The Sterling Directive

by Tim Standish

Boston Jack raised his eyebrows again. ‘Would have to be a small airship and a good pilot.’

  Church nodded. ‘It would. We have access to a ’ship that can run silent for long enough, just need the pilot.’

  ‘And who is this we?’ asked Boston. ‘Not police?’

  ‘Not police,’ I said. ‘And not army either. We’re what you might call an independent endeavour.’

  Boston laughed. ‘Seems like there’s a lot more of those around nowadays.’

  ‘Do you know someone who fits the bill?’ asked Church.

  ‘I know two pilots you could use. One by the name of Sidney Buckman, specialises in quiet landings, mostly by the sea if you take my meaning. He’s good, not too bright but dependable. Your better choice would be an ex-army guy, name of Lem Waller. But you might be out of luck there, I haven’t seen him around for a good five years or so.’

  ‘Do you have any idea where we might find them?’ I asked.

  ‘Well now, I thought your kind of independent endeavours would have the advantage over ordinary folk like me when it came to finding people.’

  ‘Ordinary folk is it now, Boston?’

  Boston Jack spread his arms wide, a gesture of hurt on his face. ‘Just a businessman, Mr Church, strictly legitimate.’

  ‘Whose doorman carry guns,’ replied Church.

  ‘I am sure we could find them,’ I said, ‘but any steer you could give us might save some time, and time is very much of the essence.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Boston Jack, putting his cigarette on the end of a cheap metal ashtray on his desk and picking up a pen. ‘Sid you can find here.’ He took a small sheet of paper from a stack in front of him and wrote a few lines on it. ‘In person or phone. But Lem I haven’t seen for a while. Just sort of dropped out of sight a few years ago. Must have made his money I guess.’ He smiled.

  I took the piece of paper, folded it and put it into my pocket. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Oh you are welcome. Always happy to help a friend of Church’s,’ replied Boston. ‘Now, gentlemen, can I tempt you to sample the delights of Boston’s while you are here? On the house?’

  Church stood and finished off his second glass. ‘We should get back.’

  ‘At least let me show you the club on the way out,’ said Boston.

  Church nodded and we both followed Boston out of the office along the corridor and down the stairs at the other side of the landing. The man who had been outside on the landing fell in behind us as we passed him and Boston led us down the stairs. The music got louder as we descended and even louder as we turned the corner at the bottom and continued down a short corridor to a door at the end of it. Boston turned back to us, gave us a wink. ‘Welcome to the future!’ he said as he opened the door and we followed him through.

  The noise was deafening, the loud and bright tones of a piano and the bleat and blast of brass underlain with the chunky strum of a double bass and the rattle and thump of drums. If the music was like nothing I had ever heard the dancing was even more surprising, as far from the sedate waltzes of my own youth as it would be possible to get. Clearly having the time of their lives, couples jumped raggedly at and around each other, feet together and arms flailing high.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Church shouted at Boston, pointing at a couple near us, his face a mixture of puzzlement and shock.

  ‘I believe it’s called the grizzly bear,’ Boston shouted back. ‘Can I get you that drink now?’

  Behind us the music came to a thunderous crescendo and the couples on the dance floor gave up a cheer in the few seconds of silence that followed before the band started up again with a rippling solo on the piano.

  Church nodded. ‘Go on then. Just the one.’

  16. Cowboy

  I had been in Bermuda for an extended stint of Maddox corporate junketing when I heard that the Confederates had bombed Washington. The news that came through at first was sketchy but eventually it became clear that the Confederates had somehow acquired a fleet of airships and used them to carpet-bomb the Northerners’ capital until barely a building was standing. Suddenly, the war that in the previous months seemed to have been heading for a barren stalemate had flared up again. Though Bermuda was by no means close to the field of battle, my family decided it would be best for me to return to London and a position was found for me at the Maddox Global Maritime offices there.

  Along with the position I was given the keys of a brand new and perfectly nice, but certainly not extravagant, flat in South Kensington. My role at Maddox Global was by no means onerous, the tradition of family leadership having already been taken up by my elder brother Julius, and so I was required to do little more than ensure that any person of importance to the company who happened to be in town enjoyed their stay. My only other duties were going to meetings or functions whenever it was deemed necessary for a Maddox to be present and Julius either could not or would not be there. Aside from that, I was free to throw myself into the sights, sounds and pleasures of London with as much gusto as I could muster.

  And muster it I certainly did, enjoying the sheer variety of entertainments that I had so badly missed during my time in Bermuda, drinking swizzles and trying to muster up the enthusiasm for yet another private recital at Admiralty House. Parched of theatre, opera, comedy and music hall, I drank it all in whenever my evenings were free of corporate jollity. I went to every exhibition that I could find, from the Royal Academy to the smallest, most cramped artist’s studio. It was at a commercial gallery approximately in the middle of this range, at some sort of opening (of something that never really stayed with me), that I ran delightedly by chance into an old friend from my Oxford days, the Honourable Edgar Theodore Huntingdon.

  Having lost touch over the years, we quickly re-established the rapport than had made us fast friends in our youth. We were both well travelled. Both an intermittent bother for our respective families. Both in less than arduous employment and generously enough supplied with family funds. Each of us was young enough to appreciate the joy of profligacy yet old enough to possess the experience and imagination to ensure that our pastimes reached beyond the blunter and more obvious pleasures the capital had to offer.

  Though of course we found time for those as well.

  It was Edgar who introduced me to Cooper’s, a place he had come across via an old school friend. I would never have found it otherwise, Mrs Cooper relying on word of mouth and personal recommendation to ensure that her clientele was of a particular quality, temperament and liquidity. I found it much to my liking, as most definitely did Edgar and it was where we seemed to end up on the evenings we weren’t at Boodle’s.

  The last meal I ate with Edgar was a veritable feast at Wilton’s. We kicked off with oysters before we moved onto lobster and an exceedingly fine bream. The group of us had spent the first part of the evening gambling in a rather vile den out in Seven Dials. We wagered first on cards then, later on, in a tucked-away basement, on bare fists. Venturing into that part of London was always a risk, even for a large group, and we had thought ourselves especially venturesome, so soon after the latest murder by the Ripper. This had been a particularly violent affair according to the men we had spoken to that evening, who gleefully regaled us with tales of mutilation and disembowelment.

  It had been Edgar’s idea to move on to Cooper’s after supper. I thought at the time we would be lucky to get in, as drunk as we were, but, with Edgar to the fore and in typically persuasive form, we were welcomed in. It was the first time for some of the others and Edgar left me to show them the ropes while he went straight to the girl who had taken his eye that autumn, the ‘young orphan Alice’. I had shown the rest of the fellows what was what as quickly as I could and, after a few minutes, left them with Mrs Cooper, answering their various questions about the girls as they stared at the paintings above the staircase, and went on my way to see Marie.

  It was a few hours later when Edgar, unusually, knocked at the door and, a bottle of champagne in hand, suggested th
at we swap for a while, he having tired of his girl. His hair was wet I remembered, though not untidy. It wasn’t unusual for him to do this, often tiring of a girl who he had proclaimed immeasurably fascinating only hours before. I was perfectly happy where I was, but, battered by his mockery of my keeping Marie to myself, I acquiesced and, after taking the proffered bottle of champagne, I walked a little unsteadily down the hallway and up the stairs to Alice’s room on the next floor, drinking as I went. As is so often the case, it was only in leaving Marie’s room and walking along the corridor that I realised how close to very drunk I was and I had to stop a few times along the way, take a deep breath or two and a gulp of champagne to try and snap myself out of it. The door to Alice’s room was closed when I got there and, feeling worse if anything than when I had set off from the floor below, I struggled for a moment or two before I managed to turn the handle. The room was completely dark, I remembered afterwards, with the curtains drawn so that I could barely make out her shape under the covers on the bed. Then: nothing. And, no matter how many times I try and force myself to remember, there still is nothing.

  I woke, lying stiff limbed on the hard, wooden floor. The room was bright with daylight, my head thick and empty. It took me a second or two to remember where I was in the unfamiliar surroundings. There was something in my hand I realised, as I pushed myself to my feet. Focusing on it I saw it was Edgar’s wolf-head walking stick, tacky with something dark, larger blobs and specks of matter caught within the dark, sticky coating. I stood, staring at the stick, befuddled at the liquid’s identity until a quick wave of comprehension shook me and, suddenly revolted, I threw it to the floor. As I did I saw that my hands and arms were likewise encrusted with blood. I turned to the bed, squinting against the light in the window and the hammering pain in my head, and I saw that the sheets which clung to the girl’s form were soaked with blood and I stood still for a moment.

  Then, and I still don’t know what macabre instinct made me do this, I reached across the bed and pulled the girl towards me so that she lay over on her back. She was frail and slim and naked, her torso bruised and beaten and her face so badly attacked that it was barely recognisable as human. And I vomited, into my hands first as I tried to save her from that final indignity, and then onto the floor as I leaned against the wall, heaving my stomach dry. When I staggered out into the corridor the first person I saw was Mrs Cooper walking, then running towards me. When she saw into the room behind me she let out an involuntary gasp, closed the door and then took me downstairs and had one of her people make me some coffee while she called the police.

  It was 11 November 1888 and my last day in England as a free man.

  The evidence was damning, the witnesses, Mrs Cooper and my friend Edgar were both shocked but adamant that I was responsible. My protestations counted for little and I was held under house arrest in one of Cooper’s rooms and questioned by Fuller until they eventually allowed me to call Julius. He arrived, silent, unsmiling and flanked by lawyers. It transpired that prior to his arrival Julius had been making a calculated disbursement of a portion of our family’s hoarded influence and persuaded certain authorities at a suitably high level that it would be in everyone’s better interest to see me enlisted rather than hanged. And so, three days later, I found myself on board a ship bound for Canada. Back in London, meanwhile, the kind of silence that significant wealth can buy washed gently across the press and life continued, untroubled and serene. My sudden departure was explained away to any who discreetly enquired as related to a liaison with a married woman and, readily believing it, society’s hunger for disgrace was sated.

  There were times in Canada, in those first few months after I arrived that I would lie awake and imagine the myriad of courses that my life could have run, pondering the choices that had resulted in exile to a remote, hellish and forgotten corner of the Empire. I picked decisions apart, reversed them and played ‘what if’. I imagined myself still in Bermuda or back in a different London where I wasn’t a murderer, had never met Edgar, never found Cooper’s, never woken up in that room.

  My plan when I arrived at the Canadian border was to sit out my exile quietly and, after a year or so, to ask Julius to petition for my return here, I told myself, I would be able to secure an acquittal. However, when I judged the time right and wrote my first letter it brought only a terse reminder from Julius of the strict terms of my sentence and a warning that any truncation thereof was utterly impossible. My letter to my father was returned to me unopened.

  So, with little other option, I tried my hand at soldiering and, to my surprise and, I think that of my sergeant, I discovered that I was actually quite good at it. The months became years; with them my knowledge and ability grew while my yearning for London faded. In time, thanks in part to the sponsorship of Major Harrington, I progressed from being a farcically old ensign to a sadly over-aged lieutenant and, ultimately, a sage and battle-worn captain. I developed a reputation amongst my men for being even handed, no shirker in a firefight and even for standing up for them against the sort of nonsensical standing orders that floated down from headquarters on occasion. I met a woman, the daughter of a German pastor, on a mission to enlighten the heathen in the ways of Calvinism. And, despite the reason for being there, I began to be happy, to put to one side thoughts of returning to England and to make a new life for myself in Canada. Then came the news of my father’s rapidly failing health and I came back to London, almost eight years to the day after I had gone.

  Throughout my time in Canada the steadily accumulating stress and bleakness of life on the border had begun to supersede the horror of that one night in London, like the strokes of a painter overlaying an earlier, unwanted sketch. And, as the months turned into years and I left the earlier, dilettante incarnation of myself behind, so I began to believe that nothing remained of that night, that I could put it behind me and start again. Even on the flight across from Canada, as I ate and slept, admired the view and made small talk with fellow passengers, I managed to deceive myself that all was forgotten and without significance. But from the moment I stepped off the last stair down from the airship and set foot on the tarmac, images started coming back, until, jerked into place by the sight of Edgar’s stick, I saw her again in horrible clarity, faceless and unmoving, and I realised that, far from erased, memory of that night was indelible.

  *

  ‘Come on, Sterling. There’s only six of them. How hard can it be?’ said Patience from her seat further along the desk, hunched in concentration over a set of old engine punch cards, working by the light of some differently sized and styled table lamps arranged around the desk.

  Even more so than during my first visit to Patience’s workspace in the basement of the Map Room, it resembled a haphazard blend of repair shop, museum and boot room, with several esoteric, mechanical projects in varying stages of completion dotted around the place. It smelt of oil and machinery and stale clothing. Patience’s engine was running in the background, generating a low, soporific whirr as it did.

  ‘It has to be one of them.’ Patience said, out of the corner of her mouth. She was holding a thin metal cylinder the same width as the holes in the cards and as I watched she picked up a large metal hammer from the overlapping layers of engine-related disorder in front of her and started gently tapping away.

  I realised that I was staring at the wall, jaw clenched. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly and looked again at the spread of grey folders in front of me. Six women with nothing to link them but age and height and hair. Sisters in data, they stared gravely at me from their engine-derived photographs, a random scatter of tiny printer smudges adding the illusion of a smirk here, a frown there. I looked closely at each in turn and tried to match their features to the memory of the grey-coated woman in Preston station. I didn’t recognise any of them.

  ‘Are you sure that these are the only ones that match the description?’ I asked.

  Patience stopped what she was doing and sat up straight in
her chair. Even from the side I could see the height reached by her eyebrows.

  ‘Fine,’ I said before she could expel whatever barbed comment was being readied. ‘I’ll take another glance at them. You carry on.’

  I went through the photos again, turning the chair away from the desk and looking at each of them in isolation. Still failing to kindle a glimmer of recognition, I turned to the folders themselves and read through the pages of detailed information in each one. The careers were similar, university followed by employment in army, police or government, and, for three of the women, a move to an agency of some sort: the Bureau of Engine Security, MO5 and the Field Intelligence Division. I went back to the photo of the woman who had ended up in the Bureau, covered her face with my hands so that just her eyes were showing. It was her. Lenora Mills.

  I reunited the other photos with their folders and put them to one side, then read through her career history more carefully. Lovelace Scholarship at Manchester Municipal School of Technology where she studied Engine Programming. Graduated in 1885 and joined the Bureau a year later where a short string of letters and numbers took over: A9, C2, K17.

  ‘Patience,’ I asked, ‘what are these numbers?’

  ‘What numbers?’ she replied as she held a punch card up to the light on the shelf above her desk and blew carefully on it.

  ‘On this file, something to do with the Bureau.’ I read the numbers out to her.

  ‘Team designations. Typical Bureau: logical to the point of stupidity,’ said Patience as she carefully slipped the card in her hands into a thick pack of similar cards and loaded them into a machine in front of her. ‘Probably makes sense if you’re an engine but it’s not that exciting is it?’ Patience put on a deep voice as she continued. ‘“I say, old boy, are you A9?” “Me, old chap? No fear, I’m K17 through and through.”’ Patience followed up this interchange with a peal of laughter. ‘What a collection of idiots.’