Clockwork Killer (Steampunk Detectives: Book 1)

by Hall, Ian

  She is well-read, and after two weeks of our work, she can be called a co-inventor of the Voltage Meter.

  I hope this missive finds you and mamma well, and not suffering too much in the winter storms.

  I will see you soon, and hope to bring you to Boston to meet my young lady.

  Your beloved and contrite brother, Francis.

  As February dawned, I was reminded of the onset of spring, and the probable return of our Johnny Reb. As winter loosed its grip on the landscape, and we neared the next round of our investigations, I began to have reservations of the bond between Emily and myself. As the days passed, it seemed as if some undercurrent of irritation grew between us; a friction I had not noticed before. We never quite came to a fully-fledged argument, yet we came close.

  The work suffered.

  Our once well contrived treatises became a stumbling block, suddenly unable to agree on the most simplest of texts.

  It all came to a head in the first week of March.

  The laboratory had been used for some time, and had become cluttered. Emily, first to recognize our need to tidy, snapped at me, her voice tinged with the sharpest tongue. I flinched at her tone, and grabbed at a bell jar battery, intent on returning it to a rack on the wall. In my haste, it slipped from my nervous fingers, crashing to the floor, showering the laboratory in a myriad of shards.

  “You clumsy idiot!” she roared, crouching over my kneeling figure, her words loud and close.

  “What heck has gotten into you?” I rose to a full stance, my hands clenched into hard tight fists. “You’ve been in a mood for days!”

  “Me?” her screech could have been heard miles away. “You’re like a bull with a sore head!”

  “Well you won’t have to put up with it for much longer!” I roared, the spittle flying across to her, illuminated by the lamplight.

  “I’ll be totally happy when you’re gone!” she railed, turning her body from me, obviously hiding her sobbing. Her shoulders shook in a regular rhythm.

  I opened my mouth to retaliate, but nothing came. Tears welled in my eyes making it difficult to see her properly. I also turned away, unwilling to let her see my weakness. I looked at the broken jar, the wires lying like twisted snakes, the wet copper plates twisted beyond repair.

  For a second, I wanted to turn, hurl another barb at her, but I stopped, realizing that I now cried openly. To my surprise, I felt her hands slip round my waist from behind.

  “I’m sorry, Francis.” She sobbed into my back.

  I slowly turned, only to see her upset as I felt. “I’m sorry too, my love, I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately.”

  We embraced, the broken bell-jar forgotten.

  “I know what it is,” she said, her lips finding mine through the salt of our combined tears.

  “What?” I mouthed into hers.

  “I don’t want you to go.” She sobbed anew. “I know I’m being selfish. I know. But I don’t want you to leave.”

  It suddenly dawned on me that I could not bear to leave either, and yet, my duties to both Pinkertons and my sister’s case beckoned. “I have to, Emily. I know that my new life lies here with you, with Harvard, but I’ll never rest properly until we catch him.”

  The subject of my leaving was talked about for many days. Then, suddenly Emily turned, and almost stamped her foot. “Then I shall travel with you!” she announced.

  I could hardly believe my ears, yet propriety sped into my head. “It would be unseemly.”

  “In what way?” she stood, her hands on her waist, defying me to cross her.

  Despite the arguments that had been raised in my mind, I remained silent, knowing that her force of will would sway both me and her uncle.

  And that is how, on the 24th March, two teenagers boarded a train for Chicago.

  Paul Chapman, Pinkerton National Detective Agency, Chicago, Illinois

  March 21st, 1867

  Sitting at my desk in Chicago I looked at my notes on the spring murders.

  18th April 1865, Decatur, Macon County, Illinois, Grizzell Wallace, aged 17.

  14th April 1866, Springfield, Sangamon County, Illinois, Rebekah Clancy (Smalling), aged 20.

  Tracing my fingers across the map before me, Jacksonville looked to be the next logical target; as far west of Springfield as Decatur lay east. Far enough away to provide anonymity, close enough to keep a familiar feel; just one county away from the last farm.

  I wrote in my notebook.

  Look for prohibition groups. Ask about newlyweds. Center operations in Jacksonville, look westward.

  I sent telegraphs to all sheriffs in the area, with our two buck recompensary offer, and sat back, staring at my blackboard.

  I told myself I waited for Smalling, but knew if he didn’t get back in time, he could catch up later.

  Actually, I think I lingered to give Frau Anna Jenkins a day or two more protection from her absent husband. Then I began to wonder if he stood outside, just waiting on me leaving. Then I started to take more care outside, going back to old tricks, using tactics learned in the war.

  I stood at the front window, only my head above the sill, and took a good look outside the front of our building.

  In a doorway opposite, I recall it being a printers, I saw the first anomaly.

  Heavy-set, but not fat; this man was no ‘Herr Schenk’. Blond hair stuck out from beneath a dark cloth cap, a thick yellow beard hid all signs of a mouth. As I exited our building and walked off north, he stood in the doorway, newspaper in hand, apparently deep in concentration, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t follow me, but then he didn’t need to; I’d grown lax over the last month, and I suddenly realized it.

  I had fallen into a pattern, and perhaps they’d found it. Each day I walked from my digs to Pinkerton’s. Each evening I walked from Pinkertons to Merchiston’s Restaurant for dinner and drinks. Each evening, around eight or nine, I walked back to my apartment. I used the same streets, probably crossed the road at the same times.

  I’d become careless, and it had almost been my undoing.

  At the next junction, I crossed at the regular place, then outside the restaurant I looked for the best vantage point for my enemy to observe my movements, a soda parlor opposite Merchiston’s. In the large window, sat a man reading a newspaper, his eyes looking over the words at me; brown cap, moustache.

  I completed my journey, entering Merchiston’s Restaurant, swinging the glass door wide. Nodding at the usual staff, surprised to see me in the middle of the day, I walked right through the establishment, the kitchens, and out into the yard behind. Circling round the block, it took me less than five minutes to enter the soda parlor from the rear. The guy with the mustache in the window had his back to me, and never stood a chance.

  I pressed my pistol hard into his kidney. “One false move, and your guts will be all over the glass.”

  With little disturbance in the parlor, the patrons turning their heads away from the possible altercation, I soon pulled him out into the back alley. I wasted no time, striking his temple with the butt of the gun, sending him reeling in my grasp.

  “Who are you working for?” I growled, grabbing him with one hand under his chin and smashing him backwards onto the brick wall. Again I cuffed him with the pistol. “Who?”

  “Charlie,” he spat blood with his word. “Charlie McGrain.”

  I took a leap of faith. “Skinny guy, grey hair?”

  The man shook his head. “Big guy, he’s got a yellow Beard?”

  I shook my head, then hit him again, this time on the temple, and he crumbled against the wall, only my hand holding him upright.

  Ten minutes later, I walked briskly along the sidewalk opposite Pinkertons. In front, Henderson walked towards me. It all came down to timing. Our boots clicked on the sidewalk, and as we neared McGrain’s doorway, I decreased my pace slightly so we’d meet together. Then, as we both came level with the puffs of smoke, we struck.

  Two shoulders hit the burly man hard
in the stomach, sending him backwards through the shattering door. As I fell on top of him, now inside the printer’s foyer, I fumbled for his pistol as I hit him in the stomach. I saw Henderson’s elbow under his chin, and slammed my fist into his belly once more, hearing a croaked gasp below me.

  I found a gun, a colt, and tossed it to one side just in time, his hand searching for it. With a grin, I smashed my fist down onto his hand, and he squealed in pain, the hand recoiling back under Henderson’s body.

  In seconds, the struggles under us had ceased, and the man lay panting. “Roll him over.” I snapped. Stuffing his pistol into my belt, we made no effort to make his ‘arrest’ private. With each taking an elbow, we simply dragged him across the street, and tied him to a post in the company stables.

  I let Henderson’s fist do a bit of digging into his belly. “Why are you watching us?” I asked, holding his chin roughly in my hand.

  “Go to Hell,” he croaked, blood smearing his teeth.

  The man proved tough, but in the end, Henderson’s fists won the day.

  “Pittsburg Railroad,” He finally let out.

  Now that did hit me hard. Of all the possible imagined permutations, I had thought his mission lay nearer to home. “What do they want with Pinkertons?” I slapped him hard, grabbing a fist of his hair, lifting his face upwards.

  “Senator Willmon wants Pinkerton out of the security game.” He said slowly, his breathing ragged. “Pinkerton’s got more enemies than friends in the Senate.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Flannigan’s,” he said, his head falling slightly. “Flannigan’s Detectives, out of Boston. It’s just a small firm.”

  I walked away from our captor, trying to think of my next move. “How many of you are here in Chicago?” I said, whirling round on him.

  He had no strength to even try to recoil from me. “Just three.” He said, obviously a defeated man, his sense of ‘mission’ gone. I would not have folded so easily.

  “One in the soda parlor, where’s the third?”

  He shook his head, but I knew his show of defiance for what it was. I nodded to Henderson. “Keep hitting him ‘til he talks.”

  “No!” McGrain instantly shook himself back upright onto the post. “No more.” He shook his head. “We have the room above you. Bert will be sleeping about now, he’s the night-shift.”

  Finding ‘Bert’ easily, and collecting the man from the alley, we soon had all three hog-tied in the stables.

  “What do we do with them?”

  “First I tell the boss,” I marched upstairs to see Missus Bainbridge.

  “He’s in Denver,” she replied. Anna stood just behind.

  “We need to send him some form of message.” I shook my head. “But I can’t just send out details of this!”

  “We send a message, asking that he contact the office.” Anna offered.

  “Perfect!” I enthused.

  Once Pinkerton had been informed, and finding nothing else to be gained for keeping the men in captivity, I dispatched them by train in handcuffs to Boston, under the supervision of three new agents.

  With my decks cleared of all distractions I returned to the ‘Johnny Reb’ case.

  A few days later, early in the afternoon, I stood flabbergasted as Smalling arrived in the office with a young woman on his arm. She wore a tight-fitting blue dress, nicely accenting her feminine curves, with a small black hat encapsulating some of her brown ringlets.

  “Paul Chapman,” Smalling brought her across the office floor. “Please meet Emily Hettinger. She is now my assistant in all things.”

  The sideways glance she shot to him gave me some suspicion that she did not consider herself to be an ‘assistant’. I took her offered hand and kissed her fingers lightly. “Delighted to meet your acquaintance, miss.”

  “See, Emily,” Francis led her to our blackboard. “This is what I do on the other half of my year.”

  I felt slightly aggrieved that a stranger should be brought into the office without permission, and then to become privy to details of our investigation, yet I hardly thought it polite to grab him by the arm and ask him the purpose of such actions.

  “Perhaps, Francis,” I began. “Miss Hettinger may find some of the details disturbing.”

  “Not at all,” she turned, giving me such a smile, that my heart almost melted on the spot. I instantly knew that if she had delivered such a look to Francis, the boy would have fallen head over heels in seconds. Emily Hettinger could be described as a bobby-dazzler. I forced myself to concentrate on her words, not her demeanor. “But the way you have projected your ideas on the board is staid, linear, and does not encourage external focus.” She lifted a piece of chalk from the tray below, and moved to the next clear board. “May I?”

  Flummoxed by her insistent personality, I waved consent.

  “From our work on magnetism in Harvard, we have developed a system of diagrams intended to encourage fluid thought processes. Taking the same scientific system to solving crime, you need to concentrate thought on the central themes.” She wrote ‘Confederate Uniform’ in the center of the board, then circled the phrase. To one side she wrote ‘Masturbation’, although I almost blushed when she did so.

  Around the central ‘Confederate Uniform’ phrase, she proceeded to ring it with other pertinent details, all of which she circled in turn. Francis just stood to one side, smiling like a Cheshire cat, and nodding as she spoke.

  “If you take your individual points, and give them room, you can then join them to the main premise.” She drew lines joining each bubble to the center one. She pointed to one line. “Now we have to look for a connection between the uniform and the sword, say.”

  “He’s an officer, or of upper class.” Francis said, and she wrote his phrase on the connecting line.

  “He may not be an officer,” I interrupted, shaking my head at the apparent simplicity of her process. “He just wants to be, he’s acting above his station.”

  And again she wrote my phrase, this time below the line. She tapped the circles. “What’s the connection between the uniform and the newly-weds?”

  Like the surprise of a bright sunrise, I realized I had never considered the question. Suddenly the whole concept of her diagram came to life. “Perhaps he himself had his wife taken from him just after being married?” I offered, rapidly warming to this young woman’s unorthodox approach.

  She spun on a tack, and offered me the chalk. “And when you have exhausted your deliberations with the ‘Confederate Uniform’ as the center hub of the investigation, you replace it with the next most pertinent clue, and ring it with the other facts. Only when you have exhausted all possibilities, do you have the fact that inside your deliberations the truth lies!”

  I looked at Emily’s blackboard, then across at my own. I had stood looking at mine all winter, yet she had inspired more questions in my mind in the last five minutes with her, wheel-hub method.

  I imagined having the ‘Newly-Wed’ bubble at the center, and it sparked more ideas still. By using her diagrams I would build a picture of Johnny Reb far faster, and probably far more accurately.

  “Missus Bainbridge!” I hollered at the top of my voice.

  To my surprise she appeared instantly, popping her head round the corner. “Yes, Mister Chapman?”

  Buoyed by my recent success, I kept a similar pace. “Tell Henderson to fetch me another six blackboards, as big as he can buy them!”

  Amazingly she almost curtseyed. “Yes, Mister Chapman.”

  Emily Joins Pinkertons

  Francis Smalling, On Board a Train from Boston to Chicago.

  March 26th, 1867

  “People are looking at us,” Emily said, snuggling close to my ear to keep her words to ourselves. “They think of us as lovers.”

  “Only because you continue to press yourself against me,” I almost blushed. “If you kept a discrete distance, we could be seen as friends or brother and sister.”

  She brough
t her face close to mine, and opened her eyes wide. “And do you want to be considered my sister, Francis?”

  I grinned back at her. She had shown this flirtatious side on many occasions on the trip, and while it proved a huge distraction from the now boring countryside that passed our windows, it did take some getting used to.

  With every mile that we put between us and the laboratory at Harvard, Emily seemed to lose a little part of the staid, regimented self that she maintained during the experiments. It seems that we grew closer, more aware of ourselves as people, rather than a scientific partnership. And of course now that we had no restrictions on her dress code she wore a dress, which only exaggerated her female curves, and that just distracted me more.

  We had come to agreement before boarding the train that if we were challenged we would tell the story that we were newlyweds, as our affection towards each other was definitely more than brother and sister. Determined that she would travel with Chapman and I to Springfield, she would either pose as my wife or Chapman’s niece.

  Very soon the familiar dark blue of Lake Michigan came into view signaling we were on the last stage of our journey into Chicago. At the station I hired a coach rather than walk and I found a comforting familiarity as we pulled up next to the Pinkerton building.

  “I’m nervous,” Emily said.

  I could see her hands shaking. “You got no reason to be.” I said. “Chapman is a good guy, you’ll like him.”

  “But I'm not expected,” she said. “He might think I'm just getting in the way.”

  “Never,” I placed the palms of my hands on her cheeks forcing her to look at me. “It's going to be fine.”

  Despite my positive affirmation, inside the office I nervously stood by as she met Chapman, then watched as Emily drifted towards blackboard. Whether it was nerves or an eagerness to supplant herself as an asset to the investigation, the reason seemed irrelevant in the end. Emily threw herself into the demonstration showing Chapman our new method of deliberation.