Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

  “Definitely automata,” she whispered. She cursed the constables who were more concerned with relaying baggage than they were with the case. In doing so, they had removed valuable evidence, leaving Hargreaves in the dark. Not a clue remained to her eye.

  Yet, that was why she had called Arturo C. Adler, wasn’t it?

  “A bat could see it was the work of a steel golem, my dear Inspector,” came the piercing, high-flown voice. On cue. Most irritating. Hargreaves pinpointed the source of the annoyance below her, and spotted the young detective wriggling out from a maintenance ditch underneath the baggage car. Startled, she nevertheless suppressed the urge to squeal. Instead, she merely stepped back so he could not see the color of her knickers.

  “How can you see anything from that hole?” she shot back gamely.

  Arturo straightened up before replying. It was a dubious process that involved brushing down layers of scalloped linen sleeves threatening to drown his loud purple vest. Impressively, not a drop of grease clung to the cumbersome garment, but he did spend an inordinate amount of time brushing a bluish dust from one sleeve. A lens, disguised as a monocle, hung from his breast pocket, and a bong hung on his belt loop. None of it was as flashy as Arturo’s hair, a shock of platinum that veered back in a series of hard spikes. The color was a recent affectation he would grow out of in a week or two. Hargreaves spotted his green greatcoat slung on a nearby rail, itself a shimmering double-breasted horror, and threw it over to him.

  “My regrets that you are late, Inspector,” Arturo said nonchalantly as he drew the sleeves over his shirt. Now, he looked merely eccentric, like a Roman candle caught in a bottle. He drew an intricately cast pocket-watch from the folds of sleeve vomiting from the coat. “Your telegram did say nine in the morning, but it cannot be helped. Scotland Yard is quite a ways from Newham.”

  “How did you….” Vanessa began, instantly regretting it. Her jaunt on Alphonse had not cleared her mind of the Montemarte case, and she had ended up collapsed atop a newsprint headline, “Temple Mills,” triple-underlined, in her office.

  “That you slept last night in your office? Your corset laces are drawn four millimeters too tight, a desperate attempt both to straighten your skirt and to hide the deplorable condition of your blouse. Your boots, though tasteful, are practical, flat, and scuffed, with secure buckles in lieu of laces, all signs they are part of your professional wear. Tweed coat still has some crumbs on it, Mr. Sanders’ Pork Pie from his cart on the embankment if I’m not mistaken. I have written a monograph on the types of street food detritus commonly found in London, you know….”

  Hargreaves touched her hat impatiently, which only let Arturo continue his deduction. It didn’t escape her that Arturo had left the hat alone in his verbal skewering—it was a felt top hat that accented her hair perfectly.

  “Most damning, your hair is dry and your skin dark under the eyes, a trait shared by those cursed to sleep on the planks they call cots in the Yard’s vernacular. Please do not test me, Vanessa Hargreaves,” Arturo quipped smugly. “If you’d like a demonstration, I can shed some light on this ruin of a train car that seems to have stumped you so royally. That is why you called?”

  Hargreaves simply harrumphed. As Arturo turned his self-satisfied mug to the train’s twisted carnage she attempted to smooth down the wrinkled blouse and skirt. Her original intention was to highlight her bust to draw attention away from her clothing, creating the illusion that her ample front was overflowing from her neckline. What lay under her thigh-highs was usually enough to accomplish seduction, while maintaining the tweed look so useful for a London copper.

  Arturo C. Adler was a completely different type of man than the dashing pirate Albion Clemens in that he seemed to care nothing for Hargreaves’ charms. Still, she never liked his taking the piss out of her efforts.

  “The constables had the baggage car stripped. There’s nothing of value,” Hargreaves said, if only to prompt Arturo’s snide put-down. He fell for it hook, line and sinker, though not much prompting or taunting had ever been needed. The two had been drawn together time and again for the very purpose of crime scene investigation. Arturo came running from his Camden Town house sometimes before the inspector sent for him.

  “As I observed on the Blackfriar Bludgeoner case,” Arturo said with a distinct cadence, beginning to flow into his rhythm of crime scene analysis. “Inspector Hargreaves sees all that I see, yet understands nothing. The very method of destruction speaks volumes. Look here, where the metal is rent from its bolts. The even, smooth punctures along the edge! The striation pattern and stress marks! The roof!” He slipped his monocle out now, and instead of placing it on his eye, hovered it between himself and the car. Squeezing the rim, the lens flexed: now concave, now convex. Arturo was plucking clues from empty air with his fingertips.

  “There is no bloody roof, you imbecile.” Hargreaves feigned a barb. Had Adler been looking, the amateur detective would have remarked upon the sardonic hint of a smirk on her face.

  “Precisely! The fact there was an automata involved is obvious—no, there were automata! One to drive in some sharp, pointed instrument.” He gestured to the puncture marks, now brutally obvious to Hargreaves. Most solutions are, after someone points them out. “Let us call it Driver. A second golem must have been present to clip and pry open the breach. Let us call it Priser. The very lack of a roof indicates that either Driver or Priser, or perhaps even a third automata, entered the breach with the precise plan to destroy the roof. That indicates the loot was probably cumbersome, perhaps too large or heavy to extract swiftly.”

  “An airship!” Vanessa now cried, and Arturo gaped slightly at her momentary burst of genius. He tried not to let it show, and Hargreaves had to be quick to catch the minute widening of Arturo’s eyes.

  “Precisely,” Arturo said, recovering. “An airship provides both the ability to move the item and the heavy golems,” he said, hopping onto the baggage car. A peculiarly ragged hole lay at his feet. “And here, this is where the ship anchored itself, with an anchor launched by steam, with great force. Note the salts left by the evaporation. Now the question is: what was stolen?”

  “I called you because I needed your forensic abilities. I’ll track down the loot and the perpetrators,” Hargreaves said, feeling the familiar caution she always felt about Arturo. If the stolen item in question were valuable, she didn’t put it past Arturo to retrieve it himself and sell it to the highest bidder. He was quite good enough to do it without Hargreaves ever suspecting a thing, a fact she bit her thumb at savagely.

  “Do not be silly, my dear Vanessa, I must know what the motive was if I am to track these ingenious malefactors.”

  “‘Inspector Hargreaves’ to you.” She took a quick inspection of her surroundings; one engineer and a foreman, not quite a coop, but enough to start a fair clucking in the Times.

  “With all we’ve been through? Why, do you or do you not remember that moonlit eve under the shade of the iconic, raven-graced Tower, standing over the conquered Crown Jewel thief Argento de Maupaussant, under the eyes of none but God, when you professed your undying—”

  “Oy, get off of there!” A cry came from above, interrupting the prattling detective mid-boast. She felt the air shudder before she heard the workman scream, cutting through their banter like a knife through butter.

  “Arturo!” Vanessa redirected the cry, and she was not a moment too soon. Lithe and observant, yes, but if not for the warning, the spry detective could not have avoided the tons of sleeper car silently falling on their crime scene from the rotary above.

  The gleaming chrome and black iron wheels came groaning and shuddering down just behind Arturo’s heels as he leaped off the baggage car, which promptly exploded in a nova of wooden splinters and lost bolts. The tinkling of pieces shot out of their mountings had not ceased when Hargreaves helped the detective up.

  “Almost went tits up, I did. What the bloody fuck?” Arturo was spitting dust, but Vanessa was not lookin
g at him. Rather, she was scanning the lofty ceiling of the train depot, where the rotary that dropped the sleeper car on them still quivered.

  “Things haven’t quite gone pear-shaped yet. There!” she cried, spotting the whisper of a jacket darting behind a boiler on the upper level. Her boots squealed with her leap towards the maintenance stairs, the .22 already sitting warm in her hand. As she passed a railing, she tossed her hat to spin neatly on top of it, for safekeeping.

  “Tosser tried to crush me!” Arturo was hot on her heels.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw him wielding a tiny weapon with a pistol grip. The barrel had a funny shape, almost like a silver iced cream.

  “Cut him off!” she said, indicating a clear access route that led to the northern exit of the depot. The gaping maw was still admitting steaming, huffing engines, looking to her and any criminal like the liberating gates of St. Peter. Vanessa lunged down a narrow alley formed by train cars crowding the upper level of the depot. Each step came down on grating suspended over two stories of steel trains, their stoked furnaces an inferno of gnashing gears. Ducking swiftly between the rotaries, Hargreaves tried to assess the number of assailants. It had been a surprise attack, and the enemy hadn’t stayed to finish the job. They had fled, so they did not outnumber her and Arturo. That meant one person, and if Vanessa Hargreaves were trying to escape after a surprise attack, she would be hiding—

  “There!” she said under her breath, and whirled round a handhold with the .22 up and ready. Nobody was in the cabin, save cold ashes and one lonely shovel leaned up against the wall.

  Instead, the expected attack came from above. In a tangle of shadowed limbs tipped with leather-wrapped steel, hard vice grips closed on Vanessa Hargreaves’ gun arm, followed by the weight of a small, fast opponent—the kind of sparring partner she hated, like a bloody Amazon monkey.

  Some kind of mask covered the assailant’s face, but when she struck one of the arms, it was wiry and covered in muscle, like punching rocks wrapped in butcher paper. She felt a stab vest under the tight jacket even as she threw the assailant’s weight off her. The .22 Tranter skidded to a halt, hanging over the lip of the walkway.

  Her weapon lost, Vanessa sidestepped into the opponent’s space even as he spread-eagled against the cars on both sides, arresting his fall. She knew for a fact it was a mistake to sacrifice her superior range. Little blokes had all the fast jabs and dodges normally kept at bay by her long legs. Cramped in by cars on both sides, her limbs wouldn’t get the leverage she needed for a punishing blow.

  Time to get close and untidy.

  Hargreaves tried a right feint, following up with a devastating stomp that made use of tight quarters, but her foe jumped, splaying his feet against the sides of the cars like a great spider. So that was how he ambushed her! Before she could react, he planted a short jab to her right cheekbone, high enough to make her see stars. She fell backwards while lifting her knee, so when the assailant’s feet hit the ground his gentleman’s sausage would be gelatin. With a shock, she felt her kneecap connect with nothing, perhaps something soft.

  “Hargreaves, down!” Arturo’s voice barely made it through the pugilistic haze, but in her periphery she saw the spiky-haired detective behind their enemy, leveling his strange weapon. Hargreaves pressed herself flat to the ground.

  There came a taste of pennies on her tongue, and suddenly her ears filled with a riotous din. Blue arcs crashed between the steel walls all round her, like Tesla lighting freed of their glass bulbs. Tongues of sparkling, crackling light danced along the tracks. A mad scientist’s experiment had been uncaged, bubbling the paint and scoring black marks where they touched.

  “Mother of God!” she blasphemed. Thankfully, Arturo’s aim was true and their mystery assailant took the brunt of it in the back, tumbling through the gap between two train cars.

  “Ach!” Arturo said as Vanessa got up. Something smoked and fizzed in his hand, throwing off sparks, and with another curse he lost his hold on the weapon. With a final crackle, a piece of it popped off and buried itself in the wood of the walkway, two inches in front of Hargreaves’ nose.

  “You could have killed me!” Hargreaves shouted. “What is that, a prototype death ray?”

  “Never you mind; the quarry is getting away!” Arturo said, and he was right. A smoking trail clinging to the air was all that was left of their mystery man.

  “Adler….” Hargreaves fumed. She scooped up her .22 and the death ray in hand, leaving Arturo gaping. Darting left and right, she followed the faint trace of a burned tyre smell hanging in the air, all the while thanking the fashion gods shin-high pencil skirts were not a la mode this year. Yet corsets and bustles were. Curses.

  “Went that way, ma’am!” hollered one of the workers overhead, before ducking back into the safety of a cabin. El-Nevazar!

  “Your country thanks you!” Vanessa shouted, and took the route indicated, only to emerge from the cathedral of rotaries and soot-smeared track into a moving labyrinth of chugging locomotives. The glaring white English sky seemed to taunt her with its sudden brightness, revealing every detail of the yard—except for her mark.

  Persistent to the last, Hargreaves dashed into the mess, her coattails flying tweed wings. She vaulted through baggage cars and over linkages like the jumps at Kent. After ten minutes of fruitless search, she skidded to a halt in the clinker.

  “Blast it all!” Vanessa cursed. The slippery saboteur could be anywhere, on any number of trains or cars. There was no way she could track the smell in all this coal smoke. She braced her elbow against a gleaming red mail train, trying to slow her heart. As she plodded back to the exploded crime scene, she passed the stoic Alphonse, sitting there like a lump of shiny Christmas pudding.

  “Fat lot of good you were,” she mentioned in passing, a barb the machine took without complaint.

  Back at the baggage car, she met the kneeling Arturo, who seemed to be canvassing the scattered pieces of the crushed crime scene. He seemed completely unfazed by the near-death experience, and was instead absorbed in his search.

  “What a fine mess this is,” Vanessa said, “I’ve just gone and lost our one real lead, my crime scene is smashed to bits, and what the hell are you doing with those nuts?”

  “Not this particular lug-nut,” Arturo was mumbling. “It was stuck in the board about there, so with the force of the explosion… eureka!” He straightened up, all five-foot-six of bottle-green detective, clutching a gold hexagon between two fingers.

  “I’m a size six, firstly, and secondly you forgot the champagne,” Vanessa said, wiggling her fingers.

  “This is no ordinary lug-nut,” Arturo said, completely ignoring her desiccated tone. “It is a twelve-gauge gold alloy timing nut, with the presence of point-zero-zero-five percent gold and twenty-five percent carbon slivers commonly known as adamant.”

  “I’m glad you’ve taken a shine to someone else’s nuts,” Hargreaves said, channeling a certain helmswoman in her annoyance. Curse those pirates and their uncouth influence!

  Arturo removed a flask from his inner pocket, and the strong herb scent that effused between his lips told Hargreaves it was his favorite laudanum, a strong port laced with plenty of opiates and absinthe. His victory drink.

  “Adamant is a hideously expensive material that has a significant reaction to fuel additives, and one that has become favored by my arch-nemesis, Professor Halley Blackwater, alias Doctor Shock.”

  “Oh, Lord, not this again.” Vanessa rubbed her temples, a gesture she reserved just for Adler. “Arturo, you have no nemesis. Professor Blackwater is an expert in economics, not bloody metallurgy. Besides, he’s been on a book tour in America since July, and won’t be back until Guy Fawkes Day.”

  “Are you his press agent? No, a spy! How are you so aware of his movements?”

  “You knucklehead, because I’ve had to protect you from the Yard. The Professor’s filed seven different complaints against you since you two met!”

  �
��He’s no academic lily-white, he’s a criminal mastermind, I tell you! He wouldn’t dirty his hands with this ground-level fluff. This is part of some bigger plot.”

  Hargreaves heaved an enormous sigh. Arturo was a great help, unfailing in his attention to detail and clues, but perpetually inept at seeing the bigger picture. Nobody could mastermind hundreds of crimes in nearly every Steam Age country, as Arturo was fond of accusing Professor Blackwater. Hell, even Clemens hadn’t gotten to Venezuela yet.

  “In any case, the nut couldn’t have come from the sleeper car. Give it here.” Fast as lightning, the lump of metal was in the inspector’s hand.

  “The distributor is either Sturluson Metallurgy or Logan Alchemics, their London offices being 42 Patch Street and 744 Wilde Street respectively. But I doubt you will find much there, for the nut is cast in American customary, not metric or Imperial standard,” Arturo said to Vanessa’s back. He brushed an imaginary piece of lint off his jacket, which was immaculate compared to Hargreaves’ begrimed duster. “It’s Shock’s, I say.”

  “Bah.”

  “And can I have my gun back, please?” Arturo continued.

  “Confiscated,” Vanessa said coldly even as she turned the clue over and over in her hand. She examined the serial number, and the odd grooves. “And you’ll tell me who supplied it to you so I can arrange a raid.”

  “Trade you for the real addresses?”

  “No deal,” she said. The amateur detective knew how to bluff, but it was not in his interest to feed her false information. He enjoyed the mystery too much. “And one of these days Proscribed Substances is going to have your dealer in cuffs.”

  “Fellow by the name of Tony Macmillan, in Whitechapel. He assured me it would shoot straight.”

  “Thanks, Art,” Vanessa said. “I’ll let you know what this turns up.”

  “No, you won’t,” Arturo said mildly. “But I’ll find out anyway. I always do.” He walked away, whistling a merry jingle.