Balfour held an imaginary cigar in his hand, splaying his first two knuckles, and extended his arm across the table.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘that seems like a d—ned inefficient way to cheat. So many ways it could fail! What if you were holding your cards close, now? What if you kept them flat on the table? Look: if I reached my arm across the table, like so … you’d pull your cards back, wouldn’t you? Go on—you’d shrink away!’

‘Never mind the details,’ said Lauderback. ‘The point is—’

‘And a fool of a risk,’ said Balfour. ‘How’s a man to make an excuse for a tiny mirror stuck into the end of his cigar?’

‘The point is,’ said Lauderback. ‘Never mind the details. The point is that Wells—Carver, I mean—said that he had a twinkle on me.’

Balfour was still flexing his wrist and cocking his elbow, squinting at the invisible cigar in his hand. He stopped now, and closed his fist. ‘Meaning,’ he said, ‘some way to read your cards.’

‘But I don’t know what it was,’ said Lauderback. ‘I still don’t. It’s driven me mad.’ He reached for the pitcher of wine.

Balfour was wearing a sceptical expression. What kind of leverage was this? A vague mention of revenge, no proper names, no context, and some rubbish about a gambler’s cheat? This was not enough to merit blackmail. Plainly, Lauderback was still concealing something. He nodded to indicate that Lauderback should fill his glass.

Lauderback set the pitcher back on the table and resumed. ‘Before he left,’ he said, ‘he asked for one thing, and one thing only. Raxworthy was short a hand on the Godspeed—it had been advertised in the papers, and Wells had heard about it.’

‘Carver.’

‘Yes: Carver had heard about it. He asked me if I’d put in a word for him. He was going down to the quay in the morning to apply. Asked me the favour man to man.’

‘You did as he asked?’

‘I did,’ Lauderback said heavily.

‘There’s another twinkle on you, maybe,’ said Balfour.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Another connexion, now—the ship—between you both.’

Lauderback thought about that for a moment, seeming very dejected. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But what could I have done? He had me tied up.’

Balfour felt a sudden rush of sympathy for the other man, and regretted his previous ill humour. ‘Ay,’ he said, more gently. ‘He had you tied.’

‘After that,’ Lauderback went on, ‘nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. I went back to Canterbury. I waited. I thought about that d—ned twinkle until my heart near gave out. I confess I rather hoped that Carver would be killed—that the thug would catch him, so I would know the fellow’s name before he came for me. I read the Otago Witness every day, hoping to see the blackguard’s name among the dead, may God forgive me. But nothing happened.

‘Nearly a year later—this is almost a year ago, maybe February, March last year—I get a letter in the mail. It’s an annual receipt from Danforth Shipping, and it’s filled out in my name.’

‘Danforth? Jem Danforth?’

‘The same,’ said Lauderback. ‘I’ve never shipped with Danforth—not for personals—but I know him, of course; he rents part of Godspeed’s hold for cargo.’

‘And Virtue too, on occasion.’

‘Yes—on occasion, Virtue too. All right: so I examine the receipt. I see that there’s a recurring shipment on Godspeed’s trans-Tasman route under the name of Lauderback. My name. Again and again, on the westbound voyage across the Tasman—each voyage, there it is, shipper Danforth, carrier Godspeed, master James Raxworthy, one shipment of personals, standard size, paid in full by Alistair Lauderback. Me. I tell you, my blood went cold. My name, written so neatly; that column of figures, going down.

‘The amount due was zero pounds. Nothing outstanding. Each month the account had been paid in cash, as the record showed. Someone had engineered this whole business in my name, and paid good money for it, to boot. I had a quick look over my own finances: I wasn’t missing any money, and certainly nothing to the tune of eighty, ninety pounds in shipping fees. I’d have noticed a slow leak of that kind, wherever it was coming from. No. Something was cooking.

‘As soon as I could, I left for Dunedin, to see about the affair myself. This was—April, I suppose. May, maybe. Some time in the early autumn. When I reached Dunedin I hardly even stepped ashore. I made straight for Godspeed. She was at anchor, and rafted up to the wharf, with the gangway down; I boarded, seeing no one at all. I was intending to speak to Raxworthy, of course—but he was nowhere about. In the fo’c’sle, I found Wells.’

‘Carver.’

‘Carver, I mean. Yes. He was alone. Holding a policeman’s whistle in one hand, a pistol in the other. Tells me he can blow the whistle any time. The harbour master’s office is fifty yards from where we’re standing and the hatch is open wide. I keep quiet. He tells me there’s a shipping crate in Godspeed’s hold with my name on it, and a paper trail that connects my name to that shipment every month for the last year. Everything legal, everything logged. In the eyes of the law, I’ve been paying for this shipment for a year, back and forth from Melbourne, back and forth, back and forth, and nothing I can say will disprove that fact. All right, so what’s inside it, I ask. Women’s fashions, he says. Dresses. A pile of gowns.

‘Why dresses, I ask. He gives me a smile—horrible—and says, why Mr. Lauderback, you’ve been sending for the latest fashions in Melbourne every month for a year! You’ve been keeping your lovely mistress Lydia Wells in good nick, you have, and it’s all on the books, to boot. Every time that trunk arrives in Melbourne, it’s shipped in to a dressmaker’s on Bourke-street—the very best, you understand—and every time it leaves, it’s packed full of the finest threads that can be had for money, this face of the globe. You, Mr. Lauderback, are a very generous man.’

Lauderback’s voice had become sour.

‘But how is it that this shipping case came to be registered in my name, I ask him, and he has a good laugh at that. He tells me that every rat in Dunedin knows Lydia Wells, and what she does to make her bread. All she had to do is tell old Jem Danforth I was keeping her in bells and ribbons, but please could he keep her name out of it, out of respect for my poor old wife! The fellow believed her. Logged the shipment in my name. She paid in cash, saying the cash was mine—and nobody mentioned a word to me. Thinking they were being discreet, you realise: thinking they were doing me a d—ned good turn, by not letting their Christian judgment show.

‘But this isn’t the half of it. Women’s fashions are not the bloody half of it. This time, he says, there’s something else in the trunk besides gowns. I ask him what. A fortune, he says, stolen, and all of it pure. Stolen from whom, I ask. Stolen from yours truly, he answers, and by my own wife, Lydia Wells—and then he laughs, because of course that’s part of the lie: they’re in on it together, the two of them. Well, what’s he doing with a fair fortune in pure, I ask him, and he tells me that he has a claim up Dunstan way. Was it declared, I say, and he says no. Undeclared means untaxed, which means this shipment is in breach of duty—or at least, it will be, if Godspeed sails on schedule with the next day’s tide.

‘Now, there in the fo’c’sle Carver lets me think about all that for a moment. I’m thinking about what it looks like from above. It looks like I’ve been going behind the husband’s back for a good long while, to court his wife as my mistress. There’s proof of that. It looks like I’ve stolen a fair fortune from the man, and I mean now to ship the gold offshore. It looks like I’ve engineered the whole business to bankrupt and ruin him, both. That’s adultery and theft and even conspiracy right off. But the real clincher is that the gold’s undeclared. I’m facing charges for breach of customs, evading duty, illegal trafficking, all of that. I’m looking at a lifetime in gaol—and I don’t have a lifetime left, Thomas. I don’t have a lifetime left. So I ask him what he wants, and finally he shows his cards. He wants the ship.’