by Will Thomas
Cyrus Barker had lost his faith. Well, perhaps not his faith as such; according to Baptist doctrine, no man is able to pluck the believer out of his Father’s hand. Still, he drew little comfort from the Scriptures as he once did, and I knew him well enough to see that it pained him. Fewer verses came from his lips. The old ship’s captain was at sea.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, that prince among evangelists, whose sermons were published worldwide and who preached at the Metropolitan Tabernacle but a few streets from the Guv’s house, had had a dispute with his congregational and denominational leaders. He withdrew from the Baptist Union over what he saw as a growing apostasy and they censured him. He retired to the South of France. As a deacon, Barker was called to an immediate meeting, which lasted long into the night. Two days later, he resigned. That was in 1887. Spiritually speaking, he was never the same again.
Barker glanced my way and I became industrious, typing notes from our last case. There was a flutter in the waiting room outside and I caught a glimpse of military braid, one of the old soldiers who delivers telegrams and packages in London. Jenkins signed for whatever was delivered, then stood. I knew what would come next: he would enter with the missive on a silver salver with as much dignity as could be mustered by a clerk who’d spent the previous evening pouring neck oil down his gullet.
In he came, of course, stopping with the salver at Barker’s desk. We live but to serve.
Cyrus Barker stared at the salver as if it were an adder that might bite him. He seized the edge of the package with his hand and raised it, testing its weight. By the way he hefted it, the package contained something heavier than mere paper. He set it down again and ran his fingers over the irregular object, trying to deduce by touch alone what it was. He nodded decisively. His hand went to his desk drawer where he kept an Italian dagger for use as a letter opener, then he slit the top and dropped the contents of the envelope into his hand. It was a key.
I rose from my desk and leaned over his, examining it as my employer turned it over in his hand. It was an old brass key, thick and long, the kind of door key that existed before locks became such fine and complicated mechanical marvels. I saw a letter stamped into the ferrule on one side, the letter Q. It was not in an elaborate script, just a simple oval with a tail. There was no way to tell if it was originally stamped thereon or if it had been a later addition.
Barker sat back between the high wings of his green leather chair, deep in thought. He spread his arms wide and placed his hands prone on the desk. Then he began to drum on the spotless glass sheet that lay upon it. He looked at his hand. He looked toward our bow window. He looked down again and then up. Then he stood.
“Let us take a walk, Mr. Llewelyn,” he said, coming out from behind his desk. Though officially we were partners in the agency, my opinion was not requested.
We passed through the outer office and I informed our clerk that we would be out. We donned our coats and stepped outside into the bitter wind. I fixed my hand to the brim of my hat, walked into Whitehall Street, and regarded the vehicles passing by. Cabmen perched atop their cabs, huddled in their thick coats, looking miserable. Their fares hunched over inside the open vehicles, no less despondent. I turned to make some commonplace remark to Barker and found that he wasn’t beside me.
I turned and saw him striding deeper into Craig’s Court, heading east toward the Telephone Exchange. I hurried until I was beside him again. His breath came in white plumes, as if he were smoking one of his innumerable meerschaum pipes. We came to the cul-de-sac, which veers right, and faced Harrington House, a wide circle of tall gambrel-roofed buildings. They had been built a few centuries earlier to provide the Earl of Harrington access to a Palace of Westminster that was never built. One felt sorry for the earl in his powdered wig, dejected that his grand scheme was thwarted by Henry VIII, that old spoilsport. But I digress.
There was a tall, thin building of indeterminate age on the right hand just as one reached the court. It had an old, yellowed TO LET sign in the cobwebbed window. Barker walked up to the door and put the key in the keyhole. It fit. It took a little jiggling, but the door came open with a protest of both the wood of the door and the aged hinges. Barker inclined his head toward the side of the entrance. In the wood there a crude letter had been carved, Q, as if by a jackknife. It did not look recent, and may even have been a hundred years old.
“I’ve never noticed this building before,” I said as we stepped inside.
“No, you haven’t,” he replied.
It was cold in the vestibule, so cold one wondered if what was floating in the air were dust motes or ice crystals. A set of steps led up toward the first floor and we found a door at the top. The Guv tried the key, but it didn’t work. We turned to the stairway leading to the rooms above, but it had been roped off: a dusty, aged piece of rope was hanging between the two bannisters. Immediately, Barker plunged down the stair to the ground floor again and I followed after.
We descended another pair of steps to the bottom of the stairs, barred by yet another door. The key unlocked it. We went through and found practically the last thing I expected to find: a long brick tunnel.
“Down the rabbit hole,” I said, quoting Carroll.
More pragmatic, Cyrus Barker lit a match and found an old-fashioned candlestick with a brass ring on a shelf. He lit the candle, and without hesitation headed forward into the tunnel. I was glad to see that it was both dry and warmer than the house we had exited. I hazarded that it might be some kind of sewer tunnel that had been abandoned. It was too narrow for even the oldest carriages of the Underground.
“Built by the earl, I’ll warrant,” the Guv said, his voice echoing in the tunnel. “A private entrance to the palace.”
“The one that was never finished.”
“Precisely.”
We plunged deeper. I don’t do well in tunnels. They are too enclosed for my liking. It was what kept me from following my father and brothers into the coal mines of Gwent. Ten minutes there and I would be in a blind panic, convinced the ceiling would fall in and crush us or a wind would come through and snuff out all the candles attached to our helmets. I tried everything, but nothing could be done. The miners considered it a curse. I half believed it myself.
Though the tunnel was perfectly dry, my face became clammy and my lungs felt waterlogged. I tried not to reveal it to my senior partner, but he misses nothing.
“Forward, Thomas. One step in front of the other. This tunnel has to end somewhere soon.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
During the first week after formally becoming partners in the agency, we had both attempted to have me call him by his Christian name, but it was a resounding failure. He would always be “Sir” and I would always be “Thomas.” I was lucky to get him to stop calling me “lad” now that I was six-and-twenty and sometimes he still forgot.
We had walked perhaps five minutes before we came to a fork in the tunnel. By this point it had widened and the ceiling became higher overhead. What was the purpose of this tunnel? I wondered. I guessed that we had been going south, but the second tunnel headed west and there was a gate blocking it.
“The key?” I asked.
It had been a rhetorical question, but Barker put the key in my hand. I tried it in the keyhole of the barred gate and it opened easily. That meant it had been oiled in recent memory. We stepped inside.
“South,” I continued, pointing down the first tunnel. “That’s roughly where the Houses of Parliament are. Perhaps this is some sort of escape tunnel for them, in case of emergency. Dangers such as Guy Fawkes’s attempt to blow up the House of Lords, or Old Boney making a landing here from France.”
“You read at Oxford, lad, not I,” Barker said.
“So, where will this tunnel end? Westminster Abbey?”
“Not so far south,” he said. “Look at the brick.”
I studied it by the flickering of the candle. I ran a hand along it and found it smooth. The brick was made more rec
ently. Possibly much more recently.
I ducked a cobweb unsuccessfully and brushed a spider from my shoulder.
“There it is,” Barker said.
We came to a door, which opened easily to my associate’s hand, even without the key. The two of us stepped inside and found ourselves in an ordinary broom closet.
Barker opened another door and we found ourselves in a large, well-appointed kitchen. The chefs and assistants glanced up from their work, then returned to it. A man in livery stood waiting for us.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he said, whisking our outer coats with a brush. He helped us doff them and took our hats, then whisked our suits, as well.
“Come this way, please. You don’t want to be late.”
We followed him, or tried to. The man was quick afoot. I’ve seen Mac glide about, but this fellow would have done himself proud at a field event.
We were led through several corridors, past innumerable rooms. I had a memory of walls and moldings in a warm marble. There was a good deal of renovation going on; canvas was on the floor and there were buckets of paint I had to skip around, and I heard someone sawing wood nearby. It looked like a typical nobleman’s home, but currently a little dowdy and neglected. Still, the owner must be rather wealthy, for the rooms went on and on.
Then we came upon a room full of people working, some typing and others writing or talking, like a newspaper office. It was jarring. Perhaps it wasn’t a residence at all, I thought. London is like that. A residence becomes a shop. A shop becomes an office, which becomes a public house, which eventually becomes a residence again. London reinvents itself every morning.
Barker and I trotted to keep up with the fleet-limbed servant. I felt sorry for the Guv on his injured leg. Were I to collide with a chance individual, limbs would be broken. Once the young man turned without warning us, and we shot past and had to retrace our steps.
Finally, we reached a pair of doors. Our guide knocked, then threw them open quickly and stepped aside, allowing us to pass through. In fact, the young man gave me an encouraging push in the back.
There was a desk and a man behind it, a heavyset man, balding, with a long beard. Cyrus Barker stepped forward and bowed his head in greeting. I was a little slower. It isn’t every day one meets the Prime Minister.
CHAPTER TWO
“Your Lordship,” the Guv said.
I wasn’t sure his usage was correct. For some reason that no one has successfully explained to me, the Prime Minister was also the First Lord of the Treasury as well as the Foreign Secretary. The third Marquess of Salisbury, as he is called, was practically the British government all by himself.
I barely noticed the man behind the desk. I was looking at the rows of books behind him and feeling green with envy. I’d work there for nothing to lay hands on a volume every now and then. The cases were inset from floor to ceiling, each shelf stuffed haphazardly with books. There were no crockery or souvenirs, no honors or trinkets to spoil the view, just paper, paste-board, and leather. Unless they were inherited from the previous occupants of the building, they showed a keen mind. Inevitably there were legal and governmental books any politician might need, but there were also Greek classics, Dante, Adam Smith and David Hume, and a complete set of the novels of Disraeli, no doubt left behind by the author himself. I wanted to take down some of those volumes and sit in a chair unobserved, reading the day away. Unfortunately, that wasn’t why we had been summoned.
Salisbury pulled a watch from the depths of his waistcoat and consulted it.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said, as if he’d lost a bet.
“Sixteen,” Barker said, consulting his own. “Your timepiece must be fast. I, on the other hand, was culpably slow.”
“It was my fault, sir,” I said to the Prime Minister. “I did not realize we were going into a tunnel. I don’t perform well underground.”
“You are Mr. Llewelyn, are you not?”
He had glanced at a piece of paper on his desk, one of thousands in stacks and piles fanned across the large expanse and spilling over onto a table nearby. The chamber smelled of tobacco. Cigars, I imagined. Dunhills. Only the best for our Prime Minister.
“I am, sir.”
“Have a seat, gentlemen. We have much to discuss and very little time before my next appointment.”
The Prime Minister wore a long beard, dark brown, laced with strands of silver. His eyes were gray, and his cheeks gaunt. He possessed one of those occupations that ages a man before his time. Did he have such strands of silver when he first accepted Her Majesty’s request? I wondered.
“Grave” was the word that sprang to mind when I saw him in person. I could not determine if the work suited the man’s natural solemnity, or if his temperament was bowed down by the sheer weight of the office he held. In either case, he would not be the sort to accept a flippant remark, which only made me want to make one all the more. Best to say as little as possible, lest such a remark slip from my lips unbidden.
“I imagined the task impossible, but you are here and so we must begin,” he said. “Sit.”
Barker and I slid into a pair of Chippendale chairs in front of his desk.
“How may we help you, sir?” Barker asked.
Salisbury sat back in his chair and scratched his forehead. I noted he was not currently parading the whole of Her Majesty’s government before us.
“A Foreign Office man was found dead yesterday morning in Whitehall, not fifty yards from your door. Were you aware of this?”
“No, sir,” Barker said.
“Pity,” he replied, as if our not knowing it was a failure. “As I understand it, his body was taken to Scotland Yard, only a few steps away, where a key was found in his shoe. It was a railway locker key as it happened, and after the Foreign Office got wind of the matter they took over the operation and tracked the key to Charing Cross Station. There they found a satchel containing … well, never mind what it contained. The curious thing was that Whitehall Street was temporarily occupied by a dozen or more men in blue uniforms, for what purpose, I cannot say. Drummond, the agent, had just returned from somewhere. Germany, Austria-Hungary, Poland, possibly even Russia. The fellow was a good man, one of the Foreign Office’s best, and he was a law unto himself, drifting here and there and sending regular and informative telegrams back to England. He arrived on the Dover Express. Some of those young men must have followed him from the train and killed him.”
“How?” the Guv asked, keen as mustard. “By gun or knife?”
His nose was twitching, figuratively speaking, and I think he wished Salisbury were not being so cryptic.
“No, Mr. Barker. With a sword. Then he was run over by a cab.”
The Guv had been sitting forward in his chair, but now he leaned back and brushed a hand over his long mustache with something almost resembling satisfaction.
“Eastern Europe, then. What country did he last visit?”
“We have no idea, sir,” the Prime Minister admitted, eyeing my employer.
I’m sure he found Cyrus Barker interesting. Most people do.
“These men,” my employer continued. “Did anyone get a proper description?”
“All we know at this time is that there were a number of men in blue coats and peaked caps. One witness said they were young.”
“University lads, then.”
“Perhaps,” Salisbury said cautiously.
“May I assume you wish us to find these young men and their leader?”
“No, Mr. Barker. The Foreign Office will deal with that. I have a special assignment for you, if the two of you are up to the task.”
“The item in the locker at Charing Cross Station,” I said.
“Yes,” the Prime Minister said, nodding. “We have the satchel and we need you to deliver it safely out of the country. Well, just barely. You will take it to Calais, where it will be handed over to someone else to take it out of harm’s way.”
“So, it is to be courier work, then,�
� my senior partner said, his face falling. He did not like courier work. There is no one to grapple with and it’s generally much ado about nothing. To be frank, he found the work beneath him.
“No, sir. The Home Office will make a show of carrying the satchel in which the package will be delivered. They will act as decoys. You will deliver the actual item yourself. In my opinion, our adversaries will be quick to spot the ruse and begin searching London. Already too many people know.”
“That is why the key and the tunnel were necessary.”
“Yes, Mr. Barker. I fear it is already too late. The worst has a way of happening.”
“Your Excellency, we are a humble agency. We have but two men, perhaps four if I can muster them. You have the Foreign, the Home, and the Colonial Offices at your disposal. You have Scotland Yard. You have the best army and navy in the world. Why would you choose us?”
“A private agency will be more difficult to spot than the more obvious government agencies. You are the last men they would expect.”
One of the Guv’s eyebrows peeked over the hill of his dark spectacles. “The last they would expect? Why, pray tell?”
“Because, sir, you would not be an agency our government would naturally choose. The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police despises you. You have a poor reputation among both the Home and Foreign Offices. Your methods are considered unorthodox, haphazard, and impulsive. Most of your cases end in bloodshed.”
“I see.”
“On the other hand, they admit you have a reputation for being successful in most of your endeavors and many detectives in London consider you worthy of respect; either that or they were leery of the secretive work we offered and suggested you instead. Somehow you manage to be both highly successful and a general risk at the same time.”
“Which is exactly the sort of agency you were looking for.”