“There, sir,” shouted Lawrence from the bank behind us. “No, to your right—a plank, I think—”
As the lantern swung wildly in my fist I glimpsed what he had spotted—a long, hard edge gleaming silver. Even as I spied it the water lapped against it, growing deeper—the tide was coming in. Throwing caution aside, I heaved my right boot free of the clay and strode out for the plank, barely pausing to test its steadiness before I brought the left after it. A second step, a third—two more and I was across, and now, when I held the lamp low, I could see a trail of footprints, the closest already filling with water. The track veered farther to the right, then turned left, up the embankment.
“Damn me for a fool—!”
“What?” asked Steinhauer.
I pointed. “Steps, in the embankment. You can barely make them out.” Yet Akushku had known they were there. All of this had been planned, but there was no time to reflect on what that signified. I felt the ground shudder.
“Another train’s coming,” I called to Steinhauer, and raced up the embankment, feeling the legs of my trousers, soaked in filth, slap against my calves. “Quickly!” The steps up the bank were as steep as a ladder and at one point I nearly fell backwards, but steadied myself. I felt Steinhauer close behind me, but I could not turn to see how many of the others had followed—I knew I had to cross that railway line before the next goods train arrived. Now I could hear it, rumbling in from the south across the river bridge, and as I staggered to the top of the embankment I glanced left and saw it—a massive black shape trailing a plume of grey smoke that glowed orange with sparks, wreathing the metal struts of the bridge. For a moment I thought the train was standing still—but that was only because Steinhauer and I were directly in its path, and in seconds it would pulverise us.
“Scheisse!” Steinhauer yelled. “Schnell, Wilhelm!” Seizing my elbow the German hauled me forwards, and we danced across the first set of tracks—I could hear them ringing with vibration—then a second, and a third, and suddenly we were scrambling and sliding down into the gasworks yard, steadying ourselves with outstretched hands. I felt filthy grit gathering under my fingernails and heard a rattle of stones following me down.
At last the ground levelled out, and it was no longer mud and earth under our boots but cinders that crunched and cracked with every step. Enveloped by clouds of choking smoke, Steinhauer and I staggered upright, then I glanced back; Connolly and one uniformed officer, the one who had given me his lamp, had made it over the embankment behind us. The rest of my men were trapped for now on the other side.
As the smoke and steam thinned I looked around to find my bearings and work out which way our prey might have fled. To the south by the river were the fuel stacks that the railway wagons fed—massive heaps of glistening black coal, at their foot a score of workmen shovelling the stuff onto conveyor belts that rattled and clanked towards a broad, low brick building to the west. Dead ahead was the gasworks itself, judging by its tall chimneys and the tangle of pipework that ran from it. North of that, along the western side of the site, were the vending sheds. The pipework ran towards the gasometers I had seen earlier, and now close up the two of them loomed over us like plate-iron mountains, their cylinders filled to capacity. The whole site was wreathed in acrid smoke and steam and the racket from the engines that powered the belts and machinery.
“Take Connolly and this constable with you,” I yelled to Steinhauer, “and head north to the main gate. No one is to leave or enter—workers, merchants, nobody—go!” The three of them raced off.
“And you—!” I shouted to a passing workman, his clothes and face as black as a miner’s with coal dust. The man stopped dead in confusion, probably wondering where the devil all these men had come from, but there was no time for explanations.
“The site manager’s office—where is it?”
“Over there,” the workman pointed. “But—”
“Take me there, now.”
I didn’t wait for him to lead, but grabbed his arm and dragged him along in the direction he’d shown me. I had thought at first our fugitive, caked in stinking river mud, would be easy to spot—but since every man I could see was black with coal dust and running with sweat it would have been all too easy for our quarry to have blended in. That said, he was a stranger all the same, and his best chance of slipping out unnoticed was via the vending sheds, where sacks of coke and coal were loaded onto merchants’ carts. There he could mingle with the coalmen, maybe pass himself off as a helper, and hitch a lift off the site to safety; that was why it was imperative we close the gates. I needed to contact the site manager and get him to shut down the machinery, then assemble the workforce and round up any strangers. If that did not flush out our fugitive, we would comb the site inch by inch until we had him.
“Dead ahead, guv’nor,” the workman shouted, pointing upwards. “Big office, top of the stairs—”
I was distracted by shouting to my right, from inside a grey cloud that swirled around the nearest gasometer. Not the shouts of men at work—these were shouts of panic, shrill enough to pierce the thunder of the coal conveyors and the passing train. Abandoning my guide, I raced towards the commotion. Perhaps there had been an accident and someone had been injured, but that would have been a damned odd coincidence.
Hurrying into the murk I nearly collided with three figures rushing in the opposite direction—two labourers propping up a third between them, a man whose face was a mask of blood and whose legs were unsteady.
“What happened here?” I demanded.
“Eric’s been shot in the head, that’s what’s bleeding happened,” said the worker on the left, trying to push past me. He was filthy, wiry and a head taller than the other two. “Let us by—”
“Stop—let me look at him—”
As gently as I could, I lifted the injured man’s sagging head. He blinked at me, in pain and semi-conscious, and I saw the livid gash under his grimy hair.
“It’s a scalp wound, that’s all, he’ll live. Who did this?”
“A bloody madman, covered in mud, waving a gun about—chased us out of the valve-house.”
“Get this man some first aid,” I said, drawing my own gun again.
“That’s what we were bloody doing, begging your pardon—”
The three of them hobbled on in the direction of the manager’s office, vanishing into the grey murk. I headed in the direction from which they had come and found myself on the other side of the cloud, in a yard that was deserted and oddly quiet, as if the fug in the air muffled the sounds of the site. Before me stood the valve-house—a shed of corrugated iron sixty feet long and two stories high, connecting the two gasometers. Its tall iron windows were yellow with gaslight, and in the centre of the shed, straight ahead of me, its metal entrance door hung ajar.
A dozen steps and I was on the threshold, gun raised and ready.
Reaching out I hauled the door wide open, quickly stepped inside and immediately moved to my right, keeping my back to the wall and my gun levelled, covering the floor in front of me. Ahead was a gloomy labyrinth of pipes and junctions and gauges and valve wheels, a vast bank of machinery thirty feet high. Halfway up was a maintenance walkway of metal mesh, accessed by an iron staircase. I swept the room for movement, but saw none, nor any sign of a fugitive. Neither could I see any second door by which he might have escaped. Gun at the ready I stepped cautiously forwards, towards the foot of the staircase—then paused. Dead ahead of me, in the shadow of the walkway, I could see on the concrete floor a small dark puddle of what looked very much like blood. As I stood there another drop fell into it from the platform above.
“Closer, policeman. I won’t kill you just yet.”
Now I could make out a shape through the mesh of the platform—a tall, thin, mud-smeared man folded up against the machinery, seated on the walkway with his knees pulled up, bracing his back against
a broad vertical pipe. One arm clutched his belly from where blood was dripping. The other, if he had one, I could not see. I pointed my pistol at him.
“Put down your weapon and place your hands on your head,” I said.
“I do not think so.”
“Surrender, and we will get you medical help.”
“So I will be well when you hang me? I die here.”
His accent was more Serbian than Russian, and though I could only make out his profile I recognised it.
“You’d give your life for Aleksandr?”
“I am Aleksandr.”
“No, you’re not. I saw you, last week, after I shot you in the arm. Bozidar, also known as Ljubo Gubec, from Belgrade. Born 1874, I believe.”
“Died in London, 1901.”
“It doesn’t have to end here, Ljubo.”
“Here, now, is good time.” He chuckled; he was a tough customer, all right—a bullet to the belly would have brought down most men, never mind a man who’d had his left arm amputated less than two days ago.
“Lady Diamond thought she could escape,” I said. “She and Aleksandr both. They planned to run off together.”
“Valeriya…Valeriya needed to believe.”
“It’s over. We know what Aleksandr has planned for tomorrow. He’s going to fail.”
“He has not failed yet.”
“He failed tonight. We have you.” No answer, but another chuckle, this time ending in a ragged gasp of pain. A stomach wound meant he would die in an hour or two, and painfully. Though he would probably pass out before then. So what was he waiting for? Did he expect me to run up the stairs and get shot in the face before I’d even reached the platform? Come to that, why hadn’t he fired on me as I came in, when I’d been silhouetted in the doorway?
Taking a tiny step forwards I looked more closely at Bozidar’s folded form. He was pressing his right arm across his belly to staunch the flow of blood, but his right hand was resting on a crate of some sort—a small wooden crate that did not seem to be part of the plant. I heard a scuffle in the doorway behind me, and a breathless voice—
“William—”
“Stay back, Gustav.” I did not turn around.
“And here is Steinhauer.” The anarchist laughed. “The butcher and his dog. But which is which?”
Keeping my eye and my gun on Ljubo, I stepped slowly back towards the doorway and crooked a finger for Steinhauer to come closer. The German, his own gun raised, came to stand by my side. “Gustav,” I murmured, as softly as I could, “you must not react to what I say next.” Steinhauer responded with an almost imperceptible nod of his head.
“I am going to order you to fetch more men,” I said. “But you must not. You must leave the building immediately and evacuate the site. Get everyone clear, including yourself.”
“But what about you?”
“That device, the one he’s shielding with his body, it’s a detonator. They planted a bomb in this place long before we got here.”
“Under the gas holder?” Steinhauer muttered a curse in German.
“He means to take as many of us with him as he can.” I raised my voice so the anarchist could hear. “All of them, Gustav. Here, now.”
Steinhauer replied loudly enough for Bozidar to hear, “Yes, Chief Superintendent. Right away.”
He backed out of my field of vision, and I heard him scramble through the doorway.
“In a few moments I will have the building surrounded, Ljubo,” I called out. “Put down your weapon and I promise you will come to no harm. You won’t hang, and you’ll serve your time in a British prison, not a foreign one.”
“Even though I killed two of your men?”
“I’ve made deals with the devil before.”
“Ah, yes. The spider spins his web of lies and waits for the fly. In all of Europe there is no policeman more despised than you, Melville.”
“You can bleed to death up there if you like. It’s all one to me.”
“I will not bleed to death.”
Another attempt at a laugh, more ragged and painful than the last. He was weakening; time was running out.
“Answer me one question all the same,” I called. “Why do you even trust Aleksandr, when he used to be an agent provocateur for the Okhrana?”
Bozidar snorted. “Svinjska sranja.”
“On the contrary, I have it on good authority. From a Latvian I know.”
“Your informer is lying.”
“I’d sooner believe him than you.”
“You think Aleksandr is Russian?”
“If he’s not, what is he?”
No reply at first, just harsh, painful breathing. Then an angry groan. “Where is your friend? Steinhauer? Why don’t you ask him?”
What did he mean by that? But I had no time to wonder.
“He’ll be here momentarily.” I took a small step backwards, then another, until I could feel the draught from the open door on my back. There was a lip at the bottom of the doorway, I remembered, two inches high, which would trip me up if I was not careful. If Bozidar saw me moving, he would know I’d guessed his plan: to keep talking as long as possible, while reinforcements arrived—so as many Special Branch officers as possible would be within range of his bomb. But I too had been playing for time, while the yard was evacuated.
Now all I had to do was to get myself well out of there.
“Steinhauer,” I said, as if greeting Gustav behind me. At the same time, forcing myself not to hurry, I turned and stepped through the door. Then I took to my heels, barely hearing the Serbian cry out a curse of despair.
“Prokletstvo dođavola!”
I raced for my life, blindly into the fog.
I heard no explosion, but I felt heat blossoming behind me, scorching my exposed neck—I fancied I could smell the hairs there singe and shrivel. Then a giant’s hand caught me in the small of my back—no, not the small of it, all of it—and pushed me, harder and harder, till the breath left my body and I was lifted off my feet and sent flying, spinning head over heels with the night whirling around me, and only now was I aware of the whistling roar in my ears blocking out every sound. I wanted to yell but had no wind, then I felt something brush the top of my head, and I slammed into a pile of loose rocks, sinking down into them, the shock of the impact resonating through my body till it ripped out from my mouth in a bellow of pain. There was a fire close to my face, and I screwed my eyes tightly shut, trying and failing to work out which way was up. For a moment I felt as if I was hanging in space, my arms and legs splayed out anyhow like the limbs of a discarded doll kicked into the gutter.
Had I been maimed? The thought appalled me. Eyes screwed shut against the heat I forced each of those limbs to move, in turn, but it was as if I was swimming in clay—all my movements were sluggish, and my arms and legs were slow to respond. When I lifted my right arm and let it drop, the ground beneath it seemed to shift. Now I realised the stuff under my back was not solid at all, but shifting and sliding, its teeth digging into my flesh. Hundreds of jagged teeth that seemed loose somehow, just as my own teeth felt loose in my head.
I opened my eyes.
Steinhauer was looking down at me, his expression grim, his face bright with fire. The night sky beyond him was not dark—it was a boiling pillar of sparks rushing away from us. When he saw I was conscious, the young German’s anxious expression dissolved into a smile of relief. His face was lit by flames; his hat was gone and his hair was singed on the right side of his head. “Can you move, William?” His voice was faint and almost drowned out by the ringing in my ears. I was lying on my back, I realised, with my feet higher than my head. When I tried to right myself, the loose rocks underneath me gave way, rattling about me so I wallowed like a drunken walrus. Steinhauer actually laughed as he reached down to help, staggering as his own feet sank int
o the heaps of coal.
Coal. I had been thrown into the air by the explosion and I had landed on one of the supply mounds, head downwards—the teeth chewing on my back had been lumps of coal. My limbs were all in working order, thank God; I was just dizzy. With Steinhauer’s help I turned and twisted my body until my head was higher than my feet, then shuffled and slid down to the foot of the stack, a dozen feet below.
The ringing in my ears was starting to recede along with the dizziness, but for a moment I still wondered groggily how long ago the explosion had occurred—it had been night when I had raced from the shed, but now it was bright as day. And then I felt anew the heat on my face and squinted up at where the right-hand gasometer had stood. Now it was a giant crucible of fire.
“The men,” I said to Steinhauer. The word came out as a croak, but Steinhauer knew what I meant.
“To the best of my knowledge they are all safe. The workers too. But I imagine there are broken windows for miles around.” He peered at me. “What of our man? Akushku?”
“That was not Akushku,” I said. “It was Bozidar.”
“Did you learn anything from him?”
I shook my head, then wished I hadn’t. It set my brain swirling about in my skull like a badly set blancmange.
“I am sorry, William,” said Steinhauer. I frowned; what was he apologising for? The German merely grinned and nodded at the enormous conflagration.
“Not even you will be able to keep this out of the newspapers,” he said.
22
Our growler jolted through the night-time streets north towards Berkeley Square, the driver rattling the bell for all he was worth to clear a path through the evening traffic. Every clang was like a nail driven into my skull, and every jolt fired bolts of pain through my limbs. But there was not a moment to lose. The poky windowless compartment reeked of scorched cloth and singed hair—a stench that came from myself and Steinhauer.
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