Forgive me; I made a foolish jest: I said that if they did not like you, they could eat you. It is my honest fear that some of them might have taken me at my word.’
Since then, Pett had survived on what amounted to barely starvation rations. His body, already thin, was becoming close to skeletal. But he was never a man who possessed the slightest interest in or appreciation for the pleasures of the dinner table, so a lack of decent meals was no loss to him. No, he suffered from another hunger, that which clawed at his guts when the voices called him, the Saint’s voice above all, imploring him to do God’s will by scouring the world of sin and the impure souls who perpetrated it. Pett could never be sure when the voices would come. Sometimes, months would pass without a single visit, but there were also times like this when the clamour in his head would barely die down at all from one day or even week to the next: always the voices, shouting at him, imploring him, repeating again and again the same implacable commandment: thou shalt kill.
Yet there could be no candidates for his deliverance as long as he was locked away in this solitary confinement. And then the Saint, as he always did, provided the means of Pett’s salvation. He was an emaciated, thirst-ravaged member of the crew. His crime, so far as Pett could gather, was that he stole one of the very last crusts of stale bread from the locked chest in the captain’s quarters. The man was delirious. He must have been, Pett thought, to have thought he could possibly succeed in his theft when the only way of opening the chest in which the precious crumbs were located was to blow the lock off with a pistol shot that could be heard from one end of the ship to the other.
Or perhaps the man just didn’t care. For twelve hours he had sat opposite Pett, occasionally breaking into rambling, slurred, incomprehensible speeches before falling into an uneasy slumber, during which he still cried out in tones of rage and alarm, though he remained asleep all the while. Pett would long since have despatched him into a silent, eternal slumber were not both men chained to iron rings set in the ship’s hull with a good ten-foot span of filth-encrusted planks between them.
Pett’s chain, attached to another ring round his ankle, was just five feet long, making it almost impossible for him to reach the other man and strike a fatal blow. But he felt entirely confident that the Saint would not have brought him the man without providing the means with which to send him from this world to the next. Sure enough, events were moving in Pett’s direction for the ship’s company – or at least a goodly portion of it – appeared to be setting off on an expedition. The ship’s walls made it hard to work out exactly what was being said, but one message came through above all others: this was a do-or-die attempt to seize more supplies. Orders were barked and passed on. There was much bustle, movement and all the noise that one would associate with a group of men preparing for an important endeavour.
Eventually Pett heard boats being lowered, along with muffled demands for silence. Wherever they were going, clearly they did not wish to alert anyone to their movements. But no sooner had the boats set off from the ship than those who had been left behind settled down to what sounded like heated debates, presumably about the likely outcome of the expedition. No matter: the key point was that they were not paying the slightest attention to William Pett, or his cell companion.
He thus had the perfect opportunity to take action without being interrupted in his labours. That was why he was already on the move. Slowly for the first few inches, silent as a leopard in the dark, ignoring the cramping pain in his limbs from long confinement.
Pett made every effort to remain completely silent as he moved, so it could only have been pure chance that his intended victim chose this precise moment to awaken. He stared at Pett for a second or two, evidently trying to make sense of his sudden appearance in the middle of the floor, realized he was in danger and scrambled away in the gloom, extending his chain as far away from Pett as possible. The man’s irons rattled and terror made the whites of his eyes glow against the blackness as he shouted for help, throwing himself back against the damp plank walls, somehow knowing that the other man meant to kill him.
Pett kept moving. He had almost reached his fear-stricken target, but then his leg chain pulled taut. He cursed and threw himself forward, stretched like a striking mamba, and managed to grab hold of the other man’s foot. The man kicked and convulsed but Pett clung on, taking blows to the face which he did not feel, and hauled the man towards him, inch by inch. The man tried to seize hold of the deck itself, to dig his fingers into it like grappling hooks, but the boards were slick with rodent faeces and slime and he could get no purchase.
The man shrieked again, his voice breaking with terror. He cried out to God, but the Almighty was not interested – He had other plans – and the Saint and all the angels were crying out to Pett to execute them on His behalf. Now Pett’s face was level with the man’s stinking crotch and still he hauled as though his own life depended on it.
‘Keep still and I’ll make it quick,’ Pett said, knowing he was wasting his breath. Frenzied, slime-fouled fingers clawed at his head and face as the man tried to push him back whence he had come. But there was no going back. Pett thrust his hand up and found the man’s throat, thumb crushing the bony cartilage of the larynx, fingers binding at the back of his emaciated neck like the lacing on a lady’s corset.
For all his lack of nourishment the jailed sailor was surprisingly strong. Years at sea, hauling on the sheets and climbing the shrouds had seen to that, and now he clawed at Pett’s hand, trying to tear it away from his own neck. But William Pett was a man of experience. He had done this many, many times before and knew that he only needed to hold on a little longer. Just a little longer.
Pett was also a connoisseur, a collector of other men’s deaths. In his mind he ordered them: the peaceful and the violent; the many who met their ends with terror and the very few who were composed and tranquil at the last. A less elevated distinction divided those whose bowels loosened at the moment of passing and those who remained unsullied. Had Pett given the matter the slightest thought in advance, he would have wagered that the lack of any material in a starving man’s digestive system would tend to suggest a clean death. But no, though the sailor’s defecation was only modest in quantity, it wanted for nothing in stench. At the very same moment, the hands on Pett’s hand relaxed. The man beneath him shuddered like a spent lover and went still.
Pett held on still, gasping for breath in that dank, airless place. The dead man convulsed one last time, his heels tapping out a ragged beat against the deck, and then it was over. You did well, the Saint whispered in his mind. But you are on a ship. Next time, thrust a sharp sliver of wood, or a metal pin through the ear canal into the brain. You will achieve a quick kill and no telltale signs left behind to arouse suspicion.
The Saint was right, Pett thought, as he often was. No matter now. It was time to prepare for the moment of discovery.
He would have preferred to put the dead man up against the side and make it look as though he had died in his sleep, but Pett’s chain would not let him push the body up against the far wall of the cockpit. So he rolled the body over and it lay face down in the filth, the dead man’s befouled petticoat breeches the first thing anyone would see when they brought a light into the place.
Then Pett scrambled back to his own corner by the cable tier and waited.
