by Tim Standish
My thoughts were jolted back to the reality of my present predicament as, after a brief clicking of bolts and with the soft grate of subdued friction, the iron bars forming the whole front of the cell slid gently to one side leaving a wide doorway for me to exit through.
Two of them stood there, faces half obscured by nocturnoscopes. In contrast to the single guard who had walked me up here the two of them looked alert, and both were well armed. Whatever was in the file had apparently levitated my status from ‘awkward coincidence’ to ‘interesting individual’. One stood at the edge of the strained light pooling out from the cell while his companion waited on the landing, gesturing with his carbine for me to move outside. These two knew their distances well, keeping me between them but not close enough to take on both at the same time. I followed their steady pace along the walkway, passing empty cell after empty cell on our left and nothing but the vast space of the courtyard on our right. Along that inner edge ran a safety rail consisting of a rope strung between rusted iron posts that leaned uncertainly at regular intervals along the landing. Based on the obvious age of the rest of building and given their obvious state of rust and decay, I made a point of treading carefully as we made our way along to the stairwell.
We trudged our way down dark stone steps in careful convoy, our little group passing faint white numbers on the wall that counted off the floors and sections. We had come up the same way and I had assumed then that there were stairwells equidistant around the various blocks of cells contained within the walls. In keeping with the overall design the stairwell was open sided, giving any guards stationed in the yard or its spire ample opportunity to monitor our descent. We reached the ground floor and started off across the courtyard floor to the central spire where a plain and heavy iron-faced door was set into the base.
‘Wait here,’ the guard behind me ordered as the one in front walked up to door and bent forward to talk into a brass box fixed to the wall. The conversation was brief. The door opened onto a room that, as far as I could see, was pitch black and the guard stood to one side; again a gentle carbine prod let me know my role in the matter and I walked through the door and into the tower.
The door closed behind me, and I was left in disorientating pitch blackness for a moment before the room’s lights glowed into life and quickly brightened to reveal a space in marked contrast to the abandoned decay of the rest of the prison. The brickwork looked recently and professionally painted and, about twenty feet from where I stood, the heavy wooden table in the centre of the room looked new, its surface unmarked. Either side of the table were two matching, iron-framed folding chairs. The only other furniture in the room was a series of iron coat hooks on the opposite wall, though the filled-in screw holes that dotted the wall around them spoke of an earlier and more cluttered configuration.
The wall behind me arced round to meet the flat wall on the other side of the table, creating a D-shaped room that was slightly less than half the ground floor of the tower and it was through a door set into this far wall that the grey inspector from Cooper’s now entered.
He had discarded his suit jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves, giving him the look of an engineer or factory foreman; the sleeves had been turned up neatly in a way suggesting that, although he acknowledged the necessity of dirty hands, it was something he would have rather avoided. A pair of drab, grey folders under his arm completed the persona; the worn cardboard edges of one sandwiching a thick sheaf of papers, the other slim and seemingly empty.
He dropped both folders onto the table as he sat down, then straightened their edges, and settled himself in his chair. He placed his hands flat in front of him, then spread his fingers and drummed them briefly before looking up at me. Behind him a less heavily armoured but still well-armed guard closed the door and stood at ease in front of it.
‘Do sit down, please, Captain Brown.’ A smile crept to the corners of his mouth for a brief moment and faded. I did as I was told, walking to the chair on my side of the table. He winced as the iron legs of the chair scraped loudly on the floor and I made the most of it, generating a few more moments of unsettling cacophony as I settled myself into position.
He waited till I had finished, allowing the silence that followed to lengthen for several seconds before declaiming in the slow style of a church reader: ‘For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life.’
I was momentarily nonplussed before I realised he was talking about the writing on my cell wall. He was starting as he no doubt meant to continue by emphasising the apparent powerlessness of my position, telling me that there was nowhere to hide; they were watching my every move. He wanted me to know that he already had all the answers, there was no point hiding the truth because he already knew what I was thinking and so on. I threw a question back at him to let him know that I was keeping up: ‘An attempt to induce piety?’
He smiled. ‘Actually it was a bold experiment in social reform, put into place by the institution’s penultimate governor. His idea was to ban all communication between prisoners, keep them in isolation where possible and provide no stimulus other than carefully-selected bible verses that he had painted in each of the cells.’
‘Was it successful?’
‘It depends on your viewpoint. Certainly the level of recidivism amongst inmates was seriously and, in some cases, permanently reduced.’
Something in his tone told me that this was another game that I could join in with if I wanted to. I hazarded a guess. ‘They killed themselves.’
‘In ever more ingenious ways. It seemed that solitude and constant contemplation of an unvarying line of scripture sent them demented, with the result that a fair few either ended up in Bedlam or victims of what the ensuing report termed self-inflicted deaths.’ He paused. ‘Nowadays there’s hardly any need to imprison violent criminals; they’re simply shipped off to the colonies, to stand guard against various sets of angry natives. But of course, you know that from personal experience.’
It was a good opening shot and it caught me slightly by surprise, but I managed to keep calm. ‘Our company had its fair share of men who chose the army as an alternative to gaol, yes.’
‘Ah yes, your company. Remind me?’
‘D company, First regiment, North American Volunteer Rifles.’
‘And when did you join?’
‘88.’
‘And when were you posted overseas?’
‘A few days later.’
‘That’s much quicker than normal. Were you in some sort of hurry to get away from London?’
‘The Rifles were in a hurry to have me out there. There was a shortage of officers at the time.’
‘I see.’ He paused. ‘And you haven’t been back to England since?’
‘No.’
‘And your military career to date has solely consisted of manning the Inner American Border? No postings elsewhere?’
‘No.’
‘And in,’ he paused briefly, ‘just over eight years you took no leave, made no effort to return to Britain until now. Why was that, I wonder?’
‘Canada is a lovely place, once you get used to the weather. People there are terribly friendly. Very welcoming.’ I smiled, helpfully.
He paused, reached for the thinner of the two folders and placed it, open, on the table in front of him. Inside was a single sheet of typed paper. He glanced down the page and then looked up.
‘And yet now you have left that lovely place and come back here to London. Why, I wonder?’ He left the question hanging with a small tilt of the head and a raised eyebrow. I declined this obvious invitation to respond and he continued. ‘I can only imagine that you had vital business here which caused you to take such a long and,’ here he glanced down and opened the thinner of the two folders, ‘expensive journey and I must say that based on the evidence we have to hand it seems clear to me that the vital business was your meeting with Mrs Cooper.’
‘I told you, I went to see a girl.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do you imagine?’
‘She was another contact perhaps, part of the same operation being run by Cooper to smuggle illegal arms to rebels seeking to overthrow the American government. We know that the last shipment was intercepted near Boston. Perhaps, as the mastermind behind all this, you had to risk a trip home to make sure that the failure wasn’t repeated?’
‘I was overdue some leave. I took it. I was in need of female company. I found it. I can give you the details if you want and I will draw you a diagram if you find it helpful but I can’t tell you anything about meetings, smuggling or lost shipments because I haven’t the faintest idea what you are talking about.’ I could feel myself getting angry as I spoke, and I tried to stop it coming through in my voice. He heard it though and decided to prod me a bit more.
‘So you expect me to believe that you, a captain on frontier duty in a down-at-heel regiment had managed to “put a few bob by” which enabled you to purchase a first class airship ticket, pay for the Savile Row tailoring we found you wearing and the company of a whore at one of the West End’s most expensive brothels? Where did all this money come from, Captain?’
‘I was lucky at cards.’
‘You are lying!’ He slapped a hand against the table as he spat this at me and looked for a moment as if he would have gladly fetched me a similar blow. He mastered his temper, busying himself with the two folders on the table before continuing more calmly; ‘And this is no card game, Captain, I assure you. Bluff and finesse are no match for facts and data, both of which we have in copious supply. I am afraid, Captain, that you may have misinterpreted the purpose of this conversation. The mystery here is not one of innocence versus guilt; it is rather that I am keen to decide which particular crime, of the many possibilities on offer, we try you for. For example,’ he continued, warming to his subject, ‘when we ran your Bertillon and cross-referenced the army identification you provided, what do you think we discovered?’
‘I’m overdue for promotion?’
He was unimpressed. ‘They don’t match. You are not Captain Brown. I would even go so far as to say that there is no such person as Captain Brown, given that his sole action whilst serving in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces has been to purchase an airship ticket. So we have you quite clearly impersonating an army officer and, by extension, lying to a police officer and forging official documents. To these charges we can add associating with a known fugitive, procuring controlled technologies, supplying Enemies of the Crown and latterly, of course, corrupting a minor.’
‘Actually, we’d only just opened the champagne when your own set of military impersonators turned up. There was barely time for conversation, let alone corruption. Besides,’ I added, ‘she was no minor. I know the difference, even if you might not.’
A cheap shot but it seemed to irk him nicely. He stared directly at me, seemed about to lose his temper again but managed to calm himself and continue. ‘As I was saying. You are not Captain Brown, which leads us to the question of who you really are.’ He closed the thin folder, put it to one side and started to unwind the red cord holding the other folder closed. ‘And indeed, when we ran a more detailed archive enquiry things became much more interesting.’
‘I have no idea whose file you have there, Inspector, but it’s not mine.’
He ignored me. ‘Our data are comprehensive and the engines we use to interrogate those data are amongst the most finely calibrated in the Empire. We are the Bureau of Engine Security, Captain. When we search, we find what we are looking for.’ The cord unwound, he carefully lifted the folder open. ‘We find the truth.’
The paper inside the folder looked newly printed. They had been busy while I was up in the cell. If, as he was boasting, they had found out everything about me then I had a feeling that a tight spot was about to become tighter still.
‘We find, for example, that you are indeed a company captain in the North American Volunteer Rifles, that you are stationed in Canada and that you have been there for approximately eight years. Unlike your fictitious counterpart, however, your military record makes for the most gripping reading; tales of derring-do abound within its pages. A rush of promotions, even a medal or two. In fact, given the speed with which the War Office habitually rushes to publicise this kind of thing it makes one wonder why we haven’t heard of you sooner. It is as if, rather, the reverse was occurring; that someone was making a concerted effort to keep you out of the limelight. Now, why would that be?’
He knew, but he wanted me to tell him. Straight out of the beginner’s guide to interrogation: establish rapport, encourage compliance and so forth. He flipped forward to chapter three, ‘Use of silence’, and waited for me to answer him. Unfortunately for him I’d read the other half of the guide and knew that my best option was sticking to my original story, no matter how threadbare, and no matter how much he claimed to know different.
I shrugged. ‘Army heroes are old hat. No one wants to hear about frozen mud and border skirmishes. It’s all about airships nowadays.’
‘Your story is too ordinary?’
‘Precisely.’
He spread out some of the papers in front of him. ‘The Honourable Tiberius Charles Arthur Maddox. Son of a viscount. One brother a commodore, the other one of the nation’s leading industrialists and managing director of Maddox Global Maritime. Both title and family wealth derived from privateering and prizes of war but, more recently, insurance and overseas investments.’ He tapped the papers. ‘I would call that interesting, wouldn’t you Captain? I can see the headlines now: “Plucky Toff pitches in with Courageous Tommies.”’ He smiled. ‘Of course, they would have to leave out the part where you joined an infantry regiment as an alternative to standing trial for the crime of murder. And assured the authorities of your exiled obscurity and non-return for,’ he picked one paper out of the pile and read from it, ‘ten years for which period of time the proceedings would be held in abeyance. This paper, signed by you, is dated 12 November 1888. The fine print makes clear that refusal to comply with the agreement renders it null and void with an immediate resumption of criminal proceedings. Which, given that you still have just under two years remaining of those ten, leaves you, Captain Maddox, up to your neck in the latrine, if you will permit me to coin a military phrase.’
‘Actually, Inspector, I believe the term is shit-house.’ He smiled. ‘And no doubt you can extend a helping hand if I give you the information that you want.’
‘You understand me precisely, Captain.’ He leaned back confidently in his chair and steepled his hands, happy in the knowledge that I was about to throw in the towel. I took a small pleasure in seeing his face change as I disabused him of that notion.
‘Then I’m sorry to say that we will both end this conversation as disappointed men, Inspector, because, as I have already told you, I haven’t the slightest clue what those boxes were doing at Cooper’s or where they were bound. I know nothing of gun smuggling or American rebels, though God knows anyone opposing President Jackson and his lunatic cabal of petty dictators deserves all the help available. I was at Cooper’s because I wanted a girl. That’s all. Now you can ask questions all night, but I won’t be able to answer a single one of them so do us both a favour, put me back on the next airship to Canada.’
He looked like he was gathering himself for another threat when there was a knock at the door and, obviously irritated, he stood up and squared the papers back into the folder, then walked over to the door and half-opened it to speak to whoever was on the other side. A short, murmured conversation ensued before he stepped out of the way and an older man walked into the room. He was dressed for a night out, a silk scarf over his evening wear, top hat and gloves in one hand. He walked over and stood behind the chair, the inspector a few paces behind and to one side of him. He dropped the hat on the table and the gloves inside it. I noticed as he did that his skin was smooth, his long pale fingers neatly manicured. He took a silver cigarette case out of his jacket, took out
a thick, oval cigarette and lit it carefully, all the while watching me for a sign of reaction.
‘Would you like one?’ he offered me the case.
I shook my head. ‘What is this then? Good constable, bad constable?’ I said. ‘You’re wasting your time. I’ve seen it done before, and not by amateurs either.’
His eyes narrowed slightly at that, then he smiled. ‘You don’t recognise me, do you Maddox?’
‘As I told your mistaken colleague, my name is Brown.’
‘And as my well informed and absolutely accurate colleague told you, Captain Maddox, the majority of what you may or may not have done in Canada is immaterial given your return to these shores before the end of a hard-won agreement to commute a capital sentence to a decade in exile. Or have you forgotten that as well, hmm?’
And I recognised him. He had been there that night in Cooper’s, arguing strenuously for a private but swift trial. Some sort of plain-clothes policeman. He had moved up in the world judging by his clothes.
He saw the recognition and smiled. ‘Ah. I see that you haven’t forgotten, Captain. Though we were never formally introduced. My name is Fuller. Deputy Director Fuller if we are being formal.’ He offered me a handshake, which I ignored. ‘My, my, what an awful habit of impoliteness you seem to have picked up in the army, Charles. And your brother argued so convincingly that it would set you on the straight and narrow.’
‘I am afraid you really do have me confused for some other poor fellow.’ It was coming back to me now; his over-friendly tone and know-it-all manner. The way he made jokes with Julius in the corridor outside Cooper’s office while they bartered for my life. Julius had never told me the details of the deal he had made but I had always assumed it was some sort of combination of money and influence. I didn’t imagine that there would be an opportunity for another deal second time around.
