Come to Grief Read online

  “I could certainly try. Could I do one chapter for you so you can see a sample of my work?”

  He looked away from her, and for a minute she thought he hadn’t heard her. Then he turned back. “You could, but there is a little problem.”

  She waited.

  “The full manuscript is in Dunedin at my old home. Someone has to collect it. I’d pay the fare, of course, and the cost of a night or two in a hotel.”

  Her heart sank. She was in no position to go all the way to the south of the South Island to fetch his papers by herself. And it wouldn’t be worth Frank’s time to go. He did better with the horses. Although, if he brought back some horses as well…that might be the solution.

  “Perhaps my husband would go. I’m on the way to meet him now. Come with me and we’ll find out.”

  The Armed Constabulary Depot bustled with activity. Soldiers in mufti loaded boxes of something onto carts — ammo by the look of it — encouraged by a sergeant with a booming voice. Off to the Front, no doubt. She was sick of all the talk about the Front, and the talk of war against the rebel Maori. She had come to New Zealand to escape a war, and hated knowing that fighting might happen in her new home.

  Frank was in the yard talking to Colonel Roberts, the man to whom he reported. The colonel, a thin, stooping Englishman with a long, drooping moustache that ran into his beard on either side of his face, was doing his best to look down at Frank, who towered over him. As she always did, Mette felt a little flutter in her heart when she saw her handsome husband.

  Frank saw her enter and excused himself, saluting the colonel who gave a langorous half-salute back, apparently too tired to complete the gesture.

  He came over and picked up Sarah Jane, tickling her neck with his beard, which made her giggle and squirm. “How’s my little girl?” He glanced at Mette. “I mean, how are both my girls.”

  “The pram ran away from me, and Sarah Jane almost got hurt,” she said, not mentioning her ankle, which still throbbed.

  He frowned. “You need to be more careful.”

  “Professor Mann saved her.” She smiled at her new acquaintance. “He stepped in front of the pram and stopped it with his body.”

  Professor Mann cleared his throat. That wasn’t exactly what had happened. He had stopped the pram by accident. But he said nothing to disabuse Frank, who clapped him on the shoulder. “How brave of you. Thank you.”

  “The professor is a teacher at the new university.”

  “Is that so?” Frank returned to pulling faces at Sarah Jane. Much to her surprise, he was the most doting of fathers, although only as long as she behaved. As soon as Sarah Jane began to act like a normal baby, he would hand her back to Mette.

  She took a deep breath. Time to bring the conversation around to Dunedin, and the manuscript she had decided he was going to fetch for the professor.

  “How many horses did you bring back this time?”

  For a minute he ignored her question, focussing on pulling himself away from Sarah Jane who had grabbed his nose and was trying to latch on to it with her mouth. He freed himself, handed her the baby, and said, “Three.”

  She was shocked. “Only three? How…?” She stopped, not wanting to mention their finances in front of the professor. Frank shrugged his apologies.

  “I’ve been offered some work that might bring in good money,” he said. “Colonel Roberts wants to send me further afield for another trip. More of an investigation.”

  “Where?” She hoped he would say Dunedin, but did not expect that he would.

  “The South Island. Lyttelton, Dunedin, Bluff Harbour, and back.”

  A miracle had taken place! Now she just had to persuade him to get the manuscript.

  “Professor Mann has something he’d like us to do. He wants me to translate his work, but the it has to be picked up in Dunedin. I was hoping you could go…and now that you’re going there anyway, you could get it.”

  He thought about it. “I’m going down by sea on the SS Tararua, and it docks in Dunedin to take on passengers, but I don’t think I’d have time to get into town, pick up the manuscript, and get back to the ship before it left. And I have to keep an eye on some people, so I couldn’t even guarantee I’d be able to leave the ship.”

  “There’s a train from the port into town,” said the professor. “Running on the hour. The house is in the centre of the city. You could get there and back to the ship very quickly.”

  Frank eyed him. She knew money was about to come up. “Would you pay for one fare?” he asked.

  The professor nodded.

  Frank turned to Mette. “Why don’t you come with me on the Tararua? You could disembark in Dunedin and take the train into town, and then catch the train to the Bluff the next day. We’d arrive around the same time. My fare is already being covered with the job I’ll be doing.”

  He had taken her breath away. To have an opportunity to see the South Island, which everyone said was the most beautiful place in the world, thrilled her. There was only one problem.

  “What about the children?” In addition to Sarah Jane, they had an adopted son, a Maori boy who had been forced from his village with his brother and sister when the chief sold it to the government. His only relative was his grandmother.

  “Joey won’t be back from Palmerston for another week. I’m sure his grandmother will keep him longer if necessary. I’ll send her a telegram. And couldn’t you leave Sarah Jane with someone? What about the girl you have coming in to help you, Bridget? Wouldn’t she stay with her?”

  Mette frowned. “She’s much too young and unreliable.” Leave Sarah Jane with Bridget? She wouldn’t sleep a wink the whole time she was away. “No. I’ll take her with me.”

  “You could take the pram…” said Frank.

  Finally, a chance to rid herself of the bloody pram! Miraculous. “I’ll carry her on my back.” She tried not to grin. “Like the Maori women do, with a shawl wrapped around both of us and under her bottom. Then I won’t have to push her around all the time.”

  The professor pulled out his pocket book. “I can give you an advance,” he said to Mette. “Would five pounds cover everything?”

  Before she could agree, Frank jumped in. “Five is a bit tight. Seven would probably be better. She’ll need to stay in a hotel for the night, and pay for the train to the Bluff. And the fare on the Tararua is thirty shillings.”

  The professor opened his pocketbook and took out two bank notes. He handed them to Mette. “I’ll write down the address for you. It’s a boarding house, and the owner is Frau Mann, my wife. She’ll give you my work. It’s quite large, so you’ll need to take a good-sized bag with you.”

  The professor left, after giving Mette both his own address in Wellington and the address of his wife in Dunedin. How strange that he had a wife living in another city; however, she had seen that kind of thing before. Perhaps they didn’t love each other.

  She and Frank walked along Buckle Street to Cuba Street and found a nice little cafe where they could get coffee and tea and light refreshments. He ordered both tea and coffee, with a plate of Mette’s favourite date scones. She had intended to feed the baby when they arrived home, but for now kept her distracted with crumbs of scone covered in butter, which Sarah Jane licked off Mette’s finger, her eyes half-closed in ecstasy.

  “What’s the job you have that takes you to the South Island?” she asked, after she’d finished her coffee. “It’s quite convenient for us, isn’t it, both of us having something to do down there.”

  Frank spooned some warm, sweet, milky tea into Sarah Jane’s mouth. “Remember that steamship robbery last year? Five gold ingots went missing from the Tararua, somewhere between Lyttelton and Melbourne.”

  Mette wiped some dribbled tea off Sarah Jane’s chin and nodded. “Did they ever find who did it? I don’t remember reading about an arrest.”

  “No, not even when the bank offered a reward of five hundred pounds. Now the reward is up to a thousand pounds.”
r />   Mette put her hand on her heart. “Oh my goodness. Do you have to find the gold to get the reward, or just the person who took it? A thousand pounds! Can you imagine how much that would help us?”

  “The governor of the Bank of New Zealand told Colonel Roberts they’ve been following a group of crewmen for months. The entire crew was fired after the robbery, but there were several strong suspects. Recently, three of them booked passages on the ship for the next time it sails. Two leave from Wellington tomorrow, and a third leaves from Dunedin the next day, all going to Bluff Harbour and then on to Melbourne.”

  “How can you follow three people at once?”

  “They’ll all be on the ship. I’m supposed to see if I can get one to turn on the other two. At this point the police are acting on the assumption that they’re all in on it. They think the man boarding in Dunedin might be bringing the gold with him from a hiding place in town. I’ll see if I can get to know one or the other of the men leaving from here. If I see a weakness in one, I’ll try to get him to turn on his mates. There’s a decent reward for getting one to talk, and if that leads to the recovery of the gold, then I believe I’d get the full shot.”

  “We’ll be rich,” said Mette. “How wonderful that will be. And I’ll make something as well. Two pounds a chapter for translating forty-five chapters of Professor Mann’s book. And a nice trip to the South Island as well. I’ve always wanted to see the South Island.”

  Frank squeezed her hand. “When we get to Bluff we can eat oysters together. Bluff is famous for oysters. We’ll be able to afford to eat them every day after this.”

  3

  Boarding the Tararua

  The Tararua was docked at the railway wharf in Thorndon, one of the more squalid parts of town. To get to the ship, they would need to pass by the infamous Thorndon Club, where a sixpenny membership bought a man the right to drink at any time of the day or night, and fallen women plied their trade at the same price.

  Frank didn’t want to go near the Club with Mette and Sarah Jane, but there was no other way to get to the wharf. As they neared the Club he took Mette’s elbow. “Keep your eyes on the ground. It’s pretty rough and I wouldn’t want you to fall.”

  Mette, carrying two bags in her hand and Sarah Jane on her back, glanced at him, smiling. “Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”

  As they reached the path in front of the club, a slovenly woman with a grubby white lace shawl draped provocatively around her shoulders leaned out from an upstairs window and coughed to get his attention. Frank glanced up, and she beckoned to him.

  “Hey there, handsome. Want to leave your daughter and her wee one for a minute and come on up? Sixpence a pop.”

  “What did she say?” asked Mette. She had the end of the shawl holding Sarah Jane in a tight grip to keep it from unravelling.

  “Nothing important,” said Frank. His daughter! He’d just turned forty-two and worried about his age compared to the much younger Mette, who was still in her twenties; at least he was fit and healthy and still had all his teeth and no grey hair — well, some in his beard. But he hadn’t been been mistaken for Mette’s father before.

  He was having second thoughts about taking Mette with him. If the wharf in Wellington was in a seedy part of town, might not the same be true of Dunedin? How would she manage without him? And what about Sarah Jane? He’d surprised himself with how much he adored his daughter, and worries about what might happen to the pair of them had begun to weigh on him. What had he been thinking, sending them off to a strange town alone, with Mette carrying Sarah Jane on her back like a peasant woman? And were babies that easy to carry around? Too late now to change his mind, but he decided he would at least accompany them to the railway station when they disembarked in Port Chalmers, the port servicing Dunedin.

  “We cross here.” He took her hand as they reached the Railway Hotel, guiding her past a gang of urchins who spent their days hanging around the station entrance. “Keep your eyes on the tracks. The wharf is behind the hotel.”

  On the wharf, passengers were already climbing the gangplank although the ship wasn’t sailing until high tide later that evening. A group of young men were celebrating their friend’s impending nuptials; he was on his way to Australia to meet his bride, and the others had come to bid him farewell and express their approval.

  “You’ll forget all your friends in Wellington,” one said, slipping a flask from his vest pocket. He held it out to the bridegroom, a good-looking man of around thirty with dark hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. The uniform he wore was one Frank hadn’t seen, but he suspected the wearer was an officer on the ship. The would-be bridegroom shook his head and refused the proffered flask with a smile. “I’m on duty,” he said, confirming Frank’s suspicion. “And besides, as you know, I don’t drink.”

  Nearby, a cluster of older men watched disapprovingly. Clergymen, Frank guessed. One held a bible to his chest while keeping an eye on the large bag by his feet to make sure no one ran off with it. The group had a long trip before them. The Tararua was on its way to Bluff, and then to Hobart and Melbourne, and most of the passengers were remaining on board after Bluff, including the three ex-crewmen Frank had been told to watch.

  The Tararua sat at anchor, her dark blue hull rising and falling with the incoming tide.

  “Quite the ship,” Frank said. The bracing wind and the thought of travel invigorated him; he was going to enjoy this voyage. “Beautiful lines, and those engines…it will handle anything the sea throws at it. Plow right through the swells.”

  Mette nodded distractedly, ignoring the ship. He’d hoped to calm her nerves by engaging her with small talk. Knowing her fear of fast-moving trains, he assumed she would be nervous about sea travel, even on a ship as safe as this one. The Tararua was a screw-driven steamer with powerful engines, part of the Union Steamship Company fleet, built originally for the Panama Line but now trading between Australia and New Zealand. Nothing to worry about. The ship the safest of any of the hundreds of ships in the coastal waters of New Zealand.

  As they climbed the gangplank, he took Mette’s bags from her so she could keep her balance by holding the ropes. Luckily, Sarah Jane was a quiet, contented baby. She had clamped her three teeth onto Mette’s braid and was chewing appreciatively, ignoring the bustle of the ship. She was a bright little girl who seemed to have inherited her appearance from him and her intelligence from her mother, although what little hair she had was reddish blond and stuck straight up, rather than being dark and curly like his. He adored her.

  A stewardess, a short, dark-haired woman dressed in the colours of the Union Line, greeted them at the top of the gangplank and took their tickets.

  “Welcome aboard. Are you travelling with us to Melbourne?”

  “I’m off to the Bluff,” said Frank. “But my wife and daughter will disembark at Port Chalmers. I’ll escort them to the railway station and return to the ship. Will that be a problem, Miss…?”

  “Aitken,” said the stewardess. “Jennie Aitken. No of course it won’t be a problem. I’ll make sure the purser knows.”

  “Is the captain on board yet? I need to speak with him on an important matter.”

  “That’s him on the wharf.” Miss Aitken indicated the group of men he’d seen earlier. “Captain Garrard. This will be his final voyage. He’s getting married when he reaches Melbourne and starting a new life. I believe he’ll be working for his father-in-law.”

  “I suppose he’s been the captain of the Tararua for a while?”

  She shook her head. “Only for a few months. After the gold robbery last year, the entire crew was fired, including Captain Muir. Captain Garrard was assigned to us after that. His first command, I believe.”

  Frank could feel Mette beside him, swaying with the movement of the ocean, holding the rail with both hands. He took her by the elbow. “I’ll take my wife to our quarters and come back up on deck. Would you tell the captain I’d like to speak with him?”

  She smiled polite
ly, not wanting to accommodate him too easily. “Could I tell him what it’s about? He’ll be busy once he comes aboard.”

  “It’s a police matter.”

  “And you are?”

  “Sergeant Hardy. Sergeant Frank Hardy.”

  “I’ll tell him to expect you.” She glanced down at the passenger list in her hand and looked back at Frank, still smiling. “You’re on the lower deck in an intermediate cabin. Number 6C. The water closet is at the end of the passageway. You’re not sharing with anyone — just the two of you and the baby. Dinner and drinks are available in the saloon, or you can take your evening meal back to your cabin if you wish.” She gestured over her right shoulder. “Take the ladder by the saloon. Give the captain an hour and then check the wheelhouse or the smoking room beside it.”

  Their cabin on the lower deck was tiny, with no porthole or private bath — just a wash stand in the corner with a ewer and basin on top and a plain white chamber pot hidden behind a curtain underneath. Frank was unable to stretch to his full height, and there was nowhere to sit, other than on the bed. It reminded him of the cell he’d been confined to in the upper reaches of the Whanganui River two years earlier.

  Mette sat on the lower bunk. “Sarah Jane and I will sleep here. You can take the upper bunk. Will you fit?”

  “Of course I will.” He patted the mattress on the upper bunk, noticing how lumpy it was. He’d fit if he slept with his knees crushed against his chest, but he was used to that. He’d been hoping to share the lower bunk with Mette, although he’d have even less room if they did. “Can’t Sarah Jane sleep in the upper bunk?”

  Mette took off Sarah Jane’s bonnet and put it on the bed, smoothing her daughter’s hair. “Of course not. You know how much she wriggles. She’d fall out of bed and hurt herself. Although I suppose I could prop her up with something. No. Best she sleeps with me. I have to feed her and change her now, so you go ahead and talk to the captain.” She opened one of her bags and took out a fresh cotton napkin and a small wooden box containing burnt flour she carried to sooth the baby’s rashes, setting them beside a book she’d brought with her to read while she fed Sarah Jane. Another one by her favourite author, Hard Times by Charles Dickens. She’d left her current darling, Bleak House, at home, saying it was too heavy to carry.