Death and the Dreadnought

by Robert Wilton

  I couldn’t see anything amiss. The glass fronted cupboards were as I’d left them.

  I shifted back along the corridor a couple of feet, to get a different perspective through the open door and around the desks. Now I could see the centre of the parquet floor, and on it a few shards of glass.

  My glance shifted slowly upwards, to the multi-paned skylight.

  Projecting down through a hole in one of the panes, hanging as if from sky, was a boot.

  As I watched, it waggled slightly – deliberately – and dislodged another few fragments of glass.

  Peculiar, to say the least.

  I mean to say, I was in no position to sneer at the odd things people did on rooftops – at least this chap had boots – but it seemed a particularly inept way to go about breaking in. It had to be a tricky job, balancing up there on the frame of the skylight trying to kick delicately at the glass.

  He seemed to think so too, for I heard an urgent murmur. And then someone, presumably the boot-fellow’s accomplice, turned on an electric torch. Its glare illuminated the shadow hanging over the skylight, foot dangling through the glass.

  It also illuminated me. I backed away but the accomplice had obviously seen me: there was a shout, it startled the chap on the skylight, he swore and slipped and his whole leg plunged through the glass. That, now, was a proper shattering sound. Shards clattered down onto the parquet, the burglar was scrambling desperately up out of the skylight again, dislodging more of it as he went, and I watched from the shadows.

  A hammering at the front door. ‘Oi! In there! This is the police!’ With the key in the chief clerk’s pocket in the suburbs he couldn’t get in immediately, but it had good dramatic effect. I heard hissing and scrambling from the roof above, and the intruders were gone. My curses went with them, for they’d queered my pitch properly now; I wished on them the biggest most vicious pigeons in London, and no right of parapet. From the other side of the door I heard the unmistakeable squawk of a police whistle, and then boots thundering down the stairs, as the policeman bustled off to summon reinforcements.

  Where exactly was the nearest key to that door? Had it gone home with the chief clerk, or was there a spare somewhere? Would the police contemplate breaking down the door? The policeman wouldn’t have to go farther than the foot of the stairs before a comrade would be running to the whistle.

  There are times when the gentleman runs out of options. I did the only thing I could, under the circumstances: I locked myself in the lavatory.

  Half an hour later, I heard the front door opening, and voices and boots hurrying into the outer office. They’d have plenty to look at, what with the shattered skylight, and what I’d done to the chief clerk’s key cabinet. I’d dropped the keys amid the glass on the floor; the only door they couldn’t open was mine.

  Halfway to the privy I’d remembered my boots, and hurried back to the coat cupboard to retrieve them.

  Once I was sure there were a handful of voices milling around, and once I got the sense they’d dispersed around the building doing whatever policemen do at a crime scene, I unlocked the door and slipped out into the corridor. Helmet pulled down hard, at first glance I was just one more policeman. The curious business at the skylight, and the consequent arrival of a posse of police among whom I could disappear, was a welcome improvement on my original plans, which had involved a reversal of the lavatory scenario or trying to pass myself off as the postman.

  I think I passed Inspector Bunce on the stairs as, trying to not to run, I hurried down into the street and away.

  27.

  I’d passed my whole life more or less unaware of the existence of the Thames Ironworks Company Shipyard. Now I seemed to spend most of my time in the damned place.

  My first visit, just a few nights ago, had led to my arrest for murder.

  My second visit had led to my fleeing for my life from thousands of outraged dockers. But I had at least got a better feel for the lie of the land.

  My third visit surely couldn’t be any more chaotic. I’d a clearer idea what I was doing this time, too.

  I’d slept for much of the day, with wild dreams of infinities of policemen and ledgers. With dusk I was heading east again. And once it was fully dark, midnight long struck and the streets of Poplar silent, I reversed the steps of my melodramatic exit via flat roof and girders and was soon back in the heart of the shipyard, climbing the steps to the walkway where the offices were. I’d not brought my Webley – unless you really know whom you want to shoot, a pistol’s just an invitation to trouble – but I’d borrowed a few tools from the theatre.

  Over my shoulder – and you may call me fanciful if you wish – I could feel the Thunderer looming over me, watching my strange games.

  Yard Manager MacNeice’s office door had a good solid lock on it, befitting the man and his importance. His office window, on the other hand, had a miserable little catch that I jimmied in something under ten seconds with a screwdriver I’d brought along.

  I stopped, and turned, and gazed around the yard below me. No sign of the night-watchman, but I was hellish exposed up there. My ears strained for imagined noises; my eyes wondered at what filled the great pockets of shadow, out of reach of the few lights.

  Nothing. Just the immense blackness of the battleship, darker and vaster than the night itself.

  I pushed up the lower sash of the window and scrambled through. Not elegant, as such, but the watchman wasn’t there to offer comment.

  The Yard Manager would surely have a set of keys for the other offices, and they were probably thought more secure in the yard, and if they were in the yard they were in here, and that could only mean his desk. Wooden desks in shipyards aren’t built to the finest engineering standards: the lock on the drawer was small, and my screwdriver was rather large, and I levered enough of a gap to be able to slip the catch. I was hoping not to draw attention to where I was really going, and I preferred to do damage where it just might be less obvious. There was a chance MacNeice would think he’d left the drawer unlocked; and I was frankly past caring.

  It was a goodly set of keys, on an old-fashioned gaoler’s ring; very satisfying. The only key that wasn’t on there was for MacNeice’s own door, of course, so after another careful scan of the yard I went back out through the window onto the walkway.

  Again I stopped, crouching low; again I checked. Still the silence, and the impassive Thunderer above me.

  The drawings office, next to MacNeice’s, showed the same insistence on extra security as the drawings room in the company’s headquarters. Its single window, and the window panel in its door, were barred. The lock was more elaborate than the Yard Manager’s. Which didn’t concern me particularly, as I wasn’t going through the window and had the key for the lock. But once again I felt the importance of the drawings. I slipped in, and closed the door behind me.

  It was a simple enough layout. The moon, and the glimmers from the yard’s minimal night-lighting, showed a bare flat desk running from under the window to the back wall, and taking up fully half the space. On an extension of the desk against the back wall was a cabinet, reaching as tall as I am. And that was about it for the decor. A working room; a place that personnel visited, but not where they were based.

  I was fiddling at the cabinet with the smallest keys on the ring, when I found the door was unlocked anyway. Which was handy, because it didn’t look as though MacNeice had a key for it.

  Inside the cabinet was a rack, and the rack held perhaps two dozen leather tubes. Their round ends stared back at me: each was four inches or so in diameter, showing a cardboard label with a handwritten number.

  For the first time in days, the world was functioning with a glorious consequence and logic. I gave thanks to the engineering brains of the shipbuilding industry. They even kept the tubes arranged in numerical order of label. It was a sight to make Quinn’s heart sing: along with my sock-drawer it was about the neatest vision of administration I could think of.

  The num
ber on the pale blue slip I’d retrieved from David Sinclair’s pocket was 1536. Sure enough, in the third row down, between tube numbers 1481 and 1883, was a neatly-labelled 1536. I was doing splendidly now. I had the tube out – it must have been three feet long – and on the desk and open with a rare sense of enthusiasm.

  There were five large sheets of technical drawings rolled inside, and I couldn’t make head or tail of them. The mystery was supposed to be becoming clear, and instead it had just got worse.

  I don’t consider myself exactly stupid, but these drawings apparently so significant to David Sinclair might as well have been blank, for all they meant to me. Some sort of machine or apparatus, certainly – I saw wheels; I saw wires. But the dimensions marked in the drawings suggested the real thing had the size and approximate shape of the average table or desk, which in the context of the Thunderer was rather a disappointment. I suppose I’d expected something vaster, or more obviously weapon-like. This looked like a lathe, or a sewing machine. What strange apparatus was this?

  My blood cooled. I felt the isolation and vulnerability of my position, staring down into those pages I couldn’t understand, in the office I’d broken into in a quest that now seemed futile. And what could I have expected, after all?

  Perhaps it worked out for the best. Perhaps it was stepping back from the desk, trying to reopen my focus from the damned drawings, feeling the vastness of the silence around me, that meant I heard the boots outside, making their way along the walkway towards me.

  28.

  For a foolish instant I started to roll up the documents. That nonsense didn’t last, thank God. The boots were thundering on the boards outside, and in a second I’d stuffed the cap back on the tube and shoved the tube back into the cabinet and shut the cabinet and grabbed up the documents in my arms and dived under the desk. I hunched back as far as I could and against the front wall of the office, stuffed the drawings behind me and covered my face with my arm as best I could: I had to become part of the darkness.

  The boots stopped just behind me, at the window.

  I’ve been in this sort of scenario a few times. Your hearing plays tricks – or, rather, your brain plays tricks with your hearing, amplifying things that are negligible and muffling things that are crucial. The knack is to concentrate on what could really give you away: a breath that becomes a gasp; an unconsidered movement of a finger that knocks something over.

  I heard a key in the door. Unnecessary, of course. As whoever it was immediately discovered, the door had been unlocked for them. All part of the good old Delamere service. My deft scouting – shimmying through windows and breaking desks – had cleared the way for them nicely.

  It was a them. The door was opened slowly, and two pairs of legs stepped in beside me.

  The nearest boot was within reach of my left hand. I pulled my left hand back under my body. The papers stuffed behind me made a sound like a tree falling in a forest.

  The two pairs of legs walked away down the office, to the cabinet. I heard it opened.

  The unusual depth of the desk made it harder for me to be seen – but likewise harder to see anything myself. All I got was the two pairs of legs. For all I could tell, the top halves could have been a couple of Red Indian chiefs or Chinese cooks or Mr and Mrs Asquith carrying banjos. Or a pair of dancers from Jolly’s, given their usual style.

  I don’t think they were any of those things. There’s something very distinctive about the sound of liquid in a metal canister: a kind of sickly sloshing echo. I heard it now. And then I smelt something very distinctive, too. Solvent, or perhaps motor spirit. I knew what was coming next.

  The opposite wall flared orange, and the two pairs of legs stepped back quickly from the cabinet. Another moment as they checked that the fire was taking properly – if a thing’s worth doing, and so on – and then they were walking past me and out.

  I heard the door lock. I was trying to decide whether I’d seen the end of a document tube under one of their arms when I heard another sound, similar but duller, like a second turn of the key.

  29.

  That was a long thirty seconds.

  Four or five times during it, I checked the ring of keys in my pocket. And I watched the flickering on the wall.

  How long might they wait outside, checking their handiwork? Surely not long, not with the start they’d given it, and the possibility that the night-watchman would see them up on the walkway.

  After about twenty seconds I saw the flames, creeping down the cabinet to the level of the desk and into my sight-line. Now I had to risk sticking my head out from cover. As I emerged, I could feel the fire hot behind my shoulders.

  They weren’t waiting outside. They’d no need to, and every incentive to hurry off home, job well done, time for a whisky and soda. At last I turned to see the fire.

  The front of the cabinet was a wall of flame. Near it, on the desk, they’d left the can of spirit. The heat, in that small office, was ferocious.

  I turned back to the door, key ring ready. But the key wouldn’t get into the lock. I swore at it: the usual clumsiness of haste. Tried more calmly. Double-checked it was the right key. Tried again.

  The key really wouldn’t go into the keyhole.

  That second, duller sound had been my efficient companions jamming their key in the lock.

  ow the security of the drawings office seemed more impressive. The lock was impenetrable. Those bars were anchored deep in the window frames. The lower half of the door was panelled; still half an inch even at its thinnest. I could feel the flames behind me. The office building was brick. It wouldn’t catch fire quickly. But the walls between the offices might, and the ceiling, and the floorboards. It would be seconds before the flames spread to the wooden desk, and then they’d spread quickly along to the front wall. The heat and smoke would get me before that. Already my throat was feeling it.

  I snatched the screwdriver from my pocket and went at the door hinges. There were only two of them; six screws was all. My wrist and shoulder strained; I added my other hand, felt my palm burning on the screwdriver.

  Nothing. Fifteen seconds, thirty, and the first screw hadn’t shifted. I coughed violently; whorls of smoke were rolling along the ceiling. I made another desperate attack on the screw, mind full of the image of the enormous navvy whose strength had driven it in years before. Nothing.

  I dropped the screwdriver, gazed around me. The far end of the drawings office was an inferno, the heat off the blazing cabinet making me flinch yards away. Beside the cabinet, the desk was starting to smoulder. The metal can of spirits gleamed in the light of the flames.

  One arm shielding my face, half-crouching below the smoke, I took two long steps towards the furnace and grabbed at the can. I gasped, swore, dropped it; the metal was scalding hot. I grabbed it up again, roaring my anger at the pain. There had to be some spirits left. They couldn’t have used all of it on that tiny cabinet. I could not die in this appalling way. Stumbling, retching, hissing with the pain in my hand, I dropped to the floor by the door.

  There was liquid still in the can. Two-handed, with desperate focus, ignoring the pain in my fingertips, I splashed some of it on the lower panel of the door. I snatched up the sheaf of drawings from where I’d left it under the desk, screwed it back into a rough roll, and scrambled back with it along the floor to the fire. It caught instantly, and I scrambled back to the door and held the flame against the panel. As soon as the first flickers of blue appeared, I stamped out what was left of my makeshift torch before it ignited my sleeve.

  I watched the flames start to spread on the inset door-panel, trying to ignore the terrific heat from behind me, breathing thin through my teeth in that increasingly rancid atmosphere.

  I had to gauge this right. I wouldn’t have too many second chances. Even if there was anything left in the can, and even if my torch would take a second use, my lungs wouldn’t stand this much longer.

  I waited, watching the flames spread across my way out. I wait
ed, my breaths shallow and rasping and hot. I had to weaken the inset panel, that half-inch thickness of wood. If I left it seconds too long, the thicker frame of the door would catch and I’d never get through. One chance.

  The panel was fully aflame. I waited. The flames started to flicker beyond the panel, onto the frame. I waited. I was alternating feeble breaths and great hacking coughs. In one spasm, I saw that the desk above my shoulder was burning fast.

  Lying on my side, I took a mighty kick at the flames on the door.

  The wood held. My foot throbbed with the impact, there were wisps of smoke on my trouser leg, but the wood held. I kicked again, and this time the panel smashed in a cloud of sparks.

  I had successfully got my foot stuck through a burning door. I wrenched it free, leaving my shoe on the other side, and kicked frantically around the hole with my other leg. As the panel gave way and cleared my path, the flames died away too, or fell as smouldering shards of wood on the other side. In another moment I was scrambling through, with smouldering shoulders and scalded breaths.

  I lay broken on the walkway. I rolled my head round, out over the edge, and took in a vast breath. It was clear and beautiful; mountain spring, the first dawn. So I took another one. Then I set off along the walkway, hands and knees. After a couple of yards I shuffled back, retrieved my shoe, and had another go.

  My journey down the steps involved falling as much as walking, but the effect was the same. At the bottom I put my shoe on, looking around, wondering when the night-watchman might wake up, getting my breath back to normal. Then I staggered more or less upright and set off, aiming for the first bit of complete shadow.

  In the shadow, I found the night-watchman. I tripped over him, indeed. He was lying in the darkness, stabbed to death. I was crouched by him, fingers tracing the outline of his body and the knife in his chest, when the shipyard came alive with light, and from behind there were shouts, and whistles, and boots converging on me.