Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,65
had tracked Moran from India to Africa during the Zulu War, then to the gold and diamonds of the Transvaal after the expulsion of the British. Some of his revelations I would rather not have heard. Moran was by then a professional criminal among canteen-keepers and wooden hotels that offered billiards and brandy to the rogues and the roués of the camps. He was well-matched by the “fathers” of crime, former convicts or the pickings of street corners all over Europe. They gambled on everything from animal fights and bare-knuckle boxing to cards, roulette, and coin-tossing. At intervals, the primitive and lawless townships were devastated by dysentry, typhus, and malaria, as surely as by devouring infections from houses of pleasure like The Scarlet Bar and The London Hotel.
Among other criminals, Moran and a younger business partner, Andreis Reuter, had little to fear. Law in the settlements was the justice of a lynch-mob, bought and paid for. The Volksraad or the Supreme Court of the new South African Republic might as well have been on the moon. The punishments of hanging and flogging became entertainments, performed for audiences of the brutal and the bestial. The weak and unknown lay at the mercy of the rich and influential. The hangman’s profession was not restrained by rules of evidence or right of appeal.
Reuter had been a youthful speculator, known as a “walloper.” He bought cheap from the diggers and sold at top prices to the jewellers of Cape Town, Amsterdam, or London. He became a prospector when there was hardly a law in the settlements, let alone a mercantile code. In swindler’s argot, “watered stock” was one of his frauds. He advertised shares in the London press, took the investors’ money, paid a promising dividend for the first year, and pocketed the rest as directors’ remuneration. No gold ore extraction had taken place. No plant or machinery had been installed—and none ever would be. But not one in ten thousand of the investors could travel to Southern Africa to see for themselves.
With Moran’s assistance, Reuter now “salted” a so-called gold mine. The cracks and crevices of two worthless diggings were plugged with gold and silver ore to make the “discovery” of deposits possible. Moran was the man for that. His work would have taken an exceptional metallurgist to detect. At first, the two partners could not risk selling the mine. Instead, they sold shares in an exploration company and options on land adjoining the digging. Andreis Reuter soon believed that with “Colonel” Moran as his partner, he had secured a prize among men.
Major Putney-Wilson saw his prey once and got no nearer Moran in the Transvaal. The colonel struck before suspicion touched him. He planned to rob his younger partner most efficiently. To do that, he must kill him. With Reuter dead, he might drain the funds and seize the shared assets.
The murder had an ironic resemblance to the fate of Emmeline Putney-Wilson. Young Reuter was as hard-faced as the older Moran; but he had a weakness, though not much affection, for certain women. Most envied among these was a maidservant, Seraphina. Her beauty as a favourite might be her downfall, but her moment of hope had not yet passed.
To Rawdon Moran, the trick was as easy as persuading a child to eat a poisoned apple. Age marked him almost as a father to the girl, and he played up to this. Through his dealings with Reuter, he became her confidant. Seraphina shared her secret ambition which was, in truth, no secret at all. She trusted him more readily when she discovered that she was pregnant by Reuter. She had no power over the man. Soon she might be lucky to have even a roof over her head. She could hope for no rescue but marriage.
Moran was wiser in the ways of the world than any man she had known. He promised to bring Reuter to the right state of mind. The younger man was susceptible, but there was no time to lose. He must be worked upon before she confided her secret pregnancy to him.
This simple and superstitious girl believed every word from one as confident in predicting as Moran. He understood the way these things are managed. He told her stories of “love-philtres” and their effects on the object of desire. A child in her ways, she would have believed him as readily if he had talked of wizards and dragons and magic spells.