by Mark Hayes
A Spider in the Eye
A HAnNIbal SMYTH MisADVENTURE
MARK HAYES
Salthomle Publishing
Copyright © Mark Hayes 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Book Layout © 2018 Saltholme publications
A Spider In The Eye:
Mark Hayes -- 1st ed.
ISBN 9781791832049
As ever this novel is for my children;
Sarah Louise and Aaron James.
Neither of whom are children anymore.
Also, this novel could not have been possible without the help of A Hawley, C.G. Hatton and A Hatton, for all the alpha readings, proofreadings, editing and importantly the ceaseless encouragment and advice. So I offer my heart felt thanks to all three of them, as well as all the Adamscon geeks, the Thursday night writers and the readers who are kind enough to keep asking for more.
Also by the same author
Cider Lane: Of Silences and Stars
Passing Place: Location Relative
A Scar of Avarice
*From Russia With Tassels (coming summer 2019)
Contents
Prologue
Breakfast At The Baily
The Humourless Mr M
A Spider In The Eye
Vibrations In The Air
The Washbowl Interrogation
Old 'Friends' In Unexpected Places
A Bad day For Captain Singh
Whispers Louder Than Sin
Cream Tea Beneath The Sphinx
Below The Sands
The Jewel In The Crown
Assignments And Assignations
The Hand Of America Lays Upon My Interests
Jonah's Lament
A Blade At My Throat
The Northern Frontier
The Sunset In The East
Captured By Jove
The Famed Shangri-La Or Some Other Mythical place
At Least It Wasn't Bloody Snowing
Raw Courage And A Cutthroat Razor
PROLOGUE
I have seen the future of humanity, and it is war.
War on a scale unprecedented, consuming the world and leaving millions slaughtered in Europe’s mud.
War in all its untold misery, as nation fights nation with all the might of the industrial age.
A mere generation will pass, the lessons of the first war unlearned, before the world is plunged once more into darkness. Conflict on a scale unreckoned by our nightmares, embroiling all in its embittered grip. Wrapping the world in choking hands and bring suffering to all it touches.
Locomotives will carry men, woman, even children, into the gaping maws of factories of death built by the dreams of madmen. Millions sent to chambers of slaughter for the systematic butchery of a race.
Machines will fill the air, raining down death upon the great cities of Europe leaving nothing but shells of former glories. Broken remains of civilisation scorched and charred by storms of fire.
Men will craft weapons that level whole cities in a single blast.
Weapons that leave invisible death and poisoned air in their wake.
Weapon once conceived never forgotten, in a world waiting on the abyss for the press of a single button.
Ideologies of East and West will clash in a century of blood, ceaseless in its undertaking. Humanity master of its own annihilation. Tyrants will rule both overt and hidden. Until money becomes the foremost of all ideologies.
An ideology that will eat away at the earth itself. Burning it up to feed the ever-growing appetites of the few who extend their power over the many with the propaganda of technology. Feeding lies through invisible transmissions that saturate the minds of humanity and reducing them to cattle, ripe for the slaughter, to feed the voracious appetites of the elite.
All to keep the system of war and hate moving forward.
All the advancements of the ages, all the wonders of humanity’s devising, all the ingenuity of man turned to one sole purpose. The slaughter of the weak, to feed the vanities of the strong.
H G Wells, 1895
Unpublished introduction to The Time Machine
CHAPTER THE FIRST
Breakfast at the Bailey
The cells of the New Bailey are not somewhere they take you to. Rather, they’re a place they throw you, because once they put you there, they’re finished with you.
It’s the last stop but one on your life’s road.
The last stop, the very last stop. Well, that’s a mere hundred-yard walk across cold, damp flagstones through a tunnel into the small enclosed courtyard behind the Bailey.
There you climb up ten final steps to the scaffold before a short, sudden and very final drop. One which never quite reaches the ground.
The New Bailey is, you see, the highest court in the British Empire. So once your appeal fails there, they don’t bother to take you anywhere else. They just throw you in a cell, to await that final journey.
That’s it; you’re done, finished.
That’s all you get.
The cells of the New Bailey are the last place you ever go.
Well, except that is what’s left of you afterwards, which they cram into a cheap pine box to be shipped off to your relatives, leastways if they are willing to pay for the body. Otherwise, it’s the rendering plant. After all, the crown must recoup its costs somehow. Death and taxes are ever the only certainties, and the crown likes to get its due.
It should be said, therefore, that when I awoke to find myself flung into that dark, damp and foul-smelling cell, I wasn’t entirely in my happy place. As such, when they threw me in that cell, I made some rather choice remarks to the court bailiffs.
There were also a few minor exclamations about injustice, protestations of my innocence and I shall admit, the odd observation in regards to the bailiff’s parentage. These remarks I will admit, though without much in the way of regret, were somewhat less than gentlemanly. Considering my own parentage, the latter observation was also a tad out of character.
I’ve never been fond of those who use the word ‘Bastard’ as an insult. It is one that I’ve heard thrown at myself all too often, and for all its accuracy, it was seldom thrown at me for reasons other than abuse. Indeed, I doubt that most of those who’d called me such over the years were actually aware they spoke a literal truth. Not that many of them would’ve been surprised by this nugget, I am sure.
I, for my own part, swore never to use the term as an insult many years ago. Though I will admit that oath, like so many others I have sworn over the years, has been broken more than once. All the same, however, it’s a rarity for me to throw that particular insult about. So, that I called the judge, the bailiffs and the jailors a ‘Set of bastards’ is perhaps an indication of my frame of mind at the moment of my incarceration. Though, in my meagre defence, I was at that juncture being condemned to dance the Tyburn jig.
Having your hanging, literally, hanging over you, does tend to prey on one’s mind I have found, and leads you to forgo some of the niceties of polite conversation.
Questioning the parentage of those charged with marching you to the gallows may seem to be a measly recompense for such an indignity, but I am one
who’s been known to seek solace in the occasional small victory. Though as they go, it was a somewhat minuscule one at best.
However, before I go any further with my tale, so you don’t begin to doubt my credence, let us have a moment of honesty between us. For I know exactly what it is you’re thinking at this moment.
You’re thinking that every condemned man protests his innocence, both to the court and elsewhere. Just as every condemned man will decry the injustice done to him. For that matter, I’m in little doubt every condemned man makes a remark or two in regards to the parentage of their jailors. But I am not claiming to be unique in this.
I’d suspect also, that you may hold true to that ever-popular view that the courts don’t in point of fact ‘get it wrong’ very often, and the majority of the condemned deserve their fate. You may even subscribe to that other irascibly popular view expressed so often in the popular press… To wit, ‘Hanging’s too good for em…’
If not, then you are a better soul than I…
Indeed, had you asked me before my own dalliance with the courts of ‘She who is seldom amused’, I would have told you that a man who’d been through three appeals and still stands guilty before the crown is a man deserving of his punishment. For a man who has had his guilt weighed before the crown and been found wanting is just that, a guilty man.
You may, if somewhat grudgingly, also believe like most good English men that if, by chance, there is the rare occasion when that old blind girl on the Bailey’s roof is miscarried, well, that is just the price that has to be paid for law and order. That too is an opinion I would have put forward myself in the past. One finds little solace in this if one is the miscarried I have come to believe.
I know there are some who consider themselves to hold to a higher moral philosophy. Those who say something along the lines of, ‘Better a hundred guilty men walk free, than one innocent hang!’ A view popularised by some important American or other before their nation fell apart, Franklin, I believe… But it’s a view that’s never proved popular with the British masses when they’re braying for blood, and such high ideals did little to keep those states united after all. That said, it’s a view I find myself with more sympathy for these days, all things considered. Certainly, right then, I was of the view that one less hanging could only be a good thing.
With that all in mind then let us be honest here. Why should you believe in my innocence? Even if I protested such as they slung me kicking and screaming into my last abode to await that longest of short strolls. I stood condemned by the court. I was, therefore, guilty. I’m sure nothing I say could convince you otherwise, any more than it convinced my jailors. But protest I did. Indeed, it would be fair to say, I protested loudly. I decried. I shouted. I ranted in anger. And I uttered my contempt for the judgement pronounced upon me. Most venomously in fact.
All of which elicited the response you’d expect from the bailiffs. A violent response involving a heartfelt kick to my rear end that sent me sprawling to the floor of the cell, followed by a few more swings of their Billy clubs than necessarily were required to subdue me. I’d stop my protests long before those blows stopped coming. Even in my anger, I knew they’d been futile before the first blow rained down, they were worse than futile once they struck. The blows, nevertheless, kept coming, along with kicks from iron-shod boots. Until, not as quickly as I would have liked, I finally slipped from consciousness, bruised, bloody and beaten on the stone floor of my new and final home, a stone-walled cell within dragging distance of the gallows.
There were probably a few kicks after I succumbed as well. Bailiffs are want to take their pleasures where they can, and in all honesty, who doesn’t like kicking a man when he is down. It is right up there with fair play, high tea, and a stiff upper lip, as a good old English tradition after all.
If you don’t believe me on that score, if indeed you hold some fanciful ideas about what it is to be English, you need only examine the treatment of any English sportsman in the tabloid press after the national team loses. Kicking men when they’re down is one of the things we English truly excel at.
However, if, and I freely admit it is unlikely, you feel the bailiffs were perhaps too heavy-handed with their treatment, then I thank you for the thought.
In truth I don’t blame them overly. In their position, I’d have done the same. Putting the boot into someone lying prone on the deck was always my favourite tactic in games lessons back at school. As long as it wasn’t me who was the one prone on the ground, then all’s fair in rugger as in life.
What care you, the bailiffs, or anyone else for that matter, if a prisoner taking the long walk has a black eye, barely healed cuts, fresh bruises, and a broken rib or three?
The bailiffs had no good reason to display a little kindness towards the condemned, and the job of death cell jailor isn’t one that attracts the gentle-hearted. Being able to give their prisoner a good kicking, well I can see how men of a certain mind might consider that a perk of the job. Thuggish jobs tend to attract thugs after all, because even thugs need to put food on the table. Some may even condone such wanton cruelty, as it gives said thugs an outlet for their rage. Better by far they get their ‘kicks’ in on the job, than say, brawling in the bars around Whitechapel. So my protests of innocence and for clemency were always doomed to fall on deaf ears.
Also, as we are being honest here, so there be no lie between us at so early a juncture in my tale, I was for all my protests, as guilty as the devil.
If indeed it had been I that sat in judgment that day, then I dare say I would have ordered my fine stiff neck to the noose just as readily as the bewigged one who pronounced sentence upon me.
I’d stood in that courtroom first accused and then roundly condemned for murder. Which as I am sure you’re aware is a charge with a long established punishment.
Perhaps had I been a more honest man I may have just coughed up to the whole thing. Though such honesty would have seen me swing regardless, even were I to claim mitigating circumstances. At most, in honesty, I could claim a modicum of innocence on this charge, in that the man I killed was doing his best to kill me at the time. So it was an act of self-defence, as it were.
So, while I am far from honest, self-defence was what I claimed in court. A defence which was surprisingly truthful, as it held no lie to its construction, for I’ve no doubt that he had every intention to be the end of me that night.
“I saw it in his eyes, as plain as day, oh yes your honour, he had every intent to kill me and it was beholding on me to kill him first if I was to live through the night,” as I claimed in court, and not one word of a lie was spoken in that claim I assure you, for all the court believed otherwise.
However, again to let the truth be our guide here, I did murder him. What I chose to omit from my feeble defence was a simple fact that paints me far from the innocence I claimed. That fact being that I had entered the gunnery bay that night with the fullest of intents to be the end of him also. That he pre-empted me and was reconciled to bring about my death is of slight regard in that respect. This fact I chose not to admit in court.
Shocking of me, I know…
I admit it now only so that you can give some credence to what I have further to tell in my tale. If it paints me black-hearted, well I see no reason to give lie to that here. So to be clear, it was with murderous intent that I was driven to act, and for that oldest and most human of reasons, that of fiscal gain.
Murder, I should mention, was also but one of the crimes for which I’d stood accused, been convicted and was now to face my demise.
There were other little matters like profiteering, black marketeering, conspiracy to defraud the crown, ungentlemanly conduct, arson of the queen’s naval yards, and of course, treason.
Little matters as I say…
Matters for which I also have no defence, for of them I was also as guilty as sin. Though again, I claimed otherwise in court. With that in mind, I should probably add lying under oath and general
perjury to the list of my perfidies.
I am, you see, as you may have surmised at this juncture, something of a villain. A man, it would be fair to say, whose word cannot be taken as true. So it is up to you, I guess, to decide if, given all that, you chose to believe a word of what I now impart. It is the truth, however, the whole truth and, allowing for the odd embellishment to save me looking a complete fool, nothing but the truth. So help me God, if you believe in that kind of thing, though I generally try to avoid such committed beliefs myself.
So as I was saying, I woke in one of the condemned cells beneath the New Bailey. I wasn’t at my best.
My right eye was swollen, to the point my vision was blurred. Dried blood mingled with dirt on my face. I ached from head to toe, and I suspected that I had at least one if not three broken ribs from the Billy clubs the night before. I was, to put it mildly, in a bit of a state judging from the pain I felt.
The cell stank like someone had relieved themselves, and once I regained more of my faculties, much to my shame, I realised that was because I had. That it most likely happened after or while I was taking the beating did nothing to restore a sense of dignity.
It may seem a strange thing to worry about when all you are facing is the prospect of a short stroll to the gallows. But even with the certain conclusion that my life, such as it was, was drawing to a close, the fact I had lost control of my bladder and soiled myself brought with it the kind of shame a guilty verdict for murder never could.
It has to be said, therefore, that as I sat there still soaked in my own urine, in a cold, damp cell, battered and bruised, facing my imminent departure from the land of the living, I wasn’t, in absolute truth, entirely happy about my current circumstances.
Beyond the cell, it was a beautiful May morning, and the sunlight was doing its best to stream through the single, very narrow and utterly unreachable window about ten foot above the cell floor. That stream was, however, little more than a trickle through the grim dirt of street-level London, so it did little to cheer my spirits. A feat that wasn’t achieved either when one of my jailers arrived, carrying with him a tray containing breakfast for the condemned man. Which after he opened the cell door, he placed just within spitting distance of my hands.