The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(117)
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When at last the beating stopped, Tom clenched his teeth and, ignoring the pain, reached out to try to grasp Claire’s flower, but was unable to because at that moment someone grabbed his hair and tried to pull him up.
“Nice try, Tom, nice try,” Jeff Wayne whispered in his ear, accompanying his words with what sounded like a snigger or perhaps a groan. “Unfortunately, your efforts were wasted. You’re going to die anyway.” He ordered Mike Spurrell to take hold of Tom’s feet, and he felt himself being borne aloft by his executioners to a place which, on the brink of losing consciousness, scarcely mattered to him.
After a few minutes of being bumped and jolted, his companions tossed him on the ground as if he were a bundle of rags. When Tom heard the sound of lapping water and boats knocking together, his worst fears were confirmed: they had brought him back to the docks, probably because they planned to throw him in the river. But for the moment no one did or said anything. Tom was trying to slip into oblivion, but the sensation of something soft, warm, and not unpleasant touching his swollen cheeks prevented him. It felt as if one of his companions had decided to prepare him for death by wiping the blood from his wounds with a cloth dipped in tar.
“Eternal, come here at once!” he heard someone shout.
The sensation stopped instantly, and then through the vibrations in the ground Tom could hear the heavy yet delicate tread of footsteps slowly approaching the scene.
“Stand him up,” the voice commanded.
His companions yanked him roughly to his feet, but Tom’s legs would not support him and gave way instantly, causing him to slump to his knees with the almost sensual limpness of a puppet whose strings have been cut. A hand grasped his collar to prevent him from keeling over completely. Once he had overcome his dizziness and was able to focus, Tom watched impassively from his kneeling position as Gilliam Murray made his way slowly towards him, his dog circling at his feet. He wore the slightly irritated expression of someone who has been dragged from his bed in the middle of the night for no good reason, as though it had escaped his memory that he was the one behind the ambush. He stopped a few yards in front of Tom and looked at him for a moment, smirking disdainfully, taking pleasure in his pathetic state.
“Tom, Tom, Tom,” he said at last, in the tone of someone scolding a child. “How has it come to this unpleasant situation? Was it really so difficult to follow my instructions?” Tom remained silent, not so much because the question was rhetorical, but because he doubted whether he could utter a word, with his swollen lips and mouth full of blood and pieces of broken tooth. Now that he could focus, he glanced around and saw that they were indeed at the docks, only a few yards from the quayside. Besides Gilliam, who was standing in front of him, and his companions waiting behind him for their orders, there seemed not to be another soul in sight. It would all take place in the strictest intimacy. That was how nobodies met their end, discreetly, without any fuss, like refuse tossed in the river in the middle of the night while the world is sleeping. And no one would notice his absence the next day. No one would say, Hold on, where’s Tom Blunt? No, the orchestra of life would carry on playing without him, because in reality his part had never been important to the score.
“Do you know what’s so amusing about this whole thing, Tom?” said Murray calmly, moving closer to the edge of the quay and gazing absentmindedly into the murky river. “It was your lover who gave you away.” Again, Tom said nothing. He simply stared at his boss, whose eyes were still contemplating the Thames, that bottomless coffer where he stored anything that posed a problem. A moment later, Murray smirked at him once more with a mixture of pity and amusement.
“Yes, if she hadn’t come to my office the day after the expedition asking for the address of one of Captain Shackleton’s descendants, I would never have found out about your affair.” He paused again to give Tom time to digest what he had just told him. Evidently, as Murray had suspected, the girl had never mentioned this to him. And why should she? From Tom’s point of view, it was unimportant, of course. For Gilliam it had been a fortuitous blunder.
“I had no idea what the girl’s game was,” he said, walking back over to Tom with mincing, almost ballet dancer’s, steps. “I gave her an evasive reply and sent her packing, but I was curious, so I had one of my men follow her just to be on the safe side—you know how much I dislike people poking their noses in my affairs.
But Miss Haggerty didn’t seem interested in snooping, quite the contrary, isn’t that so? I confess to being astonished when my informant told me she had arranged to meet you at a tearoom, and afterwards … Well, I don’t need to tell you what happened afterwards at the Pickard boardinghouse.” Tom lowered his head, in a gesture that could equally have been embarrassment or vertigo.
“My suspicions were justified,” Gilliam went on, amused by Tom’s awkwardness, “but not in the way I had imagined. I thought of killing you there and then, despite my admiration for the way you had used the situation to your advantage. But then you did something completely unexpected: you visited Wells’s house, and that aroused my curiosity even more. I wondered what you were up to. If you intended telling the writer it was all a hoax, you had gone to the wrong person. As you immediately discovered, Wells is the only person in the whole of London who is aware of the truth. But no, you had a far nobler purpose.” As Gilliam spoke, he paced back and forth in front of Tom, hands behind his back. His movement made the boards on the quayside squeak unpleasantly. Eternal sat a few feet away, fixing him with a vaguely curious look.