Titanic 2012 (inspector alastair ransom)

by Robert W. Walker

  “I-I dunno nothing ’bout’ no secret meetings, but I’ll take you to the last place anyone saw McAffey and O’Toole,” said Missing Fingers.

  “Where might that be?”

  “Number 9 mineshaft; they’d closed it down, you see, but later sent those two in to inspect it. Odd thing is…” he trailed off as if picturing the odd thing.

  “Walter, what odd thing?” asked Wyland, leaning into the table.

  “They’d been inspecting, but strange thing is the lift, she come up alone by some accounts… but at least one man claims to’ve seen O’Toole come up. But the super, McAffey, he wasn’t with him.”

  “What kind of a town is this?” asked Wyland. “You mean to tell me two men were sent into a questionable mineshaft, but no one was in charge of seeing they’d come out?”

  “It was quittin’ time, and management don’t pay overtime.”

  “Ahhh… makes perfect sense.”

  “See the lift was up next day, so it’s a cinch they left outta there.”

  “A cinch, eh? Take me to the shaft in question.” Wyland looked hard now at the two young men who had hired him. He opened his palm for payment. “You fellows don’t look like miners.”

  “How would you know either way?” asked Declan, withholding the bills.

  “Your hands… no coal under the nails, no discoloration of the skin.”

  Thomas unconsciously studied his hands. “We are—”

  Wyland stopped Thomas with a finger to his lips. “You are students at the university no doubt.”

  “No doubt?” challenged Declan. “I suspect you are making an educated guess.”

  “Your method of dress, and your politeness give you away—along with a slight scent of the dissection room—formaldehydes, I should say. Aside from this, you are disciplined but show no sign between you of ever having been in the military. Guessing that professors keep you in stringent line rather than sergeants.”

  “How can you… how can he… Declan, he’s reading our minds!” Thomas appeared astounded.

  “No, no—just quite good at reading our fingernails and ascots,” countered Declan. “The art of detection, correct Mr. Wyland?”

  “True but it oft requires intuition and instinct as well as a trained eye. Come along, and we’ll see if the shaft or the lift will tell us anything.”

  NINE

  The two medical students followed the private detective, who in turn followed the miner named Walter. A handful of other curious miners slowly got up and followed the group. Walter said over his shoulder, “No one’s wanted to go near that shaft.”

  “Curse on it, eh?” asked Wyland, smirking.

  “Had a cave in; McAffey and O’Toole were ’spose to assess the damage, and when the lift was discovered, boss decided they’d gone home for bed. But no sooner’n next mornin’ wives were down at the jail then the mine looking for ’em.”

  “Life’s a mystery,” muttered Wyland.

  “Not been seen since.”

  Wyland calmly replied in his best Sherlock Holmes imitation, “Most likely there exists a logical explanation.”

  Walter shrugged. “May’ve gone over to the next town to confer with the owners, and may’ve gotten drunk there.”

  “That’s good thinking, Walter; you might have a future in detective work,” Wyland half-joked.

  “Don’t go pullin’ me leg again, Alastair.”

  “But you’re on the money! The man’s most likely in lock-up for destruction of property, perhaps for disturbing the peace. Maybe got into a fight over one of those imponderable questions men pose when drunk.”

  Walter laughed lightly. “Guess you’d know about that.”

  “Careful, you’ll make the lads here distrustful of me.”

  “What ever do you mean?” asked Declan.

  “Mr. Wyland, here in Belfast, rumor has it that you know how to find missing people,” said Thomas in a shaky voice, “and … and that you’re also the most dangerous man in Belfast.”

  “No, no, no! Who says such dribble?” Wyland laughed as they approached the mine. “I am not; it’s all stuff and nonsense, and it would please me mightily if you spread the truth rather than the bloody rumor—ahhh, pardon me language but it gets old.”

  Declan firmly said, “We do want a man who’s had experience and is expert in his field.”

  “Some say you were a police detective in New York,” added Thomas, blinking. “Others… others say Chicago.”

  “Speculation, rumors. I’ve never been to either city except to take the train to Chicago to see the World’s Fair way back in 1893. But it was just a weekend. I lived in Boston.” He clenched his strong right hand around his wolf’s head cane, his free hand tightening into a fist, and Declan noticed this gesture; he’d seen it many times in patients at the university hospital, and it always meant one thing—lies. This man Wyland also looked more and more uncomfortable as Walter had held forth with what Wyland insisted was nonsense and rumor when Wyland philosophically spoke the bloated remark, “The most dangerous man indeed; the most dangerous man is the man everyone else believes to be the most dangerous man.”

  Declan wondered exactly what that meant, and he exchanged a questioning look with Thomas who shrugged. “You were a policeman in Boston?”

  “I was a records keeper, kept the files on villains is all, but it taught me a good deal about detection.”

  Declan whispered into Thomas’ ear, “I suspect this fellow is a charlatan, Tommie.”

  Thomas pulled away, obviously not wishing to hear the truth, and they were soon at the mine shaft in question, undisturbed since the two missing miners had reportedly entered after hours on the night of their disappearance. The same night Fiore had vanished.

  According to Walter, officials of the mine could not get anyone to go down into this particular shaft; that they’d had to pay McAffey and O’Toole a hefty bonus to do so. First there had been a cave in, and now two men who’d gone to inspect the extent of damage had disappeared. The mystery was complicated by a witness who said he’d seen O’Toole exit the mine in good ‘spirits’, but not McAffey.

  In Wyland’s mind wheels turned in all directions; it was his basic makeup to listen with care, consider all sides, weigh up everything and carry on from there. His thinking had come of a lifetime as a former police detective in his native Chicago, where he had become so embroiled in a death he had no hand in that he’d become suspect number one for the murder, arrested, about to be placed on trial, his cagey lawyer suddenly dying of an ‘accident’ and he set up by long-suffering enemies in high places; politics very much involved.

  He had for years rocked the boat in Chicago by privately investigating every detail of what had led up to the notorious Haymarket Riot. He’d been wounded in the riot when the bomb was thrown into the crowd, and six police officers were killed. It’d left him with scars and a limp, and it’d earned him the rank of Inspector.

  This little missing-persons mystery would find a quick and likely a mundane resolution: Most likely the two miners had a falling out, a fight, and O’Toole had won, and he’d left McAffey hurt, possibly unconscious down in the mine shaft. O’Toole, in a state of anxiety, thinking he’d killed a man, had left the vicinity altogether.

  Alastair Wyland, which was his alias, thought of a familiar phrase among police and detectives—‘Whenever two or more of you are gathered in Bacchanal’s name… anything can happen’.

  “Take me down then, Walter,” Wyland told his guide. “Could be a hurt man down there.”

  “I’ll drop you down, but I’d rather not go in. I’ve a new babe on the way and six mouths to feed as is.”

  “Fine, get me down to the bottom.”

  “We’re going down there with you.” It was Thomas, Declan backing him up with a vigorous nod.

  “Don’t know what we’ll find down there,” countered the private eye, Wyland, taking his coat off, hanging it on a rail, standing now in his vest, his hefty stomach and chest like a barrel.


  “We’re at your side,” said Declan.

  “Lads, it could be dangerous. We dunno what we’ll find down there. Could be that your uncle, Thomas, fell in with these two in some scheme or other, maybe to sabotage that bloody ship everyone is talking about.”

  “That’s wrong! Uncle Anton would never be a part of any such—”

  “You hired me son, and you don’t know what you don’t know as they say.”

  “I know he’d never be a part of the plans of malcontents!”

  “All right, all right.” Wyland held his hands up.

  Declan calmed his friend and added, “We’re doctors or soon will be—third year surgical students. If you do find hurt men down there, we can be of service.”

  “There’s no evidence my uncle is down there,” chimed in Thomas again, angry yet again at the suggestion. “He’d have no business in the mine.”

  “Thomas’ uncle is an upstanding citizen and no anarchist,” Declan added, frustrated as he stared at the big man he feared may well be their only hope of finding Fiore.

  “A fine recommendation but suppose the three had other dealings, dealings to do with money? Every man has his dance with Mammon, you know.”

  “Mammon?” asked Declan. “This man had no liking for greed or wallowing in wealth, sir.”

  “My uncle bowed before no false gods, and certainly not money. I can’t see it,” replied Thomas, “not in a million years.”

  “I’ll not waste another breath on you two; come ’long if you must. Walter—drop us below.”

  The odd threesome were soon being lowered below the earth by Walter when a mine official named Hal Bartholomew rushed to the site, asking, “What’s going on here, man?”

  Walter’s stuttering explanation of the two young doctors and ex-patriot American detective now gone into the mineshaft caused the other man’s eyes to bulge. “They’ve gone in search of O’Toole and McAffey?—possibly another fellow as well, you say?”

  “Y-Yes, sir.”

  “But we’ve got a search party together now.”

  “Perhaps your search party’d should’ve acted faster,” suggested Walter as he watched the platform disappear into the blackness below; he also saw that Wyland had lit the John Lantern Walter had handed him. In a moment, a second lantern held by one of the boys came on.

  “A third fellow? I’ve no word of a third miner lost below.” Bartholomew the Englishman said. Most administration at the mine were British. It was the way of things, and Walter hadn’t questioned it since he was a child. Harland and Wolff, the White Star Line, all of it was British, and more recently American interests had bought the lot of it, both the shipyard and the ship company. It was one reason the anarchists were again making noises in and around Belfast; so much so that Pinkerton agents had been called in to oversee the care of Titanic until her official launch as opposed to the hull launching of a short time ago.

  Walter had been among the huge throng of more than a hundred thousand curious who had turned out to see the successful hull launch, according to the Belfast papers. From what he’d heard through the workmen at the shipyard, it had taken twenty-two tons of tallow, soap, and train oil to grease the slipway bed. The coated slipway measures taken that last day in May 1911 had worked against the enormous three-tons-per-square-inch pressure of the freshly painted hull. The Titanic was then towed by tugs to the Harland & Wolff fitting-out basin where final outfitting had been going on these many months since—without incident or need of Pinkerton agents.

  Now this.

  TEN

  Walter had insisted they each wear a miner’s hat with a battery-operated light just above their foreheads but Declan’s went out, and Thomas kept shining his into the others’ eyes, blinding them. Alastair Wyland insisted they forego the damned hats.

  But they left the paltry lights on the helmets as they went down and down into the black hole, it grew darker and danker. To while away the time, Wyland gave the boys a history and economics lesson.

  “You know boys, given the recent backroom deals surrounding these giant ships the White Star Line is having built in Belfast? Brings prosperity, jobs, and management believes themselves saints for supplying jobs to working men—miners, shipyard workers, tugboat captains and crew, but they’ll be hiring on British crews for their Olympic class monsters like Titanic just as they did with the Olympic launched in October 1910.”

  “The British are paying the freight… it’s a British held company.”

  “Not anymore, lads.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “As early as 1869 J. Bruce Ismay’s father, Henry formed the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company in order to establish the White Star Line as a high-class steamship service in the Atlantic passenger trade, and he contracted his first ships to be built by Belfast shipbuilders Harland & Wolff. All rather hush-hush until the son took over in 1891 when under pressure, Ismay admitted to partnership of the White Star Line. He then took over completely after his father's death in ’99.”

  “What’s this to do with us going down into the mines?”

  “Getting to that. In ’94, William J. Pirrie became chairman of Harland & Wolff. And four years later, American author Morgan Robertson published his novel entitled Futility in which a British passenger liner called the Titan—get it?—hits an iceberg and sinks on her maiden voyage without enough lifeboats in the month of April in the North Atlantic. The fictional ship is eerily similar to the yet-to-be conceived Titanic in size, speed, equipment, numbers of passengers—both rich and poor. And in the end of the novel, the number of passengers who perished, God forbid, would be the same as on Titanic should she go down in the North Atlantic.”

  “A novel… so what? Fiction is frivolous,” said Thomas. “What’s it to do with—”

  “Robertson had information on the company—an insider feeding him information; the company planned to build three Olympic class ships they called unsinkable from the outset. Morgan Robertson’s book, which I’ve read, is a running history of how Titanic, Olympic, and the yet to be built Britannic were conceived by men interested in money and power.”

  “This is fascinating,” commented Declan. “Go on.”

  “Well in 1902, the White Star Line was purchased by the International Mercantile Marine Company, a shipping trust headed by U.S. financier J. Pierpont Morgan.”

  “Hold on,” said Declan, “do you mean the same J.P. Morgan who operates the largest transportation lines and all the trains in America?”

  “One and the same, yes. While the White Star’s ships still fly the British flag and carry British crews, the company is essentially controlled by American interests, and by ’04, Ismay, now age forty or so—with Morgan’s full support—becomes President and Managing Director of International Mercantile Marine with complete control.”

  “And why is that a bad thing?” asked Thomas. “I smell something awful; you smell that?”

  “Yeah,” added Declan. “Smells like decay.”

  Alastair ignored this, continuing his tale. “Another thing, Morgan Robertson is related to Morgan—hence the name, but he’s a black sheep member. And another thing—”

  A sudden jolt and the platform beneath their feet shuddered, but as the shaft was tight on all sides, they didn’t fear falling from either side, at least not yet. They heard something beneath them tumble as if caught on a rock and the platform had sent whatever it was hurtling downward with a rattling bumpity-bump pounding their ears. Still the platform continued on, lowering them still deeper.

  In unison, the detective and the young interns breathed a sigh of relief, and Wyland continued his history lesson as if nothing had happened. “As well, Harland & Wolff chairman William J. Pirrie became that same year a director of Mercantile Marine.”

  “All rather chummy,” said Thomas.

  “Inbred is what it is,” Declan replied. “And the public knows naught of it?”

  “At a dinner party in 1907, held at William J. Pirrie's London mansion, Ismay disc
ussed the construction of two huge ships—with a third to be added later—and the young author was in attendance to hear their plans; it gave him the insidious idea to make himself happy by fictionally sinking their plans before they’d begun if he could convince a publisher to take on his hair-brained novel entitled Titan. But back to the London party—it was all to do with competing, you see, with the luxury, size, and speed of rival cruise lines. These Olympic-class ships were to be known as the greatest and fastest liners afloat, intended specifically to beat out the Cunard Line for the Atlantic luxury passenger trade.”

  “You make it sound so criminal,” countered Thomas Coogan. “It is called free enterprise… capitalism.”

  “Not my point.”

  “What then?”

  “July 29, 08.”

  “What about it?”

  “The White Star owners, including Ismay, approved in principle the design plan for the Olympic class ships prepared by builders Harland & Wolff under direct supervision of Lord Pirrie, with the assistance of his nephew Thomas Andrews—architect of the ships.”

  “Yes, all in the family.” Declan worked the lever to slow the platform here where the shaft narrowed about them.

  “I met the author, Robertson, once—had a bright son named Stephen who was fascinated with law enforcement and the science of detection back in… in Boston. At any rate, Robertson showed me a duplicate copy of a contract letter dated July 31st of that year; a letter signing off on construction in the Belfast shipyards for Olympic, Titanic, and a third sister ship at the time unnamed but to follow. In part it read ‘Ultimate decisions of design, equipment, and decoration are to be made by J. Bruce Ismay. The size of Titanic will be 882 feet 9 inches long, 94 feet wide, and 100 feet high to the bridge level. Final cost: £1,500,000 or approx. $7,500,000. New docks had to be built in Belfast, Southampton, and New York to accommodate the size of these ships. Harland & Wolff built specially strengthened slips to take their weight, and a new gantry under which these gargantuan ships would be built.”