The Luminaries

Frost did not respond at once, for Ma

‘There it is!’ he exclaimed, with much delight. ‘I knew it! I knew you were in a fix one way or another—and I knew I’d smoke you out! What is it, then? What’s your crime? What’s the rub? You’ve given it away, Charlie; it’s written all over you. It’s something to do with that fortune, isn’t it? Something about Crosbie Wells.’

Frost sipped his brandy. He had committed no crime, exactly—and yet there was a rub, and it did have to do with the fortune, and it did concern Crosbie Wells. His gaze slid over Ma

After the fortune discovered in Wells’s cottage had been valued by the bank, Edgar Clinch had made Frost a very fine present, to acknowledge his role in facilitating the sale: a banknote made out to the sum of thirty pounds. The receipt of this banknote had a sudden and intoxicating effect upon Charlie Frost, whose income was devoted, in the main, to the upkeep of parents he never saw, and did not love. In a frenzy of excitement, unprecedented in his worldly experience, Frost determined to spend the entire sum of money, and at once. He would not inform his parents of the windfall, and he would spend every last pe

Lydia Wells had arrived in Hokitika some days after this prodigal fit. Immediately upon her arrival she visited the Reserve Bank, a

But he had not come to Ma

‘Well—from whom?’ Ma

‘That is precisely what I wish to speak with you about,’ the young banker said. There were lucifers in his vest pocket; he transferred his cigar to his right hand, to retrieve them. ‘I had a notion just now, this afternoon, and I wanted to run it by you. It’s about Emery Staines.’

‘Oh—no doubt he’s wrapped up in it all,’ Ma

‘Forgive me,’ Frost said, and shook his head very slightly.

‘Oh yes,’ Ma

Frost did not reply to this, having been put in mind, uncomfortably, of the thirty pounds he had recently squandered in such a profligate way; after a moment Ma

Charlie Frost explained what he had discovered that morning: that Frank Carver owned a half-share in the Aurora goldmine, and that he and Emery Staines were, to all intents and purposes, partners.

‘Yes—I suppose I knew something about that,’ Ma

‘Because the Aurora claim is co

Ma

‘I’ll tell you.’

‘Do.’

Frost puffed on his cigar a moment. ‘The Wells fortune came through the bank,’ he said at last. ‘Came through me.’

‘Yes?’

Dick Ma

Frost, however, was not to be hurried. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘here’s the curious thing. The gold had already been smelted, and not by a Company man. It had been done privately, by the looks of things.’

‘Smelted—already!’ said Ma

‘No; you wouldn’t have,’ said Frost. ‘Every piece of gold that comes over our counter has to be retorted, even if the process has been done before. It’s to prevent any makeweights from slipping through, and to ensure a uniform quality. So Killarney did it all over again. He smelted Wells’s colour before it was valued, and by the time anybody saw it, it had been poured into bars and stamped with the Reserve seal. Nobody outside the bank could have known that it had been retorted once before—save for the man who hid it in the first place, of course. Oh, and the commission merchant, who found it in the cottage, and brought it to the bank.’

‘Who was that—Cochran?’

‘Harald Nilssen. Of Nilssen & Co.’

Ma

Frost paused to draw on his cigar. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last.

‘What’s Clinch doing, dragging another body into the affair?’ said Ma

‘I’m telling you: Clinch never dreamed there’d be anything of value in the cottage,’ Frost said. ‘He was flabbergasted when the fortune turned up.’

‘Flabbergasted, was he?’

‘Yes.’

‘That your word, or his?’

‘His.’

‘Flabbergasted,’ Ma

Frost continued. ‘Well, it worked out famously for Nilssen. He was set to take home ten percent of the value of the goods in the cottage. Lucky day for him. He walked home with four hundred pounds!’

Ma

‘So I had a look at it,’ said Frost. ‘We always write a short description of the ore—whether it’s in flakes or whatnot—before it’s smelted down. The practice is no different when the gold’s been smelted already: we’re still obliged to make a record of what the stuff looked like when it came in. For reasons of—’ (Frost paused; he had been going to say ‘security’, but this did not exactly make sense) ‘—prudence,’ he finished, rather lamely. ‘Anyway, I examined the squares before Killarney put them in the crucible, and I saw that at the bottom of each square the smelter—whoever he was—had inscribed a word.’