Death and the Dreadnought Read online

  DEATH AND THE DREADNOUGHT

  Robert Wilton

  Sharpe Books

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  © Robert Wilton 2019

  Robert Wilton has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2019 by Sharpe Books.

  Also by Robert Wilton

  The Comptrollerate-General novels:

  Traitor’s Field

  Treason’s Spring

  Treason’s Tide

  Treason’s Flood [projected]

  The Spider of Sarajevo

  Sherlock Holmes & the Adventure of the Distracted Thane

  Table of Contents

  Extract from Le Figaro, November 16th 1968

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  44.

  45.

  46.

  47.

  48.

  49.

  50.

  51.

  52.

  53.

  54.

  55.

  56.

  57.

  58.

  59.

  60.

  61.

  62.

  63.

  64.

  65.

  66.

  67.

  68.

  69.

  70.

  71.

  72.

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Extract from Le Figaro, November 16th 1968

  DOSSIER DU AVENTURIER GENTILHOMME

  A curiosity is reported in Biarritz. M. Tretiot recounts that a charming oriental trunk, sold at auction as ‘the property of a lady’, was found to have a false bottom. Concealed within this space was a dossier of papers. These proved to be the work of an English Gentleman, Sir Harry Delamere, who in the years before the First World War was a renowned traveller, adventurer and libertine. His later years remain a mystery, and indeed rumour and scandal attached to much of his life, so it is thought that this dossier may be enlightening. The Minister of Interior has directed that the papers shall be first reviewed by his Department before any further steps are taken with them.

  1.

  A Dreadnought battleship dwarfs a man. And the man slumped at my feet, with his head bent up against the monster’s keel, certainly looked small enough.

  A shipyard, at night, was a damned odd place for a rendezvous. But Sinclair had insisted, and he’d seemed pretty het up, and he did owe me thirty guineas, and so I’d trekked across to London docks from the West End and spent twenty minutes stumbling around in the darkness until I’d bumped into the biggest latest thing in British naval warfare.

  Cathedrals of the new century, and all that. Most advanced specimen of man’s vision and engineering brilliance. And damned eerie if one finds oneself skulking underneath it in the small hours.

  H.M.S. Thunderer was nigh on 600 feet long, a bit shy of 100 across. If St Paul’s Cathedral were made of iron, Sinclair had said; more than once. And if St Paul’s Cathedral had ten guns capable of firing one-ton shells to a distance of ten miles or more, and were an instrument of colonial rivalry designed to overawe Germany.

  Not a very helpful comparison, all in. Sinclair’s, not mine.

  This was just the hull. The superstructure – funnels, guns, bridge, portrait of the King and so on – was still to be installed; she wouldn’t be ready to start overawing Germans until 1912. The crudeness made her immense bulk even more ominous in the gloom.

  I’d not looked closely, but I was pretty sure it was Sinclair slumped at my feet. Against the keel of his beloved battleship.

  He’d not given me exact directions, so at the gate I’d slipped the night-watchman a shilling, and he described where the offices were, and shortly afterwards I was properly lost in the vast metal jungle of the shipyard. They left a few lights on at night, but all those did was hint at the shapes around them, and make the whole effect more ghostly. I walked past corners of large buildings, under the metal feet of enormous machines, through seas of shadow. My dress shoes splashed through puddles of unknown liquids that shimmered faintly in the gloom. Cranes and gantries loomed over me.

  Eventually, my wanderings through the wasteland of metal and oil and darkness brought me to the dry dock, and what I first took to be a wall: a blackness that closed out my vision and rose in front of me; but it rose and went on rising and back over my head and far up into the night, and instinctively my fingers reached for this mammoth and found the rough chill of iron, and I knew it was the Thunderer.

  I seemed to have come at her from the river end, her stern. With a faint idea that the offices might be at the head of what was clearly the main area of the yard, I set off along those 600-odd feet of shadow towards her bow.

  Tiny metallic echoes boomed in the ship, as the wind rolled a rivet off a plank, or a rat nudged a bolt and sent it plummeting into the abyss of the hull.

  At the bow I’d found the body. There was a light strung quite near, and it caught the pale splashes of starched shirt and empty face.

  Something was dark and glistening on the shirt front. Now I bent to the body.

  It was Sinclair, alright.

  Someone had stabbed him to death right under his battleship. The commission that he’d hoped would save his company had become his tomb.

  Something gleamed faintly under his clenched left fist, and I picked it up: a cufflink, with a battleship design.

  My fingers brushed at the knife still embedded in his chest.

  At which moment the shipyard came alive with light, scorching the metal and blinding me and from behind there were shouts, and whistles, and boots converging on me.

  2.

  ‘You are Henry Delamere?’

  Now, many shrewd observers feel that this isn’t something to be proud of, but it’s true enough and I said so.

  ‘It says here you’re a baronet.’ He looked up. It hadn’t been a question, so I didn’t answer it.

  ‘Whatever that may mean. I have to call you sir, is that right?’

  ‘I’ve never much cared either way.’

  He watched me for a moment longer, then considered the papers in front of him again. I re-examined the room: small; damp; brick painted an appalling green.

  ‘It also says here that you’re more or less bankrupt. That you’ve no profession as such. “Traveller”, it says. On the omnibuses, would that be sir?’ I smiled encouragingly at this hilarity. ‘“Gambler”, it says too. Not married, but known to have been associated with a number of different ladies. And more than once linked to scandal. Theft at a country house in ’03.
Gossip about a duel a couple of years later. Various bits of murky business abroad.’ He stretched the “murky” like a connoisseur. ‘French police wanted you for killing a man, it says. Until it was hushed up somehow. Some political trouble in Con-stan-tinople. Another death.’ He tutted heavily. He looked up from the papers again. ‘No stranger to hot water.’

  Still not a question.

  They’d worked fast in an hour or two.

  ‘What were you doing in the Thames Ironworks Company Shipyard, Mr Delamere?’

  ‘Sinclair asked me to meet him there.’

  ‘Why?’

  My vis-a-vis was a shortish solid object, a policeman – Inspector, he’d said – but in civilian clothes. A grey suit with an ill-advised check and an enormous thickness that looked like it could stop bullets and, given its general state of wear, might have done so.

  ‘He didn’t say. We’d played cards in St James’s, and afterwards he grabbed me and said he needed to talk to me about something.’

  ‘But he didn’t say what?’

  ‘No. He didn’t. Seemed pretty emotional about it, though.’

  ‘Why didn’t you talk in St James’s?’

  ‘Damned if I know. He insisted. I was a bit reluctant, as you’ll imagine; no chance of a cab back to civilization at that hour. He insisted some more. Emotional, as I say.’

  ‘Did you kill him, Mr Delamere?’

  The face was as solid as the rest of him. A heavy, yeoman-of-olde-England affair topped with red hair.

  He didn’t seem to blink.

  ‘No, Inspector. I did not.’

  Still he didn’t blink. He just watched me.

  ‘The assertion is offensive and fantastical.’

  ‘Mm. Thing is, sir, business like this, we like to go step-by-step. If you follow me. I’m trying to establish who killed this gentleman. I find another gentleman, bent over the body, with the knife in his hand. Perhaps you’ll think me unimaginative, sir, but it seems only logical that I explore that second gentleman’s fit as a murderer, before I conceive of any more… fantastical hypotheses.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Sort of a journey, sir.’

  ‘Well, bon voyage, Inspector, and don’t dawdle; you’re well short of journey’s end at the moment.’

  ‘Mm. You played cards, you said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who won?’

  ‘Tonight, I did. A matter of thirty guineas.’

  The Inspector’s eyes widened a fraction.

  ‘Any… trouble about that, sir?’

  ‘No.’

  He made a charmless noise through his lips, like a cow sneering at a thistle. ‘Sum like that, sir: might easily cause a bit of unhappiness.’

  ‘But not on this occasion. I was happy to take his I.O.U.’

  He was just gazing at me again; implacable, suspicious. I didn’t like it.

  ‘Listen, old lad, I know you’re not a regular at White’s, but does it really strike you as likely that a chap wanting to clear a debt, welsh on a debt, or smoke a cheroot and chat about a debt, would invite his creditor to a shipyard at the arse end of London in the middle of the night to do so?’

  ‘Not much, your worship. But it’s the ideal place for you to invite him, if you wanted to do murder.’ It was rather a good point. ‘Another five minutes and you’d have found somewhere to put him he’d never have been seen again.’

  ‘Or I’d have found somewhere less elaborate in the first place. Or perhaps I didn’t do it at all.’

  ‘You’d quarrelled over a lady.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘We’ve done our digging, Mr Delamere. Story’s well known. You’d quarrelled over a lady.’

  ‘I deny that utterly. We were briefly – Gods, to have to discuss it in these sordid circumstances – what someone with your intimate knowledge of the Sunday papers would refer to as rivals for a lady. He lost. He took it in good heart. I subsequently learned there had been an… understanding, and I stepped back for him.’

  ‘May I know the lady’s name?’

  ‘You may not.’

  ‘I could find it easy enough.’

  ‘No doubt. You’re clearly a connoisseur of fatuous errands.’

  ‘A journey, sir. As I say. And lookee here, I’ve found two healthy motives for murder already.’

  3.

  Like Polyphemus the Cyclops stowing Odysseus and crew in his cave for future consumption, the desk sergeant had put me in cold storage in a sort of holding cell. My companions were a couple of drunks, a pimp who’d caught a truncheon across the phiz during his arrest and was having trouble breathing through a grotesquely swollen purple nose, an old boxer I was pretty sure I’d seen once in an unofficial bout south of the river, and an evil-looking little personage who’d bagged the driest corner and everyone was avoiding.

  I slept fitfully. It’s a habit of travel in out-of-the-way places that I sleep as and when I can. But it’s also a habit not to settle until I’m sure of the company, and the holding cell of Wapping Police Station was a dashed sight more dubious than many places I’ve dossed in the Balkans and the Levant. And having to prop oneself up against a damp wall with a grille above you open to the night don’t make for cosy slumber.

  In the dawn – the cold light coming in from the grille made us look like the tombs in St Paul’s crypt, frozen on our benches – I was chatting with the pug when I heard voices from along the corridor. I knew they didn’t allow visitors along, but for some reason they were making an exception: a door was opening and now heavy feet were approaching the cell.

  After a night of unpleasant surprises, a moment of good news.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said to me. ‘Did you sleep well?’

  He was carrying a loose parcel. ‘Tolerable under the circumstances, Quinn. Sorry to have dragged you out like this.’

  ‘Not at all, sir. I regret that the person at the desk insisted on examining the contents. I hope you’ll find them in good order.’

  He pushed the parcel through the bars, watched by the sergeant. Again, I had no idea whether this was normal, but my valet had bribed, bullied or charmed them into acquiescence.

  ‘I think you will have to appear before the magistrate this morning, sir.’ Quinn gets more formal in company; in his habitual Cornish drawl, the average sentence drags on for hours. ‘Some improvements to your appearance and hygiene may help.’

  ‘No need to get personal, Quinn. What news from Fawnsley?’

  ‘I regret that Mr Fawnsley has said he is unwilling to act for you, sir.’

  ‘Ah. The quality of mercy has taken one look at my predicament and buggered off, eh?’

  ‘His excuse was a matter of an unpaid bill, sir. From his other comments… he does not care to associate, sir.’

  The parcel contained a change of linen, a razor and soap, a small volume of FitzGerald and a packet of sandwiches. A nod of courtesy, and Quinn was gone.

  I’d begged a cup of water and used it to shave, and was sharing the sandwiches with the pug when the sergeant came back to confirm that the magistrate would indeed be casting his eye over me during the morning. He said it as if they’d be skipping a committal and trial and reaching for the black cap right off. He then confiscated my razor.

  I returned to my sandwich. The pug was halfway through his as I sat, but then he stopped mid-mouthful, looked confused, and – having checked that the policemen weren’t watching – cautiously pushed something out through his lips. He wiped it on his trousers and handed it to me.

  ‘Looks like your bloke ain’t confident,’ he said.

  It was a tiny pen-knife.

  I pocketed the knife quickly. ‘He gets snooty if I don’t keep my nails in good order.’

  4.

  My valet mightn’t have been confident, but the magistrate was in a good mood. I was politely asked to remain available to support the police in their enquiries, and bailed.

  I was enjoying the sweet air of freedom in the lavatory-like corri
dor outside the courtroom, until I saw someone watching me hungrily. Red hair, mighty suit. And not happy.

  ‘Ah, Inspector. Sorry to disappoint you.’

  ‘Nice to be able to buy yourself out of justice. I’m still after you. Every step.’

  ‘Better luck next time, eh?’

  ‘Sure of it, sir. Two healthy motives already, as I say.’

  ‘Give me enough rope and I’ll hang myself, eh?’

  ‘That’s the spirit, sir.’

  And he managed to smile. Sort of wolfish; implacable. I didn’t like it; I was starting to feel as though I might have stabbed the chap after all. Then he was gone.

  Then Quinn, coming from the public gallery. ‘Congratulations, sir.’ It didn’t sound much in the Cornish grumble, and neither of us was feeling it.

  ‘I have a question, Quinn. You’re moaning at me more than usual about our finances. My lawyer has passed by on the other side of the road because I owe him, and he’s in pretty distinguished company among the local tradesmen. You’re restricting me to second-rate wine and hiding the racing pages. How have I just met bail?’ The lumpy face shifted uncomfortably. ‘And anyway, what possible power induced the magistrate to give bail on a capital charge?’

  ‘Perhaps your distinction, sir, or a friend–’

  ‘Rubbish. I couldn’t get a stray dog to piss on me, even before the police sized me up for murder. There’s no-one who’d… Quinn, why are you looking so damned shifty?’ He tried to compose himself, and failed. ‘Who, you blighter? Wait. No… No, Quinn. If you’ve gone to her, you’ll be on the street in the hour.’ That put him on his dignity again. ‘A woman? You went to a woman?’

  ‘Naturally I went to no-one, sir. Her butler and I happened to be in communication on – on a private matter, and when he asked after you it would have been odd not to mention your present inconvenience.’

  He was looking solid again. ‘Very clever, Quinn. Quite the politician, aren’t we?’ I turned away. ‘Of all people…’ I was off down the corridor. I needed air. ‘Her!’