by Kin S. Law
It took her all of ten minutes to slip Alphonse into one of her underground entrances, a municipal pump house. Once inside, a ramp led down into the catacombs beneath the city where Hargreaves guided Alphonse by Tesla lamps down the branching tunnels, using a copy of a pre-Elizabethan map Hallow had procured from a private archive. She avoided her office where constables were waiting with more idiotic cases, and headed straight down to her lair in the M.A.D. machine shop.
“Reckon ye mate be right about this being American. Yanks make a fine grade of steel, so long as it’s for shooting or stabbing,” Cid Tanner supplied when Hargreaves showed him the little nut.
“This can’t be a dead end. I can’t just hop a zeppelin to America on one lead,” Hargreaves complained.
“No. Sturluson or Logan will know who made the thing even if they don’t know the way themselves,” Tanner said. He paused, taking in Hargreaves disheveled, and chuckled. “Looks more like you need a cold shower.”
“Cid….” Hargreaves cautioned. She had had just about enough cheek today. Unfortunately, Hargreaves in the part of detective had no idea whodunit, save the tenuous connection to the Highgate bank robbery, or, God forbid, Arturo’s Doctor Shock. Besides, the Highgate case had been open and shut. It had been a polite young gent called Michael O’Toole, in deep with bookies who gave him an ultimatum: rob a bank, or lose your fingers. O’Toole was the perfect rube—no ties to the mob, single, no children, just a nobody clerk from a nobody brokerage firm.
O’Toole had been caught spending his ill-gotten gains trying to catch a ship to Melbourne, and he had no idea how his metal partner had arrived to his door or where it had gone after the deed. The industry was too young to have any sort of standardization, so it could not be traced.
Back in the hall outside her office, Vanessa Hargreaves sighed at the sight of the Gwain floating outside the window, on regular patrol of metropolitan airspace.
If only I could spot the buggers from the deck of the Gwain, Hargreaves thought wistfully. The confidence-inspiring bulk hung suspended in mid-air like a fairy mountain, her foothills still scorched black from recent battles. Her maiden-and-shield figurehead still flew proudly.
Hargreaves also found Cezette Louissaint waiting there with the office’s modest tea service ready. The girl turned. She had just been setting out some biscuits, the pistachio ones Hargreaves liked. Her legs clicked softly, hidden by a voluminous skirt. Hargreaves’ own, actually.
“Oh, you little—!” Hargreaves said. “How many times have I told you not to sneak up here?”
“They’re like to think me some gentleman’s daughter, in this couture,” said Cezette nonchalantly. It was true—the dress was blue French linen, cut with a mild gothic fishtail, just the style to hide the girl’s legs. The disguise was good enough for a building full of detectives.
To drive home the point, Cezette set her feet primly and lowered herself into a chair with a barely perceptible whirring. Hargreaves harrumphed, setting aside her coat. She held no such vanities as to compare herself to her ward, but she had to admit Cezette had at most a year or two before suitors would begin to materialize like slugs.
“Well. I suppose you shall be mother?”
“Yes, Maman,” said Cezette obediently. She poured a cup with the milk in first, setting the cup before Hargreaves. It was strong Ceylon and just how she liked it. “I am beginning to like the English habit quite well.”
“And your manners are beginning to match,” added Hargreaves. “Hallow is teaching you admirably.”
In accordance with an unspoken compact, neither of them spoke about Hargreaves’ work. Instead, the afternoon was spent talking of things large and small, such as Cezette’s favorite automata, her progress on their shared book of the week, or which austere persons Hargreaves had glimpsed that day. The inspector was unfazed by these ministers and society belles, but Cezette was fascinated by them, so Hargreaves kept notes of them in her notebook filled with sketches. Cezette was working on another of Hargreaves’ dresses to fit her slighter frame, really one of her undercover costumes Hargreaves was all too glad to be rid of. By the by, the hour for tea was gone, and Hargreaves poked her head outside so Cezette could make a stealthy exit.
“It’s clear. Go, go!”
“Maman!” Cezette protested as Hargreaves nudged her out. “This is no dirigible raid! I will look au naturel walking at a measured pace.”
“Oh. Yes, you’re perfectly right, of course.” Silly, Hargreaves. How many times had she gone undercover herself as some countess or other? Before Hargreaves could do anything more, the girl leaned up on her iron trotters and threw her arms around her. Her lips landed soft on the inspector’s cheek.
“Right.” Back in her office, Hargreaves breathed milk and honey from her tea, trying to control her flush. She had never thought she was the maternal type, yet this girl brought something out in her that she couldn’t deny.
The day’s pleasantries over too quickly, Hargreaves braced herself for the work ahead by talking aloud. “Step one: alert the hospitals and constables to look for burn victims, five-foot-four, trim and fit.” Hargreaves sent out the alert over the Metropolitan Police Service tube net, a system of telegraph lines and Morse lantern codes between dirigibles. Within the Yard building itself, the act amounted to a hurried scribble stuffed into a latching ball, sent via vacuum tubes throughout the building’s walls. She doubted the overworked constables on the ground would bother, but it was worth a shot.
“Step two: put in a tip to the powder sniffers on the sixth floor, look for a Tony Macmillan in Whitechapel, store of illegal sparkers.” She scribbled this note as well, rolling it tight and setting her wax seal on the tin ball before putting it in the bolt-action slot in her wall.
She had taken the piss out of Arturo, but truth be told Scotland Yard’s problem with the weapons based off of Mordemere’s designs was an ongoing one. Firearms Division desperately needed the tip-off, as Arturo well knew. One out of nine ladies of the evening in Whitechapel could cremate an unruly client where he stood. Likely as not, the guns smoked their owners as well, leaving a blackened corset like the fossilized skeleton of a raptor.
“I’d like to see Ruddy Jack put up against this lot,” Hargreaves jested grimly at the thought. Proper police business done with, this left her with one last task.
“Step Three: Investigate Logan Alchemics and Sturlusson Metallurgy.”
True to form, Hargreaves trusted Arturo to do one thing, and nothing else: carry laudanum. She took the five-minute trek to Hallow’s office, deep in the M.A.D. catacombs. The place was as spooky as Cezette always said, full of clicking machines, strange smells and unspooling ticker-tapes like wraiths in the dark. A disused hand-cart was parked at the terminal line, full of machine parts and rolls of paper.
Jean Hallow himself sat like a monolith, near a niche he had outfitted as an office. The telegraph lines converged here, eaten up by a large Turing machine. Like Arturo, Hallow was another man immune to her charms, but she tried anyway, tipping her ample bosom close as she looked over his shoulder.
“Excuse me,” Hallow said, and reached past her for the punched card with her data on it. Hargreaves sighed.
The information Arturo gave was the truth, and would have earned brownie points if Hargreaves was in the business of handing them out. Instead, she chose to commandeer a squad cab. Sometimes, one needed the extra finesse of arriving in a squad Fjord, over the imposing, outlandish Alphonse.
Sturlusson’s was a townhouse parked between two equally gravelly tombstones of the type. A short stair led up to the parlor meeting room, with a mahogany mantelpiece holding up a glass case containing a harpoon. Obvious signs of Nordic heritage were strategically placed all round the dominating, four-seat Queen Anne meeting table. Hargreaves picked up a deceptively heavy cube of some layered mineral, which seemed out of place there.
“That would be durandite, not something just any garage tinker can make,” came a voice from her right. “Franklin
Feerick, I represent Mr. Sturlusson’s interests in Her Majesty’s Britain.”
Hargreaves gave the man her investigator’s once-over. Short, hair nearly transparent with age and trimmed round the pate of his head, the bespectacled Feerick looked the very picture of gentility—the perfect salesman. Eton, Hargreaves guessed, but could not be sure. The accent felt off, somehow, as if he hadn’t completely acquired a taste for it.
“Inspector Vanessa Hargreaves. Your man relayed to you my business with your firm?”
“Yes, and I am very pleased to be able to help a member of Scotland Yard, particularly an inspector of such high standing. Please, sit. Would you like refreshments?” The two took seats at a corner of the Queen Anne.
“Your investigation into the horrible calamity was well covered in the Times, even dramatized at the local picture house in a five-part series. I recognized your name straight away,” the elderly gentleman said as his butler appeared with English Breakfast. Hargreaves had not seen any bell pull. The butler was a large man, but seemed ill at ease, and the bone teacups were a subtle mismatch to the eggshell saucers.
“Most Londoners remember only the name Albion Clemens,” Hargreaves said. “The anonymity suits me well, but I appreciate a man who reads the entirety of his queen’s testimony.”
“Journalism is a dying art,” Feerick sighed. “A man may interpret anything he likes when he has the sepia-toned photogram in hand. People will believe his story. It takes a certain clarity to stitch together the gestalt. But I digress. May I see the sample?”
Hargreaves was beginning to like the prompt, business-driven attention. She produced the nut in question, while Feerick produced a glittering loupe with a showman’s flourish. Almost sleight-of-hand.
“Yes, this is indeed adamant, of a gauge very specialized for automata. Your source was remarkably well informed.”
“Are they used for quite powerful automata?”
“Difficult to tell. Luckily, unlike its mythic counterpart, real adamant is not indestructible. Its weakness is the fantastic cost of its making. The trace components are very dear.”
“A person would need large amounts of capital to produce it,” Hargreaves prompted, thinking of the Highgate robbery.
“And the right metallurgist. We at Sturlursson’s consist of eight percent of the global adamant market, and this is not one of ours. In fact, the gauge appears to be American.”
Hargreaves read the frown on Feerick’s face.
“Is there a problem?”
“Unfortunately… if the gauge is American, the problem is yours. The liberated colonies have significant internal trade between their states, and are especially guarded in military applications. Isolationist, you see. It may well prove their domestic market in adamant outstrips the whole of Europe’s.”
“I suppose I will find those heavily taxed products at Logan’s?” Hargreaves sighed. This clue was proving more elusive by the second.
“Indeed. They are a major source of American gauge parts here in Britain.”
Hargreaves bid Feerick goodbye, and headed some blocks to Wilde Street, a short, narrow cobble alley blocked off by stanchions to prevent hansoms from getting stuck in its winding corridor. Logan Alchemics was a far cry from Sturlusson’s, comprising of merely one crooked two-story plaster structure advertising offices in New York, Sheffield and Detroit. It wasn’t Whitechapel, but there were a couple of townhouses that looked to be upper-crust brothels or private opium dens. That is, nothing illegal, but enough to throw shade.
Hargreaves rang the braided bell-rope and was shown into a cozy study as different from Sturlusson’s professional office as Bag End was from Rivendell. Cubbyholes and bins full of documents protruded from every corner, while a merrily tumbledown hearth blazed in one wall.
“You’ll have to excuse the state of the office, we normally take orders by post or telegraph,” the whip-thin servant said to Hargreaves, and it took a second for her to register the man’s familiarity with the office to mean he was the proprietor, not the help. He seemed not to mind her standing in his foyer, and did not offer her so much as a seat, let alone the kingly reception she had gotten earlier.
“I am not here to place an order,” Hargreaves snapped. She showed him the odd little nut of adamant, dodging it left and right as his attention flitted from one thing to another.
“That’s a Mendenhall if I’ve ever seen one. The serial is in Courier,” the man said briskly, slurring his ‘that’ so it sounded like ‘fat.’ Was it his normal accent, or was he simply overworked? Difficult to say.
“And you are?” Hargreaves said, a little annoyed.
“Thomas T. Thatcher, Managing Director, and if you’ll excuse me I’m very busy.” The hawkish man with the unfortunate combination of name and affliction leaped from perch to perch, plucking a scroll of paper here, retrieving a fountain pen there, and always consulting a heavy ledger open on his desk. Hargreaves decided to cut the crap and showed him her badge.
“Inspector?” Thatcher said now, noticeably slowing down.
“Yes, and I’m investigating a theft involving automata that used this part.”
“Won’t have much luck,” he answered. “Mendenhall went under. Was a shop fire, I hear, and the shareholders lost faith. Official in today’s wire.”
“What kind of firm was it?” Hargreaves pounced.
“Strictly priva’e, very hush-hush. Listen, Inspector, automata parts is a very young industry. Cannibalizes from other steam-works as much as it can. A firm like Mendenhall decides to experiment but does not understand the engine’s danger, it has an accident. Happens all the ’ime.”
“All the time,” Hargreaves mused, which seemed to put Thatcher back to speed. “I need to know the latest order for them that came through this office,” she pressed.
“Less than a month ago,” the director answered after an industrious flip through his ledger. When it came to business, his voice was steady, and his t’s enunciated. “Here is a copy of the order invoice, several ’iming nuts, pressure cylinders, engine bolts… odd….”
“What is it?” Hargreaves asked, and for the first time Thatcher stood motionless, looking at the invoice.
“This seems like a large order. Type Four Piling Driver attachments were adapted from construction engines, cranes and shovels, and are supposed to last years.”
“Piling Driver?” Hargreaves felt like she just struck gold. “Tell me, Mr. Thatcher, who made the order?”
“A… Feerick. Franklin Feerick. 42 Patch Street, London.”
When Hargreaves burst through the front door of the handsome townhouse in Patch Street, Feerick was gone. The office door hung ajar, as if to drive in the point that nothing of value had been left.
The rooms besides the ones she had seen were unkempt and dusty. She crept through the dwelling with her .22 Tranter out, but found the only people in the house locked in the attic. They were all dead. The men showed signs of having been trapped there for some time. There was a woman in the room who wore a maid’s frock.
“Damn!” she cursed. “I was too bloody late. Damn and blast!”
Hargreaves covered her mouth from the smell of urine. This was murder by neglect. But she was accustomed to horrors worse than this by now. Hargreaves descended the stairs and found a police box nearby. The blue box was roomy enough to hold an inebriate. More importantly, the locker in its front held a telegraph apparatus. The machine accepted her inspector’s key, unfolding like Oriental papercrafts, and she hastily tapped out a message to Scotland Yard on its typewriter controls.
Clockworked porcelain tabs spun her message out through the ether, and in a moment, spun again to tell her help was coming. The contraption’s serenely ticking logic gates were an immense comfort. When she had been a constable, she had had to memorize every one of Leibnitz’s blasted telegraph codes, tapping them out in binary on a knackered rubber knob. One of the anachronisms of the age: When at sea, use Morse. Leibnitz, though, to summon horse.
&nb
sp; Hargreaves hunkered down to wait. “I expect the real representative for Sturlusson’s is in here somewhere,” Hargreaves told the detective inspector on call who arrived to help with the case. Hargreaves was pleased to see a fellow woman inspector in the Yard’s service, even if the woman brought a cadre of sleepy constables and a flashy ambulatory engine in her wake. They drew far too many people for her liking. To the other inspector’s left, a couple of clocked horses stood serenely chewing the stray clinker in the road. Children reached up to pet them, gingerly, avoiding the flaming grates in their chests.
In the back rooms, Hargreaves found a raided kitchen and pantry that looked as if no maid had touched it in months. A study adjacent to the front room had been hastily stripped of recent maps or plans, pins dotting wallpaper still flagged with little triangles of yellowing parchment. The dusty room was where Arturo C. Adler found the inspector, knee-deep in records.
“Damn! Blast everything!” Hargreaves said.
She tossed a nearby ship in a bottle out of an open window. A couple of cats shrieked their protest as the bottle shattered below. Hargreaves continued to harangue Arturo for a few minutes, comfortably, as if he were an old shoe she might wear to dance her frustrations out on. Arturo looked on mildly until her fit had subsided, before she resumed civil speech.
“I’ve just been comparing the constables’ account of the Sturlusson warehouse to the records kept here. There is already a discrepancy, mainly minor components, but a large space was recently cleared, large enough for two automata and a steam lorry to carry them. I’ve contacted the port guards, station masters, and Captain Leeds of the Gwain, to be on alert for any train, ship, or dirigible carrying our fugitives.”
“You saw nothing out of the ordinary, and the man was helpful and cooperative,” Arturo said. “It may comfort you to know this Feerick or his contemporary abused the maid frequently during their incarceration. We’ll put him away without delay. There’s no moral ambiguity here—not like Maple Cross.”
