Death and the Dreadnought Page 23

  I mention him now, because at that moment of imminent death he was suddenly very much in my mind. By some fluke, as I’d dropped towards the railway track a prong of some kind on the coupling mechanism had contrived to get hooked up under my waistcoat towards my armpit. As the Glasgow express raced on, and I tried to lift my battered swinging feet away from the track and my arms waved uselessly, I was held up solely by this prong and swinging wildly around it. My life hung, very really, by a thread: specifically, the thread that Cockayne had sewn across the shoulder of my waistcoat. So, as I say, he was suddenly in my mind. Always banging on about traditional craftsmanship, Cockayne, and now I had to wonder how committed he really was.

  I knew I had to stop writhing or I’d tear it. I managed to get my legs tucked up under me, though God only knew how long I could hold that, and I managed to hold my waving arms still. For one frozen moment, I contemplated the metal prong and the wrenched bit of waistcoat that hung from it, close against my face.

  Say what you like about tweed, but there are times when a gentleman has to rely on a good strong-woven bit of British cloth.

  I felt my legs tiring, felt my arms instinctively scrabbling for purchase. I saw the twisted material straining in front of my eye.

  Then something jerked one of my arms up, and then the other, and I was looking up into the face of Inspector Ernest Bunce. With my wrists gripped in his hands, he adjusted himself, and then heaved me up until I was perched on the coupling with my hands clutching the rough door frame.

  We stared at each other through the doorway.

  ‘Bunce,’ I gasped; ‘is there any chance you’re starting to believe I’m innocent?’

  ‘No,’ he said cheerfully over the rattle of wheels. ‘But you’re about the most incompetent guilty man I’ve ever met, and that’s got to be good news.’

  59.

  Bunce raced off down what was left of the train, yelling for the conductor.

  I staggered wearily after him, through the smouldering residue of the luggage. Then Quinn was there, of course, and somehow he had a flask of brandy, and soon enough I was starting to feel chipper again.

  He plonked me in his compartment with Bliss, and went off at my request to find out what Bunce was doing. Bliss gazed at me, rather appalled. ‘Where did you get to?’ she said.

  ‘Under the train.’

  One of the side-effects of a reputation for smart-aleck remarks is that no one believes you when you say something surprising. Mercifully, she didn’t comment. She took one of my hands, and started to examine it with apparent fondness.

  Suddenly there was the smell of perfume. ‘Why on earth are you putting – Damnit!’ My hand stung fiercely.

  She tutted. ‘Alcohol base in the perfume,’ she said. ‘You’re badly scratched.’ I looked at my hands. I was badly scratched. I sat back and let her finish dousing them in floral scent and tried not to cry out again.

  Quinn appeared in the compartment doorway. ‘We’ll be in Carlisle in a moment,’ he said. ‘The Inspector’ll alert the local police from there, and we’ll reverse up the line to chase that wagon.’

  Bliss said: ‘Would either of you care to tell me what on earth’s going on?’

  The train was slowing now, and the first buildings of Carlisle appeared through the window.

  I told her: the explosion, distracting most of the police while Hertenstein’s ruffians overpowered the two guarding the door to the luggage wagon; the gunfire and the burning luggage to hold the police back; hacking their way into the special wagon and uncoupling it so that it dropped away from the speeding train, leaving them free to make off with Britain’s secret naval apparatus. ‘Worked out handily for them,’ I said, looking to Quinn. ‘We were going up a gradient at the time, so as soon as they uncoupled their wagon they were moving away from us back down the slope. That’ll give them a few more minutes to play with.’

  We hadn’t quite stopped in Carlisle station, but I saw a policeman racing away from the train towards the station building. As soon as we had stopped, there were two or three voices shouting ‘Stay on the train! Stay on the train!’ It was hard to believe that among the policemen and revolutionaries there were still a fair number of regular humans. Regular humans presumably increasingly bewildered at what was happening to their day out. And they hadn’t yet seen what the bandits had done to their luggage, either. Already the train was heaving and belching and starting backwards. Again, Inspector Bunce had had his plan and worked it quickly. I wondered what the conductor was making of it all.

  A minute later Bunce himself was with us, a face suddenly in the compartment doorway, wild-eyed and determined. His pistol was already out – if he’d ever put it away. ‘We’ll get them now! They’ve only minutes! There’s no way they can unload it in that time!’ Immediately he was away to what was now the front of the train, the ruined luggage wagon.

  ‘We should, too,’ I said. ‘They can’t have brought another locomotive up in time: even if they could steal one, they’d have to capture umpteen signal boxes to keep it on this track after us. Their wagon will have rolled gently to a stop, and now they’re trying to manhandle a damned great crate off it and onto a cart or a motor car while the police close in.’

  ‘Take a while for the police to get there,’ Quinn said. He nodded at the dramatic landscape outside the window, the hills all around us. ‘Bad country.’

  ‘I guess they knew whereabouts they were stopping. But fewer roads for the police is fewer roads for them, too.’

  ‘Pretty desperate business.’

  He was right. It was a pretty desperate business.

  And where was Hertenstein, anyway, while his gang were up to their desperate games? Lord knows I didn’t admire the fellow all that much, but he struck me as the kind of villain who’d be on the spot for the main event. As when he’d popped up in the woods to enjoy my execution.

  By natural progression of thought, Von Hahn came into my mind. He was presumably still sitting in the dining car, enjoying his white wine. Was that glacial calm, that arrogant certainty, affected by the noises of the battle he had started, or by the police toing and froing?

  It didn’t seem likely, as I thought of his face.

  None of it seemed likely. Not for a man who calculated likelihoods so finely.

  Bliss said: ‘It must have been a clever plan.’

  I kept starting to stand, to go and join Bunce in the luggage wagon for the imminent battle. And I kept hesitating. ‘It was a clever plan’, I said. ‘Back and forth and always looking in the wrong direction.’ I shook my head. ‘And… so what?’

  Annabella Bliss nodded thoughtfully, and said: ‘The duck’s mask.’

  I gazed at her. ‘I don’t really have time, but: what?’

  ‘One of the essential ideas of magic; one of the very oldest principles of the stage. Actually, it’s French: les deux masques; but we’re a bit behind on our French reading skills in the London theatre. The audience knows they’re being tricked; they’re looking and they’re looking, and they’re determined the magician won’t catch them out. And then they spot it, they see the trick, look behind the mask. And they’re so pleased with themselves they don’t realize there’s a second mask. The real trick is somewhere else completely.’

  Quinn said: ‘like when you’re playing Spot The Lady on the street corner and someone’s picking your pocket?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘It’s a charming bit of cultural history,’ I said, ‘and I’ll know when to pop out for a gasper when I’m next at Jolly’s, but I can’t see how it’s relevant.’

  And yet; and yet… It reinforced my discomfort.

  Von Hahn was more than explosions. Armed battles with the police were far too chancy for him, surely.

  I looked at Bliss. I waited for the flip comment, the petulance at my scepticism.

  But it wasn’t there. She was just watching me, patiently; gazing with those big brown eyes. Then she said, quietly: ‘What is it, Harry? What have you seen
but not seen?’

  And then I was racing down the corridor, shoving people aside left and right and yelling ‘Bunce! Stop this damned train!’

  60.

  Bunce wouldn’t stop the train, even when I’d tried to explain. I didn’t have anything certain that I could explain. He’d been the policeman in charge when foreign agents had stolen Britain’s most important bit of naval technology, and now he was going to be the policeman in charge when it was recovered. I didn’t entirely blame him.

  That didn’t stop me cursing him pretty comprehensively for his stubbornness and stupidity. It made me feel a bit better, at least, and then I went looking for the conductor.

  A few minutes later I felt the train slowing, and before it had stopped I had dropped down to the trackside and was running beside it. I knew what I was going to find, and speed wouldn’t change it. But I was losing time nonetheless. Near the back of the train I caught up with Bunce and Sergeant Bulstrode and Stackhouse, all running.

  Fifty yards ahead of us, beyond the back of the train, sitting alone and proud on the track, was the lost wagon. There wasn’t a village or even a house in any direction. Just the emptiness of Cumbria, and in the middle of it that wooden wagon.

  No one seemed to be nearby. Bunce covered the last twenty yards with his pistol up and ready, and I let him go ahead. He needed to see this himself, and first.

  There were boxes and cases strewn around the side of the wagon. The sliding door was still open. Bunce stood in front of it, looking up into the wagon.

  I was destined never to make Inspector Ernest Bunce happy.

  ‘It’s not there, is it?’ I said. ‘It’s never been there.’

  61.

  Bunce was staring at me, at the world, in bafflement. Never a man to baffle sedately, he was looking damned angry about it. Strangely, it reinforced my respect for him. He would never give up, this policeman.

  I walked up to him, stood right in front of him, clasped him by the back of the neck, and stared into him. It was strange enough that for a moment he didn’t resist. Nearby, Stackhouse was staring into the wagon, still half full of baggage, and Sergeant Bulstrode was saying something about fresh wheel-ruts in the track that ran alongside the railway line.

  ‘Inspector,’ I said, ‘your success – your career – and my innocence are the same thing now. Now more than ever, we need to think clear and we need to think fast.’ He stared. Angry, but not entirely stupid. ‘Unless you plan to chase a cart or a motor-car across rough ground on foot, you have no time to waste here. There is no use fooling around the wagon. If we have any chance of success, it’s back on that train, moving forwards. That’s where the next station is, the next telegraph office. That’s where reinforcements are. That’s where the battle is.’

  He stared a bit longer. Then he nodded. Just once, but it was a beautiful sight. Then he was bawling at Sergeant Bulstrode and dragging Stackhouse with him back to the train.

  I don’t think he was brandishing his pistol in the face of the conductor with intent to threaten – he just hadn’t got round to re-pocketing it – but that was certainly the impression the conductor got. Within moments the train was accelerating northwards again. God knows what the regular passengers were thinking.

  Bunce all but pushed me into a seat and sat down opposite. ‘Talk’, he said.

  ‘At the next station telegraph office, you will get the local police to that wagon, and you’ll get them following the wheel marks of the vehicle that came along that track to pick up the men. That’s good. Maybe you even catch them. Either way, you won’t get the fire-control table.’ Bunce was doing his not blinking trick again. ‘It was never on this train.’

  His eyes went wide. I was losing him again.

  ‘These are clever resourceful men, Inspector. Hijacking the fire-control table en route, and transferring it on to a cart, and trying to get away across country, that’s a hellish long shot. A dozen ways it can go wrong, they’ve nothing to gain from a scrap, and they end up in a race which they’re not guaranteed to win. Could they have got the thing out of the wagon and onto a vehicle, with no heavy lifting apparatus, and be out of sight, in the few minutes it took us to get back there?’ I shook my head. ‘Same with our original idea, that they were somehow going to snatch the thing from under your nose in the docks.’

  The train was slowing again, as we approached Carlisle. Bunce felt it too, and I could see him bracing for action. I had to hurry.

  ‘It’s all just to distract us, and above all to delay us. D’you remember back in Crewe, when the wagon was being coupled? And right at that moment, our attention was distracted to the opposite end of the train, with shots and screams that didn’t mean anything?’ He frowned. ‘They probably improvised that bit when they found that we were on their train. Anyway, that was when they switched it.’

  ‘Switched it?’

  ‘Put the wrong wagon on our train. They’ve got a few friends among the working men, haven’t they? Stackhouse here saw a wagon being hitched up. But he couldn’t tell it wasn’t the wagon.’ Stackhouse looked uncomfortable. He shook his head at Bunce.

  ‘So where the hell’s the right one then?’

  Again the buildings of Carlisle and then the station rose outside the window. The train was coming to a stop.

  ‘Somewhere in Britain. When you send your telegrams organizing the local police, get the conductor to send one asking for details of any special chartered trains travelling north on this line this afternoon. Then we’ll find out where the hell it is.’

  62.

  Another policeman was thrown off at Carlisle with a set of messages to send. We continued northwards, as fast as the Glasgow Express would go.

  We continued because Bunce would have exploded if he’d tried stopping. And northwards, partly because it still felt like forwards, partly because there was an empty wagon blocking our way southwards, and partly because of my instinct that this was still the logical direction for the Germans to bring their prize.

  They’d have chartered a locomotive to pull the wagon, but they couldn’t disrupt the regular timetables of the railways. And they still needed to get the fire-control table onto a boat and away quickly, and that meant a port. There weren’t so many ports with railway links to the water’s edge. And if they still hoped to be inconspicuous as they loaded, they’d be better in a large port.

  ‘Anyone know how big Glasgow docks actually are?’ I said. There was a general shaking of heads.

  Stackhouse said: ‘The Colossus is at Greenock, and I think that’s several miles down the Clyde from the city. Never been there – not our yard, not our battleship – but I get the impression it’s quite a sprawl. Different bits of docks on both sides of the Clyde for miles.’ He saw where I was going, and looked doubtful. ‘You don’t think they’re still going there?’

  ‘Where better? One of our biggest ports, ain’t it? Lovely place to lose a railway wagon and a boat.’ My brain was working better now. I think the brandy helped. ‘And when they first planned this, they’d reckon that even if we had detectives or soldiers waiting at Glasgow, we’d stand them down once the wagon had failed to arrive.’

  At Lockerbie there was a telegram waiting for Bunce. Someone going by the name of Engineering Projects Limited had chartered a special train, to run from Crewe to Glasgow this afternoon. Locomotive and tender, one passenger carriage plus one goods wagon. Just sometimes, very very occasionally, I get a thing exactly right. I think it’s worth celebrating when it happens.

  Bunce got his pal the conductor in, and starting quizzing him about journey times. The conductor was unhappy about the whole business: a heated Bunce, combined with the implied abuse of his beloved railway network, got his back up properly. Eventually, we convinced him that it was the German agents who were disrupting his timetable, not us, and he started to co-operate.

  ‘But they must be running about the same as us!’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘Those times you said are close enough to ours.’


  ‘Behind us or in front?’ Bunce asked.

  ‘Can’t be sure. Even if they’d started behind us, there’s enough stretches of double track on this route they could have overtaken us any time; it’s mostly double track from here on in to Glasgow. That is, if they could manage the points.’

  I thought of Hertenstein, and his smart ruthless gang, up against an isolated signal man. ‘They can manage the points,’ I said. ‘What’s the next station?’

  ‘Lesmahagow.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The junction. They call it Motherwell now. Plenty track there. They’ll have to slow with the big bend, but they won’t need to stop.’

  I glanced at Bunce. ‘When are they due there, according to the timetable for that special?’

  ‘6.30.’

  ‘That’s 40 minutes.’ To the conductor: ‘How long until we make whatever you call it?’

  ‘Approximately 40 minutes.’

  ’Here’s your race then, Stackhouse.’

  63.

  A couple of miles short of Motherwell station the railway line makes a sharp curve left, and we saw them.

  A goods wagon, a carriage in front of it, and a locomotive smoking steadily. Hertenstein’s band of German professional assassins and their prize, Britain’s most precious piece of naval technology, chased by Inspector Ernest Bunce and Sir Harry Delamere and a couple of hundred holidaymakers who’d made the mistake of travelling on the Glasgow Express.

  For a moment, I thought it was a trick of light or distance. ‘They’ve stopped!’ Bunce into the wind.

  ‘Signal,’ the conductor said.

  No sooner had he said it, than they started to move again. But it took time for their locomotive to gather momentum, and we were still going at speed, and in a moment we had gained dramatically. ‘Faster!’ Bunce was shouting.