The Luminaries

Wells’s own grave,which was presumption; and he had proposed that the legal debacle over Wells’s estate had been planned in advance as a kind of eclipse, a decoy—this last, Nilssen thought, was downright fantasy. Pritchard could not account for the phial of laudanum; he could not produce a motivation, or a plausible suspect … and yet the commission merchant could not discount the man’s convictions altogether, however much he disliked the manner in which they were expressed.
    Nilssen did not share the chemist’s rapt intoxication with the plumbing of the deep: the quest for truth did not possess him as it did his guest. Pritchard became very strange when speaking of his passions, the elixirs that he brewed and tasted under the low ceiling of his laboratory, the resins and powders that he bought and sold in clouded jars. There was something cold and hard about the man, Nilssen thought—diverting his own ill feeling, as he often did, into a principle of aesthetic distaste.
    At last, and with the air of vexation that always passed over him whenever another man’s argument showed a deficiency in his own, Nilssen took his pipe from his mouth and said, ‘Well—perhaps Wells had a contact down at the Reserve. Killarney—or a Company man—’
    ‘No.’ Pritchard struck the desk with splayed fingers; he had been waiting for Nilssen to guess wrongly, and he had his counter- argument prepared. ‘This is a Chinaman’s work. I’d bet any money. The joss at Kawarau was always full of fellows without a permit—they shared the miner’s rights between them. No man can tell two of them apart, you see, and one name’s as good as another, when it comes from a foreign tongue. It’s all outside jobs in Chinatown. If this was a Company affair it would look—’
    ‘Cleaner?’ Nilssen sounded hopeful.
    ‘The opposite. When a fellow has to cover his prints—when he has to use the tradesman’s entrance, instead of coming in through the foyer as he’s known to do—that’s when he has to start making provisions, sacrifices. Do you see? A man on the inside has to contend with the pawns—with all the pieces of the system. But a man on the outside can deal with the Devil direct.’
    It was expressions of this kind that Nilssen particularly disliked. He dropped his gaze again to the bill of sale.
    ‘Chinatown Forge,’ Pritchard said. ‘You mark my guess. One fellow does all the furnace work. His name is Quee.’
    ‘You’ll speak to him?’ said Nilssen, looking up.
    ‘Actually,’ said the chemist, ‘I was hoping that you would. I’m in a spot of bother with the Orientals at the moment.’
    ‘Dare I ask why?’
    ‘Oh—bad business is all. Trade secrets. Opium,’ Pritchard said. He turned his hand over and then let it fall into his lap.
    Nilssen frowned. ‘You ship your opium from
China
?’
    ‘Good Lord, no,’ Pritchard said. ‘From Bengal.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘It’s more of a personal dispute. On account of the whore who nearly died.’
    ‘Anna,’ Nilssen said. ‘Anna Wetherell.’
    Pritchard scowled: he had not wanted to use her name. He turned his head away and watched the raindrops swell and gather under the lip of the sash window.
    In the brief pause before he resumed speaking, Nilssen was startled by the thought that perhaps the chemist loved her: Anna Wetherell, the whore. He tested the possibility in his mind, enjoying it. The girl was uncommonly striking—she moved with a weary, murderous languor, like a disaffected swan—but she was rather more volatile in her tempers than Nilssen liked in a girl, and her beauty (in fact Nilssen would not call her beautiful; he reserved that word for virgins and angelic forms) was too knowing for his taste. She was also an opium eater, a habit that showed in her features as a constant blur, and in her manner as a fathomless exhaustion—this compulsion was unbecoming enough, and now she was a would-be suicide, besides. Yes, Nilssen thought: she was just the kind of girl for whom Pritchard would fall. They would meet in darkness; their encounters would be feverish and doomed.
    Here the commission merchant missed his mark. Nilssen’s guesses were always of the self-confirming sort: he tended to favour whichever proofs best pleased his sense of principle, and equally, tohold fast to whichever principles best lent themselves to proof. He talked often of virtue, and so gave the impression of a most encouraging and optimistic temper, but his faith