Scotland Hard (Book 2 in the Tom & Laura Series)

by John Booth

  “You believe that this message is a confabulation, created by Saunders?”

  “You are a Grade 3 Empath, Belinda and yet you never have given me a reason for me to distrust James Saunders despite all the meetings you have sat in on.”

  “He was unreasonably angry with you yesterday, when you suggested Tom and Laura might still be alive,” Belinda mused, “And he was incredibly anxious just now that you approve his mission to follow the youngsters. However, if he is a member of the Brotherhood, he must be a consummate liar able to control his emotions so tightly.”

  “I have never asked him if he as a member of the Brotherhood outright,” Trelawney said speculatively. “Perhaps I should have done so a long time ago.”

  “What do you plan to do now, Ernest?”

  “Let Saunders carry out his plan, of course. For the first time since Laura and Tom were kidnapped, I believe I might have a career left at the end of all this.”

  19. The Chase

  The long journey north soon became boring though the landscape changed considerably as they travelled. Flat fields soon gave way to rolling hills and then to craggy ones. In the early afternoon, the door of Tom and Laura’s compartment opened and a butler in full regalia entered. He carried a large silver tray covered with a brightly polished domed lid.

  “Lord McBride sends his compliments and offers luncheon,” the butler informed them in a strong Scottish accent. “He regrets that other business prevents him from attending luncheon with you and that you will forgive his absence.”

  “As long as ‘e’s sent nosh, I don’ts much care,” Alice said. She had been lolling against the window and sat up straighter at the thought of food.

  The butler placed the tray in the centre of the table and removed the dome. Cold meats, cheeses, chutneys of various kinds and pickled eggs were arrayed before them in silver bowls of varying sizes. The bowls were engraved with the same crest Tom had noted on the carriages.

  The butler withdrew through the door and a serving maid appeared with plates, knives and forks, which she placed before them as well as she was able in the cramped confines of the compartment. Even the silver cutlery had crests at the end of their handles.

  When she withdrew, another maid appeared to place cups and saucers before them, followed by yet another maid carrying a teapot and fresh milk.

  “These carriages have more servants than most households,” Laura said in astonishment.

  “The Laird likes to travel in comfort,” their guard told them. All they had managed to discover about this man was that his first name was Bruce.

  Alice recited her message to Tricky in her head while the table was laid. As the hours had passed, she had become more and more bored with sending it and had whittled it down to an absolute minimum number of words. Alice never asked herself whether Tricky would be able to understand the message if he ever received it. Tom had asked her to send it and that was what she was doing.

  “We never got nosh like this at Bertie’s,” she said with delight.

  Tom lifted his teacup and sure enough, McBride’s crest was on it and the saucer.

  “It must solve the problem of thieves.”

  Laura’s eyes narrowed. “What must?”

  “Having everything marked as your own.”

  Alice smirked and felt the weight of her knife. “Me uncle Bert ‘ud ‘ave this melted for scrap afore you could look at it.”

  “You don’t have much of a criminal mind, do you Thomas?” Laura said airily. “That’s probably a good thing as jails are very cold, I hear.”

  “They’d transport ‘im soon as look at ‘im,” Alice said with a full mouth.

  “They don’t do that any more,” Laura said primly. “And don’t talk with your mouth full. It is most unladylike.”

  Alice glared at Laura, but did not speak again.

  When they had feasted on the meal, the butler and the maids removed the crockery and silverware with the same consummate skill they used to bring it into the compartment. They seemed to be comfortable with the swaying of the train on its tracks and did not drop or spill a single thing.

  The last item had barely left the table when Lord McBride appeared at the door. He had a piece of foolscap in his hand on which there was printed text.

  “Read this, bonnie lassie,” McBride said as he tossed the sheet towards Laura. “I shall be asking you questions on it later, so mind you learn it well.”

  Laura turned over the sheet of paper so the writing on it was underneath.

  Lord McBride shook his head in appreciation.

  “Aye, you’re a spirited lass and no mistake. But I shall personally whip your boyfriend’s back with a cat o nine tails if you canner recite it word perfect for me when I return.”

  Laura made no sign that she had heard his words and waited until McBride had closed the compartment door before she turned over the paper and began to read. Tom craned his head to try and make out the content, but as he was on the other side of the table from Laura he couldn’t make it out.

  Laura spent a long time studying the paper. Tom assumed she was learning its contents against an anticipated barrage of questions from Lord McBride, but his curiosity was beginning to overwhelm him.

  “What does it say?” he asked when Laura looked up for a time, her eyes unfocussed.

  “It says young men who interrupt when their young lady is learning her lines, will get whipped good and proper. And they will deserve it too!”

  “Come on, Laura, I’m dying to know.”

  “Very well, Thomas Merlin Carter,” Laura said primly. “But on your own back be it.”

  She looked at the paper and began to read.

  “Treatise on the rare metal uranium by Jacob Trent, Grade 1 Spellbinder.

  Uranium was first discovered in pitchblende by Martin Heinrich Klaproth in 1789 while working as a lecturer in chemistry for the Prussian Royal Artillery. However, he was unable to separate the element from its surrounding material.

  In 1845, the Grade 1 Spellbinder Brian Martin succeeded in purifying and separating the element from pitchblende and in the process discovered that the element existed in two forms. It proved impossible to totally separate these forms by Spellbinding, but by using two hundred or more successive binds, a mixture with high concentrations of the lighter element was finally produced.

  This strange substance exhibited the property of reacting against itself so as to produce heat. In 1850, Lord McBride used a team of Spellbinders and engineers to produce the world’s first reactatron, a fiendish device that produces copious amounts of heat without any sign of consumption of the source material.

  Those inhaling the dust of the element or spending time in its presence began to suffer from a wasting sickness characterized by loss of hair and pallor. Some workers recovered from the condition while others would die.

  Military Magic decided to withhold information of this remarkable discovery for fear that a weapon could be made of it. Possibly by killing large numbers of people from its wasting sickness. Lord McBride and his team continued to refine and perfect the reactatron until it became an efficient method of generating steam for engines.

  Work on the lighter form of uranium, now known as dantium and their reactatrons is confined to the Scottish highlands, where miles of dense forests provide a buffer zone against potential accident.”

  Laura looked at Tom expectantly.

  “Is that it?”

  “That is all that is written on this particular sheet of paper,” Laura confirmed.

  “Didn’t make no sense to me at all,” Alice said gloomily. “It were full of words I don’t understand.”

  “We now know that the metal in those rods is called dantium and it’s a form of something else I’ve never heard of. Uranium, whatever that is. But I still don’t understand what Lord McBride wants of you,” Tom said in annoyance.

  “Perhaps he wants me to make some pure dantium,” Laura suggested.

  “Whatever for?” Tom asked. “
His reactatron can already heat all the water he wants. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Laura had no answer for that and read the paper yet again. She had a good memory and was sure she would be able to answer any questions that Lord McBride chose to ask.

  The journey carried on into the evening. The train rolled on into night and they could see nothing of the country through which they travelled. It began to snow, though the only way they could tell was from the flakes that stuck to the windows and then slowly melted. They were served an evening meal, which consisted of roast suckling pig.

  The compartment was lit with dim electric lights, but even that novelty began to wear thin after a short while. Alice fell asleep and began to snore.

  Tom was woken by a sudden application of brakes, which flung him towards the table. The train screeched to a halt in the middle of nowhere. There were no lights from houses or stations and there was not a sound to be heard.

  After about twenty minutes, Jimmy opened their compartment door and stared in at them.

  “There’s been an accident up ahead and it will take an hour or two to clear. Nothing for you to worry yourselves about.”

  They sat in silence and it started to get cold, as hot water from the engine no longer warmed their carriages. The electric lights began to dim as their batteries started to fade.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the lights brightened as the locomotive started up again. The jolt forward woke up Alice and she woke sufficiently confused to send a garbled version of her message towards Tricky. Then she fell fast asleep again.

  Tricky waited until Daisy had recovered her breath from running for the train before he posed his question.

  “Did you send the telegraph…, to me mum and dad?”

  Daisy smiled and nodded her head. “And if Cam brought along those maps we stole from James Saunders, we should be able to work out where Ebb lives. We know the street name and we have a map of the whole of London. How difficult can it be?”

  “Of course I brought them. What do you think is in the carpet bag?” Cam said angrily. She dragged the bag down from the overhead shelf and she and Daisy began to look through the London maps.

  Two hours later, Daisy was willing to concede that it might be more than a little difficult. Many roads were only marked in the most desultory way by the mapmaker, obviously with his mind on the grand scheme of things and the indexes only went down to area names or places of special interest.

  Ebb didn’t help much, because he could barely remember one of two of other road names and they tended to be generic names like, The High Street, of which there was one every half mile, or so it seemed.

  “I always knew exactly where I was,” Ebb told them defensively. “Put me down anywhere and I could find me way ‘ome. I just didn’t take much notice of what places were called, is all.”

  “It’s not your fault, Ebb,” Arnold said as he gave the boy a comforting slap on the back. “At your age, I couldn’t have named any more streets than you can.”

  Cam, who had memorized every street and most of the house names in her town by the age of ten, wisely said nothing. Daisy gave the men a warm smile and then struggled to decipher the tiny handwritten script on the map in front of her. It could not have been harder if the mapmaker had been Chinese, she thought ruefully.

  After another half hour of failing to find anything, they gave up on the maps to eat luncheon. Saunders had a fairly good collection of cured meats and bottles of pickled vegetables in his kitchen. Cam had taken a good sampling of them. The only bottled drinks she had been able to find were wine. When she had put two bottles of red and two bottles of white wine in the bag, it had seemed to be no hardship at all. Now that she was dishing it out to the children, she was no longer so sure.

  The journey north took them through Peterborough, Doncaster, Leeds and then all the way through the Yorkshire Dales to York. Though they had travelled over a hundred miles already, their journey was far from over.

  Though the train was called an express, it seemed to stop everywhere regardless. Tricky and Ebb were excited by their arrival at every station where the steam trains would whoop their whistles at each other as though it was some kind of contest. The two boys never seemed to tire of the journey.

  For Cam, Daisy, and Arnold it was much the opposite. Every station took them further away from the familiar and made them think how unlikely it was that they would ever find Tom or Laura again. There were so many places on the way that their friends could have been taken into the countryside to vanish without trace.

  Some people claimed that the British Isles were a small place, that there were bigger deserts in the world. But it was an island teaming with more people than whole continents like Australia, and was an easy place for someone to disappear. A man in the desert stands out from his surroundings; in a crowd, he is easily lost.

  The frequent stops gave them a chance to buy tea for the boys, as well as freshly prepared hot food. Hawkers came to the side of the train shouting out their wares at each station and the prices were so low that even Arnold couldn’t complain that their purchases were not well spent.

  It was dark by four in the afternoon and the weather had become inclement. Snowflakes darted across the platforms and the lamps in the station gathered haloes around them. The number of hawkers diminished as the evening grew darker and colder.

  “I thought these carriages were heated?” Daisy had pushed the leaver as far as she could towards the word ‘Hot’, but the compartment was still ice cold.

  Arnold felt the metal grill under the seat. “I don’t think these carriages were designed for this weather.”

  “You mean winter?” Cam asked.

  There were all very glad they had brought coats as the night became even darker and colder.

  The train came to a juddering halt on the tracks in the middle of the night. Arnold looked out of the window expecting to see either a station or the friendly lights of a town. Instead, all he could see were flecks of snow melting as they hit the window glass.

  After an hour of sitting in the cold, a ticket collector opened the door to their compartment and leaned inside to speak to them.

  “There’s been an accident up ahead. A train ran into a cow and was partially derailed. It’s stopped all the trains travelling north, but in our case, we shall be on the move any minute now. There’s a special chartered train ahead of us, which is just about to set off. When it goes, we’ll give it a few minutes start and then follow it.”

  “Where’s it going to?” Cam asked quickly before he could leave.

  “Edinburgh and then up into the Highlands as I understand it,” The ticket collector told her and smiled. “There are a number of army camps in the middle of nowhere and it’s probably heading to one of them. Sorry for the delay, but it could have been a lot worse for us.”

  Up ahead, the train with Tom and Laura on began to move and its jolting start woke up Alice.

  Tricky put his hands over his ears in pain as a sleepy Alice repeated a message that she had send so many times that it no longer had any meaning for her. She also missed out a few words.

  “GOING TO MmmBRIDE STATE. WORKS FOR MAGIC, THE BASTARD. GOING TO WHIP TOM TO ‘URT ‘ER. FIND US TRICKY, NEEDS YOU.

  Ebb smiled as Tricky rolled onto the floor beneath the seats.

  “Knew you’d find ‘er,” he said to Tricky as he joined him on the floor.

  “It’s Alice…, and she’s close,” Tricky said weakly a few seconds later. “Damned near blew me ‘ead off with ‘er shouting.”

  “They must be on that chartered train,” Arnold said excitedly and lowered the window so he could look outside. A barrage of screams suggested he close the window up again before he was thrown out for freezing them.

  “What did Alice say to you?” Cam demanded of Tricky.

  “Didn’t make any sense,” Tricky explained. “She said she was going to be a bride and work for ‘er magic. Someone was going to whip Tom to ‘urt ‘er and that w
e should find ‘er, as she’s really needing us.”

  Cam and Arnold were astonished by this strange message.

  “Do you think she was being tortured?” Cam asked as her puzzlement over the message grew.

  “Nah, I thinks she was half asleep and got it muddled,” Tricky offered. “She’s done that to us afore.”

  Daisy smiled broadly.

  “It’s just like a puzzle in a book. We have to get Tricky to remember the exact words Alice used and then work out what she really meant.”

  Tricky looked worried. “I’ve already forgotten what she told me,” he admitted sheepishly.

  “Don’t you worry, we shall get it all out of you, one way or another,” Cam said with a smile on her face that was the exact opposite of reassuring. Tricky felt the blood drain from his face and for the first time began to serious worry about the people he was travelling with.

  20. Catching Up

  James Saunders left Trelawney’s office elated that he had managed to convince the old fool to let him chase after the young spies. There had been a real possibility he could have vetoed it. After all, the Secretary of War had demanded that his best men should search London for the killers of Young and Carter, a wild goose chase that would let the real trail go cold.

  This had been exactly what Saunders initially wanted. After all, who better to go looking for the kidnapper but the man himself? It would have been easy to suppress any incriminating evidence that might have turned up. He still couldn’t remember where he had left his top hat, for example.

  However, the danger from the Hobsgate students was much greater than the odd piece of evidence he might have left lying around on the killings. He had to trust to luck that the MM1 agents would display their usual incompetence and fail to find any evidence traceable back to him. The matter in hand was to dispose of the students and he knew exactly where he could get the help he needed for that little task.