Ah Sook studied him. ‘“One day I come back and kill you. You kill a man. He die—so you die. I come back and kill you, one day.”’

Nilssen’s eyes went wide; his next question died on his lips. He turned to Anna—who was looking at Ah Sook, her expression faintly perplexed. Charlie Frost was frowning.

‘Where’s Staines in all of that?’ demanded one of the diggers.

Ah Sook shook his head. ‘Not Staines,’ he said quietly. He got up from his cushion suddenly, and walked to the window, folding his arms.

‘Not Staines?’ said the digger. ‘Who then?’

‘Francis Carver,’ said Ah Sook.

There was an explosion of outrage around the room.

‘Francis Carver? How’s that for a séance—when he isn’t even dead? Why—I could talk to Carver myself; I’d only have to knock upon his door!’

‘But he’s at the Palace,’ said another. ‘That’s fifty yards away from where we are.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘I mean you can’t deny that something strange—’

‘I could have talked to Carver myself,’ the digger repeated, stubbornly. ‘I don’t need a medium for that.’

‘What about the lamp, though? How do you account for the lamp?’

‘It jumped across the room!’

‘It levitated.’

Ah Sook had stiffened. ‘Francis Carver,’ he said, directing his question to Harald Nilssen. ‘At the Palace Hotel?’

Nilssen frowned—surely Ah Sook knew this already! ‘Yes, Carver’s staying at the Palace,’ he said. ‘On Revell-street. The building with the blue edging, you know. Next to the hardware store.’

‘How long?’ said Ah Sook.

Nilssen looked even more confused. ‘He’s been here for three weeks,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘Since the night—I mean, since the Godspeed came to ground.’

The other men were still arguing.

‘It’s not a séance unless it’s talking with the dead.’

‘No—when you talk to Carver, it’s you who ends up dead!’

They laughed at this, and then the digger’s mate said, ‘Rum do, you’re thinking? Some kind of a hoax?’

The stubborn digger looked inclined to agree, but he cast a glance over at Lydia Wells. The widow was still unconscious, and her face was very pale. Her mouth was partly open, showing the glint of a molar and a dry tongue, and her eyes were fluttering weakly beneath the lids. If she was shamming, the digger thought, then she was shamming extraordinarily well. But he had paid for a communion with Emery Staines. He had not paid to hear a string of Chinese syllables and then watch a woman fall into a faint. Why, how could he be sure that the words were even Chinese? She might have been speaking gibberish! The Chinese fellow might be in on the secret, and she might have paid him a fee, to corroborate the lie.

But the digger had a cowardly temperament; he did not voice these opinions aloud. ‘Wouldn’t want to say,’ he said at last, but he still looked surly.

‘Well, we’ll ask her, when she comes around.’

‘Frank Carver speaks Chinese?’ one of the others said, in a voice of incredulity.

‘He goes back and forth from Canton, does he not?’

‘Born in Hong Kong.’

‘Yes, but to speak the language—as they do!’

‘Makes you think different of the man.’

At this point the digger who had been discharged to the kitchen returned with a glass of water, and threw it across Lydia’s face. Gasping, she revived. The men crowded closer, asking in an anxious chorus after her health and safety, so that it was some moments before the widow had a chance to respond. Lydia Wells looked from face to face in some confusion; after a moment, she even managed a weak laugh. But her laughter was without its usual surety, and as she accepted a glass of Andalusian brandy from the man at her elbow her hand visibly trembled.

She drank, and in the moments that followed, all manner of questions were put to her—what had she seen? What could she remember? Whom had she channelled? Had she made any contact with Emery Staines?

Her answers were disappointing. She could remember nothing at all from the point she fell into her trance—which was unusual, she said, for usually she could recall her ‘visions’ very well indeed. The men prompted her, but without success; she simply could not remember anything at all. When it was revealed to her that she had spoken in a foreign tongue, quite fluently and for some time, she looked genuinely puzzled.

‘But I don’t know a word of Chinese,’ she said. ‘Are you sure? And the johnnies confirmed it? Real Chinese? You’re really sure?’

This was confirmed, with much perplexity and excitement.

‘And what is all this mess?’ She gestured weakly at the scorched table and the remains of the fire.

‘The lamp just fell,’ said one of the diggers. ‘It just fell, of its own accord.’

‘It did more than fall: it levitated!’

Lydia looked at the paraffin lamp a moment, and then seemed to rouse herself. ‘Well!’ She raised herself a little higher on the sofa. ‘So I channelled the ghost of a Chinaman!’

‘Interference wasn’t what I paid for,’ the stubborn digger said.

‘No,’ said Lydia Wells, soothingly, ‘no—of course it wasn’t. Of course we must refund the cost of all your tickets … but tell me: what were the very words I spoke?’

‘Something to do with a murder,’ said Frost, who was still watching her very closely. ‘Something to do with revenge.’

‘Indeed!’ said Mrs. Wells. She seemed impressed.

‘Ah Sook said it had something to do with Francis Carver,’ said Frost.

Mrs. Wells went pale; she started forward. ‘What were the very words—the exact words?’

The diggers looked around them, but perceived only Ah Quee, who returned their gaze stonily, and did not speak.

‘He doesn’t have English.’

‘Where’s the other one?’

‘Where did he go?’

Ah Sook had extracted himself from the group some minutes before, padding from the room and into the foyer so quietly that nobody had noticed his departure. The revelation that Francis Carver had returned to Hokitika—that he had been in Hokitika for three weeks—had caused a flood of private emotion in his breast, and he desired, all of a sudden, to be alone.

He leaned against the rail of the porch and looked out, down the long arm of Revell-street, towards the quay. The long row of hanging lanterns formed a doubled seam of light that came together, in a haze of yellow, some two hundred yards to the south; their brightness was so intense that upon the camber of the street it might have been high noon, and the shadows of the alleys were made all the blacker, by contrast. A pair of drunks staggered past him, clutching one another around the waist. A whore passed in the other direction, her skirts gathered high above her knees. She looked at him curiously, and Ah Sook, after a moment of blankness, remembered that his face was still heavily painted, the corners of his eyes lengthened with kohl, his cheeks rounded with white. She called out to him, but he shook his head, and she walked on. From somewhere nearby there came a sudden roar of laughter and applause.

Ah Sook sucked his lips between his teeth. So Francis Carver had returned to Hokitika once again. He surely was not aware that his old associate was living in a hut at Kaniere, less than five miles away! Carver was not a man to bear a risk if he could remove the threat of that risk altogether. In that case, Ah Sook thought, perhaps he, Ah Sook, had the advantage. He sucked again at his teeth, and then, after a moment, shook his head: no. Lydia Wells had recognised him that morning. She would surely have relayed the news to Carver at once.

Inside, the conversation had returned to the subject of the paraffin lamp—a trick that Ah Sook had already dismissed out of hand. Lydia Wells had merely slipped a loop of thread over the knob of the lamp, at the moment she doused it. The thread was the same colour as her dress, and the other end of it was affixed to the inside of her wrist. One sharp twitch of her right hand, and the lamp would fall over the candles. The small table upon which the candles were burning had been coated with paraffin oil, which had the virtues of being both odourless and colourless, such that, to an outsider, the table might have seemed merely clean; at first contact with a naked flame, however, the surface of the table was sure to ignite. It was all a charade, a sham. Mrs. Wells had not made any kind of communion with the realm of the dead, and the words that she had spoken were not the words of a dead man. Ah Sook knew this because the words were his own.