Death and the Dreadnought

by Robert Wilton

  Muffled voices.

  Come on, chaps. All ship-shape, and off home with you.

  Another voice now. Oh lord… That would be the policeman. He’d be trying to show professional efficiency to the chief clerk; the chief clerk would be trying to show that the company was efficient enough without the police.

  A miscellaneous selection of boots clumped into the outer office. They could be here for hours.

  As long as they didn’t feel the inexplicable need to check the coat cupboard.

  Surely not. After all, only a madman would want to spend the night in a coat cupboard.

  The voices got louder, a nice chorus of tenor, baritone and bass murmur. The boots got louder too.

  Very slowly, I shifted my weight. My cramped muscles screeched. I reached up and carefully wrapped one hand and then the other around the door’s inner handle.

  The boots had stopped. Voices – no, boots again, just one tread, moving away. The clerk, perhaps, off to do a quick check of the office valuables.

  Voices now, just the other side of my door. The cleaner and the policeman. You’re not the policeman who was here earlier, are you? Stopped in for a piss, he did. The most casual, innocent enquiry could betray me.

  The door rattled and instantly my muscles gripped hard. I felt the pressure from the other side for a vital second, and then I heard the cleaner distinctly: ‘Just for coats. Nothing in there.’ And the pressure was released.

  I let my breath out very slowly.

  Silence. The shuffling of boots.

  And then, a few minutes later, more movement and a door closing hard and the key turning.

  25.

  Something else was troubling me – besides, I mean, the indignity of being found dead of a heart attack in a clerks’ closet.

  Sinclair.

  Up until now, I had focused on what other person’s guilty secret could possibly have brought the innocent Sinclair to the yard that night, and to his death. What if I’d been looking at it the wrong way around?

  I’d been searching for something suspicious. And the person behaving most suspiciously had been David Sinclair.

  I gave them another quarter hour to get well clear, before I risked opening the cupboard door. Even then, I was half-expecting them all to be sitting there in the office, in a little semi-circle, policeman and cleaner and chief clerk, all waiting for me; probably Inspector bloody Bunce too.

  They weren’t there. Sometimes one’s luck holds.

  I left my boots in the cupboard, and in return borrowed a scarf that someone had helpfully forgotten in there. I turned on my electric torch, muted as best I could against my palm, and walked to the front door. I thanked the lord for parquet floor; a more old-fashioned outfit would still have had floorboards, and I’d have been tip-toeing all damned night. I stuffed the scarf along the bottom of the door. If the bobby was at his post, a crack of light under the door would set his boots agleam immediately. I had to risk the sides. Fortunately, the only natural light to this office came through an elaborate skylight: had the office given onto the street this whole nonsense would have been impossible – even the sleepiest policeman on the Holborn beat would spot me wandering around by torchlight and bumping into things.

  I turned on the lights.

  There was no immediate hammering at the door, alarm bell, or lightning bolt from heaven.

  I took a better look at the outer office now. Half a dozen desks, each with ink stand, blotter, and plain chair pushed neatly under. Along one wall, a line of glass fronted cupboards, containing ledgers. A glazed partition and a doorway separated a smaller office space; that, presumably, was the lair from which the chief clerk ruled the juniors. Then the door into the corridor. In the corridor, I tried a couple of the other doors; they were locked.

  A waist-height wooden cupboard fixed to the wall in the chief clerk’s nest looked like what I was after. The keyhole suggested a modern lock, and the catch was shielded, so I didn’t waste any time on it. Fortunately, having spent lavishly on the lock they’d run out of money and ideas on the hinges; these were simple, and external, and I set about the screws with my pen-knife. Not exactly a scintillating quarter-hour; but at the end of it I had the cupboard ruined and the run of the Thames Ironworks Company offices.

  Which would have been splendid, had I possessed rather more time, more ease, and more of an idea what on earth I was looking for in all those offices and drawers and papers.

  During my vigil in the cupboard, I had of necessity decided to narrow down the search. I would look for correspondence about the state of the company. I would look for Sinclair’s particular affairs. And I would look for material about the management and supply of the yard.

  A selection of larger keys proved to be for the office doors along the corridor. The Thames Ironworks being efficient sorts of chaps, each key had a neat label on the fob, which handily corresponded to the plaques on the doors: ‘Chairman’; ‘General Manager’, ‘Mr Stackhouse’, ‘Mr Sinclair’ and so forth. All shipshape. With the light in the corridor turned off, I tried a couple of these.

  These confirmed my pessimism: the Managers’ offices – considerably more lavish than the space for the clerks – had windows onto the street. Through them I could see the other side of Holborn, a row of dark windows reflecting these ones – and, dimly somewhere within, the reflection of my ghostly self. The offices also had their own desks with drawers. I’d be fooling about on my hands and knees all night if I started going through that lot.

  Sinclair’s I had to explore, though. I crawled across it, and sat against the wall under the window looking back at the room.

  Despite the impressive panelling, the big desk and the comfortable chair, it was rather a spartan place. A framed print of St Paul’s; a framed print of a battleship. A pen and ink set with a battleship motif; the manufacturers of novelty nautical trinkets must have been euphoric when the Thames Ironworks Company won the contract to build the Thunderer.

  From where I was sitting, on the floor, I could see a flat central drawer in the desk. Inside it was Sinclair’s desk diary, a big leather covered business.

  I think a small part of me hoped it would be a journal, page after page of detailed analysis of the crimes of the Trade Union, or a signed confession of something. But of course it was only his appointments. Times; names of people or companies.

  Several times in the weeks before his death, there appeared the initials S. G., usually for an evening appointment. Samuel Greenberg, presumably. Once again, I wondered at Sinclair’s relationship with the elusive Mr Greenberg and the good old Carthorse Counting Collective.

  The day before his death, Sinclair had written two things in the margin of his diary. ‘H.M.S. ??’ Would this be His Majesty’s Ship Thunderer, or did the question marks imply speculation about a different battleship? Then a four-digit number at in the margin of his diary. The start of a calculation?

  1536.

  The number was familiar.

  I replaced the diary in the drawer. I had a peek in the Chairman’s office, just to get a sense of how the other half live, and the Chief Cashier’s, just in case he’d left anything lying around that might help Quinn with the housekeeping. The next office was ‘Drawings’. Curiosity led me in.

  It was double the size of any of the other offices. This was a working space. The inhabitants had less fancy furniture than their neighbours along the corridor. There was a drawing board in the corner: I guess they don’t do all of their technical drawings at the head office, but they could dash one off if the mood came upon them.

  And all along one wall were metal cabinets. They were out of place. Instinctively, I compared my collection of keys with the locks. None fitted; none looked even likely. In these sumptuous old-fashioned offices, these cabinets were an alien modern intrusion; and the regular inhabitants of the offices couldn’t open them. More than the affairs of the chief cashier, more than the affairs of the chairman, the technical drawings of the Thames Ironworks Shipbuilding Com
pany were close-guarded.

  I returned to the cupboards I could get at. Some of the smaller keys in the Chief Clerk’s cabinet let me into the glass-fronted cupboards of ledgers in the clerks’ office. And here the fastidiousness of the servants of the Thames Ironworks Company, pain in the arse though it might be to a man hiding in a cupboard and waiting for the coast to clear, proved more helpful to the man ransacking their correspondence. The ledgers were all named and indexed, fully and neatly.

  In twenty minutes or so I was able to skim through ‘General Correspondence T.I.S.C. January – June 1910’, as well as its sequel, the similarly engaging but as-yet unfinished masterpiece ‘General Correspondence T.I.S.C. July – December 1910’. Even assuming I knew what to look for, I could see nothing to indicate a company in anything other than steady satisfactory health.

  Two recent letters did interest me. The first was from the Chairman to the Home Secretary. It summarized recent incidents of sabotage in the Thames Ironworks yard and more or less asked the Home Secretary what he proposed to do about it. Fairly high-handed stuff: where most citizens confronted with crime had to roam the streets hoping to find a policeman (and fat chance of that they had; most of the police were now in my sitting room rummaging through my French magazines for artistic pictures), the Chairman of the Thames Ironworks Shipbuilding Company went straight to the top, and didn’t mince his words when he got there.

  The second letter was in similar style: take the opportunity to inform the Home Secretary that, following our recent conference, and noting your reassurances about security and the Foreign Office’s on the diplomatic issues, and in spite of German and other protests, the Company will not protest against the visit of German Trade Union representatives nor impede their meeting with Company workers. And when it all goes to hell in a handcart, it’ll be your fault as Government and good luck trying to scrounge campaign contributions for the next election. I paraphrase, but that was the thrust.

  There was a third caught my eye, chivvying McKenna, the First Lord of the Admiralty, about getting in early with a follow-up order for Dreadnoughts beyond the Thunderer, but I assumed that was standard practice, like when the fellow tries to sell you a second pair of boots.

  Useful colour, but nothing specific. I went looking for Sinclair’s side of the business. The Chief Clerk had thoughtfully labelled one of the ledgers ‘Legal Correspondence’. I had even less chance of spotting anything out of place, but I went at it dutifully. I didn’t spot anything out of place. Working back through dozens of recent letters signed by David Sinclair, there wasn’t one suggestion of concern; not a single legal eyebrow raised.

  I was losing heart a bit. I hadn’t known exactly what I was looking for when I contrived to get myself locked into the Thames Ironworks offices for the night, but I’d hoped for at least some indication of something awry. Now I felt I could spend a week in here going through ledgers and I wouldn’t find a damn’ thing. The night was passing, there was always the chance that the policeman outside might have a key and might feel the need to come in and put his feet up for ten minutes, and my involvement with Sinclair and his company was leaving me more and more trapped.

  I ran my finger along the spines of the ledgers, looking for inspiration; or, if not inspiration, at least something to do with the yard.

  I didn’t find either. I went all the way to the end of the line of ledgers – these last were labelled as receipts, and such things – and back again and the yard didn’t seem to have a ledger of its own. There’d been sets of ledgers on ‘Supply’ and ‘Contracts’ but it would take me months to make anything of them, even were there anything to be made. To make up for not finding what I really wanted, I had a quick look at the recent entries in ‘Labour’: some stuff about predicted manning needs and work-rates that might have fascinated my Trade Union pals but didn’t do as much for me, and a couple of recent bits of correspondence with the Union about their regular meeting with management. Other than the sheer fatuousness of the management world-view – essentially that the workers should work harder for the same money because it was their patriotic duty as free-born Englishmen, an approach never calculated to have much impact on the impoverished Irish who probably made up most of the yard – there was nothing of note.

  I turned away, and started to scan the office, wondering if there was another cupboard or cabinet somewhere.

  But my subconscious, a tad more methodical and sure, stopped me. Something among the apparently trivial administrative ledgers. Something had caught my attention. Something had resonated. One of them…

  The edges of the pages of one them were pale blue.

  I’d seen paper that colour before. Recently.

  The same blue as the slip of paper Victoria had pulled out of Sinclair’s suit.

  The ledger, squatter in shape than the others, was labelled ‘Drawings Log’. I opened it. It was a book of receipts: all the same colour and shape as the one that had been in the dead man’s pocket.

  Pretty routine, presumably, but after hours of fooling around in the office it was the first link I had with what had happened in the yard, so I gave it a few more seconds’ thought.

  The ledger was mostly made up of stubs of paper, with perforated ends: the slips that had once attached to them had been torn off. It had been one of these slips that Sinclair had been carrying when he’d been murdered. Each stub had a serial number printed on it, and a handwritten name and date and reference number, and each had then been stamped ‘Returned’ with some initials and another date. There were then several stubs with the slips still attached: the stubs had the same details on them, except they hadn’t been stamped and initialled; the attached slips repeated the serial number, and the name, date and reference number. The rest of the book was made up of blank stubs and slips.

  The ledger was for drawings, it said. So it presumably recorded drawings that had been taken out of those metal cabinets in the Drawings room down the corridor. If they were special enough to need their own cabinets, it made sense that there’d be a system for keeping track of any that were taken out. And presumably those doing the actual building would need to consult the drawings occasionally – check they hadn’t put the guns on the wrong way round, or missed off a funnel. And when such a person borrowed such a drawing, the details of both went onto both stub and receipt slip – I saw MacNeice’s name a few times, but there were a couple of other names that came up much more often, presumably those responsible for particular bits of construction, or perhaps the men who couriered between office and yard. That way the office could see, from the slips that were still in the ledger, which documents were out and who had them. When the drawing was returned, the stub got stamped to close the story, and the borrower got the slip for his scrapbook and to prove that he’d handed the drawing back rather than leaving it in a tram or selling it to the Frogs.

  The slip in Sinclair’s pocket had had the serial number fifteen hundred and something – I remembered I’d thought of Henry VIII.

  1536. The same number I’d just found written in his diary.

  I skimmed through the early 1500 stubs; sure enough, serial number 1536 had Sinclair’s name on it. The stub only, of course, not the slip that had once attached to it. That was in my pocket, in the bedroom of a music hall artiste in east London.

  There was one inconsistency. The tearing out of the slip, presumably for Sinclair, should have meant that the document had been returned. But, uniquely, this stub hadn’t been stamped ‘Returned’.

  Trying to make sense of this probably trivial bit of bureaucracy, I walked back down the corridor to the Drawings Room. Perhaps the handwritten serial number would tell me something.

  I was standing in the open doorway of the Drawings Room when, from behind me, back down the corridor, apparently in the clerks’ office, there came the sound of breaking glass.

  26.

  If you ever fancy a really good laugh, get Jacko Hart-Dixon to tell you about the time he was on the run from the Boers after
they’d cut up the convoy he was escorting at Heilbron. Skirmishers from the Boer commando were tracking him, and he’d had to shimmy up a tree. Despite them rootling around beneath him, he was cosy enough for an hour or two – until the call of nature became increasingly urgent. Very uncomfortable moment. And then he realized he was about to sneeze. Funniest thing, the way he tells it; gets better every time, too.

  Funny in hindsight, anyway. Well, old Jacko was much in my mind as I hesitated in that doorway in the Thames Ironworks Company offices. There I was, a wanted murderer on the run from the police, a conspiracy of unknown assassins, and the restive proletariat of Europe. For reasons that were increasingly elusive to me at that moment, I’d chosen to secrete myself in a set of offices that were under 24-hour police guard. And now, bizarrely, and unless I was much mistaken, someone was trying to break in after me.

  Thank God I’d used the privy when I’d had the chance.

  The sound of breaking glass had been short and faint. Not the crash of something heaved through a window, but a subtle, controlled sound. If my predicament prowling around the offices hadn’t got me at my most alert, I mightn’t have heard it at all.

  I stood still; listened.

  Nothing more.

  It hadn’t been a whole window, surely. And only a lunatic would have put a ladder up from Holborn to one of the office windows, anyway. There was no glass around the front door, nothing that one would break to try to get at the lock.

  Had I disturbed something? Had one of the ledgers fallen against one of the glass fronts of the cupboards?

  Above all, how alert was the policeman standing guard outside the office door?

  I crept back along the corridor, towards the clerks’ office. Fortunately I’d left the corridor light off, for my forays into the larger offices. Ahead of me, light from the clerks’ office spilled into the corridor.

  Keeping out of it as best I could, pressed into the shadows against the wall, I peered round into the office.