Free The Poisoned Island by Lloyd Shepherd

around his wife as she slept. Abigail had been quiet when they returned from Sam Ransome’s room, and had only nodded to his repeated questions about her well-being. He had marveled at her calmness in the presence of Ransome’s body, but then remembered her time as a nurse, and reminded himself that the cheerful bearing of his precise wife hid a coriaceous toughness. She had gone to sleep immediately, encased inthe arms of her husband, who had counted her breaths and measured their depth in a doomed attempt to calculate her state of mind. The old weight of responsibility had tugged him down, though not into sleep.
    From the river, the Solander isn’t easy to spot in among the vessels moored at the chains off Rotherhithe, but Horton has already identified her from Harriott’s office window and has no trouble finding her. She is a plain-looking collier but she is also, thanks to the pioneering example of Cook, the very model for a sensible, careful round-the-world vessel. There is very little to distinguish her from other similar colliers in the river, some of which are now stocking up on gravel as ballast for their return journeys to the northeast. She is buff-bowed, her front rising almost square from the water. Her sails have been stowed in readiness for a long stay, and there is little activity up among the rigging of her three masts. She is a little less than a hundred feet long, by Horton’s reckoning, and perhaps twenty-five feet across the beam. A pinnace is tied up at her side. If you did not know what she was, there would be no earthly reason to be interested in her, apart from one oddity: a square-shaped superstructure on her quarterdeck, which looks to Horton’s eyes like a big shed, and which immediately disturbs the expected lines of the ship, lines which every London river dweller has become intimate with over the centuries. That shedlike structure makes the Solander look a little eccentric, like a single gentleman appearing at a party with a small monkey on his shoulder.
    Horton calls up to the ship while the waterman comes alongside, and a face appears at the gunwale.
    “River Police!” he shouts. “Permission to come aboard and talk to Captain Hopkins!”
    The face nods and disappears. After a few minutes, theface reappears and motions for him to come aboard. He tells the waterman to wait for him, and climbs up onto the ship.
    Halfway up, his nostrils begin quivering with the shocking aroma which pours out like liquid from the Solander . Stepping on board is like stepping through a curtain of smell. Before, the smells of the riverside commerce: oil, salt, tar, and the pervasive, solid stench of the river. After, a green gas which seems to swirl through the air, dropping pollen and spores and vegetable matter, such that the Solander reminds Horton of a lady’s bouquet held to her bosom against the smoke-and-ale smell of a public saloon.
    The hold of the ship is open, and looking down into it Horton has an impression of flying over a compact, impossible jungle garden. Greens and browns predominate but here and there is an outrageous splash of color, as if whatever dwells below is captivated by the weak London summer sun. Horton breathes in several times, inhaling the pungent wash, and remembering half-forgotten voyages. Beaches and rocks and palm trees on Caribbean shores.
    He looks up from the hold, aware of a man watching him, silently but carefully. He does not speak until Horton looks at him, as if to allow the new arrival to take in the view.
    “I chose not to disturb you,” says the man. “You had the air of a man experiencing a kind of epiphany.”
    His voice is educated, with a strong hint of Welsh about it. He certainly looks Welsh: short, stout, solid, with a dark barrel-chested melancholy.
    “I thank you for that,” says Horton. “It is not every day one gets to gaze down into a tropical paradise within the confines of London.”
    “No indeed,” says the other man. “And now I would