. ‘We’re
associated.
Trace it back far enough, and you’ll find an author. It’s all of a piece.’
    ‘Do you suggest this was planned—in advance?’
    Pritchard shrugged. ‘Looks like murder to me,’ he said.
    ‘Conspiracy to murder,’ Nilssen corrected him.
    ‘What’s the difference?’
    ‘The difference is in the charge. It would be conspiracy to murder—we’d be convicted for the intention, not for the act itself. Crosbie wasn’t killed by another man’s hand, you know.’
    ‘So we’ve been told,’ Pritchard said. ‘Do you trust the coroner, Mr. Nilssen? Or will you take a spade in your own hands, and bring the hermit’s body up?’
    ‘Don’t be ghastly.’
    ‘I’ll tell you this: you’d find more than one corpse in the hole.’
    ‘Don’t, I said!’
    ‘Emery Staines,’ Pritchard said, relentlessly. ‘What the devil happened to him, if he wasn’t killed? You think he turned to vapour?’
    ‘Of course not.’
    ‘Wells died, Staines vanished. All in a matter of hours. Wells is buried two days later … and what better place to hide a body,