Firebrand

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Firebrand Page 27

by A. J. Hartley


  “Get a message to Inspector Andrews. Have him meet us at Horritch’s factory in Dagenham Steps, fast as he can get there. He’ll need armed support.”

  “What is it?”

  I told him, quickly, and his face set like concrete, his dark eyes flashing.

  “I will join you there,” he said.

  “There’s no need,” I replied, not wanting him to risk his life or position. “I’m sure the police can—”

  “I said I’ll join you there,” he answered.

  I nodded, and he managed a smile.

  “Can’t have you spreading mayhem and destruction without me to clean up after you, can we?” he concluded, closing the front door behind him.

  I raced down the hallway calling Willinghouse’s name. He trotted down stairs, dapper in his dark, conservative suit and cravat, a buckled briefcase in his hand. He looked mildly irritated by all the shouting but stopped when he saw my face, then the fragment of bone and teeth which I held out to him.

  “What is that?” he asked, his green eyes bright, hawkish.

  “Horritch’s factory wasn’t empty when it burned,” I said. “It was full of refugees, most of whom did not make it out alive. He has another factory in the same area where more are working right now.”

  It was easier to say it like that, simple, without outrage or any other emotion, and now that I had his attention, I didn’t even shout.

  * * *

  THE FACTORY’S LOWER FLOOR was in full and deafening use when we arrived, the looms pulsing, clacking, and roaring so that Andrews had to lead his men back out to give them instructions. Willinghouse clamped his hands over his ears and looked to me. I pointed toward the locked door that led to the only staircase, and he made for it, Namud at his heels, only to be intercepted by a blustering white foreman in a flat cap. The man attempted to bar our passage, but when he saw the uniformed officers, truncheons in hand, he gave up the cause as lost. I passed the empty steam elevator shaft and joined them as the foreman took an iron ring off his belt and unlocked the heavy door.

  “There’s another at the top,” I shouted over the din.

  “What?” bellowed Willinghouse.

  “Another door,” I yelled back. “At the top.”

  He still couldn’t hear me, so I snatched the keys from the foreman and led the way up four flights of fifteen steps that brought us to another concrete landing and, as expected, an identical door. I thrust first one key in, then another, checking Andrews’s pinking, anxious face before turning the key and putting my shoulder to the timber.

  The door scraped, then flew open.

  I knew immediately we were too late. The air, which had been heavy, hot, and rank the night before was clear and comparatively fresh. Every window had been unshuttered and opened, and the room was quiet.

  I ran among the still and silent looms shouting, “No, no, no!”

  The machinery was all still there, but the workers and their poor bits of things were gone. Andrews sighed, and Willinghouse shouted a single curse, and then there was only the throbbing of the concrete floor as the looms in the hall below lumbered on.

  “I came right to you!” I yelled at Willinghouse. “How could they have been cleared out so quickly?”

  “The machines have been running recently,” said Andrews, who had stooped to a patch of oil on the ground.

  “Of course they bloody have!” I shot back at him. “I was here. I saw them!”

  “Well, the workers are not here now,” the inspector returned.

  “I can see that too!” I shouted. “Get some men on the ground asking what people saw. The morning shift must have seen them leave. It’s been less than an hour since I was here. How could they have been cleared out that fast?”

  “We have nothing!” roared Willinghouse. “Again.”

  “We know there was an illegal operation working out of this space,” Andrews conceded.

  “We can’t prove it,” Willinghouse said, turning on him. “We had to catch them red-handed.”

  I closed my eyes and put my hands to my head as if the looms were running and I was trying to shut out the noise. Behind me, Willinghouse continued to bicker with Andrews. I walked to one of the windows and looked out over the river to the city proper.

  Bertha, I thought. I’ll ask her. Maybe if she was early, she might have seen something, or heard from someone who did.…

  The ting of cable under tension struck my consciousness, and I turned. I’d heard it before, but it hadn’t registered. Now it did, and I strode to the steam elevator, whose gate was closed, though the platform was not there.

  But it hadn’t been at the bottom either. The shaft had been empty.

  So it was in the middle, suspended between floors, and that meant that someone was on it. It wasn’t anywhere near big enough to hide the refugees, but it was hiding something, or someone. I rejoined the others and told them.

  Andrews arranged all but two of his men around the room. Willinghouse, Namud and the rest, one of whom had a shotgun, took the stairs down. As we reentered the cacophonous lower hall, Namud drew a revolver from his jacket pocket, and I—reluctantly—fished the single-shot pistol from my satchel and cocked it. Willinghouse motioned the women at the nearest looms to stop working and go. They frowned, deaf to what he was saying, but they saw our weapons, and soon the machines were shutting down one by one and the workers were pushing for the door. The din of the machinery and of anxious voices gradually subsided, and the shed lapsed into an eerie calm as I knelt behind one of the silent looms, my pistol trained on the elevator, the memory of my last gunfight stampeding through my head like a wild orlek.

  Namud went to the steam generator which served the elevator, threw a lever, and turned a handle. A valve opened by the water tank and, with a great serpentine hiss, the steam blew out in a long jet, which became a cloud and drifted away. I saw the red needle on the gauge slide slowly round to the left, and then the elevator was creaking and groaning its way down.

  The gate was open, so I saw the platform descend. It was heaped with boxes of blankets and dirty clothes, everything they had not been able to clear out in time. It was evidence, of a sort, and it had been left to one man to take care of.

  The burly man in sea boots, the one with the heavy stick, his face slashed from the nails of the women who had slowed him down as I made my previous escape, rose up from behind the crates, a black and heavy pistol in his hands. He knew what being caught here now meant, and he had no intention of coming quietly.

  The gun flashed once, twice, its cannon roar filling the uncanny silence of the mill before the policeman’s shotgun knocked him down. I had fired but hit only the wood of the crate. The bellow of the weapons, the sudden rush of acrid gun smoke, filled my nose and ears completely. For a moment I was stunned and terrified, even though I had seen our foe go down. I shrank back behind the frame of the loom, muscles tight, a full body cringe away from the carnage and into myself which is, perhaps, why it took so long for me to realize that the villain in sea boots had not been the only casualty.

  I was the last to reach Namud’s body.

  He had been hit only once, but the bullet had gone through his chest and his back was slick with blood when I put my arms around him. He looked not so much afraid or in pain as stunned, his eyes wide, lips parted but still, breath coming and going in shallow gasps. Willlinghouse dropped to one knee and took his hand.

  “Hold on, man,” he said in a bluff, hearty way. “Help is on its way.”

  “Not, I think, quickly enough,” whispered Namud with a bleak smile at me.

  Behind and above me, officers barked commands about bandages and where to put the pressure, and then a strong hand gripped my shoulder and started to pull me politely but inexorably out of the way.… Or would have, were it not for Namud himself, who suddenly seized my wrist and pulled me toward his face as his mouth sought to form words. I shrugged off the policeman’s grip and lowered my head to his. He moistened his lips, and there were flecks of
blood in the saliva.

  “Namud,” I whispered.

  “Don’t,” he began, then hesitated, fighting through a cough that brought more blood up from his lungs. “Don’t … be too hard on her.”

  “What?” I asked, my eyes swimming. “On who?”

  But he was smiling vaguely now, and his words, when they came, were dreamy, as if coming from far away.

  “You were,” he managed, “a damned fine steeplejack.”

  And then he was gone.

  CHAPTER

  30

  SOMETIME LATER, WE MADE a grim procession to the site of Horritch’s burned-out factory but were too late there as well. The yellow steam-driven bulldozers emblazoned with the stenciled M’s were sitting by the riverbank, and the shore, which was usually black with oil and coal dust, was white with ash. Of the factory, its equipment, and—most important—the remains caught inside when it burned down, there was almost no sign. It could have been that some of the bones had not yet been washed downstream, but finding them would take time and resources, and proving who they were and how they had died was next to impossible.

  * * *

  NAMUD HAD BEEN MORE than a helpmate in my planning for the Elitus episode, and inside the club itself, when things had lurched toward disaster, he had kept me safe. I had thanked him in a cursory sort of way and had meant to say more at some later time. That would never come now. He had, I realized with mild surprise, been as close to a male friend as I had had of late, a Lani from the streets, like me, taken in and made … what? Useful? Family? I wasn’t sure, and his loss made my isolation sharper. That he had known things, things I had hoped he would eventually share with me about my employer’s family, things that seemed to touch me in ways I could not explain and that had died with him, burned within me like acid.

  And I had liked him. Not romantically, of course, but with the instinctive closeness of people who have taken similar paths through life and wound up in the same place. He was clever and funny, humble and—in his way—kind. That I had only realized these things after his death felt like an especially bitter failing of my own.

  We returned to the city in stunned, defeated silence. Andrews and Willinghouse said nothing and, unable to bear the restraint of their grief, I slipped down from the coach at the westernmost point in the journey and told them I would rejoin them at the town house later that morning.

  Don’t be too hard on her, Namud had said.

  On who? My heart said he was talking about Madame Nahreem, but the words made no sense to me, and the idea that he had died offering me something I could do nothing with made losing him all the harder.

  * * *

  I HAD NO PLAN, but a possibility had occurred to me, and I needed to do something to get out from under the sense of loss and failure. I had been asking myself over and over how someone had spirited a large number of women and children away from the factory without anyone noticing but then I remembered something.

  The container car.

  As I had crept into the factory last night, I had hidden behind a single rail truck parked on one of the numerous sidings that served the docklands. It had ventilation slits cut in near the roof. In the morning when we had returned, it, like the children, was gone. There was no system for tracking privately owned railway carriages, and without a serial number to go by, there was no point in asking for police assistance, but there were other ways of finding such things, other people who kept their eyes on what moved through the industrial hinterland of the riverbanks.

  After laying flowers for Namud on a shrine at the old monkey temple on the edge of the Drowning, I went down to the river and found the children sitting around Bertha, who, the factory being closed for the day, had opted to throw in an extra lesson. She managed to be somehow deafening and serene at the same time. The children were gazing at her, laughing and signing. All of them. Tanish, all his city swagger abandoned, was joining in with great enthusiasm while Aab gazed on him, shyly fascinated. When I beckoned, he came away reluctantly.

  “You want me to find a container car?” he asked, recovering his worldly skepticism.

  “It was marked with a letter M,” I said.

  “That’s nothing,” he said. “There are hundreds of them.”

  “It had holes cut in near the roof. Vents.”

  “No one’s gonna notice that.”

  “You can’t do it,” I said. “All right.”

  “Didn’t say that, did I?” he said. “I’ll ask around. Got a mate who works round there. If things move off schedule, like, unexpected, so to speak, he might have noticed.”

  “Thanks, Tanish,” I said. “You like being here, don’t you?”

  “The Drowning’s all right,” he said, shrugging, like he didn’t really care one way or the other.

  “I mean here with my sister’s children and the others.”

  “Yeah,” he said, unable to completely suppress a grin, as he glanced back to where Aab was twittering with her fingers, beaming and full of life, a person I had never seen before. “Family-like, you know?”

  I nodded, wondering vaguely if Namud had also been a Drowning boy once, if there might still be people here who had known him. Someone should tell them what had happened. Someone should weep for him.

  * * *

  TWO HOURS LATER, SITTING in Willinghouse’s town home parlor, we received word from a police runner that Nathan Horritch was blaming whatever had been going on at the factory on his subordinates, mostly on the black man who had died that morning. Expensive lawyers were already making his case, and Willinghouse had been cautioned by senior members of Parliament to drop the matter, lest his involvement look like politically motivated interference.

  And that was that. Horritch had been released on bond. There was no sign of the missing refugees. Namud was dead. It was more than defeat. It was an inversion of that feeling I had had in the Drowning only the day before, that sense that the world was how it should be.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said Andrews.

  I nodded absently, wondering how many times I would hear that and if it would ever feel true.

  Andrews had brought a piece of the fabric they had found snagged on a wheel in the steam elevator in Horritch’s factory. It was a strap, three inches wide with a slimmer piece stitched along its length, but bunched to form a series of narrow pockets, open at each end, just wide enough to take a pencil. Though it was stained with oil from the machinery it was, like Agatha’s shawl, sheer as gossamer but remarkably strong.

  “It wasn’t just looms up there,” said Andrews. “There were cutting tables and sewing machines too, so whatever they were making was coming out as a finished product.”

  “No dye vats, though,” I said. “So unless they were coloring the fabric elsewhere—”

  Willinghouse cut me off. “Color? We’re worrying what color it was?” he spat.

  “Actually,” I said, as patiently as I could manage, “I’m saying the opposite. Whatever they were making, I don’t think they cared what color it was.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense!” Willinghouse exploded, launching himself to his feet and pacing the room like a caged clavtar. “Horritch and Markeson are extremely wealthy men. All this risk for a smuggling ring? For cloth and cheap labor? There has to be more to it.”

  “Does the name Georgie May mean anything to you?” I asked.

  They shook their heads.

  “Sounds like a woman’s name,” said Dahria. She had been sitting with us the whole time, but had not spoken till now, and I felt that Namud’s death had hit her much harder than any of us would have expected. Even Dahria. “I know a few Georges, but none of them go by Georgie, not publicly anyway. I know one Georgiana, though, and all her friends call her Georgie.”

  “What’s her last name?” I asked.

  “Svenhold,” she said. “She’s a twenty-four-year-old debutante who spends all her father’s money on making herself look beautiful. Mr. Svenhold, alas, does not possess the necessary means.�
�� She attempted a bleak grin, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  “The machine gun plans,” said Andrews. “That’s where this started.”

  “Yes,” said Willinghouse, pointing at him emphatically. “There has to be a connection.”

  “Elitus,” I said. “They are all there: Horritch with his fabric factories, Markeson with his boats, and Montresat with his guns. If they are smuggling weapons, he has to be involved, and using Markeson’s private shipping would be a way to sidestep military and governmental oversight if he’s dealing guns illegally.”

  “Elitus doesn’t connect to Darius,” said Andrews. “He was a nobody.”

  “Connects to his killers,” said Willinghouse. “This Barrington-Smythe character and his cuff-linked friends.”

  “It’s more than that,” I said. “I don’t think the sign writer Gillies was Darius. Gillies was afraid of heights and had a history of violence against women. I think he died during an attempted rape, and that his body is in the morgue. Get a picture of the corpse to David Vandemar, his boss, and I think he’ll confirm it.”

  The two men stared at me.

  “Then who was Darius?” asked Andrews.

  “A man called Ephraim Sandringham, another frequent visitor at the club till he recently went missing,” I said.

  Dahria reacted to that, a momentary look of surprise, hastily doused, and I caught her eye, thinking of the way her friend Constance—Horritch’s daughter—had been romantically linked to the mysteriously absent Sandringham by the Merita ladies. If he had indeed been Darius, then Constance was another link between the theft of the plans and her industrialist father and his friends. How much of this Dahria read in my face, I couldn’t say, but she looked sadder and wearier than I had ever seen her, and I resolved to say nothing about Constance for now.

  “So the body was deliberately misidentified?” said Andrews.

  “To divert attention from Elitus, yes,” I said.

  “By whom?”

  “A young lady with blond hair, according to the papers,” I said. “Darius’s alleged fiancée.”

  “Who was really…?” Andrews prompted.

 

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