The Sign of Fear

by Robert Ryan

‘From Colchester or thereabouts,’ said Watson.

  Garavan smiled and Watson didn’t like that one bit. He was enjoying himself.

  ‘Very good. Our acoustician, who had reached the end of his useful life.’

  ‘Follow me,’ said Bullimore.

  Together the two men continued to descend the stairs, keeping their weapons firmly focused on the group.

  ‘Lord Arnott!’ shouted Watson.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Come to us, please, slowly and steadily.’

  The man actually looked to Garavan, as if seeking permission. Garavan nodded and Arnott scuttled across like a wounded animal.

  ‘Where’s the staff?’ asked Watson. ‘Killed them too?’

  ‘I didn’t have to.’ He pointed to a metal door, painted green and barred across the outside. ‘Children and old men, for the most part. They have a little funk hole where they take shelter from the bombers. All we had to do was lock them in.’

  ‘That other door, there,’ said Bullimore to Arnott, nodding at a newly installed slab of steel. ‘I assume it’s a vault?’

  ‘To the cash room, yes.’

  ‘How do you open it?’

  Arnott hesitated.

  ‘We must lock these men away,’ said Bullimore as they finally reached the floor. ‘Where they can do no harm.’

  ‘To access the vault, I need to open the key safe,’ said Arnott. ‘In the office. Two vault keys are kept in there.’

  ‘Combination lock on the safe?’ asked Watson.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which you know?’

  ‘Yes,’ confirmed Arnott.

  Having confirmed his suspicions, Watson spoke to Garavan. ‘So this was merely a robbery. A way to terrorize Lord Arnott here so he would give you access to the vault?’

  Garavan shrugged. ‘Don’t expect chapter and verse from me, Watson.’

  ‘But how would he know about all this?’ asked Bullimore. ‘A D-Notice building? A new installation for printing notes?’

  ‘An insider,’ muttered Watson. ‘Like the nightwatchman. Lord Arnott, go and fetch those keys.’

  ‘Yes, Lord Arnott, do as he says.’

  The new voice came from behind them. ‘Steady, now, gents. Twelve-gauge shotgun coming through. Not likely to miss from this range. Guns down. Now.’

  Watson twisted his head. He didn’t recognize the man standing above them holding, as he had said, a hefty double-barrelled shotgun.

  Bullimore, though, clearly did. ‘Amies. What the hell are you playing at?’

  The dapper MI5 agent took a step down. ‘As your friend here so succinctly put it, being an insider.’

  THIRTY-SIX

  I think I have been here long enough.

  Watson looked at the inscription, playing the candle over the wall, wondering what anguish lay behind those words. St Luke’s had been famed for its robust treatment of the insane – purging, shocking, near-drowning. How long was long enough of that regime? A year? Ten? Twenty?

  More to the point, how long would he be in that tiny cell, with but a single, high-barred window? Bullimore, he knew, was in a cell on the same level, although not immediately next door. Both had been incarcerated while Garavan got on with his plan. St Luke’s had been converted by the Treasury at considerable cost, but money must have run out before they could modernize these upper attic rooms on the sixth floor. Which left them as a ready-made prison for Garavan’s use.

  But why hadn’t the Irishman killed them?

  Because once they had cleared out the vaults, what use was Watson and Bullimore’s evidence? Yes, they knew who did it, could piece together the methodology, but the men involved would be long gone, back into the criminal ether from whence they came.

  Besides, surely, Garavan wanted them to suffer for coming so close to stopping him.

  Watson moved to the wall opposite the door and sat down on the hard floor, which was covered with a few strands of the straw the inmates had once had to lie on. There was also a rusty bucket, which he had no intention of using unless desperate. The smell was of cold, damp stone and brick, with top notes of desolation.

  With the adrenalin gone, he could now feel the effects of the explosion out in the car. His knee had taken a knock, right shoulder crunched, elbow grazed, bruises about his body and a cracking headache.

  Don’t waste this time, Watson. Think, man. Start with the acoustician.

  So the dead man who took the place of the nightwatchman had been an acoustician. A physicist, an expert in acoustics. That was where the Gotha Hum out in the street came from. It was how there had been a phantom bomber raid. The Gotha Hum, artificially engineered by that man to send London underground, to keep them away from Old Street while the crime was committed.

  Very good.

  The explosions outside in the street had not come from bombers at all. Just as in the case of Porky’s death, when a phoney raid – and doubtless a trial run – had covered up the murder. In this instance, the detonations had come from the sewers. Hence the manhole covers. One of them had been designed solely to breach the walls of the asylum, enabling Garavan and his men to get access.

  And what of the nightwatchmen, firemen or police who would have been on duty?

  They had taken cover in their ‘funk hole’, meaning it was simple to lock them all in one place.

  And what about the five members of the War Injuries Compensation Board? And the GODS? A smokescreen, a piece of distraction, designed to hide the fact that they only wanted one of the board, the moneyman, Arnott, in charge of the new facility for printing the one-pound and ten-shilling notes that were replacing the sovereign.

  Very likely.

  But Garavan was clearly a man who, nevertheless, revelled in the mutilation of the abducted men. And for what? A hundred thousand pounds? A million? Who knew how much was in the vault awaiting distribution? But surely that depended on how much they could carry away?

  The voice in his skull spoke softly, tentatively, as if not sure it was correct.

  Leather Lane.

  Leather Lane, running parallel to Hatton Garden, was another street of specialists in precious metals and jewellery, including . . . engravers.

  The street of engravers. Holmes had heard that Frank Shackleton – or the man they had thought to be Frank Shackleton – had been spotted in those very streets. They had assumed he was there to try, finally, to sell the Irish Crown Jewels. But what if he was having plates made up? Not easy – each heavy square plate was designed to print twenty notes at a single press, but the actual design of the pound note was relatively simple. What if it was his intention to swap the bogus ones for the real thing in the vaults? So that . . .

  So that the Treasury would be producing the forgeries, and he would have the genuine article. The cash taken would be another diversion. Once he had the plates, Garavan could make as much money as he liked for however long it took the Treasury to notice the switch had been made. Or Garavan announced, once he had amassed enough genuine notes, that the Bank’s efforts were the real forgeries.

  His head spun with the audacity of it. Not a simple robbery, but a sleight-of-hand undermining of the whole financial system. He banged on the wall of the cell, hoping to attract Bullimore’s attention, but there was no response. The walls were too substantial to allow much sound through, at least not from mere flesh.

  Watson stood, took the bucket and hammered it against the wall, harder and harder until a rage took hold. It distorted and disintegrated in his hands into a series of flakes, until only the handle was left.

  Could he make a weapon out of that? In time, perhaps, but he suspected time wasn’t on his side. He had no real idea how long he had been locked up. An hour perhaps? Probably less.

  The candle was guttering now. Soon he would only have whatever meagre light might come from the barred window many feet above his head. The glow of London burning, perhaps. Some of the raids might have been false, but not all. There had been real bombs falling that night.

&
nbsp; And what of Miss Pillbody? They had abandoned her on the pavement. She could easily have died. Why should he regret that? The woman was a murderess and a spy. She had shot and killed Mrs Gregson. Surely, the Hippocratic Oath didn’t apply. She deserved to die, either on the gallows or prostrate on Old Street, no matter.

  The Dover Arrow.

  Ah, yes, the Dover Arrow. She held the key to that. And the fate of Nurse Jennings—

  The bolt on the outside withdrew with a sharp scrape and Watson was on his feet, holding the handle in front of him, crouched and ready to jump.

  ‘Really, Watson,’ said Holmes coolly, ‘I expect a better greeting than a mere snarl.’

  At that moment they both heard the boom of a twelve-gauge shotgun.

  Micky Garavan watched the last of his men pass through the double doors that led to the platform of the St Luke’s underground railway terminus. Once used to transport the mad and the dangerous to and from the hospital away from prying eyes, it ran from the west to join with the Post Office line at Bunhill Row and south to Bank. It was this link that had helped it being selected as a site for the new printing works, because people and cash could be transferred below ground from the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.

  Now, though, no trains ran because the power to all rails was turned off while so many people colonized the Underground. No matter, the group would walk along until they reached one of the ventilation shafts on City Road, where a lorry was waiting for them above ground.

  It was a pity he wouldn’t be going with them.

  Each man had filled his kitbag with the new notes from the vault, their reward for the months of work. Some were rich beyond their feeble imaginings. And because of that, they would all be caught within hours or days. They were not conditioned to have such wealth. Dizzied by it, they would make the most basic errors. If they weren’t shot in these tunnels first.

  ‘Keep going, come on,’ barked Garavan. ‘We don’t have much time before all hell breaks loose here. Start walking along the platform. Make room there.’

  When the last of the Canadians was through, he nodded to Crantock and Amies and they swung the steel doors shut, trapping the deserters on the other side. Before they could throw themselves at the metal, Crantock pushed the heavy bolts into place. They could hear shouting on the other side, and the ring of rifle butts, but the doors could withstand an artillery shell.

  ‘What about the prisoners?’ asked Crantock.

  He meant Watson, Bullimore and Arnott. They had locked up Lord Arnott only once he had gained them access to the shelves of notes. While the men had gone into a money-frenzy, Garavan and Crantock had unbolted and substituted the plates on the pound-note machine, a hefty slab of metal that now sat at Garavan’s feet in its special reinforced case, of the kind artists used to transport their bulkier works. It was far from lightweight, but he didn’t have to carry it far. Next to it was a Gladstone containing his own stash of cash. Well, it had seemed a waste not to take some to be going on with, until his friends in Ireland could get to work producing genuine treasury bills, while the real presses cranked out very good forgeries.

  Amies snapped the safety off the shotgun. ‘Leave them to me.’

  ‘No time,’ said Garavan. ‘They don’t matter now.’

  ‘They know who I am,’ said Amies. ‘Well, Bullimore does. Let me kill him at least.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Garavan. ‘But we won’t be waiting on you.’

  ‘Won’t take me two minutes.’

  Inspector Bullimore stood up when the door to his cell swung open. Amies stood framed in the doorway, shotgun held at waist height.

  ‘You can’t murder a policeman,’ he said. ‘Not one of your own.’

  ‘You’re not one of mine,’ said Amies. ‘You persecute my kind.’

  His kind? ‘And that’s reason enough to kill me?’

  ‘No, you see, I want to go back to my old job. Just to make sure that the trail is cold. And kept that way. It was all part of the plan. Which means you have to go, because you know the truth. And didn’t I hear you shout my name to the good Major Watson?’ His eyes went along the passageway, to where Watson was imprisoned. ‘So he’ll go next. Sorry.’

  Amies placed the shotgun stock against his shoulder.

  Bullimore closed his eyes and thought of Marion and the child he would never see, the child Arthur would believe was his own. He found himself laughing.

  ‘What is there to smile about?’ asked Amies, momentarily perplexed.

  ‘Just that, although you don’t know it, you’ll be doing me a favour.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Amies, still puzzled. ‘Always happy to oblige.’

  Two shots filled the cell. The first, from a small-calibre pistol, sent a bullet through Amies’s skull; the second was the reflexive discharge of a single barrel by a dying man, which blew pellets across the wall and peppered Bullimore, who barely managed to lift his arm to protect his face in time.

  Amies stood swaying from side-to-side for a moment, the force of the tiny bullet not quite enough to knock him off his feet. His jaw worked as if he was trying to say something, but the light was fading from his eyes and he finally crumpled to the floor, the shotgun clattering beside him.

  It was Miss Pillbody, ragged and bruised but still with a defiant grin on her face, who stepped over the dead man into the cell. ‘Lucky I was in the vicinity.’

  Bullimore’s cheek was stinging where pellets had caught him. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  She looked down at Amies and the blood pooling around his head. ‘Right now, it looks like I’m your guardian angel, Inspector. Coming?’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Watson looked at the group gathered around the polished table of the Club Room of St Luke’s Hospital, a space originally designed for the recreation of the Treasury staff, most of whom had gone to war. There had once been portraits on the wall, but now only ghostly outlines remained. The carpet, too, had gone, revealing the floorboards, and the chandelier was running on three-quarters of its electric bulbs. The organ and stage at one end were dusty and neglected. The drapes were pulled shut. Outside, with the German planes gone, there were only the flames the bombers had set to see.

  Holmes, Sir Francis Lloyd, Mycroft, Sir Gerald Huxley of the Treasury – Lord Arnott having been sent to hospital – Bullimore, Miss Pillbody and himself were seated around the oval of mahogany. Downstairs, a detachment of the Volunteer Defence Force was scouring the building for any remaining interlopers. Elsewhere, Sir Francis had sent men from the London Regiment down into the Underground in pursuit of the thieves. Another group were exploring the nearby rooftops, looking for the acoustical machine that had generated the false Gotha Hum.

  There was a burble of subdued conversation around the table. Miss Pillbody and Bullimore were speaking in low tones, Watson noted, not a situation he liked. Bullimore had a series of sticking plasters on his face, marking where the pellets had caught him. He looked like a particularly clumsy shaver.

  ‘I heard you say,’ she said to the inspector, ‘that he would be doing you a favour if he shot you.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘I think you’ll find that you did.’

  ‘I simply meant that it would be a blessing to get it over quickly.’

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  Bullimore shook his head. ‘Who are you again?’

  ‘What is it? What’s caused that sadness in your eyes?’

  ‘Why do you care?’

  Miss Pillbody hesitated. Why did she care? She didn’t, not really. She must be getting soft. Either that or the old instinct of trying to discover a man’s flaws and weaknesses was as strong as ever. ‘You’re right. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘No. But that doesn’t mean I’m not grateful that you saved my life up there.’

  She smiled as sweetly as she knew how. ‘It was a pleasure.’ Now that was the truth. Killing MI5 men, rogue or no, was definitely part of her job.

  As Watson was wondering ex
actly what Miss Pillbody was smiling about, Mycroft tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Who is that friend of yours again? Quite a remarkable woman.’

  ‘Miss, er, Adler? Oh, I’ve known her for some time. And, yes, she has some peculiar talents.’

  ‘Vernon Kell at MI5 could use the likes of her,’ Mycroft suggested.

  In the aftermath of the tank affair in Suffolk, Kell had wanted Miss Pillbody hanged or shot, Watson thought, but said nothing. He resolved to get her away from there as soon as possible. She caused too much curiosity. She couldn’t help it. It was as if there was an energy crackling off her, not sexual exactly, but some sort of animal magnetism. It was like being drawn to the ledge on top of a high building or bridge, looking down, wondering if you’d have the nerve to jump. Something about Miss Pillbody pulled you to the edge.

  It was Sir Francis who brought them to order. ‘Gentlemen, Miss Adler. I think first of all it is Miss Adler whom we have to thank, for raising the alarm and browbeating – his words, not mine – the desk sergeant at City Road police station to contact both Holmes and myself.’ He turned to Watson. ‘And the major, for realizing that there was more to the War Injuries Compensation Board business than met the eye.’

  Watson glanced guiltily at Holmes, but he had his eyes shut. His dash across London seemed to have quite drained him.

  ‘I am sure we will get to the bottom of this affair eventually, but for the moment . . .’ He turned to Sir Gerald. ‘Do you have any idea of how much might have been taken?’

  Sir Gerald looked down at his notepad. ‘There was close to half a million pounds in the vault. We estimate about half of that is missing.’

  ‘I fear that is a distraction,’ said Watson.

  ‘A quarter of a million pounds a distraction?’ asked Sir Francis, incredulously.

  ‘How often do you change the plates on the machine. The actual pound-note ones?’

  ‘Depends. Every six to eight months. We can print up to four million notes a week and there is a pressure of four hundred tons applied. They don’t last for ever.’

  ‘When did you last change them?’ Watson asked.