The Hidden Man by Robin Blake

Author:Robin Blake
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466857858
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter Sixteen

I BEGAN MY SUMMARY by reminding the jury of everything we had heard about the events within Pimbo’s business room in the early morning of the fourth of June. I went on to speak of the health of Pimbo’s business, and of his home life.

‘Mr Pimbo showed signs of lacking money – he deferred payment of bills and he kept his housekeeper chronically short. Yet his business here in Preston, as we have heard, was going along nicely. The source of difficulty therefore lay, I believe, not in Preston, but in his connection with Mr Zadok Moon, with whom Mr Pimbo hoped to establish a banking house. From letters I have with me, and which I shall provide for the jury’s consideration, it is clear that the connection had involved Mr Pimbo in a heavy burden of personal expense and that this caused him anxiety.’

From the bundle of papers in front of me I held up a sample of the letters found in the desk at Cadley Place, all pertaining to the voyage of The Fortunate Isle. I read out those parts proving that Pimbo had undertaken to buy a ship and largely to fit it out for a Guinea voyage, and that the bills found with the letters were all for the sort of items needed on such a voyage. I also showed the letter where insurance is mentioned, and Pimbo is asked urgently to provide the sum of fifteen hundred pounds sterling to pay the premium.

‘The voyage itself evidently began more than a year ago, and such ventures usually take this length of time to be completed. But there has been no sign of The Fortunate Isle returning to Liverpool and, as we have heard, Mr Moon has now put in a claim for insurance compensation and produced a letter from the ship’s captain detailing the ship’s loss. Yet his letters to the deceased prior to the voyage and during its early stages were full of optimism. Let me read to you from another of them.’

I gave them the letter in which Moon dangled the prospect in front of Pimbo’s eyes of a hundred-fold profit, after the ship had bounced home ‘on the bosom of the trade winds’.

‘The profits from the Guinea Trade are very large, as we have heard, but not as incomprehensibly vast as Moon says here. That gross exaggeration is deeply suspicious. Furthermore, as some of those present must already know, the trade winds blow from north to south, so that to descant about a homecoming on the trade wind’s bosom is to promise something impossible. Unfortunately Mr Moon, just as he did not appear on Friday when sent for by Pimbo, has not answered our letters or summonses to attend this inquest. Therefore we cannot question him about these oddities, but we have heard instead that the same man has fallen under suspicion of dishonesty in another quarter – the insurance company.

‘So let me then draw all the threads of this together. Picture

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