by Will Thomas
Sometimes when a bad event occurs-the death of someone one cares about, for example-there is a period just when one is waking up before one remembers. One has a general feeling of well-being, a cheery optimism. The day is full of myriad choices. Then the terrible memory returns, and one’s entire world comes crashing down about one’s ears. At least, that was my experience the next morning. I didn’t know which hurt more, that she was dead or that she’d played me for a fool.
Mac was busy opening curtains and greeting my morning. I don’t know why he did it, since I was not the master of the house, but a hired employee. Perhaps Barker had asked him to do so. As usual, Mac disguised whatever feelings he might have about me in a professional manner, solicitous but remote.
“I trust you slept well.”
“Very well, thank you,” I replied automatically. My mind was back on the Charing Cross Railway Bridge.
“Mr. Barker requests your presence in his room at your earliest convenience.”
Dressing was not too complicated, and it took only a few moments to run a brush through my thick hair, but during the night my nose and eyes had swollen even more. Barker could not help but comment on it.
“Quite a brace you have, there,” he commented over his tea. “You look as if you just went ten rounds with the great Mendoza himself in his prime.”
“You wanted to see me, sir?” I asked, helping myself to the contents of the silver coffeepot, which Mac had obviously brought up for me. Dummolard had provided currant scones.
“I thought we might discuss the case,” Barker said. “Let me begin by admitting a mistake. I should have gone after Miss O’Casey myself.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to shoot her.”
Barker poured another thimbleful of tea into his handleless cup. “Oh, that could not be helped, lad. If you hadn’t shot her, I would have. She wasn’t going to be allowed to get off that bridge with one of our bombs. If your conscience is bothering you, let me state that I have my doubts as to whether you triggered the explosion at all. The actual time of the explosion was very near.”
“I’m sure I shot the bag, sir.”
“How’s your shoulder?”
“It’s fine.” Actually, there was an ugly purple bruise, with a reddish ring about it.
“I’m sorry you went over the railing, Thomas. I tried to get to you, and my hand was no more than a foot away, but you flew past me too quickly. It was good that you were wearing that coat. It saved your life. I shall have another made for you, and buy a new Webley to go with it.”
I sat down and idly began to pick apart one of the scones. Barker was buoyant, and why shouldn’t he be? His case was completed successfully, and in the very face of Inspector Munro. I, on the other hand, felt like a complete failure, and a murderer as well.
“Are you feeling sorry for Miss O’Casey and the faction?” he asked. “Don’t. Remember, they would have killed us without mercy had they discovered who we were. And if you were swayed by Miss O’Casey’s words on the bridge, remember she was still using you, hoping to get you to join their side, but she despised you. When she saw you were of no use to her, she had no qualms about dispatching you. She was a brilliant leader, a strategist, and as ruthless as she needed to be.”
I put my hand to my face, then instantly regretted the gesture. “I’m confused,” I admitted.
“I thought you might be. Now that the case is finished, I shall go over it with you. Let us start at the beginning.”
Had it really been only four weeks ago?
“Very well,” I said. “Why did you offer your services in the first place? As everyone has pointed out, you’re an enquiry agent, not a spy.”
“Scotland Yard is good at what it does-keeping the peace, investigating crimes, and patrolling the city-and I have the greatest respect for the organization, but this operation was beyond their scope. The Special Irish Branch, under Inspector Munro, has made great strides since it was formed last year; but it takes several years to develop the connections I have in this city, and the S.I.B. was not yet ready. As for the Home Office, their members are recruited from the top schools in the country. As good as they are, it was difficult for them to infiltrate the factions. That’s why their spies died in the field, all, that is, save Le Caron, whom, you remember, I trained myself. Now, I couldn’t make a convincing Irishman, and there are very few people I could impersonate, but Johannes van Rhyn was one of them. It just happened that he was the one man they wanted most of all.
“The last I spoke to him, van Rhyn was complaining because Rossa was attempting to recruit him for his faction. I thought that if Dunleavy knew the other factions were after him, he would jump at a chance to make use of van Rhyn.”
“How could you be certain you would discover the faction that blew up the Yard?” I argued.
“The Irish are a loquacious race. We would have had almost no chance of discovering them had they been Chinese, for example. Cathcart deserved his pound a day. As for Soho Vic, I’ve kept him busy running messages between the Harp and our offices. There was a chance I couldn’t discover which faction had blown up Scotland Yard, but I did, so the question is moot.”
“Dunleavy was never able to convince you he was the faction leader, was he?”
Barker lit his pipe, in no hurry to answer, running the lit vesta around the bowl before blowing it out. “No,” he stated. “Alfred Dunleavy was too weak. He is undisciplined, lazy, melancholy, and a drunkard. He had grandiose schemes and a complaint against the world for not making him a great leader. He could not have thought up or enacted the brilliant scheme of employing a team of five men using timed assaults to bring down London.”
“So, whom did you suspect?”
“Everyone, of course. A brilliant leader would be capable of playacting. Now, confess, lad, even when you found O’Muircheartaigh’s letters, I’ll wager you didn’t once suspect Miss O’Casey of being the leader, did you?”
I had to admit it, but I wasn’t going to say it was because she had turned my head. “No, sir, I didn’t.”
“Yes, well. My second list of suspects, if you considered the faction leaders as the first, were: the O’Caseys, Garrity, McKeller, Yeats, the Bannon brothers, and Mr. O’Muircheartaigh. Oh, and Dunleavy, since there was a small chance he was more clever than I thought he was. That was my list of suspects, and I merely had to winnow it down.”
“Yes,” I added, “while concealing who you were, making their bombs, and preparing a plan to capture them when they reached London.”
Barker gave a cough, his answer to a chuckle. “I’ve had a little experience doing this, lad. Where was I?”
“The list of suspects.”
“Correct. I crossed McKeller off early. It’s possible he was more than he claimed, but he seemed so genuine, I believed him. He was a big, violent man, without much of a past or a future. By the way, I must compliment you on defeating him. He was a very dangerous opponent. Did you really intend to put up that weak guard?”
“Yes, sir. I remembered what you said about putting everything into a final effort. It was the only way I could win.”
“You improve, Thomas.”
“Thank you, sir,” I murmured. It was rare praise, indeed.
“The Bannons I dismissed because they were twins. I know it was possible for one of them to be the leader, but they were very self-involved, as twins sometimes are. Also, they seemed to be doing mere yeoman service. They had no internal fire.”
“O’Casey,” I said. “Now, he was the logical choice. Trinity educated and obviously talented. He’s good-looking, intelligent, not to mention a trained fighter. What was it about him that didn’t make you suspect him as the secret leader?”
“He didn’t rise to the bait.”
“Bait?” I asked. “What bait?”
“You, lad,” he said, taking his pipe from his mouth. “I used you as bait. Surely you must have seen that. A young fellow like Thomas Penrith, armed with all the skills of van Rhyn,
with decades to develop more. I thought if O’Casey or Dunleavy was the actual leader, they would have been astute enough to latch onto you early. You’ll note that Dunleavy barely spoke a word to you, and young Eamon O’Casey didn’t warm up to you until after the bomb demonstration. He was a little closer to you later, but not enough. I would have thought that someone wishing to attach a man of your skills to this cause would have forged a bond with you. He did not, but Maire O’Casey grew very interested in you.”
“What of that?” I asked. “She was a beautiful woman.”
“I will not say otherwise, but think of it. If she had the world at her feet, if she could have her pick of any man in England or Ireland, why would she choose a little Welsh bomb maker? That is not the decision of a beautiful young woman but the thinking of a leader trying to build a strong faction.”
That was a trifle harsh, I thought. I sat there for a moment, trying to look at it all objectively, but it was difficult.
“So you don’t think she genuinely cared for me.”
Just then, Harm trotted in the room. He came up to me, but when I reached for him, he avoided me, convinced, perhaps, that I was going to blubber in his fur again. He settled into Barker’s lap and fell asleep.
“Believe what you like,” my employer pronounced, scratching the dog’s fur absently. “But it was deucedly convenient. It was that more than anything that made me consider her as a possibility.”
“Before we get into that, what about Yeats and Garrity?”
“I’ll admit I thought hard about them both. An innocent student would be a good pose to assume, and Yeats did deliver messages to and from Dunleavy, but he was a callow youth. Garrity was not. Ah, I missed that sound.”
The sound to which he was referring was Harm’s snores. I had to admit, I’d grown accustomed to them. The dog ran to some sort of schedule every night. He began on the ground floor, arrived on my bed around midnight, then vacated it for Barker’s nest upstairs sometime in the wee hours. It never happened any other way for one very good reason: the Imperial Dog could climb stairs, but he could not go down them.
“Garrity,” I prompted.
“Yes, Garrity,” Barker went on. “It would not have been difficult for him to run the faction from Paris, with a puppet like Dunleavy in his hands. But he is already a respected member of the I.R.B. Were he ambitious enough to wish to run his own faction, he could have formed one himself among the Irish in Paris.”
“Surely you suspected Seamus O’Muircheartaigh,” I said.
“Of course I did,” Barker said. “When I get that man behind bars, I’ll feel I’ve accomplished some good for humanity. When I looked over those letters a little more closely, I saw that the final one was written last year, when O’Muircheartaigh was in Dublin. The last was very accusatory. It is possible they had not communicated until the Americans notified Dunleavy that the money would not make it in time. The money that sent you to Paris was likely a loan from him. Yesterday, one of Soho Vic’s boys spotted her but couldn’t get word to us of it until this morning. A careful reading of O’Muircheartaigh’s letters showed that his feelings were not reciprocated, but they parted amicably enough for her to appear at his door and receive aid at a moment’s notice.”
“Yes, but, hang it all, you make her sound so-so mercenary. This was a girl who cooked for her family, who was sentimental-”
“Sentimental about Ireland, lad.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said with a sigh. “I mean, I do believe it, but it’s rather hard. She was so sincere.”
“I did not doubt her sincerity,” Barker said, “not for the Irish cause, anyway. As for you, who can say? She is gone and cannot tell us either way. Perhaps she genuinely cared for you. For your sake, it would have been better that she didn’t, for I would have brought her to justice all the same. Now, come, it is time we left. I believe we need a barber’s attention before we visit the Home Office to report.”
29
I winced as the first leech bit into the tender skin under my eye. It is an eerie sensation, feeling the blood draining away. One would think in this age of science, with the latest developments in antiseptics and pharmacology, that there would be a better remedy for a black eye than the humble Hirudo medicinalis.
“Would you like me to pull any teeth while you are here?” the barber asked solicitously.
“No, thank you.”
He reached into his apothecary jar again and attached another of the bloodsuckers to the skin under my other eye. The jar was pink and had the word “leeches” written on it in gold. Perhaps the beauty of the jar was an attempt to disguise the loathsome contents therein. While he set about doing the more mundane part of his work, I glanced over at my employer. He was smiling at my discomfort.
Barker was swathed in a sheet. The gray solution had been rinsed out of his hair and the stiff length pruned back to its more austere form, like one of the Guv’s Penjing trees. His beard was gone, and he was back to wearing his usual spectacles, round disks with a high bridge connecting them in the Chinese manner, with sidepieces of tortoiseshell.
“Here,” he said, reaching into his pocket after we were done. He handed me the spectacles he’d worn while impersonating van Rhyn. “You might wish to wear these.”
“You’re joking,” I said.
“Would you rather go about London looking like an owl?”
He had a point, I had to confess. My face in its present condition would scare governesses and small children. Reluctantly, I put them on. I glanced at myself in the barber’s mirror. The spectacles might have been appropriate for Barker, but I looked ridiculous. Having custody of Barker’s wallet again, I paid our bill and we left.
We waited a full thirty minutes in the lobby of the Home Office, under the suspicious eye of the porter. I thought it shabby treatment for two fellows who had just saved London. Was Anderson aware we were out here waiting? I wondered. Had he decided the entire affair had been an unmitigated disaster and was dreading speaking to us? I had to admit to being rather nervous, like a prisoner awaiting a verdict.
I need hardly mention how Barker was. He might as well have been waiting for an omnibus. He was sitting in a hard wooden chair, staring abstractedly into nothing, and whistling tunelessly, as he did when thinking. The only good thing I can say about it was that it was bothering the porter even more than me.
“Gentlemen.” Robert Anderson appeared and bowed. I immediately tried to gauge his mood. Did he seem satisfied or displeased? Neither or perhaps both. He led us down the hall to the large table with the lion’s feet again. There was no Sir Watkin or carpetbag to balance out the ends that morning, only a folder in the middle of the table. Anderson seated himself in front of the folder, and motioned for us to be seated. Then he looked over the items in it and did the one thing I’d been dreading: he cleared his throat.
In between my release from Oxford Prison and my employment with Cyrus Barker, there were several months in which I looked unsuccessfully for employment. I answered advertisements seeking secretaries, clerks, scriveners, librarians, and shop assistants. I offered myself as a domestic. I attempted casual labor and dock work. Everywhere I went, I was met with the throat clearing, which, along with the inevitable widening of the eyes when they saw Oxford Prison among my bona fides, meant I was already late for the pavement. Throat clearing never signals good news. No one does it before telling you that you have just been promoted or are about to inherit five hundred a year. Barker himself is an expert at throat clearing, and the very action of doing it sets the hairs on the back of my neck on end. Understandably, then, my stomach fell when Anderson did it.
The bureaucrat browsed through the file, shuffling this paper to the front, and that one farther back. He ignored us completely, which, if anything, increased my apprehensions still further. Finally, he removed the top sheet of paper and slid it over in front of Barker.
“We’ve had several complaints about your handling of the case,” he informed us. “This i
s a telegram from Inspector Munro, stating that you hampered his investigation severely. In Liverpool, you injured a guard, and there is reason to believe you were responsible for damage to a piece of property in Wales. According to this, it was a lighthouse.”
Barker took the telegram and looked over it as casually as if it were a tailor’s bill.
“And this,” Anderson said, adding a second yellow sheet on top of the first, “is a telegram from Superintendent Williamson of the Criminal Investigation Department, complaining that we hired a private detective, who is known for advertisements in the newspapers, suggesting that you mismanaged-no, excuse me, you bungled the case severely, and had the Yard not come along at the proper time to take control of a desperate situation, London would now be no more than a memory. He says he is consulting with solicitors at Temple Bar about proceedings against you.”
Barker took up the second, with no more interest than the first, but I was concerned. Proceedings? What sort of proceedings? My word, was Barker about to be arrested?
“Enquiry agent,” Barker said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I prefer to be called an enquiry agent.”
Anderson frowned. “Mmm, yes. I’m not finished. Here, you will be interested to see, is a third telegram, also from the Yard. It is from the office of Commissioner Henderson, superseding the other two and informing me that on advice from counsel, they will let the matter drop, and they hope for better relations with the Home Office in the future. Ha!” Anderson broke into a big smile. “Mr. Barker, can you imagine the reason for the sudden reversal of their decision?”
“I assume that the Prince wrote a letter to the Yard, commending their efforts in saving him from being blown up.”
“Exactly.”