Death and the Dreadnought

by Robert Wilton

  30.

  ‘Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.’

  Forget your Greek Gods and your grand sculptures. If ever humanity has produced a model of triumph, it was Inspector Ernest Bunce in that moment, sitting in his vile green interview room, gazing at me.

  I wasn’t much to gaze at. My clothes were a mess, my face – from the glimpse I’d caught in a mirror as I was pushed through the front room of the police station – was smeared and greasy with soot and dust, and my hands hurt like hell.

  Don’t tell me, Sir Henry: you and the night-watchman had your tea together at the Ritz, then he invited you to the shipyard to give you a tip on a horse. Like that, was it?’

  I was very tired.

  Old pal of yours from Eton, was he?’

  The wearying sarcasm was undercut with something else. He was spitting the words out. Inspector Bunce was, I realized with some concern, steaming angry.

  He gazed at me some more. ‘Anything to say? Any funny remark?’

  ‘Will this take long, Inspector?’

  ‘A man is dead, Delamere! Not an especially remarkable man, not a gentleman. An average sort of fellow. John Tulliver; guess you didn’t even know that, did you? Just another anonymous innocent, and you don't care.’

  ‘And when I'm swinging for it, Inspector, and you're leering at your triumph, and you find out that I was innocent after all, what then?’

  He leaned in close. I forced myself not to recoil from the proximity. The big, battered, pock-marked face was in alarming detail. He hissed: ‘I’ll take that chance.’

  I won’t deny I was worried. Even if they couldn’t get me all the way to the gallows on coincidence and a bad habit of bumping into bodies in shipyards, the next days – weeks – Gods, months even – were going to be hellish inconvenient. Even Victoria Carteret couldn’t get me out of this. And all the while, the real killers – and though I had some idea of the sort of thing they were up to now, there was so much more I had to find out – would be jogging along unhindered.

  There was no point saying anything to Bunce, and he wasn’t wasting any more time on me. I was in my old cell not fifteen minutes after I’d arrived at the police station.

  And now my situation was even more grim. I might have been confident in escaping a murder conviction because there wasn’t conclusive proof I’d done it, but not four murder convictions. Four – I thought it was four, but it was becoming hard to tell – four times I’d been on the spot, four times I’d a kind of motive, and now the police had caught me.

  Five murders. I kept forgetting the fat man in the baths. Perhaps the police would never have the witnesses to tie me to that one.

  And what the hell did it all mean?

  The paperwork showed that David Sinclair had ordered some very special drawings to the shipyard. At the shipyard, less secure than the company offices, murderers had come to steal those drawings.

  In the morning – after another uneasy night – I was woken by an argument from somewhere along the corridor. For a moment I thought it might be Quinn, trying to bully his way in with a change of smalls and a pistol hidden in a pork pie, but he wouldn’t be making that kind of noise.

  It went quiet for a time, someone swore again – it sounded like Inspector Bunce, for some reason – and then there were footsteps in the corridor. A policeman opened the cell, and a stranger stepped into the doorway, and considered me.

  Good boots. Smart suit. Expensive-looking tie pin, elegant ‘tache.

  ‘Delamere’, he said. Drawled. ‘Time to go.’

  I can’t say I liked the look of it.

  ‘You really don’t’ he said firmly, ‘have any choices. Out you come.’

  I didn’t like the look of it at all. I stood, put my jacket on, and out I went. I didn’t have any choices.

  Inspector Bunce was at the front desk, and he had another go at protesting. He barely glanced at me, and when he did it was with pure hate. I didn’t meet his eyes. I wasn’t at all sure what was going on, I could see his fury and I guess I could understand it, and antagonising him couldn’t make things any better.

  We were sitting in the carriage outside – a neat affair, two horses and closed – before I said anything. ‘Pardon my curiosity, but who in hell are you and where in hell are we going?’

  The dapper stranger glanced at me. ‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ he said. Then he tapped on the roof with his stick. ‘And I ain’t saying.’ We rattled off westwards.

  31.

  I’ve never particularly liked the new Admiralty Arch – building a set of offices into an arch over the road is pure swank, and it’s played havoc with the traffic going up – and I was in no mood to have my opinion improved.

  The building wasn’t what was making me uneasy. What was making me uneasy was that I was being marched into the building when it still wasn’t finished. They’d started it a few years ago, as a tribute to the late Queen from her respectful son and heir; but now Eddie the Elephant had followed his mama across the great divide – if they’d ended up in the same department, one of them must have been sorely surprised – and the memorial arch was still a building site. The structure was done, but they were fitting the place out: there was scaffolding up against the facade, and I was marched between piles of wood that would become panelling, and the door was a temporary business of planks and cloth. No workmen; no watchman. All wrong.

  I’d been bustled out of the cab too fast to do more than glimpse where I was, and to see how my escorts arranged themselves to limit my lines of escape, and then I was inside. The dandy was at my shoulder, all the way up a flight of stairs and tap-tap along a stone corridor and through a doorway. Everywhere was bare plaster, and dust, and the debris of abandoned work. Everything was a pale grey.

  Except in this one room.

  In this one room, amid the paleness and the dust, three elegant hard-backed chairs had been arranged in an arc. Three elegant men were sitting in them.

  There was a fourth chair in front of them. I looked once round the room, and sat.

  ‘Well, Delamere, is it? Run out of rope, have we?’

  I didn’t say anything – tempting though it was to suggest that if I wasn’t Delamere they were going to feel pretty foolish.

  The chap who’d spoken was sitting in the centre: a stately, solid worthy in his forties, formal suit, stiff collar, I guessed official rather than commercial, and sure of his own importance.

  The second, to the left, was older: a gaunt and weathered ancient, somehow so grey that he hardly seemed there.

  The only good news was number three. It was Hugh Stackhouse – the shipping company director who’d given me a second cigarette and put me onto manager MacNeice at the Thames Ironworks yard.

  ‘Been having rather a lively time of it, have we?’ The politico again.

  I still didn’t answer him. I considered each of the other two, and nodded to them.

  ‘What d’you think you’ve been playing at?’

  Now I looked at him again. ‘First, trying to keep myself alive. Second, trying to work out what in hell’s happening at that shipyard.’ I leaned forwards towards the big cheese. ‘What are you playing at?’

  He didn’t like it. He looked a little more pink and stuffed, and said nothing. Stackhouse was clearly too junior in this company to speak. It was the old man who answered me at last. ‘Trying to work out what in hell’s happening at that shipyard, Sir Henry,’ he said, and the voice was as dusty as the speaker. ‘On your first point, I confess that we are… indifferent, to whether you stay alive.’ There was a lightness in the words, as if he wasn’t so concerned about this world.

  It was honest enough, anyway.

  I was gazing at the big cheese in the middle. ‘You’re properly worried, aren’t you?’ I said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I might have accused him of robbing the collection box or pushing urchins off Westminster Bridge for fun.

  ‘Sir… Percy something. Savary. Sir Percy Savary.’

&nb
sp; Now he looked as if I’d caught him red-handed. ‘I hardly think–’

  ‘Sometimes I trip over the political pages on the way to the racing; seen your face. Don’t worry, Savary. The police and the press think I’m a murderer and a scoundrel; they’ll hardly believe me if I tell them I’m having secret meetings with the most powerful fixer in London, will they?’

  He still didn’t like it.

  ‘But I should probably be flattered, shouldn’t I? Or worried. If the man who guards the stability of the Government suddenly takes an interest in one errant baronet. For you to take a hand, and to dirty it with me, this business must be something.’ I sat back. The chair creaked. ‘So what do you want?’

  Savary glowered at me. ‘We want your co-operation on the business at the yard.’ He was more comfortable making demands.

  ‘And in return?’

  The old man, of course: ‘Work with us on your second objective, and perhaps we can make things a little easier for you on the first.’

  ‘And if I refuse?’

  ‘The door is open, Delamere.’ Savary. ‘All London is yours. Somewhere out there are the police, and apparently they’re the least of your troubles. Good luck trying to claim this meeting ever happened. We’ll watch the chase with interest.’

  I considered him, without warmth. ‘A wash’, I said. ‘Something to eat. A drink.’

  32.

  ‘Know much about ship-building, Delamere?’ A fatuous question, obviously. ‘After your recent experiences?’

  I waited. Dousing my head in cold water and bolting a sandwich had left me significantly livelier, but hardly jovial.

  Sir Percy Savary leaned forwards. ‘It’s a war in itself!’

  This rather startling statement made, he sat back, inviting me to consider the grandeur of his pronouncement.

  I considered it rather foolish, but I was trying to behave myself so didn’t say so. He gestured impatiently to Stackhouse.

  ‘It’s like this, Delamere. A battleship is actually a thousand different technologies, synchronised; brought together and co-ordinated. About the most complex organism you can imagine, even before you start trying to organize the men to run it. And in every one of those thousand technological areas – the engines, the quality of the oil, the umpteen different scientific skills that make an effective gun – there is a race for progress.’ I waited; it was clear enough. ‘A competition. We are temporarily strong in one; one of our rivals is temporarily strong in the other. By and large, everyone is aware of new technological developments. But a small improvement can have a decisive impact on the overall performance of a battleship taken as a whole machine. Anything from a new material or shape for the propellers, to the modernisation of the fire-control table.’

  Now it wasn’t clear enough. ‘The what?’ I said.

  Savary looked pretty scornful – clearly, any truly patriotic Englishman should be an expert on this particular piece of furniture – but he wasn’t the sort to bother with details himself. He gestured impatiently to Stackhouse.

  I took another sip of brandy. It was poor stuff, but it did.

  Stackhouse took a moment to compose an answer fit for those too imbecilic to be up to date in naval warfare – or for those still too disreputable to be trusted with specifics. ‘The capacity of modern naval guns makes it possible to throw a shell many miles. But that, plus the speed of modern ships, makes it dashed hard to aim.’ His was a good voice for explanations: steady and sensible. ‘You’re trying to hit a moving target from a moving base, at long distance. You’re having to compute the interaction of three different moving bodies: your ship, the enemy ship, and the shell on its parabolic trajectory between them.’ Sir Percy Savary’s face twisted faintly: he could make or break a Cabinet Minister’s career with a single telegram, but he didn’t know what was going on here and he didn’t like it. ‘A fire-control table – and its base has the size and look of the average table – is a mechanical calculating device that does the mathematics for you. You set a couple of dials to reflect the course and speed of your target, and your own, and it tells you how to aim. Rather an extraordinary business: an apparatus more capable than the human brain.’

  Well now, I was thinking, maybe Delamere ain’t so ignorant after all.

  But even if I’d been tempted to brag, Sir Percy cut in first: ‘These machines are one of the areas where Britain has a considerable edge, I think I’m right in saying.’ He half inclined his head towards Stackhouse, but Stackhouse was too sensible to suggest otherwise. ‘We’re well ahead. And we intend to stay that way.’

  He stopped. Apparently under the impression that he was addressing a public meeting, he seemed to feel this was an adequate conclusion.

  ‘Rule Britannia’, I said heartily, and I think I saw the old man suppressing a smile.

  Stackhouse hurried on. ‘Naturally we’re very nervous about any attempt to slow our progress. If we lose our advantage in any one area, then the relative strengths of our rivals in other areas – explosive propulsion, for example, or the technology of armour – become even more troubling.’ I nodded.

  ‘The preponderant strength of our Navy, Delamere,’ – Sir Percy Savary was still on his public platform – ‘its power not only to defeat the enemy but to so overawe him that he dare not dream of defying us, neither on the high seas nor in the farthest Asian inlet, lies partly in its true strength, but more in the reputation of its strength.’

  I nodded again. My radical comrades like Raikes would have proposed a simpler approach, and rather cheaper, but within the mad logic of imperial rivalry this all made sense.

  I yawned, and pretended to try to hide it.

  Stackhouse politely pushed on. ‘The recent trouble at the yard – the stoppages and so forth – is beginning to look like something even more serious. The murder of poor Sinclair. The burning of the drawings room last night. It’s as if someone wants the Thunderer badly delayed.’

  Savary piped up. ‘There have been a series of incidents at or around factories involved in the manufacture of components for our Dreadnoughts.’

  ‘A bit of industrial espionage is normal form, I should say.’ It was the old man. He spoke like it was normal form for him. ‘Any of three of four countries might be up to it, including those we consider allies.’

  ‘And no doubt we’re doing it to them’, I said.

  The old man merely smiled. Sir Percy was ploughing on, full of alarm. ‘We’ve reports over recent weeks of various suspicious persons lurking around the Thames Ironworks yard.’

  ‘Besides yourself’, the old man said pleasantly. I smiled back.

  ‘Then, two nights ago,’ – Savary leaned in confidentially – ‘there was a break-in at the Thames Ironworks offices on Holborn.’

  ‘Gosh’, I said. ‘What effrontery.’

  ‘Damned outrageous’, Savary said. I saw the old man considering me curiously.

  ‘Anything taken?’ I said.

  They looked at each other. Stackhouse was clearly uncomfortable. Presumably pretty embarrassing to convince the nation you can be trusted to build a battleship and then fail to manage your front door properly. Eventually, the old man said: ‘We’re not quite sure.’ A lie, presumably. ‘They made rather a mess of the place. And now the diaries of Sinclair and a couple of his colleagues can’t be found.’

  Savary said: ‘The police are closing in.’

  I hurried on. ‘So the question, then, is: who are the “they” you keep talking about?’

  The old man again: ‘We were rather hoping, Sir Henry, that after your recent investigations and adventures you’d be able to tell us.’

  33.

  I took a large mouthful of brandy.

  ‘Let me start by offering you two possibilities. Possibility number one: I am some kind of traitor or lunatic, who murdered David Sinclair as the prelude to a trail of death and chaos over the last few days. Possibility number two: I am not.’ I paused, to try to make possibility number two sound more weighty. ‘As soon as yo
u decide to accept number two–’

  ‘Temporarily.’

  ‘All I can ask. As soon as you consider possibility number two, then certain points become clear.’ I paused, to recollect and arrange the conclusions I had drawn in the cupboard at the Thames Ironworks offices, in the cell last night, and at various other occasions. ‘Firstly, we are speaking of a substantial and organized group, with resolve and resources. I have met a few of them. There must be more, in order to trail me as they have. They are well-informed and well-supplied. Secondly, they are linked to a series of crimes. I take it for granted that Sinclair’s murder is part of this. They have attacked me in my rooms and then in a bath-house. One of the men involved in that attack was also on the scene of the murder of the moderate union leader Merridew, and then tried to kill me in the theatre. Then this, er, appalling business of the break-in at the Thames Ironworks offices, and the attack at the shipyard last night.’ I checked. The three of them were watching me, considering. I wondered how much they were still debating between possibilities numbers one and two. ‘Finally,’ I said, ‘they are somehow connected with the group of international trades union delegates visiting England at the moment.’

  Three pairs of eyes widened, and very satisfying it was.

  ‘Anarchists!’ said Savary. Stackhouse looked worried. The old man was frowning; perhaps his grasp of labour politics was a little sharper than the grandee.

  ‘There were two attacks on me in one day. At the time it seemed rather remarkable; I’m more used to it now. Anyway, the first of them, in my rooms, was carefully planned to look like suicide. I was suspected – at that point’, I added heavily, ‘– of the murder of Sinclair, and I’d have been found with all appearances of having put a bullet through my brain. In one elegant coup they’d have tidied up both Sinclair’s death and any possibility that I had learned anything from it, and no-one would ask any more questions. Later that day they tried again, in the bath-house, and this time they made no attempt to stage something plausible.’