Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories by H.E. Bates Page A

understood about the funk money but not about Torgsen. ‘Why should that old junk-store shell-collector know anything?’ she said. ‘He looks like a soaker to me.’
    â€˜He’s a remarkable man,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘Maxted made a pal of him. He liked catching out of the way fish and getting Torgsen to set them up. You soak them in formaldehyde and then they harden up in the sun. Maxted had a big collection, all done by Torgsen.’
    Thoughtfully Mr Pickering began to polish the eye pieces of his goggles.
    â€˜If the money was so hush-hush I don’t see how Torgsen got to know about it anyway,’ Mrs Pickering said.
    â€˜Maxted began to pay him in gold,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘That’s how.’
    â€˜I don’t see how that makes sense.’
    â€˜Oh! yes,’ he said. ‘That makes sense. That was the vanity part. It wasn’t only that Maxted liked empires. He liked behaving like an emperor. Sometimes he’d go in to see Torgsen and if a fish wasn’t ready he’d knock Torgsen down. One day he pressed his thumbs under his eyes until his eyeballs stuck out.
    Mrs Pickering began to say that she did not wonder that Maxted, making so many enemies, had been murdered at last, but Mr Pickering said:
    â€˜Funny thing, he made friends that way too. Torgsen was a friend. Every time Maxted knocked him down or shoved his eyeballs out he’d come back next day in a terrible state—remorse and all that—and beg forgiveness and say what a brute he’d been and what could he do to show how sorry he was?’
    â€˜Torgsen was the fool.’
    â€˜Oh! no,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘I don’t think so. Maxted would give him ten or twenty pounds as sort of compensation. Easy money. Then one day he kicked him in the belly and knocked him unconscious—and then next day Maxted was in a terrible way and that was when he paid him in gold.’
    Mrs Pickering in a bored way got up and put her wrap on her shoulders and thrust her feet into her pink sisal-grass beach shoes that had an embroidery of pale green and blue shells on the toes.
    â€˜It all sounds like drink to me,’ she said. ‘Anyway I’m going up to change now. Don’t be very long. You know how it is if we’re not in there when the gong goes.’
    â€˜He was a drunk all right,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘But that doesn’t alter the fact that Torgsen can buy dollars and sovereigns on the island. That’s a fact you can’t get away from.’
    â€˜I’d better take your trousers, hadn’t I?’ she said. ‘I’ll put the coins in my handbag. By the way, what do you give for them?’
    â€˜They’re glad to get about twenty per cent less than they’re worth,’ he said. He laughed with brown, leathery, acquisitive lips. ‘Figure it out while you’re dressing.’
    Mr Pickering put his goggles on and flapped down to the sea like a semi-naked, balding, upright frog. For some time heswam in and among the low reefs protecting the little inner bay from the trade winds that blew beyond the headland. The water everywhere was so clear and limpid that he could see in these sea-gardens shoals of blue and orange fish, a few inches long, and larger fish of striped pink and blue. The seaweed, rose-violet in places, chocolate in others, sometimes bright yellow, waved everywhere about him with the gentle torment of shoals of anchored eels.
    When he came out of the sea and went back to his place on the beach he lay there for some time with his face upturned to the sky. The sun was very hot and there was no sound in the air except the small folding lap of minute waves eating into smooth white sand.
    â€˜Somebody knows,’ Mr Pickering told himself. ‘Somebody must know.’
    In that moment he remembered the crab; and as he turned his head he saw to his surprise and delight that it had come out again to look at