Death and the Dreadnought Page 11
23.
I have, I’m afraid, killed more than my share of men in my time.
For all his thoroughness, Inspector Bunce didn’t know the half of it. Or perhaps he’d been saving the good stuff for my trial.
A few in the war in the Cape, of course. With time, some of the memories fade. But so, with time, does the comforting certainty that we were fighting that war for a good reason. There are faces that don’t fade, and as with age one becomes aware of one’s own corruption, so the faces of those dead boys become more innocent.
And as – Bunce’s phrase – no stranger to hot water, I’ve added a few in the miscellaneous, peacetime column of the ledger too. They’ve all seemed necessary at the time. But you’d oblige me by not pressing the point now.
In the chaos caused by my latest victim dropping out of the sky into the middle of ‘The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery’, and a costume which I don’t care to describe, I made it out of the theatre at last. Quinn came out safe too, with less need for disguise – which I thought unfair, given that he was the blighter who kept assaulting policemen. He’d pushed off home, to try to maintain the pretence of normality at the Albany.
The evening had been a shambles, but we were all in one piece; in the circumstances, I thought that was rather positive.
Bliss was having none of it. She was livid – fuming at the interruption of her performance. I had one attempt at pointing out that the only alternative outcome had been me instead plunging to my death during the final chorus of a rather hackneyed music hall number, but it didn’t help. She sat with the obese cat on her lap, murmuring into its ear my many crimes against the drama. The cat regarded me smugly.
‘And after all I did for him last night…’
‘Right. Yes. Eh?’
She looked up. ‘Your fair-haired friend. The one you’d started off chasing. The one you killed before he could tell you anything. Well, when you had to come and hide in the theatre because you’d attacked that policeman–’
‘Quinn, actu–’
‘I followed him. Before he came back to the theatre.’
‘You what?’
‘He went off up the street, and I followed him. He gets round the corner, and has a conversation with someone in a carriage. Smart business: four-wheeler, two horses.’
‘You could have been killed!’
‘Least I’d have gone quietly.’
‘Yes. Good point. Beautifully put. Any markings on the carriage?’ She shook her head. ‘Did you hear any of it, or see who was inside?’
‘I came up too late for that. Just at the end, when they were finishing, I walked past them. I got sort of a glance inside, but nothing I could describe. I did hear the voice of the man inside.’
‘What was he saying?’
She stopped scratching the cat’s tummy for a moment. ‘He said “Kill him”.’ She smiled grimly. ‘Meaning you, I suppose.’
I nodded. ‘Usually means me.’
‘Suppose you’ve got what you need now, anyway.’ I looked the question. ‘You’ve enough to go to the police, surely.’
‘Enough to get hanged, certainly. Even if I could prove myself innocent of the deaths of Sinclair, and Merridew, and clear up the business in my rooms and the business in your piano – which at the moment is unlikely – they’d have me banged up for days first. No good.’ I shook my head. ‘I’m still in the wind.’
She gazed at me with something between despair and scorn. Then she buried her face in the cat’s fur. ‘It’s not very impressive, is it?’ she said into its neck. ‘No, it certainly isn’t.’
The cat purred its agreement.
I spent the next morning grouching around Bliss’s rooms, in enforced and uncomfortable idleness. She was on necessary missions of reconnaissance and logistics for me, and I wasn’t fine company in any case.
I slumped in one of the armchairs, in the increasingly battered trousers of my evening suit – the only non-ludicrous male legwear available to me – and the dressing gown, arguing with the cat. The cat was unmoved.
Among other things, I reflected on the various attempts to close my account permanently during the recent days. At first I replayed them with rather unproductive bitterness; but with time on my hands I got myself to review them more coolly. What seemed most striking – besides my obvious unpopularity with some of the most vindictive elements active in London – was the difference in style between the business in my sitting room and the businesses at the baths and the theatre. The first had been elaborate, and considered; the assassination de luxe. The others had been hurried and clumsy. On the first occasion, they had felt it worth their trouble to try to set up a suicide. On the second they’d risked questions being asked: Inspector Bunce wasn’t a stupid man and, however satisfied he might have been by my death in a bath-house, he’d probably have thought it unlikely I’d throttled myself. Something was different by Round Two; something had changed. I felt it might be important to know what.
Sometime in the small hours of a fitful night, Annabella Bliss and I had bumped into each other, and nature had taken its course.
There are faces that don’t fade, and as with age one becomes aware of one’s own corruption, so the faces of the girls become more innocent.
In the morning, I found that I’d made the newspapers again. Twice, in fact, and neither alas recalled the luxuriant self-assured vitality of Miss Bliss.
I featured anonymously in the Mail’s front page story: MURDEROUS OUTRAGE IN THEATRE: Desperate Death-Struggle Of Masked Bandits.
I got top-billing in the second page feature: SHOCKING NEW DISCOVERY IN PICCADILLY ASSASSINATION. The police – still, apparently, fooling around my rooms in The Albany and attracting the macabre West Country curses that my valet had picked up from his mother – had finally discovered something. I don’t say it was shocking to me, exactly – a gentleman doesn’t betray that sort of emotion, and in this business nothing was surprising any more. But it was certainly curious.
In a development ‘described by Inspector Bunce as “highly significant”’, ‘police thoroughness’ – instinctive light fingers, more like – had found a cufflink somewhere in my rooms. A single cufflink: one with a unique battleship design made only for senior personnel in the Thames Ironworks Shipbuilding Company.
Curious, certainly, as I worked out how it must have got into my rooms.
And then somewhat vexing, as I checked, and confirmed that its companion cufflink was still, at that very moment, in my trouser pocket.
24.
SCENE: The Thames Ironworks Company Head Office on Holborn. The curtain parts – well, two horse-drawn omnibuses cross, pass each other and go their separate ways, one top-heavy with unshackled clerks heading west for the railway station or a pint of beer, the other rather emptier and returning east to collect another load, and the gap between them widens – to reveal the pavement bustle of Holborn, and through it a discreet doorway with a brass plaque to one side. The attentive viewer may read on the plaque the name of that august shipbuilding enterprise.
A scream, obviously female, from somewhere inside the doorway. Then a pause, and after a few moments the thunder of boots as a POLICEMAN hurries down the internal staircase from his post at the inner, first floor entrance to the Thames Ironworks Company office and finds a YOUNG WOMAN swooning on the bottom step. Perhaps the policeman glances towards the face, but it is veiled. If he is a policeman of regular instincts, perhaps his glance is more naturally drawn to the considerable disarray of the young woman’s clothing in the area of her bust.
YOUNG WOMAN: (gasping, distressed) Oh – help me sir, please. The brute! He attempted… (points along the street, swoons some more)
The POLICEMAN notes that the young woman is still conscious, casts one last look at the pale plentiful promise of her décolletage, and hurries along the pavement in the direction indicated, blowing his whistle as he goes. As he starts, he notices a SOLID FIGURE disappearing down an alley.
From the other dir
ection, another FIGURE IN POLICE UNIFORM appears, and enters the doorway. The YOUNG WOMAN emerges, crosses the street and exits.
This had been the relatively easy bit of the business. Quinn had been a bit windy about framing himself as an assaulter of women and getting chased by the constabulary, but I’d cursed him for having the easiest bit of the job, and Bliss had fluttered her eyelids at him and talked a lot of guff about characterization and said how wonderful he’d be, and between us we talked him round.
She, of course, was in her element. My only worry was that she’d be determined to overdo the thing, and start reciting Cleopatra or bits of Shelley. I felt sorry for her: her Sarah Bernhardt moment at last, and it was just to help a wanted fugitive with a bit of breaking and entering. But we had to have another to-do over costume. She wanted to be a duchess or a flower-girl; I observed – with, I regret to say, more asperity and coarseness than was appropriate – that as long as she opened her top-hamper it wouldn’t matter if she was dressed as Kaiser bloody Wilhelm. She did as told, but I didn’t entirely relax until she was well out of the door and away.
Even my own part – in this first phase – wasn’t so hard. I hadn’t really done anything wrong, yet. The costume might take some explaining, but given the remorselessly lengthening list of serious crimes for which the police were hunting me, a few minutes of impersonation wouldn’t make it out of the miscellaneous etceteras at the bottom of the charge sheet.
Quinn leading the police sentry into the back streets, and Bliss across the road and clear, I had the stair to myself and a moment to breathe.
Assuming the reconnaissance was to be believed, the plan ought to work. But we hadn’t had time really to establish the routine at the Thames Ironworks offices, and it would only take a variation in routine or a bit of bad luck and-
-At which point a door opened beside the foot of the stair and a tubby fellow in clerk’s coat was immediately under my nose.
For a moment we stared at each other. I tried to look imposing, restrained the urge to say something. He gazed up at me. Eventually, he mumbled ‘Oh – the Thames Iron – of course… Er, thank you’, and squeezed past me and out into the street.
I breathed again, and started up the stairs.
Quinn and Annabella Bliss had – separately – watched that front doorway at closing time and well past. If our understanding was right, once the last of the managers and clerks was clear, it was just the cleaner left in the offices – and of course the policeman on guard outside. That extra snag had to become my way in.
I trod up the stairs with deliberate pace: sturdy; unflappable; not an impostor. As I turned the half-landing I saw the closed door up ahead of me, and as I reached the first floor I saw another brass plaque confirming that this was the inner entrance to the Thames Ironworks office.
The other deduction from the reconnaissance was that – unless the shipbuilding chaps had bladders the size of rugger balls or were in the habit of pissing out the window during working hours – their office had to have a lavatory in it.
I knocked.
This, I realized as I stood there, essentially trapped in a dead end, was where the plan could most easily go wrong. At any moment the policeman would be back, having lost Quinn in the undergrowth and recognizing that he’d deserted his post with nothing to show for it. If he got onto the stairs before I got off them into the office – or before I gave up the madness and hurried down and out again – I’d be done for. I was the very man he’d been posted here to watch out for, and I’d have nothing to say and nowhere to run.
I knocked again. Harder.
From the bottom of the stairs, I fancied I heard boots.
I tried the door. Locked, obviously.
Definitely feet on the stair. Hopefully Quinn had exhausted him in the chase. Hopefully he had bunions. I glanced around me; the stairs went no further, and there were no other doors. Hopefully he’d collapse on the stairs and suffer some kind of –
The lock clicked and the door opened, and the cleaner stuck his head out. He was uneasy, and more so when he saw my policeman’s uniform. 'Mind if I use the thunderbox?’ I said, pushing the door open and stepping past him. ‘Long shift today.’ I closed the door behind me, and locked it.
He led me through a front lobby of desks to a corridor, and pointed out the privy. ‘Thank’ee’, I said, and jerked my thumb back towards the entrance. ‘I’ll let myself out when I’m done. Lock her up after me, soon as you’re passing that office again. Have to be extra careful, with this madman on the loose.’
He nodded, and lolloped off to wherever he’d been sweeping. I took the chance to use the facilities – verisimilitude’s the thing in these affairs, and more importantly I knew I’d have to hole up somewhere for a good few hours – and to remove my boots. Then I cautiously came out into the corridor again, alert to where the cleaner might be, and hurried for the front door again. I unlocked it as quietly as I could: to my anxious mind it sounded like a rifle shot, but I had to hope the policeman on the other side was a little less nervy than I. Now the cleaner would find it unlocked, and conclude that as promised I had let myself out, and lock it again as I had asked, and everything would be in order.
I was already moving swiftly back through the front office, boots in hand and hunting for my hide-out. It had to be big enough to take me for a couple of hours, and it had to be something that the cleaner wouldn’t want to come and clean. Almost at once I got lucky: a door in the corner of the front office proved to be a walk-in cupboard for the coats of the junior clerks, and I was in there immediately and closing the door, and settling myself into as comfortable a sitting position as I could manage.
I’ve had a goodly share of vigils over the years, often in darkness and occasionally in much greater discomfort than this. One learns tricks and habits to get through them without going batty or reckless.
If at a truly loose end, one keeps the bean ticking over healthily by recalling lists. Kings and Queens of England. Horses on which one won a bundle. Women.
If wanted for more murders than one can keep count of, one gives one’s bean a cold shower and takes the opportunity to run through the problem.
In this case, and still, the problem of how David Sinclair had ended up dead in his shipyard. And, consequently, what I was supposed to do about it, having got myself cornered in the company offices.
Time passed. At least, I reflected, this would be the last place the police would look for me.
What upsets a man about his business?
Fraud? But why the yard? Sabotage? But what would Sinclair have known about it – and, as MacNeice and I had agreed, what was he doing on his own at the yard? What possible proof of sabotage could he have hoped to find or deal with on his own?
Of course, he wouldn’t have been on his own, would he? He’d invited me to meet him there.
Was he looking for something there? Or something missing?
That was a fool’s errand, surely. Unless someone floated the Thunderer off downriver in the middle of the night, Sinclair couldn’t possibly hope to spot something missing, not in that vast warren, not in darkness.
Time passed. Harry Delamere, legendary boulevardier, spending his night in a cupboard.
In any conceivable scenario of criminality, Sinclair would have had half a dozen people in his company to talk to, and all the forces of law on his side to investigate it. This was the nation’s newest battleship: the government would give him an army of policemen and detectives – they’d give him the army, indeed – to keep it protected.
Sinclair wasn’t sure.
He suspected something, but he was so uncertain that he had to go to the yard to check… something.
Something at the yard that was… what? An object or a fact? There or not there?
It was still – however much I tried to make it make sense – nonsense. MacNeice would have spotted that kind of thing long before the company lawyer, and he’d have been the man to find –
MacNeice?
Surely a man of MacNeice’s character… But that was naive of me. Old soldier sentiment.
Was MacNeice a secret revolutionary? Was he selling off rivets on the side? Swapping out quality parts for cheap?
I couldn’t believe it. By force of character and talent he’d won himself an excellent billet managing the yard; status, good salary no doubt, and probably a fair pension too. No shabby fiddle on the side could be worth jeopardising that.
And what of the mysterious Samuel Greenberg, Sinclair’s frequent acquaintance in the period before his death? The Cabal of Carefree Cat-burglars, or whatever his damned shop was called. What did he mean to Sinclair? What might he know, if I could track him down?
Had he been Sinclair’s informant? What might he have known about what was happening at the yard, and why would he have wanted to share it?
A door thumped. For a moment I thought it was my cupboard door, and for another moment – snatched from my reflections – I was about to reply.
It wasn’t the cupboard door. The reconnaissance conducted by my mixed squad of valet and burlesque dancer had shown that at eight o’clock the chief clerk of the Thames Ironworks Company offices would conclude his supper in the public house round the corner, and return to the office to turf out the cleaner, check that he hadn’t damaged the portraits or looted the glassware, and lock up finally for the night.
I assumed this would be a pretty brisk business, abbreviated by habit and complacency. I hoped, anyway.
I heard footsteps, and then a lock. The cleaner opening up from inside. He’d be keen to be off, surely; thirsty for a refresher with the lads and then home. He’d be waiting ready. Unless the chief clerk was particularly picky, in which case the cleaner would make sure to be caught with broom in hand trying to do an especially good job.